The Red River Campaign of 1864 was meant to be a decisive Union victory that would secure eastern Texas and its vital cotton supplies, but instead it became one of the most remarkable engineering survival stories of the Civil War. By June 1862, only a quarter of New England’s cotton spindles were still operating, giving the campaign political, military, and economic urgency. In March 1864, Major General Nathaniel Banks and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter left Vicksburg and moved down the Mississippi toward the Red River. Porter’s gunboats reached Alexandria, Louisiana, on March 15, and federal troops occupied the town the next day.
Reinforcements under Major General Frederick Steele were supposed to march south from Little Rock, Arkansas, and link up with Banks, creating a two-pronged advance that would break Confederate control west of the Mississippi. Confederate Major General Richard Taylor concentrated his forces to meet the threat. Skirmishing broke out in late March and early April at Natchitoches, Louisiana, and at Granny Core, with fighting also reported around Arkadelphia, Arkansas. At first, things seemed to be moving in the Union’s favor, but on April 5 the Red River began to cause serious trouble.
The river was simply running too low. On April 8, Taylor chose to make a stand near Mansfield, Louisiana, to keep Union troops out of Shreveport. Banks’s column had been drawn away from the river and the protection of his gunboats, leaving the force strung out on the march with wagons dangerously placed in the line. Taylor struck, and despite somewhat disjointed attacks, pushed Banks back.
Confederate casualties were estimated at about 1,000 out of 8,800 men, while Union losses were reported at 2,235 out of approximately 12,000. The next day, fighting resumed at Pleasant Hill, where the Union achieved a tactical victory, but on April 10 Banks pulled his force back toward the river and the safety of his gunboats at Granny Core. Steele’s column likewise turned back toward Little Rock. The river’s level continued to drop, and Porter grew increasingly concerned that his fleet would be trapped in the shallow water.
On April 15, his largest ironclad, the Eastport, struck a Confederate torpedo and was severely damaged. Despite efforts to refloat her, the ship repeatedly ran aground and had to be destroyed by her own crew on April 26. Confederate harassment also sank two transports and damaged many others. With the campaign reduced to a simple matter of survival, Banks and Porter fell back to Alexandria, arriving April 25.
There the fleet faced its gravest danger. Near Alexandria, the Red River was obstructed by two sets of rapids, and Porter needed seven feet of water to get his vessels through. From local residents, he learned the river failed to rise in nine-year intervals: 1846, 1855, and again in 1864. In places, the water was only three or four inches deep, with a seven-foot drop at the upper rapids and a six-foot drop at the lower set.
Porter’s fleet was trapped: eight ironclads, one tinclad, one wooden gunboat, and dozens of transports, roughly 35 vessels in all, including the USS Osage, the USS Louisville, and the USS Pittsburgh. Help came from an unlikely source. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Bailey, a former lumberman from Wisconsin serving as acting chief engineer for the 19th Corps, had spent his civilian career building dams to float logs down rivers. He was convinced the same technique could save the fleet.
Porter was skeptical but agreed to let Bailey try, with infantrymen providing all the labor. Bailey’s plan called for two wing dams at the lower rapids, each 300 feet long, projecting from opposite shores. On the north shore, large trees were cut down; on the south, cribs were built and filled with rock, stone, and confiscated machinery. Former loggers and lumbermen from the 29th Maine worked the north shore, while men from the 116th, 133rd, and 161st New York handled the southern cribs.
About 3,000 men and 300 wagons were employed in the effort, all while dealing with dwindling supplies, deep enemy territory, and constant sniper fire. Between the wing dams, four naval coal barges were scuttled to help raise the water at the lower falls. The 24-by-170-foot barges were laid lengthwise, parallel to the current, joined by long timbers, and filled with sand, bricks, and iron rails, leaving gaps about 20 feet wide. One barge was deliberately left lightly loaded so it could be rammed out of the way when the run was made.
The idea was to impound enough water for the ships to pass the upper falls, then break through the light barge and ride the current over the second set of rapids. On May 8, the three shallowest vessels, the Fort Hindman, Osage, and Neosho, made it over the upper falls and came to rest just above the dam. The others needed deeper water. But as the water rose, so did pressure on the dam, and at 5:30 a.
m. on May 9 several barges broke their moorings, creating a 66-foot gap. Porter, who had been warned this could happen, raced upriver on horseback to get his ships moving. The Lexington scraped through first.
