What
Happened To 'Em Part V
The
Union Navel Force at the The Battle Of Mobile Bay
As I noted in the last post (Which was far, far too long
ago...Sadly routine life sometimes gets in the way of things
like, oh, I dunno, working on a Blog) the collection of navel
vessels at The Civil War's largest navel battle just begs for a
couple of 'What Happened To 'Em ' posts. I took care of the Confederate
Naval Force last time. The US Navy...known as the Union Navy during
the Civil War...gets it's turn this go-round.
This one's going to be just a bit more complicated, and
way longer, than the
'What Happened To 'Em ' post for the Confederate Naval Force. There
were four Confederate Navy ships at Mobile Bay, but there were
eighteen Union ships, so we're
going to split this one up into sections (And indeed, subsections).
Also, most of the Union Navy ships didn't have overly
blog-worthy careers after the battle...they and their crews did their
jobs and duty and did it well, but the most notable part of their
career was The Battle of Mobile Bay.
OF course, that wasn't the case for all eighteen.
You have an ironclad that has become what's likely the
most complete example of a Union Navy Monitor type Ironclad in
existence...and she's completely inaccessible. Another
ironclad...this one a twin turret river monitor...was in service,
sort of, until the 1950s.
The ships of the line?
One was around until 1956...and her story is not only sad, it's
tragic, especially if you're a History Buff. Another was involved in
one of the most controversial incidents of the late 18th
century...a deadly incident that caused a major British shipping line
to be banned from American ports for decades and put a memorial to
the crew of a U.S. Navy ship place smack dab in the middle
of a city that would be a major Axis port during WW II. This incident
has earned this particular ship a place in two of my blogs, BTW. A
third was carried a mile inland by a Tsunami and deposited high and
dry on a nearly even keel.
I'm going to divide this post into sections...Ironclads,
Ships Of The Line, and Gunboats...with subdivisions within each for
the ships with the more interesting after-battle histories. Ok, now
that the Technical doin's of this post are taken care of...on the The
Ships!
First a real real
quick review of how Dave Farragut set things up for The Battle of
Mobile Bay...for a more in-depth description of the battle, take a
look HERE for my post
on the battle.
He had to engage, and get past both Fort Morgan, on the
eastern side of the bay's entrance, and the heavily armed Confederate ironclad CSS Tennessee to take the bay. He had to
do this with his ships and crews intact. And he had to pass between
the fort and a minefield (Called 'Torpedoes' back during the Civil
War) to do it.
So he sent his four
turreted ironclads...Tecumseh, Manhattan, Winnebago, and
Chickasaw...in to deal
with the CSS Tennessee and engage
the fort while he slipped his fourteen unarmored wooden ships past.
Tecumseh and Manhattan
and their pair each of big 15
inch Dahlgren cannon were there specifically to deal with CSS Tennessee while
the Winnebago and
Chickasaw were there,
with twin turrets and four 11 inch guns each, to keep Fort Morgan's
gunners busy.
There would be seven Ships Of The Line, all Sloops of War, and seven gunboats passing the fort. Admiral Farragut lashed the gunboats to the port sides of the sloops so the gunboats' engines could pull the larger ships clear in the event they became disabled. All of them needed to stay to the right of a set of buoys marking the minefield. OH, yeah. They also had to contend with CSS Tennessee as her main reason for being was to prevent just what Dave Farragut and Company were trying to pull off..
There would be seven Ships Of The Line, all Sloops of War, and seven gunboats passing the fort. Admiral Farragut lashed the gunboats to the port sides of the sloops so the gunboats' engines could pull the larger ships clear in the event they became disabled. All of them needed to stay to the right of a set of buoys marking the minefield. OH, yeah. They also had to contend with CSS Tennessee as her main reason for being was to prevent just what Dave Farragut and Company were trying to pull off..
So they had business toward the fort and the bay,
started engaging Fort Morgan's guns, annnnnd....
CSS Tennessee sortied,
obviously intent on positioning to engage and ram the ships of the
line as they cleared Fort Morgan Point, the narrow peninsula that
Fort Morgan sits on the tip of.
USS Tecumseh's captain
saw this, and ordered her helmsman to maneuver to engage Tennessee,
ordering her helm to port, and
heading right into the torpedoes, striking one. The ensuing explosion
blows a barn-door size hole in her hull, and she goes down in a
minute and a half, taking most of her crew with her...
THE IRONCLADS
USS
Tecumseh
USS Tecumseh did
not have a long
career. Her keel was laid in late 1862, she was launched in Sept of
1863, commissioned in April of 1864...and she made that fateful turn
to port and had a barn door opened in her side by a torpedo on August
fifth of that same year, so she was in commission for a shade under 4
months, meaning she was essentially still brand new when she was
sunk.
She was a Canonicus
class Monitor, and like all of
her sister ships she was named after an Indian Chief. It took almost
18 months to build her...a long long
time back th the 1860s...due to changes being rung in her design
almost daily as battle experience with other monitors revealed
weakness in design. Among other changes, the thickness of the armor
on her turret and pilot house was increased by two inches, from 8”
to 10”, her turret was relocated to 'Trim' her properly, her hull
was deepened (Increasing her buoyancy...but also increasing her
draft) and bolts securing her armor were replaced by rivets to
prevent the bolts from becoming deadly missiles from a hit.
She was 223 feet long with a beam of 43 feet and a
draft of 13 feet and change. She was powered by an 310 HP
Ericsson-type vibrating lever engine that turned a single 4 bladed
screw to give her a top speed of 8 knots (Well below her designed top
speed of 13 knots). As I noted above, she boasted a pair of huge 15" Dahlgren smooth-bore cannon...the largest naval artillery that could be had in 1864.
She was originally
assigned to the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, based in Newport
News, Va, and her first sortie was to escort the transports carrying
General Ben Butler's Army Of The James up-river to kick off the
Bermuda Hundred Campaign. She helped sink obstructions in the river to bottle the
Confederate forces up north of Bermuda Hundred (Which is just north
of City Point, where the James and Appomattox Rivers become one, and
within sight of where I work), fired on breast works under
construction, and, along with her sister ships Canonicus
and Saugus,
had it out with several gun emplacements near Howlett's Farm,
knocking one of the guns out in the process. She also exchanged
shots with Confederate warships near Dutch Gap (The CSN Naval Academy
ship Patrick Henry
likely among them) in an indecisive battle. The warships were firing
all but blind as the two opposing forces were hidden from each other
by trees and a bend in the river.
She headed back down
river for Norfolk two days later, only to run aground when her
steering cables parted after being weakened by the heat from her
boilers (Likely creating yet another mod to be made on Monitors, both
already in service and abuilding). She was refloated, towed into
Norfolk, underwent repairs, and got orders transferring her to the
West Gulf Blockading squadron. She departed Hampton Roads heading
South on July 5th.
She'd meet her date with a torpedo exactly a month later.
When Tecumseh
hit the torpedo, it struck on
the port side just about directly below the turret, and the explosion
was beyond huge, boosting a geyser of white water dozens of feet into
the morning air, and sending a double thunderclap across the bay as
the sound was transmitted through both air and
water. According to witnesses Tecumseh's bow
actually lifted several feet out
of the water, then just kept on going when it came down, twisting her
as she sank by the bow with her propeller still turning. She took 93
of her crew with her...many of them were either killed or injured by
the torpedo explosion and those who weren't injured barely had time
to comprehend what had just happened, much less try to get off of
her. Estimates of how long it took her to go down
range from 25 seconds to a minute and a half. Escape would have been
all but impossible even on the long end of that scale. There were
relatively few ways to get on deck, all involving climbing a vertical
ladder, and by the time anyone still able to try to escape made it
to one of the few routes topside, climbed the ladder, and got to a
hatch, she was under. This even included her two gun crews, who were
trapped in the turret. So Tecumseh
still has 93 of her crew on board, making her a war grave. And this
set up the first bit of controversy involving her.
The wreck lay on the
bottom of Mobile bay, forgotten, for several years. She was deep
enough that she wasn't a navigation hazard, and while most everyone
knew she was there and had a good idea about where 'There' was, she
kind of slipped out of everyone's mind. That is, until several
individuals realized just how much valuable scrap metal was sitting
on the bottom of various bays and rivers courtesy Civil War naval
battles. A Mobile businessman named James Slaughter was thinking
along those very lines in 1873 when he bid on Tecumseh's
wreck for the sum of 50 dollars,
and won the bid. The Department Of The Treasury passed title to him
and Slaughter made his intentions more than clear...he intended to
have divers plant explosives on the wreck so he could blow it apart,
thereby exposing her boilers and machinery for salvage as well as
breaking her hull into pieces small enough to raise and sell for
scrap.
One problem here...or actually, 93 problems. What about
the remains of the brave sailors who went down with her? Slaughter
obviously didn't give a rats ass about them, and sadly, it seems that
the Navy forgot about them as well. The Media grabbed this story and
ran with it. True, Newspapers were the only way to distribute the
news to the public back in the1870s, but distribution of news had
advanced leaps and bounds over what it had been a quarter century
earlier. Two things helped speed the distribution of news
nationwide...the Telegraph, and the oldest News Agency in the U.S.,
The Associated Press.
The A.P. Grabbed the
story of the businessman who, in the name of profit, intended to blow
up the remains of 93 brave sailors who made the supreme sacrifice for
their country, newspapers published the story and the public went
ballistic. You think the public
was irate? The families of those 93 men pretty much wanted to take a
trip to Mobile, Alabama and deal with Mr Slaughter personally. Me
thinks it would not
have been pleasant for him.
The
negative publicity put the project on hold before it even got going.
More than a little negative publicity was heaped on the Federal
Government for selling a War Grave for salvage in the first place,
and Congress actually realized 'We Blew This One' fairly quickly.
Amazingly, they acted to fix it real
fast. They quickly
passed Joint Resolution No. 23 on 15 August of 1876, directing the
Dept Of The Treasury to return Mr Slaughter's 50 dollars with
interest, and directing the Navy to regain ownership of the wreck
while also empowering the Secretary Of The Navy to protect it.. While
salvage wasn't forbidden, a very important stipulation was made...ANY
salver had to see to the proper
handling and identification of the remains, and return them to their
families if identification was possible. If Identification was not
feasible (And with the technology existing in 1876, it likely
wouldn't have been) they were to see to proper burial of the remains.
There were no more bids on the wreck for salvage.
So,
Tecumseh's wreck sat
on the bottom, slowly sinking into the mud, for a century. Once in a
while divers ventured down to explore the wreck, occasionally items were
removed...and then came 1965.
The National Geographic Society organized a project to raise the
ship, and articles were even published in both newspapers and
periodicals describing the process that would be involved. She was to
be the centerpiece of a National Armed Forces Museum Park in D.C.,
which would have meant transporting her by barge after she was raised
and preservation efforts had been accomplished.
They found her, upside down and mostly buried in the bottom mud. Me
Thinks they they really didn't understand what would be required to
raise and preserve a nearly 225 foot long 2100 ton warship that had
been submerged for a century, but they were willing to give it a
shot. ANNNNND...their primary source of funds had to back out, ending
that project. Divers did make it inside of her though, and raised her
bell as well as chinaware from her crew's or possibly Officer's Mess,
among other artifacts and these items were put on display at the
Smithsonian. The divers reported that she seemed to be in a
remarkable state of preservation.
Location of Tecumseh wreck site, from Wikimapia. |
She
slowly sank further into the mud for another decade until Mobile
Naval Historian Jack Friend was tapped to lead a feasibility study
RE: Raising Her. They surveyed the wreck, entered her and explored
her and were amazed. See, that mud she's buried in? It's preserved
her. Yes, she's in one piece, upside down and lying on top of her
turret. Loaded with 50,000 or so artifacts. The white paint on her interior bulkheads supposedly looked like it had just been applied. In short, Tecumseh's
a literal time capsule.
It
was estimated that it'd cost 10 million to raise and preserve her and
properly and respectfully handle the remains of her crew back in
1974. Multiply that by about ten today, so she's probably not coming to a museum near you anytime soon. But some things have gotten
much better for her. She's been added to the register of National
Historic Places, and is, of course, considered a War Grave.
Technically she still belongs to the U.S, Navy. And don't even think
about trying to dive on her without a permit. Drop a 'Divers In The
Water' flag above the wreck and, trust
me, you'd barely even get an anchor in the water before a
Coast Guard patrol boat was boiling up next to you with her guns
manned, a Coastie hailing you in a no nonsense tone of voice.
So she's still there, about 1500 feet or so off of Fort Morgan Point,
marked by a can buoy, waiting for someone to figure out how to raise
her and give her crew a proper Military Funeral.. For now her 93 crew
members are still On Watch, peacefully guarding the Entrance to
Mobile Bay.
USS Manhattan
USS
Manhattan was
one of USS
Tecumseh's
sister ships and was identical to her right down to the design
changes during construction that delayed her completion. She was
launched in October1863 (A month after Tecumseh),
commissioned in June 1864 (Two months after her sister ship)
and, also like Tecumseh,
she was nearly brand new when she participated in the battle of
Mobile Bay. Unlike her sister ship, though, The Battle of Mobile Bay
was
Manhattan’s
first taste of war…she was assigned to the Gulf Coast Blockading
Squadron when she was commissioned, and dispatched to Mobile Bay as
soon as her sea trials were completed. Of course, Manhattan
also
survived the battle.
