Beschreibung:

CDV of Brigadier General Alfred W. Ellet. H.C. Phillips: Philadelphia, PA, n.d. Ink signed beneath portrait, "Very Respectfully/Alfred W. Ellet/Brig Genl USV." A brevet penciled dedication at bottom of back reads, "L.J.C. from/Genl Ellet/June 20, 1865." Ostensibly familiar to Ellet, the "L.J.C." is unknown to us. The single star of a brigadier general is just visible on the shoulder strap closest to camera. By 1861, Captain Alfred Washington Ellet (1820-1895), a Pennsylvania native, was in command of Co. I, 59th Illinois Infantry. After participating at the Battle of Pea Ridge, he joined his brother Charles in Cincinnati, where he enterprisingly purchased and converted civilian vessels into warships for service on the Mississippi during the spring of 1862. On April 28, 1862, Alfred Ellet was commissioned as lieutenant colonel, A.A.D.C. reflecting the vague command structure of the joint Army-Navy Mississippi River Squadron. On June 6, 1862, the Union Squadron comprised of five Navy ironclads and four of Charles Ellet's rams (commanded by Navy officers!) engaged a similarly constituted force of eight makeshift Confederate cottonclads at the Battle of Memphis. The entire Confederate force, called the River Defense Fleet, was either sunk or disabled (and captured) within view of the city while Colonel Charles Ellet became the only Union casualty of the battle, wounded by a pistol shot in the knee and dying on June 21. Alfred Ellet had assumed command after his brother was wounded and later received formal endorsement from the Secretary of War together with a promotion to brigadier general on November 1, 1862. In the intervening time Lieutenant Colonel Ellet steamed up the Yazoo with a small flotilla of three rams and discovered the the presence of the the Confederate ironclad ram CSS Arkansas. Upon promotion to brigadier, Ellet took it upon himself to raise a body of ship borne infantry to supplement the largely naval crews of his ram vessels and for further work as a quick reaction force for raiding and reconnaissance along the reaches of the Mississippi and its tributaries. This force - evolutionary along with its tactics - later became known as the Mississippi Marine Brigade (MMB) drawn largely from existing (Illinois) infantry regiments, never numbering more than 800 men with detachments of artillery and cavalry. On April 16, 1863, David Dixon Porter's fleet including Ellet's rams succeeded in running the Confederate water batteries at Vicksburg with many of the ships damaged but only a single transport lost during the downriver passage. Afterwards, Ellet was occupied by transporting Grant's army as the siege ring around Vicksburg methodically took hold and tightened. Ellet and the Marine Brigade burned Austin, Mississippi on May 24 in retaliation for the near loss of a transport and five days later joined the fleet above Vicksburg on May 29. During June the MMB constructed a casemate battery opposite Vicksburg and commenced shelling the city on the 23rd. It is recorded that the battery, reinforced and strengthened, did effective work causing considerable damage "especially by stopping work at the foundry and machine shop." Another contingent of Marines accompanied a river borne expedition to Greenville, Mississippi on June 25 and Goodrich's Landing on June 30, losing one officer killed. Jurisdiction over the MMB had always been a source of army-navy contention complicated, it is said, by General Ellet's abrasive and overbearing personality. In a ruling dated June 11, 1863, The Army's Judge Advocate General seemed to make the brigade a "special contingent of the army and not the navy," but General Grant temporized, stating on July 23 that "they are not subject to my orders." Clarification sought by Ellet up the chain of preferred command did not occur until October 1863 when the Army Secretary of War "assumed full jurisdiction over the brigade." The Navy rejected Stanton's interference and supposed authority in the matter, un