The Neosho followed, but her captain shut down the steam engines near the gap, losing all control. The vessel slammed into rocks and went over the lower falls almost vertically, knocking a hole in her bottom, though the current carried her through to deeper water and the damage was repaired within the hour. The Fort Hindman and Osage also scraped through. Four gunboats were safe, but six still remained upstream.
Bailey immediately began stage two, building a dam at the upper ford with tree dams on the north bank and crib dams on the south. By early morning of May 10, the water had risen enough for the Chillicothe to plow through. The Carondelet followed but bottomed out, and the Mound City slammed into her, leaving both stuck and blocking the channel. Working with another veteran dam builder, Lieutenant Colonel Uri B.
Piol, Bailey responded with a third type of structure, a bracket dam, completed at 10 a. m. on May 11. Within an hour the river rose a foot, and crews on shore used ropes and winches to pull the two vessels to safety.
The next day, the Ozark and Louisville ran the gauntlet, and by the morning of May 13, all vessels were through the rapids. Bailey then faced one more challenge. Union troops in retreat found the 600-foot-wide Atchafalaya River too wide for their pontoons, with Taylor’s Confederates in close pursuit. Bailey took every available ship, lined them up side by side across the river, bolted them together with timbers, and covered them with additional timbers to create a serviceable bridge.
It undulated with the current, but it worked. By May 20, all wagons and infantry had crossed safely. Though the Red River Campaign itself was a failure and drew heavy criticism onto Banks, Bailey was richly rewarded for saving the fleet and allowing the army to retire intact. He received the thanks of Congress and was promoted to brigadier general.
Porter’s men donated money for a silver vase valued at $1,600, inscribed with an image of a dam and the fleet, and presented Bailey with $3,000 in cash. Porter himself gave him a sword valued at $700. Bailey was not the only innovator to emerge from the war. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants of the 48th Pennsylvania had trained as a civil engineer and before the war had driven a tunnel nearly a mile long through the Allegheny Mountains for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
By the summer of 1864, he was a 31-year-old mining engineer from Schuylkill County, commanding a regiment that included many experienced anthracite miners. When the Union siege of Petersburg began on June 18, 1864, the 48th Pennsylvania was entrenched closer to the Confederate lines than any other Federal unit. About a quarter of the regiment’s roughly 400 men were miners, and they had already proven their skills earlier in the war, building a causeway at Hatteras Inlet and constructing defenses at Fort Sanders in Knoxville, Tennessee. With the Confederate line so close, Pleasants conceived a bold plan: dig a tunnel from the Union line to a point beneath the Confederate position known as Elliott’s Salient, pack it with gunpowder, and blow a gap in Lee’s defenses.
Pleasants received little help from Major General George Gordon Meade or the Army of the Potomac’s engineers, who considered the plan absurd. Undeterred, his men scrounged picks and shovels from other units and began digging at noon on June 25. About 210 miners worked around the clock in three-hour shifts, averaging 28 feet per day. The shaft was about four and a half feet high, varying in width from four feet at the bottom to about two feet at the top.
To keep it from collapsing, they needed stout timbers, and when army engineers refused to help, the men found an abandoned sawmill five miles to the rear and produced their own. Excavated debris was discreetly spread in a ravine behind Union lines so Confederate pickets would not notice. Progress was smooth until July 2, when miners struck a layer of solid, wet clay that caused the ceiling to sag. Stouter timbering solved that problem, but days later they hit marl, a putty-like mixture of clay and calcium carbonate that hardened quickly once exposed to air.
Unable to dig through, Pleasants and his mine bosses decided to angle the shaft upward 7. 7 degrees, rising 13. 5 feet over a horizontal distance of 100 feet. To calculate the exact length needed, Pleasants used a theodolite, a precision surveying instrument he borrowed from a contact in Washington after Meade’s chief engineer failed to provide one.
He had to expose himself to Confederate sniper fire to take his triangulation readings, and from those observations he determined the precise distance to the Confederate line. Ventilation posed another problem. Most believed the shaft was too long for adequate airflow, but Pleasants knew warm air rises. About 100 feet from the entrance, still behind Union lines, his men dug a vertical shaft down to the tunnel.
Between that shaft and the entrance, they stretched an airtight canvas door, then ran an eight-inch-square wooden air duct along the floor from the entrance through the canvas to the digging face. A grate and fire built on the far side of the partition created a giant air pump: warm air rose up the vertical shaft, lowering pressure, and cool fresh air was drawn in through the duct. At the end of the 586-foot shaft, a T-shaped chamber was dug, and 8,000 pounds of black powder were placed 22 feet directly beneath Elliott’s South Carolina battery. The entrance was blocked so the blast would direct upward.