An 1860s lithograph of USS Manhattan at sea. |
After
the battle she steamed to New Orleans, and was assigned to patrol
duties at the mouth of the Red River, where she stayed for the rest
of the war. After the war she was decommissioned and mothballed (‘Put
In Ordinary’ as it was termed then) until 1870, when she was
transferred to Pensacola Florida…from there she steamed to Philly,
where she underwent a year-long refit at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
After her refit she returned to Pensacola, and was utilized for
patrol duties off of the Carolinas until 1877. She was then
transferred to Norfolk, and either steamed or was towed a little
further up the James River with each passing month until she ended up
moored at Richmond Va. (More on that in 'Notes'...trust me it's an
interesting little story)
Personally,
I think the Navy was trying to figure out what they were going to do
with her. And
decide they ultimately did. In 1888, she steamed to League
Island in Philadelphia…home of the Philadelphia Navy Yard and of
The Navy Reserve Fleet. She was decommissioned and laid up in
the reserve fleet, to be recommissioned and pressed into service in
1898, along with several of her sister ships, for coastal defense
duty off the East Coast during the Spanish-American War. She was in
commission for this task for less than a year before again being
decommissioned and returned to League Island, where she stayed until
she was sold for scrap in 1902.
USS
Chickasaw
USS Chickasaw and USS
Winnebago were sister ships,
both being shallow draft Milwaukee class
twin turret river monitors, both mounting a quartet of 11 inch
Dahlgrens in those twin turrets, two guns to a turret. Both were just
shy of 230 feet long with a beam of 56 feet and an extremely shallow
draft of 6 ft that allowed them to operate efficiently on rivers.
Chickasaw was ordered
in 1862, launched on February 10th,
1863, commissioned on May 14th, 1864, and spent a couple of months
patrolling the Mississippi before she was assigned, by request, to
Admiral Farragut's West Gulf Blockading Squadron in July, 1864...just
In time for the Battle of Mobile Bay
Chickasaw mounted a pair of
Eriksson design turrets, very similar to Monitor's.
Winnebago (And the other three
Milwaukee class boats)
mounted a single Eriksson-type turret and a single Eades-type
all-steam powered turret. As similar as the two sisters were, what
happened to them is about 180 degrees ... and nearly a
century...apart. USS Chickasaw...or
at least portions of her...were around until the 1950s, so we'll take
a look at her first.
A period photo of USS Chickasaw... |
Having a pair of Eriksson type
turrets ended up being a major plus for her...though
the turrets' rotation was steam powered all the other operations were
powered by good old elbow grease. And, like a car with manual windows
and locks a century and a half later, while it required a little more
effort to operate there was far less to go wrong. Her two Eriksson
turrets never missed a beat and she basically
became Admiral Farragut's heavy hitter and big-gun workhorse for the
entire battle.
She fired over 70 shells at fort
Morgan, but her best trick of the battle was 'Crossing The T' at CSS
Tennessee's stern and sticking
to her like a leach while pumping 11 inch shell after 11 inch shell
at her at ranges as close as 10 yards...yep, 30 feet...while getting hit
eleven times herself. Chickasaw's gunners
never managed to put a shell through the armor on Tennessee's
casemate (One of USS
Manhattan's 15 inch guns almost
managed that one) but
she did managed to jam most of Tennessee's
gun port shutters, all but remove her funnel, and most importantly
take out her steering chains, then towed her to the U S Fleet
anchorage after she surrendered.
Then
she shelled all three forts..Morgan, Gaines, and
Powell... leaving shell holes in Fort Gains' wall that are still
there. In short, If Admiral Farragut needed big guns to pummel a
Confederate target, it was a pretty good bet that Chickasaw would get
the job. She hung
around Mobile Bay for the rest of the war, performing patrol duties
and being put to work whenever her combination of big guns and
shallow draft was needed. She participated in the battles of Spanish
Fort and Fort Blakely (Arguably the last battles of the Civil War)
and sortied up the Tombigbee River along with a pair of other
warships to capture the side-wheel ironclad CSS Nashville,
the gunboats Morgan
and Baltic, and
the riverboat Black Diamond.
That
was pretty much her last hurrah...of the war, at any rate. She headed
for New Orleans on July 3rd to be decommissioned...a
status she'd enjoy for nearly a decade. She was finally sold on
September 12th, 1874, and that's when her career took more
of an interesting turn...see, unlike most former Civil War ironclads
that survived the war, when she was sold, she wasn't sold for
scrap.
She
was purchased by the New Orleans Pacific Railway Co, whose marine
division took a look at her, did some calculations, and picked her
up, probably for a song or less.
The
Navy removed her ordinance and turrets and likely salvaged some of
her machinery, then The N.O. P. R.C. stripped her down to her bare
hull, made a couple of modifications, and converted her into a coal
barge. She spent another ten years and change transporting coal on
The Mississippi, probably to supply their locomotives rather than for
commerce.
I can
hear everyone thinking 'So She Became a barge...so what?? Things got
a bit more interesting in 1880...The N.O.P.R. needed a car ferry at
one of it's crossings on the Mississippi. Saving money's always been
high on the list of corporate America. The N.O. P. R.C. suits' thought process was likely
along the lines of 'Why build a bridge when traffic volume's low
enough that you can use a ferry, and why contract to build a new
ferry from the keel up when you have a 225 foot long iron-hulled
barge that was built as a warship originally, meaning she had lots of
reserve rigidity, toughness, and capacity built into her. We'll just build the ferry on the barge's hull...' And that's exactly what they did.
She
was highly modified of course...She was rebuilt as a side wheeler
with a two track car deck flanked by crews quarters and machinery
spaces and an ornate pilothouse perched above the car deck,
renamed Gouldsboro, and placed in service at a crossing a bit north of New
Orleans.
She
operated at a crossing near New Orleans and, as it was a short river
crossing, she either had no passenger accommodations or very
rudimentary ones. The locomotives would have kept steam up on the
crossing, and in colder weather, the string of cars still coupled to
the engine would be heated by steam from it's boiler. As for the
detached string of coaches, I'd bet lunch at Applebees that there was
a dedicated steam connection from the Gouldsboro's boilers for
just that purpose.
At
some point the N.O.R.C. either merged with or was purchased by the
Texas and Pacific, and the Gouldsboro soldiered along,
transporting trains across the Mississippi for another sixty or so
years until 1939. (When, likely, she was finally replaced by a
bridge). Oh she was rebuilt a couple of times and by the time she was
sold again and converted into a work barge in the early or mid 40s
about the only thing left from the original Chickasaw was her
keel and part of her hull. But what was left of her was still the
longest surviving in service vessel from The Civil War.
You'd
think that once she was converted to a work barge, she's just fade on
out to obscurity, ultimately being scrapped or just forgotten,
rusting away at some backwater, and you'd almost be right...almost.
For un-noted reasons she sank near New Orleans sometime in the
mid-50s, and by all rights that should have been it. Should
have, you may note I said.
For
anyone not familiar with the Mississippi’s wandering ways, it does
just that…wander, that is The Mississippi regularly
changes course, sometime a couple of times over the course of a
half century. So, when a section of riverbank collapsed several miles
above New Orleans in 2004 it didn't come as any surprise at all that
said riverbank had, at some point in the past, been in the middle of
the river.
The
Army Corps of Engineers was called in to repair and stabilize the
collapse area and while they were surveying the collapse so they
could figure out how to do just
that,
they struck metal. And after probing and digging, and probably using
ground-penetrating radar/sonar they realized they had found a sunken
barge. After consulting records and making inquiries, they realized
they had found the remains of the Gouldsboro,
AKA
Chickasaw.
Her
hull’s in a pretty decent state of preservation, but as noted, only
the keel and the bottom of the hull are original to the ironclad.
Digging her out and restoring her to her Civil War configuration was
both practically and financially out of the question, but the Corps
of Engineers does plan to preserve the wreck in place.
USS
Winnebago
USS
Winnebago
was ordered in May of 1862, launched on the 4th
of July, 1963, and commissioned on April 7th,
1864. Like Chickasaw, she spent several months patrolling the
Mississippi before she was assigned to the Mobile Bay operation.
Winnebago
was
Chickasaw's
sister ship and, other than one big glaring difference was virtually
identical to her. That big difference, as I noted above, was
the fact that one of Winnebago’s
two turrets was one of the new Eades type turrets that had all
of
it’s functions powered by steam. And, as often happens with new
technology, that high-tech turret brought a lot
of bugs with it to Mobile Bay. This became obvious in a huge way
when she arrived off of Mobile Bay with her
high-tech Eades turret jammed...and no amount of head-scratching, tinkering, prying, or cursing would unjam it. Even with this little ongoing problem she still managed to slug it out
with Fort Morgan's guns, as well as taking
on ten survivors from Tecumseh who had been rescued by one of USS
Metacomet's boats.
After
all of the ships of the line had entered Mobile Bay she suffered more
mechanical bad luck when the Eriksson turret's rotating gear jammed
as she was
getting ready to engage CSS
Tennessee,
putting her out of that action completely. SOOOO, while Chickasaw
became
the hero and workhorse of the battle, Winnebago’s
crew
had to stand off from the action and watch her sister ship take on CSS
Tennessee, very likely fuming and cursing any and all new
technology as they watched.
Their
fates after the war were also 180 degrees apart….while at least
part
of Chickasaw
was still afloat nearly a century later, Winnebago
didn’t even make it all the way through the next decade. OF course,
there’s a reason for this.
As
happens at the end of any war, the military was immediately downsized
at the end of The Civil War, and this of course included the U.S.
Navy. Budgetary concerns, logistics, and plain old common sense kind
of call for it. While any nation must
keep a strong military up and running for it’s own protection, the
need for wartime levels of manpower and resources just doesn’t
exist during peacetime.
USS
Winnebago became
a victim of this down-sizing when she ended up enjoying the
shortest post-war career of any of the three surviving U.S. ironclads
at Mobile Bay. She was laid up at New Orleans in September 1865, and
stayed right there until 1874, when she was sold for scrap.
It was in the middle of all of this explosive commotion at Vicksburg that Octorara gained her first minor claim to fame when her steering ropes jammed, probably due to jumping a pulley somewhere below decks between her helm and the rudder.
The
Ships Of The Line
All
of the Ships of The Line were steam and sail powered Sloops of War...a 19th century Sloop of War is generally defined as 'A warship with a single, usually open gun deck'...but they were of a
couple of different classes, and enjoyed post war careers that
ranged from Worthy Of their Own Post and a Place In History Post
Battle of Mobile Bay to Routine Assignment-Shuffling until they were
decommissioned and sold. Soooo, that being the case, I'm going to post the stories of the
three Ships Of The Line with the most interesting (IMHO,
anyway)
post battle careers
...USS
Hartford, USS Oneida, and
USS Monongahela...first,
with the other four following.
The
Sad Fate OF The USS
Hartford
As
the weather warms up, flowers blossom, birds sing, and winter coats
go into mothballs, it’s time to load the kids in the family highway
cruiser, aim the front end towards Mobile, Ala, and take a tour of
the immaculately restored USS
Hartford…Oh,
wait…ya can’t. You shoulda
been
able to. And if things had gone the way they should‘ve
gone,
ya woulda
been able too. But…well the Government was involved. We’ll get to
what happened here in a bit…but first let’s take a look at Dave
Farragut’s favorite floating war-horse.
Lets
get the vitals out of the way first. She was launched at Boston Navy
Yard in November of 1858 and commissioned in May of 1859. She was 225
feet long with a beam of 44 feet and a draft of 17’2”. For
shootin' purposes. she mounted twenty 9” smooth bore Dahlgren
guns, a pair of 20 pounder Parrott rifles (Probably her bow mounted
chase guns) as well as a pair of 12 pounder howitzers on wheeled
carriages. She had a single steam engine as well as a full
suite of sails, and could cut through the water at a shade over 13
knots, or about 15 MPH.
Two views of an outstanding model of USS Hartford. |
Hartford's
first assignment was The
East India Squadron (One of the forerunners of the legendary Asiatic
Fleet), and while serving as the squadron flagship, she transported
the U.S. Minister (Now called Ambassador) to China on a voyage that
saw numerous ports of call. Not a bad assignment for her crew at
all...Sailing to exotic ports, beautiful sunsets over the Pacific…
…And
then cannon balls started falling on Fort Sumter. Hartford
was
ordered home, sailed for Philly at the end of August, 1861, arrived
at The Navy Yard on December 2nd,
and the next thing ya know, yard workers were scrambling all over her
getting her fitted out for War, and a fella named David Farragut was
told he was in command of The West Gulf Blockading Squadron, and that
the Sloop Of War Hartford
was
to be his flagship.
Yep…Hartford
was
Admiral Farragut’s flagship almost from the git-go (He was in
command of USS
Brooklyn before
the West Gulf Blockading Squadron was formed),
and Hartford
participated
actively in every major waterborne campaign in the Gulf, the very
first task being capturing New Orleans. (The CSA’s largest and most
prosperous city and the guard-dog of the Mississippi). After taking
New Orleans they planned to move North up Old Man River and meet the
Confederate forces as they moved south. In short, they wanted the
Mississippi…all
of it. That campaign would continue through the entire war. As for
New Orleans, a quick word’s definitely in order. To approach New
Orleans, the Union fleet had to pass between a trio of forts, get
through a very effective set of obstructions, and take on a couple of
dozen Confederate warships of various descriptions, all of which were
crewed by very capable crews who were very determined not to let
New Orleans fall.
And
then there were the fire rafts, which were exactly what you’re
probably thinking they were. Wooden barges loaded to the gunwales
with combustibles that were lit off before said burning barges were
floated among the attacking warships. All of which were wooden.
The
Confederate ironclad Manassas
tried to ram her, and as she dodged that ploy, a fire raft floated
across their bow. Emergency helm and engine orders were given and she
missed the fire raft…and grounded solidly on a mud bar. And then
Manassas
pushed the fire raft up against her hull, managing to light her off.
