The CSS H. L. Hunley Rises Again
By Robert A. Waters
“[The Hunley] is more
dangerous to those who use it than the enemy.” Confederate
General P. G. T. Beauregard.
George E. Dixon and Queenie
On April 6, 1862, a year after the United States of America
invaded the Confederate States of America, the two armies collided near a small
village called Pittsburgh Landing, in southern Tennessee. The carnage at what was
later called the Battle of Shiloh was unprecedented in the history of the
Americas. In two days of fighting, tens of thousands were killed or wounded.
One Alabama regiment, the 21st, lost 200 men out of 650. Sergeant George
E. Dixon, a Kentuckian who had enlisted with the regiment in Mobile, was
among the injured. Before the war, he had worked as a steamboat engineer in New
Orleans, but resided in Mobile when the war broke out.
Dixon should have been just one more dead soldier hauled from
the field and hastily interred in a mass grave. But he was lucky. Before he
left for battle, his teenaged girlfriend and Mobile resident, Queenie
Bennett, slipped a newly-minted twenty-dollar gold coin into his pocket as
a good luck charm. In the battle, Dixon was shot point-blank. The Yankee Minnie
ball struck the coin in his trouser pocket. Instead of plowing through flesh and bone and
arteries, it absorbed the impact, sparing Dixon's life.
Queenie, daughter of a prosperous steamboat captain, was known around Mobile as the “the little Rebel.” Dixon, a blonde-haired, highly intelligent
22-year-old, was smitten with Queenie and, had he survived the war, they likely
would have married.
Dixon’s wound was severe, a broken left femur, which caused
him to walk with a limp for the rest of his short life.
When he returned from Shiloh to Mobile to recuperate, Dixon became
aware of a “torpedo boat” being constructed nearby. The project was supposed to
be top-secret, concocted by local pro-Southern entrepreneurs and the
Confederate Secret Service. One of those loyal benefactors was Horace Lawson
Hunley, a wealthy marine engineer originally from Tennessee. Dixon became
friendly with Hunley as the Confederate Navy feverishly attempted to mold the
submarine into a viable weapon. The Kentuckian would eventually be promoted to
lieutenant and given command of the torpedo boat.
The Confederacy’s purpose in building a workable submarine was
a direct result of the Union blockade of New Orleans, Mobile and other ports.
The shutting down of Southern harbors had been one of the first actions taken
by Abraham Lincoln and his war machine. While in New Orleans, Horace Hunley and
others had begun a serious quest to build an underwater “fish” that could blow
up the blockaders.
The Torpedo Boat
During 1862 and the early part of 1863, attempts to construct
a workable submarine had failed miserably. As boat after boat sank or capsized during
trials, resulting in the deaths of numerous crew members, the project faltered.
But as the war progressed and the South continued hemorrhaging its limited
manpower in battle after battle, the situation became dire. The charismatic
general P. G. T. Beauregard issued a command that the new submarine, the
Hunley, be moved from Mobile to the besieged city of Charleston, South
Carolina. On August 12, 1863, the submarine arrived by rail.
In a test trial while still in Mobile, this underwater torpedo
boat had blown up an antique coal-hauling barge, bringing a glimmer of hope to
those in the know.
Constructed from iron boilerplate, the submarine was shaped
like a shark, 40 feet long and just wide and high enough to carry her cramped
crew. “The Hunley could dive by opening a valve and letting sea water
fill the ballast tank,” wrote Gerald Teaster. “A set of crude diving planes,
sticking out the side of the boat, was also provided for up and down motion. A
mercury manometer, or pressure gauge, was mounted inside to show the depth. Two
small hatches were installed on the top of the boat for getting in and out.
Each of these had a small glass viewing port.” The propeller in the back of the
submarine rotated inside a circular metal shroud that protected it from
snagging on nets or other debris. Eight hand-cranks were spaced so the crew
could sit along the length of the torpedo ship and drive the propeller shaft.
On its final voyage, the shark-boat held seven crew members as
well as Captain Dixon. The crew, using the hand-cranks, was responsible for propelling
the ship. Dixon stood in the front of the boat with his head in the forward
hatch, looking out the glass window and guiding the crew. He also operated the
diving planes and was responsible for setting off the explosive.
A press release from the Hunley excavation team
explained that “the Hunley used an innovative lanyard system to detonate
the torpedo. The idea was to ram the spar torpedo into a target and then back
away, causing the torpedo to slip off the spar. A rope from the torpedo to the
submarine would spool out. Once the submarine was at a safe distance, the line
would tighten and detonate the warhead.” The shark-boat had to be up close and
personal to work effectively.
In Charleston, the Hunley team took the boat out into
the harbor numerous times to test it. However, on August 29, 1863, it sank,
killing all its crew. The boat was raised and refurbished and new trial runs
began. On October 15, 1863, it sank again. Four of its crew died, including Horace L. Hunley, while three survived.
After this new debacle, General Beauregard famously said, “[The
CSS Hunley] is more dangerous to those who use it than the enemy.” But he
reluctantly agreed to let Lieutenant Dixon have one last opportunity to prove
that a submarine could sink an enemy vessel.
Engineers again raised the boat and began new tests. They renamed it CSS H. L. Hunley, for the man who had done so much to bring it to life.
The Attack
Like a shark, the gray boat knifed through the water. Just
beneath the glassy sea in Charleston Harbor, the hunter had set her sights on
an outsized prey.
The night of February 17, 1864 saw calm seas in the harbor.
