Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

Mallory proved equal to the task of creating a navy from scratch. He bought tugboats, revenue cutters, and river steamboats to be converted into gunboats for harbor patrol. Recognizing that he could never challenge the Union navy on its own terms, Mallory decided to concentrate on a few specialized tasks that would utilize the South’s limited assets to maximum advantage. He authorized the development of “torpedoes” (mines) to be planted at the mouths of harbors and rivers; by the end of the war such “infernal devices” had sunk or damaged forty-three Union warships. He encouraged the construction of “torpedo boats,” small half-submerged cigar-shaped vessels carrying a contact mine on a bow-spar for attacking blockade ships. It was only one step from this concept to that of a fully submerged torpedo boat. The Confederacy sent into action the world’s first combat submarine, the C.S.S. Hunley, which sank three times in trials, drowning the crew each time (including its inventor Horace Hunley) before sinking a blockade ship off Charleston in 1864 while going down itself for the fourth and last time.