Her fire pumps and hose lines were manned, and as the guys on the
hose line (s) fought fire while under
fire, Hartford’s
gunners kept up a withering fire of their own. Hartford,
and
Farragut, made a name for themselves that’d be proven valid again
and again throughout the war (And this made her ultimate fate all the
more sad.)
They
took New Orleans, securing the mouth of the Mississippi, and giving
the U.S. Navy a base on the Gulf.
The
fleet proceeded up the Mississippi, taking Baton Rouge and Natchez
without firing a shot…and then they got to Vicksburg. When a
request for surrender was sent, it was answered by this little gem:
"...
Mississippians don't know and refuse to learn, how to surrender to an
enemy. If Commodore Farragut or Brigadier General Butler can teach
them, let them come and try."
(It’s
been strongly suggested by Ole Miss fans since time eternal that, if
you substitute the names of the opposing coaches for Farragut and
Butler, that very same philosophy is still in force on the
gridiron today)
Did
I mention that the Confederate forces had big guns on a nice 200 foot
high bluff that the Union naval cannon could not elevate high enough
to hit? There
was no way the Navy could pull that one off, and the Army had LOTS of
other fish to fry. They basically ended up laying siege on Vicksburg
and blockading the river, denying them any supplies and waited them
out. The fort on the bluff surrendered in mid July.
Then
came the Battle Of Mobile Bay, where one of the most famous and most
often misquoted battle-born catch phrases in history was coined. I
covered both the battle and the catchphrase in detail HERE.
Hartford at anchor in Mobile Bay, sometime in August 1864 |
Hartford
remained in Mobile Bay though the end of the war, then steamed for
New York where she was overhauled and repaired, then reassigned to
her comfortable old pre-war stomping grounds in the newly
reorganized…and renamed…Asiatic Squadron. She had that assignment
until 1868, when she returned home and was decommissioned. She was
recommissioned in October 1872 and rejoined the Asiatic Squadron,
where she stayed until 1875 before returning home to be put in
Ordinary until 1880 or so, when she was again recommissioned and
assigned as the flagship of the North Atlantic Squadron. I can't help
but think that the 'North Atlantic' part was a mere suggestion
considering the fact that she sailed to ports as far removed from the
North Atlantic as Valparaiso,
Chile and Honolulu, Hawaii.
She
then sailed to San Francisco and was pressed into service as a
training ship before being decommissioned once again at Mare Island
for refurbishment and rebuilding, a process that took much of a
decade. In 1899 she was officially designated a Midshipman Training
Ship. She served in this capacity, with her lines and sails handled
by hundreds of Midshipmen, until 1912, when she was taken to
Charleston, S.C. and converted into a receiving ship, a process that
involved removing all but the stubs of all of her masts, all of her
machinery and basically turning her into a floating receiving center
for new sailors as well as a floating office building for the base
staff.
Irony
does exist, By The Way. Charleston, S.C. is, of course, the home of
Fort Sumter and the Civil War's first shots. A bit ironic that it
also became the home of one of the most celebrated of all Union
warships.
USS Hartford after she was converted into a receiving ship |
Speaking
of Hartford's stint as a receiving
ship...ever heard of a fellow named Norman Rockwell? He was in
the Navy briefly during WW I, and ended up assigned to Charleston as
an artist for the base newspaper. His studio was aboard the Hartford,
and the description he gives of her made it clear that when they
turned her into a receiving and headquarters ship they went upscale
with her decor. Of course the Officers' quarters were pretty lavish
when she was an active warship, but as a floating office building the
entire ship was extremely well appointed. Carpeted and paneled
companionways (My dad was in the Navy during World War II...I refuse
to call a passageway on-board ship a 'Hallway'), a well appointed
galley (If it's on-board ship, it's not
a 'kitchen') manned by a bevy of chefs of all culinary
specialties, well appointed and equipped office space, and U S
Marines in full dress uniform guarding the gang planks.
She
served in this capacity until 1928 when she was decommissioned for a
final time after 60 years of active service in one capacity or the
other. And that's where the story gets sad.
She
was declared a relic, and by all rights she should have been
restored, and become a museum ship, A La USS Constitution, AKA
'Old Ironsides'. Didn't happen.
She
remained in South Carolina, moored to the proverbial backwater pier
in an out of the way corner of the naval base in Charleston for 12
years or so, until Franklin D Roosevelt heard of her plight.
Among
the many other things that FDR was deservedly well known for, he was
also a history buff as well as the former Assistant Secretary Of The
Navy, and he had a special love for the U.S.Navy The thought of
Hartford slowly rotting away
in Charleston just did not
sit well with him. One of his pet projects was a naval history
museum, proposed for the Washington, D.C. and an immaculately
restored USS Hartford
would be a perfect centerpiece..
Hartford
was actually towed to the
Washington Navy Yard in 1938, where she joined the historic old cruiser USS
Olympia and a WW I vintage
destroyer in awaiting funds for restoration...and waited...and
waited...and The Depression got in the way...and then WWII happened.
Obviously
with a global scale war to win, the Government had other things to
expend funds and effort on, but FDR kept the idea for the museum
simmering on the back burner. It was, after all, his baby.
The museum actually came very close to happening, but unfortunately his death in 1945 put an end to plans for the project, so Hartford was claimed by the Navy base in Norfolk. They too had vague ideas of restoring her, and even drydocked her to evaluate her for possible restoration in 1946, but it didn't happen. What did happen was work immediately started on a massive resto...oh, wait. It didn't.
The museum actually came very close to happening, but unfortunately his death in 1945 put an end to plans for the project, so Hartford was claimed by the Navy base in Norfolk. They too had vague ideas of restoring her, and even drydocked her to evaluate her for possible restoration in 1946, but it didn't happen. What did happen was work immediately started on a massive resto...oh, wait. It didn't.
Every
time the pier she was moored at in Hampton Roads was needed she was towed to another
pier somewhere else in Hampton Roads until finally everyone got tired of
moving her. Then she was towed to, very literally, an out of the way,
backwater pier in the St Helena Annex, across the Elizabeth River
from the main portion of Norfolk Naval Ship Yard where she was
promptly all but forgotten as were, apparently, any plans for: her
restoration.
Anyone
who owns a wood constructed boat of any size and age, much
less one that's 225 feet long and just shy of a century old, can tell
you what happened next...she deteriorated until her hull started
leaking. Pumps were put on board and ran constantly to keep her
afloat, and she was monitored regularly to make sure that she was
still afloat but other than that little was done.
This
was her status into and through the 50's and here's the wild part of
her entire sad ordeal. The City of Mobile wanted her...they were
planning a National Monument dedicated to the men on both sides lost
during the Battle of Mobile Bay, centered on Fort Morgan, with the
restored Hartford moored nearby and open for tours. The City of
Norfolk also (Again) expressed an interest, and while Norfolk would have been
nice (And closer to me than Mobile by about 850 miles), Mobile would
have been where she belonged. The city of Mobile may have even
offered to help fund her restoration...which would have cost two
million dollars in 1954 dollars. That'd be just shy of $17,570,000 in
2014 dollars.
A
bill was introduced to provide funding, and while it passed the
House, Congress adjourned before the Senate could do anything with
it. This, BTW, has been a favored stalling tactic used by Congress to
stall an unpopular bill (Often to forestall the expenditure of money)
since there has been
a Congress. Of course, Hartford's
restoration
would have been a major undertaking with a Capitol 'M'. Her masts
were gone. Her below decks had been totally reconfigured. Her
machinery was long gone as were her cannon (All of the above were
probably now razor blades and other metal goods). Restoring Hartford
wouldn't
be simply a case of slapping on some paint and calling it a done
deal. Congress proceeded to do one of the things they do
best...procrastinate.
The
Navy wanted to scrap her then and there...she was, after all, still
the property of the U. S. Navy and they sure didn't need her. Yeah,
any and all thoughts about restoring her had been long forgotten by
the USN....but even so, in June1956 some enlightened members of The
House Armed Services Committee introduced a bill that would provide
funding for the project. And the Bill was put in the queue for
consideration and action. And it was still awaiting said
consideration on November 20, 1958 when the pumps that had been
dewatering her for nearly a decade gave up the ghost, likely with a
final forlorn gurgle. Hartford promptly flooded and settled
into the bottom mud, 27 feet down.
Bow-on shot of Hartford after she sank at her mooring in Portsmouth, Va |
Pumping her out to refloat her after she sank at her mooring. What happened next was one of the saddest things to ever happen to a piece of Naval history. |
More
pumps were lowered into her flooded below decks spaces, she was
pumped out and raised, and an examination and survey of her hull was
carried out...and the Navy realized just how bad a shape she was in.
(You can bet that the Navy Brass did not think 'How bad a
shape we let her get in).
The
Navy got their permission to scrap her. Her sad and leaking hulk was
towed to an even more out of the way, derelict, and semi-forgotten
pier (Much easier to find in Hampton Roads in the late fifties than
in the mid 2010s) and she was ripped apart. And her death was not
quick. Between raising her, surveying her, deciding what to do with
her, and finally doing it, she hung on for almost a year.
By
Nov. 6th. 1957. all that was left was her keel and part of
the bottom of her hull. This was pulled out of the water, soaked with
diesel fuel, and lit off...and Hartford met the fate intended
by the Confederate Navy nearly a century earlier when the Manassas
pushed the fire raft against her hull.
OK,
I'm just a major History nut, and Naval History's one of my favorite
subjects, with historic ships being way up on the list, so maybe my
opinion is a bit skewed...but when a shipyard worker threw a lit road
flare into the capsized, diesel soaked remains of Hartford's
hull, that was way up in the top ten most shameful ways a
floating piece of history's ever been treated.
She
should be permanently docked at Fort Morgan, crewed by families on
vacation and kids on field trips, and dads explaining to their kids
just how the heck they fired those huge freaking cannon. But she's
gone. And a piece of history was lost forever.
USS
Oneida and the infamous
hit and run in Tokyo Bay
USS
Oneida was so new she still
smelled like a new ship when The Civil War started. She was ordered
in February 1861, two months before the shooting war actually
started, but during that period of over-wound clock-spring
war-is-inevitable tension that comes just before the shooting war
does start. She was
201 feet long with a beam of 33' 10”, a draft of 8' 11” and
displacement of 1,488 tons, making her a bit smaller than most of
Admiral Farragut's ships of the line, and the 12 knots that her
single engine and single screw could push her through the water at
made her slightly faster than all but USS Hartford.
Like all of the Sloops of War, she was well and heavily armed,
mounting a quartet of 32 ponders, a trio of 30 pounders, a pair of 9
inch guns, along with a single 12 pounder howitzer.
She
was launched in November of 1861, commissioned in February of 1862,
and was assigned to Admiral Farragut's West Gulf Blockading Squadron
right out of the box. She was also in the middle of the action just
as soon as she hit the Gulf, participating in the daring and
successful nighttime sortie from the Gulf into the Mississippi,
passing Forts Jackson and Saint Phillip, and the capture of New
Orleans. During these actions she engaged both of the ships that sank
the big gunboat USS Varuna...CSS Governor Moore and
CSS Stonewall Jackson. She
sank the Governor Moore and
chased the Stonewall Jackson
off. She then headed up the Mississippi attached to the Union fleet,
commanded by Admiral Farragut, that was charged with taking
possession of the Mississippi River.
During this portion
of the campaign, she destroyed obstructions that were set up to
prevent them from doing just what they were doing, then got right
into the middle of the action in The Battle of Vicksburg.
After
this campaign she was back on blockade duty, harassing, capturing,
and occasionally sinking several vessels, until August 5th
1865, when she acted as the Tail End Charlie of the line of ships
passing Fort Morgan and entering Mobile Bay. She
also proved the validity of Admiral Farragut's tactic of lashing a
Ship Of The Line and a gunboat together when a shell form Fort Morgan
took out one of Oneida's boilers,
and USS Galena towed
her out of range of the fort's guns.
After the battle she
sailed to New York Navy Yard and was decommissioned for repair...
...And
had that been it, she would have been little more than a footnote,
the ship that proved Admiral Farragut was just as smart as everyone
pretty much knew he was. But that wasn't
it.
See, she was the
victim of a hit and run collision, a collision between her and a
British steamer that's still on the upper end of the list of the
deadliest peacetime accidents involving a U.S. Navy vessel. This same
accident also managed to get a major British shipping company banned
from US ports for decades.
Oneida
was recommissioned in May 1867
and assigned to The Asiatic Squadron, home basing in Yokohama Japan
and visiting exotic Asian ports...until the very chilly evening of
January 24th,
1870.
Her crew had
actually gotten a tiny taste of disaster a few weeks earlier when a
storm caused some damage and destroyed two of her boats...boats that
her captain had spent a frustrating chunk of time sending messages
back and forth trying to get funds authorized to replace them. So
far, said funding had been denied, or at the very least the request
and approval was stuck deep within the bottomless cavern of Federal
bureaucracy. (We keep seeing proof that some things just haven't
changed in 144 years or so).
She
was scheduled to sail for home on January 24th,
and U.S. Navy sailing schedules are one thing that, barring major
disaster or seriously nasty weather, are pretty much set in stone.
So, at 1830 hours (That's 6:30 PM for the military-time-challenged
among you guys) she was outbound and coming up on an out-jutting
point of land on Tokyo Bay's northern shore then known as Saratoga
Spit. now known as Futsu Cape. They needed to keep their distance
from the Spit and the shoal waters surrounding it, and while steering
clear of the spit, they were also keeping an eye on the running
lights of an inbound steamer. They could see her green starboard
running light, and her white masthead light, and as long as that
light combination remained constant, they would pass starboard to
starboard...that is if
both the steamer and Oneida
kept to their current courses.