Early on July 30, 1864, everything was ready, and at 3:15 a. m. the fuse was lit. But by 4 a.
m. , nothing had happened. The cheap, low-grade blasting fuse had failed. Sergeants Henry Reese and Lieutenant Jacob Douty volunteered to investigate, found the break at the first of ten splices, and relit the fuse.
At 4:44 the ground bulged, bubbled, and burst open in what became known as the Battle of the Crater. The explosion created a crater 180 feet long, 60 to 80 feet wide, and about 30 feet deep, killing 278 South Carolinians instantly. Some 15,000 Federals of the Ninth Corps moved forward, but many poured into the crater instead of attacking around it. The result was a Union disaster: more than 4,000 Federal casualties against about 1,500 Confederate.
Both sides settled back into a siege that would last until April 1865. Technology in the Civil War transformed not just engineering but the fundamental nature of combat. The era of smoothbore muskets firing round balls gave way to the age of mass-produced rifled weapons, and tactics would never be the same. The standard shoulder arm was the rifled musket, a term adopted in 1855 for weapons that kept the outside dimensions of old muskets but had rifled barrels.
Many Union soldiers carried Springfield models 1861 and 1862, produced at the Springfield, Massachusetts Armory, which turned out more than 793,000 weapons between January 1, 1861, and December 31, 1865. The Springfield fired a . 58-caliber Minié ball, developed in 1849 and named for French army captain Claude Minié. When fired, expanding gas entered the bullet’s hollow base and forced its sides into the rifling, creating a revolutionary improvement in accuracy and range.
Another advance was the Colt repeating rifle, introduced in 1855 when Samuel Colt adapted his successful revolver principle to a long arm. A soldier could fire as fast as he could cock the hammer and pull the trigger, and a veteran could fire five shots in nine seconds. At the Battle of Chickamauga on September 20, 1863, the 21st Ohio, armed with repeaters, fired an astonishing 43,550 rounds in five hours of fighting. A captured Confederate exclaimed, “My God, we thought you had a division here.
” The weapon had a flaw, however: gas and flame could leak between the cylinder and barrel, occasionally causing all barrels to discharge at once. The Henry repeating rifle, introduced around 1860 and named for designer B. Tyler Henry, plant superintendent of Oliver Winchester’s New Haven Arms Company, became the first magazine rifle used in quantity by the Union, with about 10,000 seeing service. Its distinctive tubular magazine under the barrel held fifteen .
44-caliber rimfire cartridges. Pulling the trigger guard down and returning it cocked the hammer, ejected the old shell, and loaded a new one. Confederates who faced it called it “that damn Yankee rifle that could be loaded on Sunday and fired all week. ” Winchester still stamps an “H” on the base of its rimfire cartridges in Henry’s honor.
Dr. Richard Gatling, a North Carolina native, invented the Gatling gun, though few saw Civil War service. It was not truly a machine gun because it was powered by an external source. Admiral Porter ordered one, Major General Benjamin F.
Butler used two at Petersburg and placed eight aboard gunboats, and Major General Winfield Scott Hancock ordered twelve. Despite its notoriety, the U. S. Army did not adopt it until 1866.
Another rapid-fire weapon, the Ager “coffee mill” gun, was hopper-fed and inferior to the Gatling but better promoted, and also saw little use. For most Confederates, the favorite weapon was the Enfield rifle, adopted by the British Army in 1855 and used until breechloaders arrived in 1867. It fired a . 577-caliber projectile, was accurate at 800 yards, and fairly accurate at 1,100.
About half a million were imported to the North until domestic production was mobilized, and many made their way into Confederate hands through capture or blockade-running. Cavalrymen favored the Sharps carbine, one of the first successful breechloaders, patented in 1848 by Christian Sharps. About 100,000 were used in the war, and the carbine fired . 52-caliber, .
42-caliber, and . 37-caliber ammunition. The user lowered the breech block by pushing forward a lever that doubled as a trigger guard, allowing access to the chamber for a paper or linen cartridge. The weapon was accurate up to 600 yards, and a skilled soldier could fire ten rounds a minute.
The Spencer carbine, patented by Christopher M. Spencer of Connecticut in 1860, was the first successful breech-loading repeating rifle and became the standard arm of Federal cavalry by 1864. Its tubular magazine, loaded through the stock, held seven . 52-caliber cartridges.