Seven miles out, the silhouettes of many Yankee ships could be seen waiting to
apprehend smugglers and blockade-runners. But Dixon noticed a lone Union vessel
anchored just four miles away. It was the USS Housatonic, a three-master
that was 207 feet long. The sixteen-gun “sloop of war” had been instrumental in
capturing several blockade runners. As she sat in the harbor, Captain Charles
R. Pickering kept the boilers running and nine guards on deck.
The Confederate torpedo boat, CSS Hunley, was about to
make history. Never in the history of the world had a submarine made a
successful attack on an enemy ship.
Just a few hundred yards from the Housatonic,
Lieutenant Dixon urged on his crew as they sped the boat forward. Besides
Kentuckian Dixon, three came from the states of Alabama, Florida and Maryland.
Little is known about the other four except they were of foreign descent. At
least one, who was only known only as “Miller,” hailed from Germany.
One hundred fifty sailors manned the Housatonic. At 8:45
P.M., through the darkness, several men standing guard noticed a wake streaking
towards their ship. At first, they thought it was a log, but soon determined it
was moving too fast to be a natural phenomenon. By then, the shark-boat was
closing fast. The Housatonic crew did what they could: they opened fire
with rifles. Captain Dickering rushed up on deck and fired a double-barrel shotgun
at the intruder. The small arms fire ricocheted off the iron skin of the
submarine, and it kept coming.
Less than two minutes later, an explosi0n rocked the Housatonic.
The copper keg, filled with 135 pounds of black powder, detonated just below
the waterline at the stern of the ship. The explosion was muffled, but sent a
cascade of sea-water billowing toward the sky. Five sailors died instantly, and
two were wounded. Within five minutes, the ship had sunk to the bottom.
The Union sailors were lucky. The ship came to rest with part
of its masts rising out of the shallow water. Many sailors climbed the masts,
holding on for dear life until the USS Canandaigua appeared to rescue them.
Other crew members boarded lifeboats and were rescued.
The Housatonic was lost.
But what happened to the Hunley? No one knew. It never
returned to shore--it had just vanished.
Raising the first submarine to sink an enemy ship
Fast forward to May 3, 1995. Archeologists from the National
Underwater and Marine Agency, financed in part by novelist and adventurer Clive
Cussler, discovered a rusted hull at the bottom of Charleston Harbor. Four
miles offshore, it lay in 30 feet of water. After lying on the ocean’s floor
for 131 years, experts identified the ship as the fabled CSS Hunley.
In 2000, as millions watched on television, the ship was
raised intact from the ocean. A time capsule, it contained bodies of the crew
and artifacts of the soldiers. Because of the delicate condition of the ship,
it was placed in a 75,000-gallon steel tank filled with fresh water to protect
the boat. From there, archaeologists would spend years excavating the H.
L. Hunley.
Among the interesting finds was a $20.00 Lady Liberty gold piece. The coin
and a gold pocket-watch lay underneath the skeletonized remains of George
Dixon. For more than a century, historians had debated whether the story of
Queenie and the gold coin that saved the young Kentuckian was true. Many
thought the tale, like countless war-time stories, had been fabricated. But the
finding of the coin confirmed the story. Dixon had engraved the following
statement into the back of the coin: “Shiloh. April 6th, 1862 My
Life Preserver G. E. D.”
In addition to Dixon’s artifacts, archaeologists found
artillery buttons, a pipe, a pencil, a leather wallet, and other personal
items. One item stirred much interest. A Union dog tag was found beneath the
body of crew member Joseph Ridgeway. At first, researchers thought he may have been a spy, but later determined that he had picked up
the souvenir after one of the battles he’d fought in.
How did the Hunley sink, and how did the crew die?
These questions loomed large throughout the years as archaeologists worked to
uncover the mystery. There had been little damage to the boat, eliminating the
possibility that it had been sunk by enemy fire or had been blown up when the
dynamite exploded.
CBC News reported that “the crew were killed by massive lung
and brain injuries caused indirectly by their own torpedo…The exit hatches were
closed and the bilge pumps that would have been used if the sub started to take
on water were not set to pump, suggesting that the crew never tried to save
themselves as the sub sunk.”
Dr. Rachel Lance, who graduated from Duke
University with a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering, said “There were some holes
in the hull that were the result of time under the sea. But there was no actual
damage caused by the blast itself.”
CBC News reported that “when the charge exploded, the blast
would have caused the submarine’s hull to transmit a powerful, secondary shock
wave into the submarine, crushing their lungs and brain (sic) and killing them
instantly.”
While there are other theories about how the Hunley met
its doom, this seems to be the most likely.
On April 17, 2004, the crew of the first submarine to sink an
enemy ship were interred. Thousands of Americans, many of them descendants of
Confederate veterans, attended the funeral. After a memorial service and a
four-and-a-half mile march through Charleston, the eight-man crew was laid to
rest at Magnolia Cemetery.
My friend and fellow-Southerner, Max Northcutt, made
the trip from Tennessee to South Carolina to attend the services. He was kind
enough to lend me his extensive archives about the Hunley, which I used for
this story.
Sources:
The Confederate Submarine H. L
Hunley by Gerald F. Teaster
The CSS Hunley: The Greatest
Undersea Adventure of the CIVIL WAR by Richard Bak
The CSS H. L. Hunley: Confederate
Submarine by R. Thomas Campbell
The Hunley website: The Friends of The Hunley – The World's First
Successful Combat Submarine