The
steamer was the British Peninsula and Oriental Line steamer City
of Bombay, and when the two
ships were within a couple of hundred yards of passing harmlessly,
her red port running light suddenly popped into view. She was turning
in to them! Eyes on Oneida
popped open wide in disbelief,
new curse words were
invented loudly, and emergency helm orders were given. Oneida's
helmsman spun the helm hard to
port as the steamer's bow bore down on them, and as happens in many
disasters, they came painfully close to making it. The City
Of Bombay's straight up-and-down
bow ripped into Oneida's starboard
stern quarter at an angle, about 80 or so feet from the stern, and
tore a wedge shaped hunk of her stern quarter off, opening all decks
to the sea.
Oneida
was built long before watertight compartments and
compartmentalization...technologies that were just coming into use on
new all iron constructed ships...were a standard feature of ship
construction, so the in-rushing waters of Tokyo Bay had the run of
the ship. Her crew desperately tried to get topside if they were
below deck and get the boats they did have loaded and away, but it
was a loosing battle from the git-go. Oneida went
down in about 15 minutes, taking 124 sailors and one boy...a Japanese
orphan who'd been adopted by one of Oneida's officers...with her. The
child's newly adoptive father died trying to save his adopted son.
Sixty-six
sailors got off of her, the majority making it to shore aboard her two small cutters. Several swam for shore
and made it. You may note that nowhere is any rescue effort by the
City of Bombay
mentioned...that's because there was none.
She
kept on getting up, anchoring off shore in Yokohama Harbor about an
hour later, her captain acting as if nothing had ever happened.
During the investigation of the disaster, City of Bombay's
captain claimed that he barely
even realized that he'd hit Oneida, and
figured it was a minor collision, with little or no damage.
Unfortunately for him, his crew...who were just about as disgusted with him as
everyone else who'd heard about the disaster...pretty much ratted him
out. Both the captain and the company were sanctioned, and the
British Peninsular and Oriental line was banned from U.S. Ports for
years.
The
U.S didn't plan to attempt to raise or salvage Oneida, so
the wreck was sold to a Japanese firm almost three years later at
auction. Divers entered her and recovered the remains of most of
those lost. The remains were buried with honors at the expense of the
salvage company on the grounds of Ikegami Temple, in Tokyo. An
ornate headstone bearing inset metal letters telling the story of the
wreck, was made and set at the grave site. Ironically, the letters
were removed and melted down in W.W.II for the Japanese war effort...
...But
that's not the end of
the story. Oneida was on her way home, and she had on board a goodly
bit of moolah that was payment for arms purchased by the Japanese
government, and it was generally assumed that this money was still on
board the wreck. So, in 1955 a crew, funded by a gentleman named
Takeshito Haseo dived on the wreck to look for the strong box. They
recovered quite a few artifacts, including coins, personal
belongings, the steam guage from the engine room, and some remains
missed by the original salvage and recovery effort (The latter were
interred with the rest of their fellow crewmen), but no strong
box...no money at all except for the vintage coins found among the
wreck's timbers.
She sat on the
bottom undisturbed until 2010 when another attempt...this one
sponsored by one of the Japanese TV Networks, and sponsored by one of
Takeshito's relatives...came up just as empty handed as the 1955
attempt, mainly because they weren't even sure they'd relocated her.
They found a shipwreck that resembled her, and they're pretty sure
that it was indeed her, but they weren't absolutely sure.
SO
Oneida still sits on
the bottom of Tokyo Bay, about opposite what used to be called Saratoga Spit, not quite
ready to give up all of her secrets.
USS
Monongahela hangs ten on
a Tsunami
The
crew of USS Monongahela ended up taking a waterborne
thrill-ride the likes of which modern-day water parks haven’t even
begun to fantasize about creating....but that was a bit after
the war, and her little trip past Fort Morgan on the fifth of August,
1864.
Monongahela
was yet another War-Child…she was built at the Philadelphia Navy
Yard, launched in July of 1862 and commissioned in January of 1863.
She was 227 feet long, had a beam of 38 ft and drew 17.5 feet of
water while displacing 2078 tons. Her single steam engine and single
screw could push her through the water at 8.5 knots, and like 90% or
better of the ocean going steam ships of her era, she had a full
suite of sails as well as an engine.
For
armament she mounted a single big 200 pounder Parrott rifle, a pair
of 11” smoothbores, and a pair each of 24 pounder and 12 pounder
howitzers. The Parrott Rifle and both of the smoothbores were all pivot guns.
After
her shakedown cruise she was first assigned to the North Atlantic
Blockading Squadron, then almost immediately transferred to Dave
Farragut’s outfit in the West Gulf…I have a sneakin’ suspicion
that the West Gulf Blockading Squadron was fast becoming known as one
of the squadrons that saw lots and lots of action.
She
patrolled the mouth of Mobile Bay for a while before being assigned
to head up the Mississippi with Admiral Farragut’s fleet.
Monongahela caught a bit more than her share of Confederate
heavy cannon fire at Port Hudson when she and USS Kineo, lashed
along side of her, grounded directly beneath the guns of a
Confederate heavy battery. The battery’s crew took great joy in
pounding Monongahela as she and her escort worked desperately
to pull her off the mud. They finally worked loose and almost managed
to head upriver, beyond Port Hudson, when Monongahela’s engine
called it quits, leaving them with only USS Kineo’s engine to pull the both of them. On top of that, somewhere
during the ordeal Monongahela lost her steering. Heading
upstream against the current wasn't going to happen.. Soooo, they had
to make another run past the Confederate batteries (Which
they’d never really gotten out of range of in the first place) and
the Confederate gunners had no problem at all with sending more heavy
shells their way…and this time they got one, though it wasn’t
Monongahela or her escort.
The
big steam sidewheel frigate USS
Mississippi also
grounded right under the guns defending Port Hudson…running hard
aground at all ahead full… and the gun crews just as gleefully
pumped shell after shell into her as her crew desperately tried to
refloat her. The Confederate gun crews managed to set her on fire,
and her crew took to the boats, leaving Mississippi
to burn until the fire reached her magazines, blowing her up
spectacularly. USS
Mississippi's
loss was likely Monongahela's
and Kineo's
gain, as they probably slipped past, with Kineo's
engine pounding to drag them out of harms way, while the Confederate
gunners were concentrating on
Mississippi.
Monongahela
was repaired, and continued both blockade and bombardment duties
as needed while also supporting amphibious operations. Her next
biggie was, of course, The Battle of Mobile Bay, after which she
continued blockade duty of of the Gulf Coast until the end of the
war.
It
after the war that things got interesting!
She
was assigned to the West Indies Squadron as soon as the war ended and
set sail for Caribbean waters. One of her early big assignments was
as part of a fleet acting as the floating headquarters and water-taxi
for the group of diplomats handling the transfer of ownership of St
Thomas and St John from Denmark to the U.S. Of course, when these
diplomats headed for the soon-to-be-former Dutch West Indies they had
no clue that they were about get slammed by a triple-disaster the
likes of which the world...thankfully...seldom sees.
First,
on October 28th 1867 a hurricane that would have probably
been a category 4 or 5 in modern measurement of force slammed the
Caribbean, killing at least 900 people between the Virgin Islands,
Puerto Rico, and the Dutch West Indies, the majority in the latter.
Twenty days later, as the carnage and devastation from the hurricane
was still being dealt with, an earthquake, centered on the floor of
the Virgin Island Basin and estimated to have hit around 7.2 on the
current Richter Scale shook the Dutch West Indies like a dog shaking
a chew toy...and then came the Tsunami, and with it the Monongahela's
ride from hell.
Monongahela
had just taken several of the
commissioners and diplomats involved in the negotiations on a tour of
St Johns and St Thomas and had disembarked them at Frederiksted,
St Croix, where she was at anchor when the quake hit. The quake let go energy
equal to about one thousand Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs, and was
powerful enough that all of the ships at anchor shivered like
just-rung bells for well over half a minute. The crews and officers
on Monongahela (And
every other ship at anchor) made quick inspections of their ships to
try and figure out what was happening and to check for damage. The
huge clouds of dust rising from just collapsed buildings throughout
Frederiksted made it clear what was going on, and crews were
preparing to send rescue parties ashore when they noticed a strange
phenomenon...the harbor was emptying of water.
As
the Tsunami barreled across open water at around 300 miles per hour
it sucked water from ahead of it, dropping the harbor water level
until Monongahela was
almost high and dry...but that wasn't what really worried her crew...they were for
more concerned with the twenty or thirty foot high wall of water that
they spotted about three miles out, stretching all the way across the
horizon, and moving faster than any wave had a right to move.
The harbor refilled
in a violent roiling instant, lifting Monongahela and carrying
her towards the beach at a speed no man made vehicle would reach on
it's own for about fifty years. Her anchor didn't as much drag as it
lifted up and bounced across the bottom before snagging something and
ripping it's capstan loose from the deck, which in turn took out
several feet of ships rail as it shot overboard like an unguided
missile. She crossed the coral offshore and then the beach with a
good ten to fifteen feet between her keel and the bottom, enough
water that her crew set the jib and stay sails and tried to bring her
head around and sail out to deep water...her engine was useless right
then because she didn't have any steam up, but it wouldn't have
mattered. A modern destroyer probably wouldn't have been able to
steam against that current, much less Monongahela with her 300
horsepower steam engine. Trying to sail against it was pointless.
She grounded first
on the first street inland from the beach, then was lifted again, and
taken further inland until she was deposited somewhere between 400
yards and a mile from the beach, depending on which source you
read...far enough inland that refloating her would be a major
undertaking.
They had only lost
four crewmen, all aboard a boat that had been lowered to check her
for hull damage after the 'quake...all had been bodily ejected from
the boat when the Tsunami lifted it and tossed it like a kid trying
to skip a rock across a pond. One of them was crushed beneath
Monongahela when she landed the first time on the street.
Damage wise she
must've been one of ol' King Neptune's favorites, because she ended
up sitting almost on an even keel...heeled over maybe 15
degrees...with minor bottom damage and no damage at all to her keel,
propeller, propeller shaft, or machinery. Her crew spaces were
intact, as were her stores. Her captain composed a report outlining
what happened, her damage, and suggested that a team be dispatched to
Frederiksted to refloat her as she was all but intact. Meanwhile,
beings they were there, their crew rolled up their sleeves and dived
headfirst into disaster relief in what was one of the U.S.Navy's
first major efforts in that direction. Some of her sails were even
donated to the citizens of Frederiksted for use as tents as
aftershock after aftershock hit...the good people of Frederiksted
quickly learned not to trust any portions of buildings that were
still standing, and much preferred makeshift tents, as they were far
softer than buildings when they collapsed on top of them.
Refloating her was a
major undertaking, commanded by Thomas Davidson and undertaken by a crew from New
York Navy Yard, that took the better part of six months of repairing
the damage to her hull, blasting channels, building a slipway, and
finally relaunching her in May of 1868. She was towed to New York
Navy Yard, where the temporary hull repairs were made more permanent,
then to Portsmouth Navy Yard, in Maine, where she was refurbished
over a period of several years.
Why so long, you may
ask...simple. Naval Technology was advancing in leaps, bounds, and
broad-jumps. Within two decades sails and the forest of masts
and rigging supporting them would be long gone, hulls would be all
iron and later steel, and warships would begin to resemble what we
think of today as a fighting ship, and would resemble the big,
traditional wooden wall 'Ship Of The Line' only in that they both
floated and both carried guns. Though the last Sloop of War was
launched in the late 1870s, the sail equipped warship (And ship in
general) would be all but replaced in front line service by all iron or steel steam powered warships by the late 1880s. Therefore funding tended to favor the
newer ships, and repair work on Monongahela was moved off of
the back burner to the shelf behind the stove, undertaken, apparently
only when funding was available and the 'Spirit moved them'.
When she was finally
recommissioned in 1873 she was assigned to the South Atlantic
Squadron, an assignment she enjoyed for three years before returning
home to become a training ship for a couple of years before being
assigned to The Asiatic Fleet. She was on that assignment for about
two years before returning home for repair in 1879. She was
decommissioned and was In Ordinary until 1883, when she was converted
to a supply ship.
All of her machinery
was removed to allow more room for stores, her rig was changed to a
Barkentine rig so a smaller crew could handle her, and she was
assigned to the South Pacific Squadron, acting as the supply ship at
Callao, Peru until 1890. That was the year that her crew sailed her
'Around The Horn' and to Portsmouth Navy Yard for another refit.
This refit restored her full sailing rig, and converted her to an
Apprentice Training Ship, a role she served in until she was assigned
to The Naval Academy in 1894 as the Navel Academy Practice Ship. She
relieved the venerable old 'USS Constitution in that role,
BTW.
Monongahela after her 1890 rebuild...she now has a full ship rig as well as the sharply raked 'Clipper' bow and true bowsprit traditionally found on the front-end of sailing ships. |
USS Monongahela under sail as the U.S. Naval Academy practice ship |
She made
annual Midshipman training cruises for four of the next five
years...she missed 1898 because of The Spanish-American War...and was
again reassigned to the training station in Newport, Rhode Island as
a practice ship, a capacity she served in for another three years.
She was released
from the training squadron in 1904 and assigned to Guantanamo Bay
Naval Station in Cuba as a stores ship. By all rights she should
have stayed in this capacity...basically a floating warehouse...until
her upkeep became more expensive than her scrap value, but she
didn't. Monongahela apparently
decided that, rather than being
unceremoniously scrapped a couple of decades in the future, she would
go out in a blaze of glory. Literally.