Pulling down the trigger guard ejected the empty cartridge, and returning it allowed a spring to feed a new one. Weighing only eight and a quarter pounds with a 39-inch barrel, it was ideal for horsemen. It was the first firearm to use completely self-contained cartridges, and cavalrymen usually carried ten extra magazines for 70 extra rounds, though it lacked range and muzzle power. Artillery also benefited from technological advances.
The favorite piece on both sides was the Napoleon gun-howitzer, named for France’s Napoleon III and first appearing in 1856. The 12-pounder fired a 4. 62-inch projectile and was initially made of bronze, capable of firing grapeshot, solid shot, spherical case, shell, and canister, with a maximum effective range of 800 to 1,000 yards. Rifled versions added range.
The Parrott rifle, named for Robert Parker Parrott, fired shells from 3 to 10 inches and was distinguished by a heavy wrought-iron band at the breech, heated and shrunk into place after production to withstand firing pressure. It had twice the range of smoothbores: 20-pounder Parrotts threw a 3. 67-inch shell more than two miles at 10 degrees elevation, and 30-pounders threw a 4. 20-inch shell 4,400 yards.
The maximum effective range for rifled artillery was about 2,500 yards. Heavy Parrotts, including 200- and 300-pounders, were used mainly for coastal defense. Technology also transformed military communication. Electromagnetic telegraphy had existed in some form since the late 1700s, but the groundwork for practical systems came from a series of discoveries.
In 1820, Hans Christian Ørsted noticed that a current in a wire deflected a nearby magnetic compass, founding the study of electromagnetism. Three years later, Englishman William Sturgeon wrapped wire around an iron bar, creating the first electromagnet. American scientist Joseph Henry, later secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, developed the first practical telegraph by placing a battery at one end of an electrical line and an electromagnet with an iron bar at the other, and finding that a switch could pull and release the bar. By the 1830s he had improved the device with much more wire insulated in cloth, and by 1835 he invented the electrical relay.
Samuel F. B. Morse took Henry’s unprotected ideas and patented the telegraph in 1840. In 1843 he received $30,000 to build a line from Baltimore to Washington along the B&O Railroad.
After trials with underground cable, he found that poles with glass insulators worked best. In May 1844, Morse transmitted a message from Baltimore’s Pratt Street station to the Supreme Court chamber in the Capitol, reading “Everything worked well,” sent in long and short bursts that the receiving apparatus traced as dots and dashes. On May 24, he gave a public demonstration and sent the message widely regarded as the first telegraphic transmission: “What hath God wrought? ”
Telegraph lines expanded rapidly: 40 miles in 1846, more than 2,000 in 1848, 12,000 by 1850, and 23,283 miles by 1852.
Lines ran mainly east–west, with only two major north–south routes. By 1860, six companies operated, the most prominent being the American Telegraph Company on the eastern seaboard and Western Union in the North and Midwest. When the war began, the Union quickly deemed the telegraph essential. Secretary of War Simon Cameron placed telegraphs and railroads under federal control.
Telegraph headquarters was established at the War Department, staffed by four young operators: David Strouse, Samuel Brown, Richard O’Brien, and David Homer Bates. Oddly, lines ran to the Navy Yard and Arsenal but not to the White House. Soon after the war began, representatives of the American Telegraph Company met on the Long Bridge over the Potomac to sever lines between Richmond and Washington. By February 25, 1862, all Northern lines fell under federal control, creating the United States Military Telegraph, operated by civilians under the heavy hand of Cameron’s successor, Edwin Stanton, who sometimes empowered operators to withhold information even from the commander-in-chief.
Major General George B. McClellan recognized the telegraph’s importance early, using it in western Virginia in 1861 and on the Virginia Peninsula. On June 29, 1862, angry and frustrated, he telegraphed the War Department: “If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any other person in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.
” The USMT’s operational head, Albert J. Myer, oversaw between 1,000 and 1,500 employees, organized into teams of foremen, wagon makers, teamsters, messengers, battery keepers, linemen, watchmen, and laborers. About 300 were wounded, disabled, or captured during the war. By 1864, improved insulated wire allowed about two miles of line to be laid per hour, and over the course of the war some 15,389 miles were erected, carrying 6.
5 million messages at 40 cents each. Lieutenant Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Major Generals George Thomas and William Sherman all used the telegraph extensively. Henry Rogers developed strong, flexible insulated wire that could be unwound in the field, and his teams traveled in telegraph trains.
