Home : America At War : The Civil War : The Civil War On The Fringe :

What Happened To The H.L. Hunley

On February 17, 1864, the Confederate Navy scored the first victory for a submarine in the history of naval warfare as Lt. George Dixon and his eight man crew piloted this strange vessel with it's unique torpedo spar into the side of the U.S.S. Housatonic, lighting up Charleston Harbor with a deadly fireworks display.

It could be one of the nation's oldest cold case files: What happened to eight Confederate sailors aboard the H.L. Hunley after it became the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship? Their hand-cranked sub rammed a spar with black powder into the Union blockade ship Housatonic off Charleston on a chilly winter night in 1864 but never returned.

Its fate has been the subject of almost 150 years of conjecture and almost a decade of scientific research since the Hunley was raised back in 2000. But the submarine has been agonizingly slow surrendering her secrets. "She was a mystery when she was built. She was a mystery as to how she looked and how she was constructed for many years and she is still a mystery as to why she didn't come home," said state Sen. Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston and chairman of the South Carolina Hunley Commission, which raised the sub and is charged with conserving and displaying it.

Scientists hope the next phase of the conservation, removing the hardened sediment coating the outside of the hull, will provide clues to the mystery. McConnell, who watched the sub being raised more than eight years ago, thought at the time the mystery would be easily solved. "We thought it would be very simple ... something must have happened at the time of the attack," he said. "We would just put those pieces together and know everything about it."

But what seemed so clear then seems as murky now as the sandy bottom where the Hunley rested for 136 years. When the Hunley was raised, the design was different from what scientists expected and there were only eight, not nine, crewmen, as originally thought.

The first phase of work on the Hunley consisted of photographing and studying the outside of the hull. Then several iron hull plates were removed allowing scientists to enter the crew compartment to remove sediment, human remains and a cache of artifacts.

Thousands of people, many re-enactors in period dress, turned out in April 2004 when the crew was buried in what has been called the last Confederate funeral. With the inside excavated, the outside of the hull will now be cleaned before the sub is put in a chemical bath to remove salts left by years on the ocean floor. The Hunley will eventually be displayed in a new museum in North Charleston.

Archaeologist Maria Jacobsen said the Hunley is like a crime scene except that, unlike on television shows, there is no smoking gun. "If we compare this crime site investigation with, say, a tragic plane crash in the mountains, that investigation would be a lot easier," she said. "You can go to the crash you can see the metal pieces and they have the fingerprints of the crash site." In the case of the Hunley, some of those fingerprints may be covered with the encrusted sediment on the hull that scientists refer to as concretion.

When the sub was found there was no window in the front conning tower, suggesting it had been shot out, perhaps by Union sharpshooters. But no glass was found inside the sub and the remains of the captain, Lt. George Dixon, showed no injuries to his skull or body consistent with being shot while looking through the window, McConnell said.

The crew's bodies were found at their duty stations, suggesting there was no emergency resulting in a scramble to get out of the sub. And the controls on the bilge pump were not set to pump water from the crew compartment, suggesting there was no water flooding in.

After the attack both Confederates on shore and Union ships reported seeing a blue light, believed to be the Hunley signaling it had completed its mission. A lantern with a thick lens that would have shifted the light spectrum and appeared blue from a distance was found in the wreck. But after the attack, the USS Canandaigua rushed to the aide of the Housatonic and there is speculation that the light could have come from that ship instead.

Could the Canandaigua have grazed the Hunley, disabling her so the sub couldn't surface? A good look at the hull in the coming months may provide the answer. Historians also know the Hunley needed to wait for the incoming tide to return to shore. "Were they waiting down there and miscalculated their oxygen and blacked out?" said McConnell. He said a grappling hook, believed to serve as an anchor of the Hunley, was found near the wreck. Cleaning the hull may produce evidence of a rope showing the sub was anchored, perhaps waiting for the tide to change.

Then there is the mystery of Dixon's watch, which stopped at 8:23 p.m. Although times were far from uniform in the Civil War era, the Housatonic was attacked about 20 minutes later, according to federal time, McConnell said. One theory is the concussion of the attack stopped the watch and knocked out the sailors on the sub. Or the watch simply might have run down and was not noticed in the excitement of the attack. That could have led to a miscalculation of the time they were under water.

Union troops reported seeing the Hunley approaching and the light through the tower window "like dinosaur eyes or a giant porpoise in the water," McConnell said. If the Hunley crew miscalculated and surfaced too close to the Housatonic on their final approach they would not have had enough time to replenish their oxygen before the attack, he said.

The clues now seem to indicate the crew died of anoxia, a lack of oxygen, and didn't drown. "Whatever happened, happened unexpectedly, with no warning," McConnell said. Running out of oxygen can quickly cause unconsciousness. "One you reach that critical stage, it's like you flick a switch," he said. "It's that fast, like on an airplane."

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.

Fate of Civil War Sub a Cold Case File. Military.com. January 05, 2009

Submarine Warfare in the Civil War The hardcover edition, Union and Confederate Submarine Warfare in the Civil War, was published to wide acclaim in 1999. For this new paperback edition, Ragan has revised and updated the text to include the full story of the Hunley's recovery and restoration.

---

top of page

back a page