Sometime
in the early hours of March 17th,
1908, bells rang in Guantanamo Bay Naval Stations fire station(s),
banging out a box at the docks, and when the guys pushed the bay
doors open as the horses trotted to their positions in front of
steamers and hose wagons, they could already see what looked like the
sun rising over the waterfront several hours early, boosting an
orange bottomed column of smoke into the predawn Cuban sky.
Now,
when a fire call comes in at Oh Dark Hundred for a 225 foot long
wooden structure...be it afloat or land locked...and the sky's lit up
from a mile or so away when you hit the street, the outcome';s pretty
much already determined, and the way it's handled hasn't changed in
basic form in 106 years. Lay in, set up master steams and big water,
and perform what is known, in highly technical fire fighting
terminology, as 'Surround And Drown'. She was fully involved when
the first steamer rolled up, and despite also having at least one or
two fire boats hitting her with few big streams from the water side
as well as land companies lobbing big water into her burning hull
from the pier, there was no saving her. (Nor would she have been
saved today.). Monongahela
burned to the waterline, and then her remains sank into Guantanamo
Bay's murky water.
I
can't help but think that, as she burned into the night, she was
thinking 'Think I'm gonna survive a freaking Tsunami
and let you let me rot away loaded with consumables until you scrap
me? HA! Scrap this!
Supposedly
her wreck's still right where she burned, 106 years ago, on the
bottom of Guantanamo Bay at her old mooring.
USS
Brooklyn
When
Dave Farragut ordered USS
Hartford
to swung out and around the lead ship of the squadron
attempting to enter Mobile Bay so could coin his catch phrase while
listening to torpedo primers ‘snap!, it was his old
command…USS
Brooklyn…that
she swung out and around.
For
a quick mini-recap, Brooklyn backed down after Tecumseh
exploded, blocked by both the torpedoes and by the quickly sinking
Tecumseh and the few survivors who made it off of her. This
threatened to trap the rest of the ships directly beneath Fort
Morgan’s guns, so Farragut ordered his helmsman to go around, and
the rest, as they say, is history.
Brooklyn,
like Hartford, was launched in 1858, and was a slightly
smaller version of Admiral Farragut’s flagship.
Brooklyn was actually longer than Hartford
…233 feet to Hartford’s 225 feet, but she drew a foot less
water, (16 feet vs 17 feet ), and was less beamy by a foot (43 feet vs 44
feet). Brooklyn also displaced almost 400 tons less than Hartford.
Brooklyn was given to then-captain David Farragut when she was launched and her shakedown cruise took her to Beaufort, South Carolina. After that, she had a busy career, both pre, during., and post war. She spent just about all of her prewar time in Central American waters…unstable Central American Governments are not a new phenomenon. Her first Central American voyage had her investigating the coup that disposed Haitian Emperor Soulouque .
A sadly very poor pic of USS Brooklyn as she appeared during the Civil War. |
Brooklyn was given to then-captain David Farragut when she was launched and her shakedown cruise took her to Beaufort, South Carolina. After that, she had a busy career, both pre, during., and post war. She spent just about all of her prewar time in Central American waters…unstable Central American Governments are not a new phenomenon. Her first Central American voyage had her investigating the coup that disposed Haitian Emperor Soulouque .
Next
she acted as the floating headquarters for former U S
congressman and then Minister (Ambassador) to Mexico Robert McClain
during negotiations to end the civil war in that country…this saw
her shuttling back and forth between Veracruz, Mexico and Pensacola,
Florida for recoaling, as well as to to New Orleans several times to
deliver McClain to that city to so he could catch a train to DC and
report to Congress. They also sailed to both New York and Norfolk on
a couple of occasions to pick McClain up and return to Veracruz.
After
her Mexican operations, she carried a scientific survey team to
Panama to search for a route across the Isthmus…one of the early
operations that would result in the Panama Canal being opened sixty
or so years later. It was during this operation that Farragut got the
promotion to Flag Officer, and was relieved by Captain William
Walker…
…And
it was shortly after this that Brooklyn
became
involved in the turmoil that immediately preceded The Civil War when
she was sent to Charleston, S.C. to assist in resupplying Fort
Sumter, an operation that failed due to the entrance to the harbor
being blocked by obstructions.
She
returned to her then home port of Norfolk and was immediately
assigned to the Gulf of Mexico where she operated to intercept
Blockade runners and Commerce raiders…this is before a true
blockade had been established, and though she, along with several
other warships, made several captures as many Confederate ships got
past them as were intewrcepted.
She
ultimately steamed for Philadelphia, where she was
decommissioned for refurbishment and repair. When these were
complete she was nearly a new ship…with a new Captain. Thomas
Craven, who’d be in command at Mobile Bay, took command of her
while she was in Philadelphia. She returned to the Gulf and was
involved with pretty much every major operation in the West Gulf
Blockading Squadron’s domain. It was during one of these
ops…attacks on Confederate Forts St Phillip and Jackson...that the
Confederate forces unleashed pretty much everything they had on her
from heavy artillery to fire rafts to the Confederate ironclad
Manassas, which managed to ram her and cause enough damage
that she had to have a 24 foot long patch applied to the gash the
ironclad ripped in her hull.
That
operation was the battle of…and ultimate capture of…New Orleans,
and one of the first major, if temporary repairs made at the Union Navy’s
newly captured base was the aforementioned hull patch. After repairs
she was with Admiral Farragut’s fleet when he was given the orders
to, basically, ‘Clear the Mississippi of anything that so much as
looks like it’s Confederate'. This operation is what
took them to Vicksburg where Brooklyn was, once again, right
in the middle of the action.
After
Vicksburg she sailed for Pensacola where more permanent repairs were
made to the damage bestowed upon her by CSS Manassas
She
also participated in the battle of Galveston, which ultimately
restored the blockade after a Confederate surprise counter attack
broke it, and captured several vessels while she was at it. Before
reinforcements arrived to restore the blockade, Brooklyn
became
a pretty efficient commerce raider as her crew chased down and
captured a slew of small, fast blockade runners loaded down with
products such as cotton.
The
Battle of Mobile Bay and her participation in the creation of David
Farragut’s renowned catch phrase came after another round of repairs
and refurbishment for her, and rest and recuperation for her crew.
After the Battle of Mobile Bay she was reassigned to the North
Atlantic Blockading Squadron, and it was during this assignment that
she was in on the very last major naval operation of the war…the
attack on Fort Fisher at Wilmington, North Carolina.
After
the battle of Fort Fisher she sailed north to the New York Navy Yard
where she was decommissioned for repairs on January 31st
1865. She was under repair for the final few months of the war, and
wasn’t recommissioned until October 1865. She was then assigned to
Brazilian waters, where she stayed for two years until her next stint
in ordinary, which began in Philadelphia in September 1867.
When
she was recommissioned in 1870, she was assigned to European waters
(Primarily the Mediterranean, not a bad gig at all then or now) where
she stayed for another three years until she returned to U.S. waters
and was decommissioned for repairs at New York Navy Yard.
She
was recommissioned in January 1874, and patrolled off of the
southern US until fall of that same year when she was assigned as the
flagship of the South Atlantic squadron. For much of the rest
of her career she operated in South American waters, also sailing to
Africa. She had this gig for about a decade, visiting every South
American Atlantic port and several African ports before being
decommissioned yet again in New York in October 1884. She was in
ordinary for nearly a year before being reassigned to the South
Atlantic Squadron, and this time she only stayed in South American
waters for about seven months before being ordered to return home.
Her next assignment would be her last…but it’d be a biggie.
She
was fitted out for duty in the Asiatic Squadron, and in August 1886
set sail for the far east…via the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Suez
Canal, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean. She spent two years showing the
flag in the orient before being ordered home in August 1888. She
returned via Honolulu, then rounded Cape Horn before returning…for
the last time…to New York, where she was decommissioned for the
last time in May, 1889. She had managed to circumnavigate the globe
during her last assignment...a nice little final note in her career.
Brooklyn as she appeared shortly after she returned from her stint with the Asiatic Squadron, and shortly before she was decommissioned for the last time. |
She
was in ordinary for almost two years before she was sold to
E.J.Butler. While it wasn’t noted specifically, it’s a good bet
that she…like many proud ships before and after her…was sold for
scrap.
USS Richmond
USS
Richmond was identical to Hartford in size and
armament, though she did get rid of the 12 pounder howitzers and
mounted an 80 pounder Dahlgren smoothbore and a 30 pounder Parrott
rifle to complement her 20 9” Dahlgrens.
She
was also two years newer than Hartford (And despite this, two
knots slower). She was built at Norfolk Navy Yard and launched
in January of 1860. As soon as her shakedown cruise was completed she
was assigned to the Mediterranean and spent about ten months in the
Med before coming home to find that All Hell had broken loose.
She
was immediately fitted out for war and sent to Jamaica in hot pursuit
of the infamous Confederate commerce raider Sumter. Richmond
searched the Jamaican and Cuban waters where Sumter was
supposedly hanging out extensively, but the Commerce raider…under
the able command of Raphael Semmes…had managed to slip past them
and return to New Orleans without even getting within a mile of being
caught.
NOT
an auspicious start to her career at all. After this FMF
(That’s First Mission Fail) Richmond was reassigned to the
West Gulf Blockading Squadron, where one of her first
assignments was at the Head of Passes…the mouth of the Mississippi
River…to maintain the blockade of the river.
The
Confederate forces weren’t having any of that.
Under cover of darkness on the 12th of October, a trio of
gunboats from Confederate Commodore Hollins’ Mosquito
Fleet, backed up by the Confederate Ironclad Manassas, fell
upon Richmond, USS Preble, USS Vincennes, and
several support ships, included among them the coal schooner that
was tied up next to Richmond re-coaling her. A general
waterborne melee ensued.
CSS
Manassas… The Confederate Navy’s first ironclad, a
small, fast, completely enclosed ironclad that was built almost
exclusively as a ram…made for Richmond, but glanced off of
the schooner before hitting her a glancing blow. The impact still
shook Richmond down to her keel, and punched a hole in her
hull, thankfully above the waterline. Manassas slipped astern
and to port of Richmond and began a tight turn to come
back around and try to ram her again.
While
this was going on, of course, buglers on all three U. S.warships were
blowing General Quarters and gunners were scrambling to their guns,
slamming powder bags and shot home, and running their guns out.
Richmond’s starboard guns roared and puked fire as she got
off a solid broad side as Manassas was coming around. Though
her rounds bounced off of the Ironclad like oversize, over
weight hailstones, it definitely gave the Confederate
crew something to think about, and she retired upriver. Meanwhile,
USS Preble and USS Vincennes, both of which had
steam up, retired towards the Gulf with Richmond covering their
retreat as shells from the Confederate gunboats began raising geysers
at all points of the compass. As if that wasn’t enough
Oh-Dark-Hundred excitement, the river lit up as a trio of fire
rafts were lit off and sent their way, the gunboats behind and
covered by the burning barges. Richmond got under way as well
even as shell-splashes crept closer as the the Confederate gunners
began to find the range.
All
of the U.S. ships tried to make it across the bar at Head of Passes
but the Confederate force, with the possibility of a U.S.,Navy
retreat in mind, had timed their attack with the tide going out
perfectly. Richmond
and
Vincennes
both grounded on the bar. Shore batteries joined in and things were
beginning to look a bit on the grim side until the timely arrival of
the U.S. Army transport Mclellannd
arrived, armed with some big
rifled guns that quickly evened the score.
USS Richmond at anchor in Baton Rouge in 1863, a year or so before the Battle Of Mobile BAy |
So
we have a pair of missions that didn’t exactly inspire the singing
of ‘Anchors Aweigh’ to kick off Richmond’s career. After
this she cruised off of the mouth of the river, both blockading the
river and protecting Army engineers building gun batteries on the
banks of the south and southwest passes. In November she sailed to
Pensacola Bay to the US Naval yard there (Not to be confused with
Pensacola Navy Yard, which was in Confederate hands at the time) for
repairs, then joined USS Niagara and Fort Pickens' guns
in the bombardment of the aforementioned Pensacola Navy Yard,
Confederate shore batteries at Fort McCrea, and the town of
Warrenton. She didn’t come out unscathed and it was a near miss
that came fairly close to doing her in when a shell went in the water
just off of her stern and exploded four feet beneath her, causing her
to begin taking on water.
She
retired to Key West for temporary repairs, her pumps running wide
open to keep her afloat, then sailed to New York Navy Yard for more permanent
repairs.
After
she was repaired she headed back to the Gulf and the West Gulf
Blockading Squadron, where she ended up in the middle of The capture
of New Orleans, as well as the battles of Vicksburg and Port
Hudson. She made it through the first two all but unscathed, and they
almost got them selves a Confederate iron clad as the
Confederate casemate ram Arkansas slipped out of the Yazoo
River and made a dash past the U.S.Fleet. Several of Farragut’s
ships went after her, but she managed to make it to Vicksburg and the
protection of the gun batteries there.
Port
Hudson, however, was another story. First and notable, Port
Hudson was the trial run of the same tactic Admiral Farragut was
going to use at Mobile Bay…lashing a smaller gunboat to a larger
ship of the line so they could provide mutual assistance to each
other and the gunboat could pull the larger ship out of harm’s way
should she become disabled. Works fine in a bay without any real
current running. Not so much, as they were to find out, in a river
with a strong, constant current,. Port Hudson was about 15 miles
up-river from Baton Rouge, and Naval battle ferocity-wise, the battle
probably ranked about 2nd
or 3rd
after The Battle Of Mobile Bay.