One important vehicle was the battery wagon, carrying 100 battery cells at 1. 5 volts each. The Beardsley telegraph was designed to operate without batteries, powered by a hand crank that moved a needle on the receiving end, but it lacked reliable range beyond five miles and was prone to wrong letters. Pocket-sized keys could also tap into the system: in July 1862, Confederate Ed Seville listened in for four days and eventually interrupted a message to send a taunt to Jefferson Davis.
Jeb Stuart once sent a message from Burke Station, Virginia, complaining about the quality of horses he had been capturing. For encoding, the Confederacy used the Vigenère tableau, or the “Vicksburg Square,” marking the first time electrically transmitted messages were encoded, but Confederate operators found it so confusing that one officer for Kirby Smith, after twelve hours trying to decipher a message, rode around a Union force and asked the sending operator what it meant. The South lacked factories for glass insulators, wire, and battery acid, and depended on prewar resources. Perhaps oddly, the only wartime strike in the Confederacy was by telegraph operators, who felt overworked and underpaid; management responded by threatening to fire and conscript them, and the strike ended after a little more than a week.
Confederate telegraph service lasted until spring 1865. The Federals used a route cipher system adopted by Anson Stager, a rectangular grid of words with keyword-determined reading paths. Innovation also reached into the sky. On June 18, 1861, President Lincoln received a telegram from Thaddeus S.
C. Lowe, floating 500 feet over the Columbian Armory near the Executive Mansion: “Sir, this point of observation commands an area nearly 50 miles in diameter. I have pleasure in sending you the first dispatch ever telegraphed from an aerial station. ” Ballooning itself was not new; by 1861 it was in its seventh decade.
Prominent aeronauts included James Allen, John Steiner, John Wise, and John LaMountain. LaMountain had drifted 1,000 miles from St. Louis to upstate New York in nine hours, while Lowe once flew from Cincinnati and landed in Unionville, South Carolina, on April 20, 1861, eight days after the firing on Fort Sumter. Rivalries among aeronauts were intense, and problems often came from inexperienced ground crews.
John Wise’s balloon became entangled in telegraph lines over the Potomac, which sliced through the tethering ropes; the balloon floated away until alert federal troops at Arlington shot it down, making it the only balloon brought down in the Civil War, and by friendly fire. The first U. S. balloon downed by enemy fire did not come until 1898.
John LaMountain likely made the first effective reconnaissance from a balloon on July 31, 1861, counting tents and fires from 1,400 feet, which led to what may have been the first wartime blackout by the Confederacy. He mastered free ascensions, drifting east to west at lower altitudes and ascending to catch the lower effects of the jet stream to return to Union lines, though he once dropped into the middle of confused German troops who beat him up. Despite these efforts, Thaddeus Lowe, who had better political connections, was officially named the first U. S.
military aeronaut on August 2, 1861. He was paid $5 a day when not flying and $10 when aloft, and the government built him a new balloon. He used portable gas generators, of twelve total, taking six to the field in 1862. The generators stood five feet high and eleven feet long, using hydrogen for inflation.
McClellan created the U. S. Balloon Corps, and Lowe recruited nine other aeronauts. He even modified a naval coal barge, the George Washington Parke Custis, to carry a balloon, effectively creating the first aircraft carrier.
Lowe left Washington on March 27, 1862, for the Virginia Peninsula. His largest balloon, the Intrepid, was big enough to carry a telegraph operator; it was made of fawn-colored India silk, hand-sewn and varnished to prevent leaks, and his Constitution balloon was lettered so it faced Richmond during reconnaissance. He usually used three or four mooring ropes, some 5,000 feet long. It was Lowe who discovered the Confederate lines at Yorktown evacuated just before McClellan planned an attack on May 4.
On April 11, 1862, corps commander Major General Fitz John Porter went up alone, and when a mooring rope snapped and entangled the valve that released gas, he rocketed upward, calmly climbed the basket, freed the lines, and opened the valve to descend. Balloons had a psychological effect if nothing else. Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston called them “the infernal balloons,” and a Union balloon reconnaissance spoiled his attack at Seven Pines in May 1862.
Balloons were also used near Sharpsburg and Harpers Ferry that year, and at Fredericksburg on December 13, though fog limited observation. Under Major General Joseph Hooker, Lowe was placed under Federal officer Cyrus Comstock, who did not value balloons and cut Lowe’s pay. Despite effective reconnaissance during the Chancellorsville campaign, including aiding an attack by Major General John Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps at the Second Battle of Fredericksburg, the conflict between Comstock and Lowe grew so bitter that Lowe resigned on April 12, 1863. It would be another 30 years before the United States again used a military balloon.
