Aaron Sheehan-Dean
speaker
924 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 24 Aug
Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And if it's paired with a ram, as it is in the case of the Arkansas, even a single ship like that can be devastating to the Union hulled ships of the Union Navy.
It can just sort of slowly go from ship to ship, punching holes and watching them sink.
And Arkansas is sent from Vicksburg down to Baton Rouge to disable those Union ships while hopefully Breckenridge's troops move coming from the east, pushing Union troops up against the river, capturing or killing them.
That's the kind of plan is to pinch them between the river and this crush of troops coming from the east.
april 5th 1862 the battle will begin now i just want to remind listeners you are standing i mean you are located pretty much on that battlefield where you sit right now right it's true so the union formed a defensive line the union infantry forms a defensive line in a kind of concave shape about a mile and a half from the river that is a mile and a half east of the mississippi river
That's our hard western boundary.
If readers want to draw on their minds a kind of straight line on the left-hand side of the page, that's the Mississippi River.
And then there's this open sea shape, the bottom edge of which is just actually about a block from me.
The main fighting happens at a place called Magnolia Cemetery, about a half a mile north of where I am.
Breckenridge's troops, as you say, have marched in from the east along the Greenwell Springs Road and what's today Florida Avenue.
And those 2,600 men hit the Union line, and there was terrific fighting for much of the early morning and the midday in this private cemetery called Magnolia Cemetery.
Williams has about 3,000 men and probably fewer effectives than that when the battle actually starts.
Breckinridge comes down with 4,000, but 2,600 effectives.
I mean, one regiment of his has 45 men in it.
A usual regimental size would have been 1,000 men or 800 if they're all healthy and for duty.
So they're actually reasonably evenly balanced.
The key here is still the Union naval capacity, those Union gunships.
And because the Union knows that this battle is going to happen, they begin clearing obstructions to create lines of sight.
That is, they're knocking down homes in Baton Rouge so that the gunners on those boats have even ways to calculate their trajectory out to where the battle is happening about a mile and a half east of the river.
And that, of course, the burden of that falls on the civilians whose homes are destroyed.
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