Admiral
Farragut attempted to get his fleet past Port Hudson’s heavily
armed, well manned, and well fought set of fortifications in order to
cut off supplies coming into Vicksburg from the west. Only his
flagship, USS Hartford and her gunboat USS Albatross
made it it past the guns. The rest of his fleet swung around and
headed back down river. On top of the guns, the river was
running high and fast and Richmond and her gunboat, USS
Gennessee couldn’t make any headway against the current
once they got just about even with the guns…so they ended up coming
under fire for longer than any of the paired ships as they turned
just about directly under the Confederate gun muzzles while the
Confederate gunners pumped shell after shell at them. Richmond’s
executive officer was fatally wounded, then a 42 pounder shell
tore through Richmond’s engine room and took out a steam
line, filling the machinery spaces and berthing spaces with steam.
Meanwhile another shell found Gennessee and managed to
touch off a 10 inch shell in one of her ready magazines, causing
major damage and loss of life. While all of this was going on, both
ships’ rigging was ripped to shreds.
Richmond
underwent some more repair work before finding herself third in line
in the queue of ships passing Fort Morgan in Mobile Bay where, BTW, no fewer than 29 of her crew were awarded the Congressional Medal of
Honor for their actions. Four more of her engineering crew won
the Medal of Honor for their actions when the engine room was hit
during The Battle of Port Hudson, for a total of 33…the most medals
awarded to any crew of any U. S.ship during the Civil War.
She
hung around Mobile Bay for a bit after the battle before being
reassigned to the Southeast Pass of the Mississippi, at Head of
Passes, in April of 1865…she scored a major win the very first
night she was there.
That
evening the Confederate sidewheel ram Webb made a run for the
Gulf of Mexico She popped out the Red River, made it past Union
warships at the mouth of that river, then headed south, probably with
the safety valves on her boilers tied down and tallow and coal oil in
her fireboxes to squeeze an extra knot or two out of her.
It’s
been told that she had a legitimate bone in her teeth as she passed
New Orleans,
paddlewheels
thrashing the water, her wake boiling dirty brownish-white astern as
the wind of her passage flattened the smoke column boiling from her
funnels into a fan behind her. Several of the ships that she
blew past in at the Red River’s mouth were close behind, and a
couple of the ships at New Orleans joined in the chase as well. And
she almost made it…until she chose the southwest pass as her route
to the Gulf and found Richmond
between
her and the Gulf. With her guns already manned, Richmond
was
sending 9” shells down range in matter of seconds. With Richmond
ahead
of her and a bevy of gunboats whose crews were just itching
to add a ram to their score behind her, Webb
was trapped. Her captain ran her ashore where she was set on fire to
prevent her capture.
Richmond
was decommissioned at Boston Navy Yard in July 1865, and over the
next year or so she was refitted and refurbished, complete with a new
set of engines and new rigging. Her first post-war assignment was in
January 1868, to European waters where she called at Mediterranean
ports and showed the flag and protected American interests and
citizens possibly endangered by the Franco-Prussian war. She spent
two years in the Med before returning home to Philly and another
stretch in Ordinary in November 1871.
Her
next assignment was to the West Indies in November of 1872…again
she ended up displaying a show of force when she assisted in securing
the release of U.S. sailors being held in Santiago, Chile in
April 1873. The very next month she received orders sending her
around The Horn to San Francisco where she underwent
repair, and was assigned to the South Pacific Squadron. She spent the
next two years cruising the western coast of South America, then
rounded the Horn again, cruised the east coast of South America, then
headed home, this time to Hampton Roads where she was decommissioned,
underwent a year or so of repair, and was then, in January 1879,
assigned to what had by now been named The Asiatic Fleet as the
fleet’s flagship, visiting ports of call in Japan, China, and The
Philippines. She headed back for home in April of 1884
Brooklyn in January 1879 |
Her
final active assignment was a year on the South Atlantic Station,
cruising off of Brazil and Uruguay, beginning in January 1889
and ending when she returned to Norfolk in June of 1890. She was
immediately sent to Newport, Rhode Island where she served as a
training ship until 1893…she steamed to Philadelphia a
year later and was converted to a receiving ship, a capacity she
served in until 1900, when she was moored at League Island, in the
reserve fleet.
In 1903 she was decommissioned as a receiving ship and sent to Norfolk…then as now the largest Navy base in the world. She served as a receiving ship in Norfolk (Actually as an auxiliary to the USS Franklin, already assigned to Norfolk as a receiving ship), an assignment she filled until after World War I.
She was decommissioned the final time June 1919, struck from the Navy list in, then sold for scrap the following month.
In 1903 she was decommissioned as a receiving ship and sent to Norfolk…then as now the largest Navy base in the world. She served as a receiving ship in Norfolk (Actually as an auxiliary to the USS Franklin, already assigned to Norfolk as a receiving ship), an assignment she filled until after World War I.
She was decommissioned the final time June 1919, struck from the Navy list in, then sold for scrap the following month.
USS Richmond, along with USS Franklin, in her last days as a receiving ship at Norfolk. USS Richmond's on the right, Franklin on the left. |
USS
Lackawanna
USS
Lackawanna was
yet another of the Sloops of War that were the mainstay of the
U.S.Navy in the mid 1800s, and was comparable size and armament-wise
to the other six Ships Of The Line that she joined forces with at
Mobile Bay. She was 237 feet long with a beam just north of 38 feet,
and she drew just over 16 feet while displacing 1558 tons.
She was also another ‘War-Child’, sliding down the ways At New York Navy Yard on July 9th 1862. She was commissioned five months later, in January 1863, and was immediately assigned to Admiral Farragut’s West Gulf Blockading Squadron, patrolling off of Mobile Bay, and she immediately got down to the business of intercepting blockade runners. She didn’t actually score until June, when she captured two blockade runners in two days, chasing one of them for hours. That particular ship’s crew jettisoned her cargo in a desperate attempt to escape, so even if she had gotten away, it would have been a partial victory for Lackawanna’s crew as the now sodden, now ex-cargo of cotton couldn’t be sold abroad to help fund the Confederate war effort.
USS Lackawanna about 1880. |
She was also another ‘War-Child’, sliding down the ways At New York Navy Yard on July 9th 1862. She was commissioned five months later, in January 1863, and was immediately assigned to Admiral Farragut’s West Gulf Blockading Squadron, patrolling off of Mobile Bay, and she immediately got down to the business of intercepting blockade runners. She didn’t actually score until June, when she captured two blockade runners in two days, chasing one of them for hours. That particular ship’s crew jettisoned her cargo in a desperate attempt to escape, so even if she had gotten away, it would have been a partial victory for Lackawanna’s crew as the now sodden, now ex-cargo of cotton couldn’t be sold abroad to help fund the Confederate war effort.
She
shuttled between Galveston, Texas and Mobile Bay for the next month,
returning to Mobile just about a month before the Battle Of Mobile
Bay, and just in time to join USS
Galena, USS Monongahela, and
USS
Sebago in
shelling the steamer Virgin,
which
had managed to run aground at the mouth of Mobile Bay…right under
Fort Morgan’s guns, which kept the four Union warships out of
effective ship-shellin’ range. The Union ships did manage to
discourage efforts by a couple of Confederate vessels to assist the
Virgin…
at least until nightfall, when the Southerners managed to refloat the
steamer, which then quickly headed into the bay.
After
the fifth of August, such incidents became a memory…August 5th
was, of course, the Battle of Mobile Bay. Lackawanna’s crew
enthusiastically gave the Confederate forces, both afloat and on
land, everything they had…they were so enthusiastic during that
profoundly one sided naval brouhaha, in fact, that she managed to ram
Hartford
during her second attempt to Ram CSS
Tennessee.
Neither Hartford or Lackawanna
suffered
more than cosmetic damage and not much of that, and the aquatic
fender-bender between them barely even interrupted the cannon fire
they were sending Tennessee’s
way.
The
first
time
she rammed Tennessee she hit the Confederate ironclad hard
enough to heel her over about 15 degrees, and crush her own bow in
about 8 feet, thankfully mostly above the waterline..
After
the battle of Mobile Bay, Lackawanna
continued to plug away on blockade duty, keeping that
assignment until the end of the war…as soon as the war ended she
headed for New York Navy Yard, where she was decommissioned on July
20th
She
was recommissioned in May, 1866 and assigned to the South
Pacific, arriving at Honolulu, Hawaii in February 1867 after
transiting the Straits of Magellan….this wasn’t a bad gig at all.
She patrolled off of the California and Western Mexican coast as well
as Hawaiian waters for four years until she was again decommissioned
at Mare Island Navy Yard.
She
was recommissioned in 1872 and assigned to the Asiatic Fleet until
1875, when she returned to San Francisco and was assigned Coastal
patrol duties…musta been nice to stay close to their home port for
a change. In 1880 she was traveling again, this time to the
West Coast of South America for the specific purpose of assisting in
efforts to arrange a truce in The War Of The Pacific…no not that
The War Of The Pacific. This one was between Chile and a united
Bolivia and Peru, lasting from 1879 to 1883, and started over mineral
rights.. No agreement was reached, and the war continued for another
three years.
She
continued to operate off of the west coast for another five years
before finally being decommissioned at Mare Island on April 7th,
1885, and was In Ordinary for a shade more than two years before
being sold for scrap in July 1887
USS
Ossipee
USS
Ossipee was also laid down and
launched after the war started...her keel was laid in June 1861, and
the crews building her were apparently working double overtime
because she was launched barely five months later, in November of the
same year. She had three sister ships, one of which, USS
Housatonic, found fame a couple
of years later in Charleston harbor when she lost a one sided come-to
with a little vessel known as the CSS Hunley.
USS Ossipee, about 1867 |
Though
Ossipee was launched
five months after her keel was laid, she wasn't commissioned
until almost exactly a year later, in November 1862. She was put to
work in the Hampton Roads based North Atlantic Blockading Squadron,
and hung out off of the Atlantic Coast until May 1863, when she was
assigned to Admiral Farragut's outfit, the West Gulf Blockading
Squadron. Like pretty much every warship assigned to that squadron,
she found plenty of action just about right out of the gate.
In her
first two months off the Gulf Coast she captured a schooner and a
pair of steamers, one of which, the James Battle
had been one of of the finest river packets on the Alabama River
before the war. At the war's onset the Battle
was stripped of her finery and turned into a fast blockade runner,
and it actually took a couple of warships to chase her down and
capture her after a pretty wild chase. Like the other blockade
runners Ossipee and
every other ship on the blockade captured, the steamer was loaded
down with goods for sale abroad to fund the Confederate war effort.
In September of 1863 her station was changed to the Texas Gulf Coast,
where she hung out successfully harassing blockade runners for about
six months, until March of 1864, when she returned to Alabama and
Admiral Farragut's build up of his Mobile Bay Invasion Force.
Ossipee
ended up taking CSS Tennessee's surrender
at the battle simply because she was making a run to ram the
Confederate ironclad when she surrendered...Ossipee
was so close in fact that, despite ordering astern full, she still
bumped the Tennessee. Her
crew ended up being the crew to board Tennessee and
raise the stars and stripes.
After
the battle, Ossipee
went back to harassing blockade runners off of the Texas coast, and
continued that duty until April of 1865, when she was reassigned to
New Orleans...she got there just in time to join in the chase of the
Rebel ram CSS Webb that
resulted in that ship's crew grounding and burning her to prevent her
capture.
After
the war, Ossipee was
decommissioned at Philadelphia Navy Yard, and stayed in ordinary for
about 18 months before being recommissioned and assigned to the South
Pacific Squadron, operating generally off of Mexico's and Central
America's Pacific coast. She didn't always stay down in those always
warm waters, though...in September of 1867 she was sent north to
Sitka Alaska with various Russian commissioners on board, to
participate in the October 18th
ceremony transferring Alaska to the U.S.
She
operated in the Pacific until Spring of 1872, when she returned to
New York, and was decommissioned there on Nov 30th,
1872.
She
was recommissioned on Oct 10th.
1873 and assigned to the North Atlantic Squadron, and a month later
got deeply involved in what was to become known as the Virginius
affair...A fraudulently registered steamer (False U.S.Registry) that
was seized by the Spanish cruiser Tornado, and
held in Cuba where 53 of her crew were executed as pirates...did I
mentioned Cubans hired the ship to bring insurrectionists in to
attack the Spanish, as Spain had control of Cuba at the time.
To
make a long and complicated story short, The US...who was considering
declaring War on Spain over the incident...negotiated reparations to
the families of the executed men and return of the ship. Virginius
was turned over to the crew of
USS Despatch, and
taken to Tortugas, a group of islands near the Florida Keys.
USS Ossipee was
to meet them and tow Virginus north...and
she left Tortugas on December
19th
doing just that, but the Virginius
had one more trick up her sleeve. She foundered off of the North
Carolina Coast...Cape Hatteras to be exact...to become one of the
hundreds of shipwrecks off of the beautiful beaches of The Tarheel
State.
Ossipee operated in the North Atlantic area of operations until May
1878, when she was decommissioned at Boston Navy Yard.
She
was recommissioned in January 1884,and assigned, almost inevitably,
to the Asiatic Squadron. She transited the Suez Canal enroute to the
far east, and spent three years in that exotic part of the world,
returning to New York and another assignment to the North Atlantic
Squadron...she had this assignment for two years, until her final
decommissioning in Norfolk in November 1889. She was sold, probably
for scrap, in March 1890.
The Gunboats
The Union Navy had a
slew of gunboats during the Civil War, all of them either built or
acquired and modified for a specific purpose...as a heavily
armed jack-of-all-trades that could act as escort craft, fast scout
and attack boats, and generally wade right into the middle of things
and start slugging it out.
Though
smaller than the Ships Of The Line, these were not small
vessels by any means…most were good sized side-wheelers of
600-1000 tons pushing (And often exceeding) 200 feet long. Keep
in mind here that some of the smaller Sloops of War barely cracked
200 feet, and displaced only 1500 or so tons.