Confederate engineer E. P. Alexander was mystified that the Union would abandon such a valuable means of gathering information. Others dreamed of heavier-than-air flight.
Luther Crowell of West Dennis, Massachusetts, patented an aircraft with hinged steam-driven propellers allowing vertical and horizontal takeoffs. W. F. Quinby of Smyrna, Delaware, designed a steam-driven device with rotating wings, much like a helicopter.
Arthur Canella of Cascades, Washington Territory, patented a rocket-shaped device that would move forward as air was forced out its end. And in a story fitting the outmanned South, a man calling himself “Professor Blank” collected contributions around Richmond for an aerial bomb-dropping device, then skipped town with the money. From the sky to beneath the sea: the concept of submarines was not new. Legends credit Alexander the Great with descending in a diving bell, and Leonardo da Vinci sketched underwater vessels.
In the 16th century, English naval gunner William Bourne wrote on submarine physics, and in 1623 Dutch chemist Cornelius van Drebbel built what many consider the first working submarine. During the American Revolution, Connecticut inventor David Bushnell constructed the Turtle, an eight-foot-long, six-foot-tall, three-foot-wide submersible made of two wooden shells coated with tar and reinforced with steel bands. It submerged by letting in water and ascended using a hand pump, powered by a hand-cranked screw propeller. Bushnell planned to attach a 130-pound keg of gunpowder to an enemy hull with a drill and time fuse.
The pilot had air for about 30 minutes and navigated by bioluminescent fox fire that illuminated a depth meter and compass. On September 7, 1776, Sergeant Ezra Lee attacked the HMS Eagle off Governors Island, but failed. The Turtle is still considered the first submarine used in battle. Robert Fulton, later of steamboat fame, designed the Nautilus, a copper-sheathed vessel with a foldable sail, compressed air for the crew, horizontal rudders, and a lead keel, some believe including a rotating periscope.
He offered it to the French, then the English, but received no takers. During the Civil War, James R. McClintock, Baxter Watson, and H. L.
Hunley sought to build a Confederate submersible. Their first craft, the Pioneer, was an oversized cigar 34 feet long, four feet wide, and four feet deep, weighing four tons, powered by a hand crank, with a hatch only 18 inches around. In February 1862, they tested the black-painted vessel on Lake Pontchartrain, attacking a wooden barge with a spar-mounted torpedo. A letter of marque for privateering was issued on March 31, 1862, making the Pioneer the only submarine ever sanctioned as a privateer.
When New Orleans surrendered on April 25, 1862, the men scuttled their invention and moved to Mobile. There they built Pioneer II, or the American Diver, larger but still hand-cranked after experiments with electromagnetic and steam power failed. It was 36 feet long, with two hatchways for five or six men, but critics found it slow and its towed torpedo unreliable. In February 1863, towed into Mobile Bay in rough weather, waves rolled over the open hatches, the vessel filled with water, rolled over, and sank.
Miraculously, no lives were lost. Confederate naval officer Franklin Buchanan, of CSS Virginia fame, remarked, “I consider the whole affair as impractical from the commencement. ”
Yet more backers lined up, including investor Gus Whitney, a relative of Eli Whitney. The third vessel, built at Mobile, was described by engineer Lieutenant William A.
Alexander as a half-cylindrical boiler 40 feet long, four feet wide, and five feet deep, with two hatchways and raised combings acting as conning towers, plus a mercury gauge for depth. Admiral Buchanan was present for tests on July 31, 1863, watching it descend 20 feet and blow up a flatboat, but he expressed concern about what he called “another infernal machine,” worried about fairness. With Charleston Harbor blockaded and the city under constant fire, P. G.
T. Beauregard sent for the vessel, and it arrived around August 12, 1863, by rail, docked on the Cooper River. Until then called the porpoise or fish boat, it was around that time that it began to be called the H. L.
Hunley, the first submarine in history to sink an enemy vessel in wartime. As the war’s technology raced ahead, observers offered sober reflections. Playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder wrote in 1962: “Then there is technology, the excesses of scientists who learn how to make things much faster than we can learn what to do with them. ” Karl Marx once wrote, “The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
” And a 1931 New Yorker observation put it simply: “The higher we soar on the wings of science, the worse our feet seem to get entangled in the wires. ”
By the middle of June 1864, the war in the eastern theater had begun to foreshadow the static trench warfare of a world war five decades later. Mobility and maneuver were giving way to miles of entrenchments, setting the stage for the ten-month siege of Petersburg.