The Hunley Was Not Alone
BY THE 1860S A LOT OF PEOPLE ERRONEOUSLY thought the submarine was an idea whose time had come. The historian (and owner of a two-man sub) Mark Ragan describes some two dozen Civil War-era projects in his book Union and Confederate Submarine Warfare in the Civil War . But in most cases nothing survives beyond tantalizing glimpses—the names of people involved, ledger entries at an ironworks, a few cryptic messages in military archives.
Confederate inventors began trying to build subs almost as soon as the war began. In Richmond in 1861 an inventor named William Cheney had a small one constructed at the city’s Tredegar Iron Works. It apparently had a three-man crew, including a diver who could leave to attach an explosive to an enemy ship. A Union spy reported that it was tested in the James River in the fall of 1861, but its fate is lost to history.
In Georgia, Charles G. Wilkinson and Charlie Carroll built another small sub; a valve failed during a test dive and it sank in Savannah Harbor in February 1862. John P. Halligan was more successful. He launched his Saint Patrick in Selma, Alabama, in June 1864. It used steam on the surface and a hand-cranked propeller underwater. A Union informer reported that it had a length “of about 30 feet; has watertight compartments; can be sunk or raised as desired; is propelled by a very small engine, and will just stow in 5 men.” On January 27, 1865, it attacked the sidewheeler USS Octorara in Mobile Bay, but its explosive charge failed. It later ferried supplies to a beleaguered Confederate fort in Mobile.
The Union also tried to make submarines. Capt. Edward B. Hunt became the North’s first sub fatality in October 1862, when he was trapped in his one-man vessel off Long Island. Lodner Phillips tested submarines on Lake Michigan and offered to build a 40-foot version that would use compressed air to keep a crew of five submerged for 24 hours. His “use of buoyancy tanks and compressed air was a precursor of the surfacing and diving methods” of the twentieth century, Ragan writes. But he apparently never built that vessel, and at one point the government turned him away, saying, “The boats used by the United States Navy go on and not under the water.”
The most ambitious Union project was the inspiration of Brutus de Viileroi, a Frenchman who wrote extravagantly to President Lincoln in 1861: “I propose a new arm of war, as formidable as it is economical. Submarine navigation which has been sometimes attempted, but as all know without results, owing to a want of suitable opportunities, is now a problematical thing no more.”
Villeroi won a contract to build a craft within 40 days at a cost of not more than $14,000. He launched it in Philadelphia on April 30, 1862. Forty-seven feet long, with an arched iron roof and small glazed windows, it had some sort of compressed-air system and an especially odd propulsion arrangement that used 16 paddles projecting through watertight seals, with each blade hinged so it would close on the reverse stroke to reduce water resistance.
Christened the USS Alligator , it was towed to Hampton Roads, where the commander of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron commented, “I hope it may be of service to the Government, but my impression is that it is next to a very useless concern.”
His sour assessment proved correct. The James River was too shallow for submarine operation, and before long the vessel was in Washington, where its unwieldy oars were replaced with a hand-cranked propeller. Lt. Thomas O. Selfridge, who then took command, showed no greater enthusiasm: “My preliminary inspection of the Alligator … was disappointing. She was little more than a cigar-shaped hull with crude man power propulsion machinery inside.” On a test run on the Potomac, the bow suddenly sank, leaving the stern sticking up from the water and a panicked crew fleeing onto the deck. Even under the best circumstances the 18-man crew couldn’t make headway against the river’s 1.5-knot current. The best Selfridge could say was, “If her speed were greatly increased, and steering apparatus improved, she couid perhaps be made effective.”
He went off to other commands, and the Alligator eventual Iy sank in a gale while being towed to South Carolina for possible operations there. Today the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Office of Naval Research have started a program to recover the Alligator . In 2003 researchers turned up Villeroi’s hand-drawn designs, but nothing was found in a first search for the craft itself off Cape Natteras in August 2004.
The Hunley is not the only sub from the time whose remains survive, though. In 1863 Scovel Merriam, Augusta Price, and Cornelius Bushnell (a distant cousin of the Revolutionary War submariner) formed a partnership to build a submarine for the Union, but they didn’t complete their wonderfully named Intelligent Whale until after the war. It underwent its first and only trials in 1872, and the disappointing results “put an end to American military submarine development for over thirty years,” in Ragan’s words. The Intelligent Whale is now on display at the National Guard Militia Museum in Sea Girt, New Jersey. And a Confederate submarine recovered from Lake Pontchartrain in 1878 belongs to the Louisiana State Museum, in New Orleans, and is undergoing conservation elsewhere. As perhaps befits a relic from the murky history of Civil War submarines, nobody knows who built it.