The
great majority of these gunboats were all steam without a single
mast, much less sails, most of them were side-wheelers, and all were
fast and nimble for their era...the majority could crack 12 knots
without breaking a sweat, which was flat out getting' it on the water
under steam power back in the 1860s. Also, while they couldn't
necessarily turn on a dime they could easily turn inside of any of
the larger warships or merchant ships of the era, a very useful
ability when chasing blockade runners.
The
biggest difference in the gunboats and the Ships Of The Line came in
their post-war fates. Most of the Sloops of War were still in active
service of one sort of the other for several decades after the
war, and several of them lasted well into the twentieth century. The
gunboats however, almost to a ship, were decommissioned as soon as
the war ended and sold within a year or two, either for scrap or to a
commercial owner who converted them to freighters or passenger
boats,.
All
were well designed, well built, scrappy, well fought vessels crewed
by sailors who had no problem with going into harms way and fighting
their way back out, kicking maritime Rebel butt and taking names
while they were at it. And a couple of them even found themselves in
the middle of a historic engagement or two.
Soooo….let's
take a look.
USS Octorara...Friendly Fire and Torpedo Boats
USS
Octorara went
into Mobile Bay lashed to the side of USS
Brooklyn,
but she had a couple of other claims to at least minor fame and/or
infamy during the course of the Civil War…she had the dubious
distinction of almost being sunk by a Union Navy ship (Guess which
one), and
later
in the war she almost became the only Union ship actually sunk by a
Confederate torpedo boat.
She
was a double ended side-wheeler with an overall length of 193 feet,
a beam of 33 feet and a draft of just 4’9”. She displaced 829
tons and had a single steam engine turning a pair of paddle wheels
that could push her through the water at 11 knots. For armament she
mounted a single 80 pounder Dahlgren rifled gun, a single 9 inch
Dahlgren smoothbore, and a quartet of 24 pounders.
She
was built at Brooklyn Navy Yard, launched on December 7th,
1861, and commissioned only two months later in February 1862.
Her first assignment upon completing her sea trials was the North
Atlantic Blockading Squadron, but she wasn’t in that outfit long at
all before she was reassigned to the Gulf.
A model of USS Octorara |
Her
duties were pretty much routine, if there’s such a thing in the
middle of a war that’s tearing a nation in two. Then she was
assigned as the flagship of a very unique squadron of vessels.
At both the Battle of New Orleans and the Battle of Vicksburg, fortifications and gun emplacements needed some serious softening up, so several small schooners were obtained and modified as bombardment ships...one or two big bombardment mortars were mounted aboard each of them them so the enemy fortifications...especially the high, bluff mounted and near impregnable fortifications at Vicksburg...could be bombarded from the river, and from a safe range. This deadly little flotilla was under command of David Dixon Porter, who answered to Admiral David Farragut, and their mortars…probably 10 inchers…arced shell after shell behind the fortifications, wreaking havoc in the process and keeping the Confederate gunners’ heads down while Admiral Farragut’s ships passed Vicksburg and headed up-river.
At both the Battle of New Orleans and the Battle of Vicksburg, fortifications and gun emplacements needed some serious softening up, so several small schooners were obtained and modified as bombardment ships...one or two big bombardment mortars were mounted aboard each of them them so the enemy fortifications...especially the high, bluff mounted and near impregnable fortifications at Vicksburg...could be bombarded from the river, and from a safe range. This deadly little flotilla was under command of David Dixon Porter, who answered to Admiral David Farragut, and their mortars…probably 10 inchers…arced shell after shell behind the fortifications, wreaking havoc in the process and keeping the Confederate gunners’ heads down while Admiral Farragut’s ships passed Vicksburg and headed up-river.
Octorara leading Commander Porter's flotilla of Mortar Schooners in to position to bombard New Orleans. |
It was in the middle of all of this explosive commotion at Vicksburg that Octorara gained her first minor claim to fame when her steering ropes jammed, probably due to jumping a pulley somewhere below decks between her helm and the rudder.
Had
she been a twin engine side-wheeler this wouldn’t have been as big
a problem…she could have been steered using her paddle wheels, making her at
least manuverable enough to get out of harm’s way until the steering rope
could be cleared. Unfortunately she had a single engine turning both
paddle wheels, so she quickly became unmanageable, drifting at the
will of Old Man River's current. While she was drifting, several crew
members hustled below, tracing the steering ropes until they found
the jam, and then, straining and cursing, muscled it back into place.
This wasn’t an entirely uncommon event back in the day when all
ships had truly manual steering, with the wheel moving the rudder via
a rope or cable that led from the helm to the rudder posts, so
re-tracking a rope that had jumped a pulley was probably a pretty
well oiled operation. It wasn't exactly a fun job in peace-time on a
nice 70 degree day, it was probably particular hell during on an
ultra-humid Deep South summer day while several hundred guys with big
guns were trying to blow you out of the water.
It
also took a considerable bit of time and minutes seemed like hours as
the crew members assigned to get her steering back in operation
sweated and strained to pull the rope back up and around the pulley
(Think trying to get a bicycle chain back on the sprocket, multiplied
by about fifty) while shells screamed past.
Newsflash...all
of the danger wasn't from Confederate
shells. The bombardment of Vicksburg continued, and Porter’s
mortar ships weren't the only Union ships shootin'…the ships of the
line were also pounding the fortress as they passed, including USS
Brooklyn. And Octorara managed to drift past her just
about the time she let go with a broadside....
A
couple of
Brooklyn's shells
found Octorara,
but
thanks to sheer
luck, the damage was actually minimal and the only casualties, were
some of the crews' likely now damaged underwear. It could have been
far far
worse.
The shells that found her actually fell short of their intended
target, splashing into the river water just short of and exploding
beneath Octorara's
stern quarter rather actually than hitting her. Had Brooklyn
been firing on a target at a lower level Octorara
could well have caught a full broadside, which would have either
severely damaged or sunk her, and killed or injured many of her
crew.
She
sustained enough damage to need a dry dock once temporary repairs
were made, so she headed for Baltimore, MD for more permanent
repairs…and on July 24th,
while enroute to Baltimore, promptly ran up on the British blockade
runner Tubal
Cain off
of Savannah, Georgia as she tried to slip into Charleston, S.C
loaded down with munitions destined for the Confederate battlefields.
Octorara
captured the British vessel, and promptly took her in tow.
She
was back in service by September, and was assigned to a squadron of
ships whose whole mission in life was to find and sink the infamous
Confederate commerce raiders CSS Florida and CSS Alabama.
While they didn’t as much as get a glimpse of the commerce
raiders, Octorara still had a successful year or so, capturing
nine, count ‘em, nine blockade runners.
On
October 19th,
1863 Octorara
was
reassigned to the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, and spent the next
ten months or so assisting with the blockade of Mobile Bay as well as
lobbing a few shells at Fort Powell on a couple of occasions.
On
August 5th,
1864, of course, she entered Mobile Bay lashed alongside USS
Brooklyn…the
very ship that had nearly sunk her at Vicksburg. Brooklyn,
of
course was the lead ship in the line attempting to enter Mobile Bay,
primarily due to her torpedo rakes, but the sinking of USS
Tecumseh
threw a wrench into the plan when her wreckage blocked the channel.
Brooklyn (and
Octorara)
stopped dead, trapping the rest of Admiral Farragut’s fleet just
about under Fort Morgan’s guns, and Admiral Farragut ordered his
fleet to go around Brooklyn
and
through
the torpedo field, resulting in the creation of the most famous catch
phrase to come out of the war.
Octorara stayed around Mobile Bay until the end of the war, and it was during
his period that she snagged her second minor claim to fame. January
28th,
1865 wasn’t but about an hour old when lookouts on board Octorara,
which was anchored in Mobile Bay, peered into the Oh-Dark-Hundred
darkness, trying to decide if they really did
see
something or if their eyes were playing tricks on them.
Everyone
on board well remembered USS
Housatonic’s
fate at the hands of CSS
Hunley
nearly a year earlier, and also knew that the Confederate Navy was
still actively developing combat capable subs (Though they didn’t
know that they hadn’t launched another successful sub) but they
also knew of…and probably feared even more…the Confederate David
class torpedo boats.
These
potentially deadly little craft were all but submarines. They were
iron, cigar shaped, and 50 feet long with a single steam engine that
could push them through the water at around 12 knots. They also had
ballast tanks that, when flooded, submerged everything except her ten
or so foot long, two foot high conning tower/ventilation intake
structure, and her funnel, which was about 10 feet tall. Their only
weapon was a 135 pound explosive charge mounted on the end of a 20
foot long horizontal spar mounted on her bow…in practice this would
be rammed into the hull of a Union ship, firing a contact fuse
(Primer) which would set the charge off, blowing a hole in the hull
of the ship's hull. (I’m not sure how they figured the torpedo boat
would come out of this unscathed)
The
Davids were painted overall black and their single boilers
were fired with nearly smokeless anthracite coal. They’d get within
several hundred yards of the target, fill their ballast tanks, and
charge for their target at about two to four knots, so the structures
still above water wouldn’t leave much of a bow wave.
On
a dark night they’d be hard to see until they were right on top of
their target, and that’s exactly what happened when the Confederate David class torpedo boat St. Joseph made a run on USS Octorara on that early Alabama
morning.
A
lookout probably finally spotted her funnel, likely when she was only
a couple of boat-lengths out…around a hundred feet, at four knots just under twenty seconds out. By the time the call to arms was
sounded, St
Joseph
had rammed her torpedo into Octorara’s
starboard
side, just forward of the wheel-box. St
Joseph’s
crew was jolted forward by the collision even though they were braced
for it and everyone on both vessels heard the loud ‘SNAP!!’ of
the primer firing and braced for the explosion. On board St
Joseph, the
captain called for full reverse to get her out of the way of the
explosion that didn’t come. She backed off possibly as much as
fifty feet, then charged again but by now small arms were firing at
her, and at least one cannon got a shot off, her second hit was a
glancing blow (And wouldn’t have been effective had it been a solid
hit because her primer had already fired, unless they could embed the
charge and back away, using a line and trigger to fire a second
primer).
At
any rate, her captain called for hard right rudder and all ahead,
swinging parallel to Octorara’s
hull
as they preformed a ‘U-Done-It’ to get thew hell outa Dodge.
According to one popular illustration of the period, one of the
gunboat’s crew actually grabbed the funnel as she swung close to
Octorara’s
side, apparently with the thought of holding her. He may have even
managed to heel her over before he was very likely pulled overboard,
to be fished out by his shipmates as the torpedo boat disappeared
back into the darkness. The entire encounter, in all probability,
lasted less than five minutes. Had the charge fired, she would possibly have
been the only Union ship actually sunk by one of the torpedo boats,
though they did manage to damage a couple.
After that, Octorara operated ‘as required by the fleet commander’ on Mobile Bay until the end of the war, and the Department Of The Navy wasted no time getting rid of her. She left Mobile Bay on July 20th, 1865, arrived at New York Navy Yard on July 29th, was decommissioned a year to the day after The Battle Of Mobile Bay, and was sold fifteen months later, in November 1866.
After that, Octorara operated ‘as required by the fleet commander’ on Mobile Bay until the end of the war, and the Department Of The Navy wasted no time getting rid of her. She left Mobile Bay on July 20th, 1865, arrived at New York Navy Yard on July 29th, was decommissioned a year to the day after The Battle Of Mobile Bay, and was sold fifteen months later, in November 1866.
USS Metacomet
A bit of irony
here...though USS Metacomet
is, after USS Galena,
arguably the best known of the Union gunboats at the Battle Of Mobile
Bay, she had the shortest and least diverse career of any of them.
She was launched on March 7th,
1863 and commissioned three days into 1864, and was a 205 foot long
wooden side-wheeler with a beam of 35 feet drawing 8.5 feet of water.
Her 1173 ton displacement made her a big
gunboat, and the 12.5 knots that her single steam engine could push
her through the water at made her a big fast
gunboat. Her armament wasn't anything to sneeze at either...she
mounted four 9 pounders, a pair each of 100 pounders and 24 pounders,
and a single 12 pounder.
Period Pen-and-Ink drawing of USS Metacomet |
She was assigned not
only to the West Gulf Blockading Squadron but to the blockade of
Mobile Bay right out of the box, and immediately got down to serious
work. Possibly her best known engagements before The Battle of Mobile
Bay both occurred in June 1864. On the sixth of that month she
captured the British blockade runner Donegal,
then on the last day of the month she engaged the blockade runner
Ivanhoe...a big
British side wheeler...and forced her aground. Only problem was,
Ivanhoe's crew managed
to get beneath the protection of Fort Morgan's guns, which meant that
Metacomet, or any
Union
warship for that matter., couldn't get close enough to her to pound
her into kindling as they sorely desired to do...Fort Morgan's guns
would have happily returned the favor had they tried it.
Metacomet,
joined by USS
Monongahela,
tried to shell her from long range, but they couldn't find the range,
and watched all of their shells fall short of the target...their
efforts actually extended over several days off and on and involved
several other Union ships, all of which had equally little success.
Admiral Farragut decided something to the effect of 'The hell
with this noise', and called off the shelling, then conferred with
the crews of Metacomet
and USS Itasca,
made
a plan, and after dark, boats from each of the gunboats slipped in
under Fort Morgans Guns, and went to work. The soldiers at the fort
had no idea anything was amiss until they heard commotion and saw
flames rolling from Ivanhoe's
hold.
They also likely tried firing on the boats as they departed the
scene, sailors pulling at oars with renewed strength as Rebel bullets
wizzed past and possibly a couple of shells screamed over, raising
geysers far ahead of them. Providence and luck was with the Union
sailors as all of them got away with nary a scratch.
Of
course, as it would turn out, the action wasn't as successful as the
Union Navy would have liked it to have been...there was a reason that
they were able to light the Ivanhoe
off with little or no resistance. While the Union Navy was
ineffectually shelling her, The Confederate forces, with help of the
blockade runner's crew, had salvaged all of her cargo and the
majority of her machinery. All that the crews of Metacomet
and
Itasca
burned was, basically, an empty hulk.
A
month and change after her action with the Ivanhoe,
Metacomet
became
one of Admiral Farragut's workhorses at Mobile Bay when she steamed
past Fort Morgan as USS
Hartford's
escort. As soon as they cleared Fort Morgan, Farragut cut Metacomet
loose,and
sent her after the Confederate gunboats that had been very
efficiently harassing them, and Metacomet
wasted no time what so ever returning the favor. She ended up
engaging at least two of, and likely all three of the Confederate
gunboats in CSS
Tennessee's
support squadron. She engaged CSS
Morgan
first, and that scrappy little gunboat;'s very feisty crew managed to
hold her off long enough to get under the protection of Fort Morgan's
guns. Next she was probably among the group of Union gunboats that
chased CSS
Gaines
down and damaged her so badly that her crew abandoned her and set her
on fire so she wouldn't be captured. Finally she engaged CSS
Selma
in an hour long aquatic dogfight, both gunboats twisting and turning
as Selma
tried
to get under the protection of Fort Morgan's guns, and
Metacomet successfully
cut her off each time. Selma's
Captain
finally called for 'All Stop' struck her colors and raised a white
flag. Metacomet
came alongside and took her surrender.
A sketch of Metacomet capturing CSS Selma, drawn by renowned historical artist Robert Weir. |
That
night, when CSS
Morgan
made her epic and successful dash for Mobile, Metacomet
was probably one of the gunboats she left in her wake as, with her
boiler relief valves likely tied down, she managed to squeeze about
12 or 13 knots out of her engines and out run them for a solid 30
miles, guns on all of 'em booming into the sticky-humid Deep-South
August night.
Metacomet
even
acted as a hospital ship and floating ambulance when she transported
all of the wounded...both Union and captured Confederate...to a
military hospital in Pensacola. This included Confederate Admiral
Buchanan, whose serious injuries were the inspiration for
Metacomet's mission
of mercy.
Admiral
Farragut noted that his now vanquished rival and former arch foe
Admiral Buchanan was
in a bad way. The worst of his injuries included a compound leg
fracture, and compound fractures are even now not minor injuries. A
century and a half ago they were debilitating, almost always
requiring amputation. The US naval hospital in Pensacola was far
better equipped to handle serious battle caused injuries. (This is
relative of course...today a Patient First is hundreds of ways better
equipped than that hospital would have been). Quite a few Union Navy
personnel had been injured, and the captured CSS
Tennessee's
surgeon was adamant that Admiral Buchanan be removed to a
hospital...a view that Admiral Farragut concurred with. He sent a
message to Fort Morgan's C.O...Brigadier General Richard
Page...asking that Metacomet
be allowed passage out of the bay...taking injured from both sides to
Pensacola...and back into the bay, bringing back nothing that she
didn't leave with. Brig. General Page agreed to the arrangement, and
Metacomet
added
'Hospital Ship' to her many talents.
Of
course records indicate that she might not have completely
stuck to the arrangement. The arrangement said she couldn't bring
back anything she didn't leave with...it said nothing about capturing
a couple of blockade runners and taking them somewhere else on her
return trip. Or, in fact, postponing her return trip while she
engaged in a bit of blockade runner interdiction. After offloading
the wounded in Pensacola, she headed for and hung out off of the
Texas coast, staying there for about four months. She captured at
least three blockade runners off of Galveston during November and
December 1864, and January 1865.
She returned to Mobile Bay in March of 1865 and acted as
a mine sweeper to rid the bay of torpedoes, then hung around Mobile
Bay until the end of the war (Likely getting involved in the Battles
of Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely, often considered the last battles
of the Civil War, while she was at it).
After
the war she steamed to Philadelphia, where she was decommissioned on
August 18th,
1865. She was sold to John Roach and Sons on October 28th.
While
it doesn't say she was scrapped, John Roach and Sons was a shipyard,
so she was probably broken up, with her machinery being salvaged,
soon after she was sold.
USS
Port Royal
There's
really not a whole lot out there on the USS
Port Royal. She
was another of the double ended side-wheel gunboats that the U.S.
Navy put in service in droves during the Civil war. She was launched
in January 1862 and commissioned three months later in March. She was
209 feet long with a beam of 35 feet, a draft of 9 feet, and a
displacement of 1163 tons. She had a single steam engine that could
push her through the water at 9 knots. While her armament isn't
listed anywhere,
I'm
gonna go out on a limb and say it was probably about the same as the
other gunboats of similar size and layout.
She
was assigned to the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron right out of
the box, and withing three weeks of her commissioning she was
slugging it out with gun batteries at Sewell's Point. A week later
she was part of the squadron that steamed up the James River to
(Attempt to) knock out the fortifications and gun batteries at
Drewry's Bluff, a campaign that did not
go
as planned. The guns at Drewry's Bluff were on a 100 foot or so high
bluff that could fire down on the Union ships, while only the lightly
armored ironclad Galena's
guns could elevate high enough to return fire, and her crew quickly
found out just how thin her armor was when the 8 inch shells from
Fort Darling...the fort atop the bluff...started ripping through her
armor like it was made of paper. Port
Royal,
being of wood construction and easily turned into smoldering
kindling, retired out of range of the Confederate gunners early on in
the battle.
These actions were in support of Union Army General
McClellan's push up the peninsula towards Richmond, a drive that a
guy named Robert E. Lee turned back very skillfully.
After
the Peninsula campaign, Port
Royal operated
off the North Carolina coast, then the Florida Coast as she worked
her way around to the Gulf. She actually saw the most action
patrolling off of Florida. On several occasions she sent raiding
parties ashore, attacking and destroying a schooner laden with cotton
as well as shore facilities at Apalachicola, Florida, and later
destroying a ship repair facility at Devil's Elbow...near St
Augustine.
She
ended up assigned to the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, and was part
of the fleet that took Mobile Bay on August 5th,
1864, entering the bay as USS
Richmond's
escort. She assisted the other gunboats in wreaking general havoc
after they entered the bay, and was assigned to Mobile Bay for the
rest of the war.
She was decommissioned in May 1866, in Boston, and sold
at the same city in October of the same year. Like the majority of
the gunboats in the battle (And likely in the war) the trial goes
cold at that point.
USS Seminole
USS Seminole was
unique among the escorts that were lashed to the port sides of
Admiral Farragut's ships of the line because she wasn't
built as a gunboat. She was
actually a smaller version of the Sloops Of War that comprised all
seven of Admiral Farragut's Ships Of The Line.
She was launched in June 1859 and commissioned almost a
year later in April 1860. She was 188 feet long with a beam of 30' 6”.
She displaced 801 tons, and while I couldn't find her draft listed
I'm going to make a guess based on other ships her size and
displacement and say she probably drew somewhere between six and
eight feet of water. She had a single steam engine turning a single
screw...her speed isn't listed but I'm going to guess again and say
she could probably make somewhere in the neighborhood of about 8-10
knots..
She was assigned to the South Atlantic Squadron, at the
Brazilian Station, shortly after her commissioning, but didn't stay
there long. Shortly after cannonballs fell on Fort Sumter she got
orders to head for Philadelphia Navy Yard, where she was fitted out
for blockade duty. As soon as her fitting out was complete she was
assigned to the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron out of Hampton
Roads, and she wasn't at her new home port long enough for her crew
to get liberty before she sailed for Savannah, Ga, making a stop at
Charleston enroute.
She patrolled off of
Savannah for close to a month and proved the value of having sails as
well as a steam engine while she was at it...she actually ran out of
coal. She headed back for Hampton Roads under sail, and on the way
got in an old school wind-powered chase with the schooner Albion.
She chased down the blockade
runner, likely fired the legendary and traditional warning shot over
the schooner's bow, captured her, and took her in tow...arriving at
Norfolk, under sail, with the Albion
at the end of a towline at her stern.
Here coal bunkers were
filled, and on August 30th...while
she was still in Hampton Roads...the Confederate armed tug Harmony
attacked the Sloop of War USS
Savannah. Seminole closed with
the tug and exchanged shots with her, but the tug managed to stay out
of range and get away.
A shade more than a
week later, on September 10th,
she steamed to and up the Potomac River accompanied by the small
steamer USS Rescue on
a recon mission to scout an enemy position near Alexandria. She
stayed on the Potomac for about a month, proving herself a major pain
in the butt to all things Confederate while she was there. She
captured at least one blockade runner and exchanged fire with
Confederate gun batteries (Knocking out a couple of the guns while
she was at it). After making her presence well known she steamed to
Washington Navy Yard for repairs, returning to Hampton Roads October
16th.
In her absence the
South Atlantic Blockading Squadron was formed, Commanded by Flag
Officer Samuel DuPont. (Yep...he was indeed one of those
DuPonts, of Ginormous chemical company fame. He was a career naval
officer who pushed hard and successfully for modernization of the
Navy)
The new squadron headed south, steaming from Hampton
Roads and all but immediately attacked Forts Walker and Beauregard,
at Port Royal, South Carolina. They forced the abandonment of the
forts, then captured Port Royal itself, raising the Stars and Stripes
over the port and wasting no time turning it into the home base for
the squadron...they operated out of Port Royal, blockading the
Georgia coast and the East Coast of Florida from the base for the
duration of the war. Seminole
and her crew again quickly got into the swing of making a nuisance of
themselves, capturing a couple more blockade runners and getting in
on the capture of Fernandina, Florida.
In March of 1862, when
the Union Naval forces in Hampton Roads were in a near panic state
over CSS Virginia, Seminole was
sent back north to to Hampton Roads to strengthen Union naval
defenses. She was involved in the shelling of Sewell's Point. It
wasn't too long after this that Gosport Navy Yard (AKA Norfolk Navy
Yard) was abandoned by the Confederate forces...and Seminole
was sent to New
York Navy Yard for repair.
When she came out of
the Navy Yard almost a year later, on June 8th,
1863, she was assigned to the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, and on
the way to her new assignment she ran up on the blockade runner CSS
Charleston, which she promptly
chased down and captured. She was initially assigned to the blockade
of Galveston, where she captured at least one more blockade
runner...the British merchant ship Sir William
Peel...before being sent to
Mobile to join Admiral Farragut's invasion fleet.
She entered Mobile Bay
lashed to USS Lackawanna's
port side, and her main claim to fame during the battle was as a
floating brig to hold CSS Tennessee's crew
after the Confederate ironclad was captured.
She was sent to
Pensacola for repairs after the battle, then on September 14th,
1864 she was sent back to her old post off of Galveston. She helped
maintain the blockade off of Galveston for the rest of the war,
capturing or destroying at least two more ships before war's end.
She headed for Boston
Navy Yard on July 20th,
1865, and was
decommissioned there on August 11th.
She'd be 'In Ordinary' until July 20th,
1870, when the firm of Mullen and Winchester bought her. Sad to say,
like many of the less well known ships of the Civil War, her fate
after that's unknown but I have a feeling she was sold for scrap.
USS Kennebec
USS Kennebec was
part of the U.S. Navy's build-up at the beginning of the war...she
was one of 23 Unadilla
class screw-propelled gunboats thrown together in six months or less
(They were nicknamed 'Ninety Day Gunboats' if that tells ya anything)
during 1861 and 1862.
Like all of her sisters
she was 158 feet long with a 28 foot beam and a draft of 9.5 feet.
She displaced 691 tons and had a pair of 200 HP back-acting steam
engines spinning a single screw that, theoretically at any rate,
could push her through the water at 10 knots. Note that I said
'Theoretically'
All 23 Unadilla
class boats were originally armed with a single 11 inch Dahlgren
smoothbore and a pair each of 24 pounder Dahlgren smoothbores and 20
pounder Parrott rifles. All had their armament increased as the war
progressed, and seldom was was any individual gunboat's armament when
the war ended recorded for posterity.
She was actually one of
two Unadilla class
gunboats in Admiral Farragut's fleet, so I'll throw in a quick word
about the class itself. These were not well-loved
ships. They were considered slow and ponderous, some of their hulls
were built with unseasoned lumber, promising future problems with
structural integrity and short service lives, and their engineering
staffs developed a special hatred for the engines, which were almost
three times as heavy as they needed to be and had a tendency to be a
bit cantankerous.
They also didn't always live up to their promised
performance...though the gunboats were rated at 10 knots, and one or
two touched 11 knots, their usual top speed was was around 8-9 knots.
Remember, these gunboats were also two masted schooners, so I have a
sneaking suspicion that the 11 knots was with sail and steam, or even
possibly sail only. Early steam/sail combination ships were renowned
for often being faster under sail than they were with their engine
only. Remember, steam, propulsion was still a fairly new technology, though it's level of sophistication was growing with leaps and
bounds, especially with wartime development. Engines the size of a
room produced the same horsepower as a modern 4 or 6 cylinder
gasoline engine that'll fit on a kitchen table does today, while sail
powered ships were a centuries old, well proven technology with crews
that were trained to get every bit of performance \possible out of
every breeze.
All of that being said,
the Unadilla class
gunboats still managed to rack up a pretty impressive service record,
and the Kennebec was
no exception. She was launched in October 1861, commissioned in
February 1862, and assigned to the then-newly formed West Gulf
Blockading Squadron right out of the box. She
Left for the Gulf on Feb 12th,
1862, arrived at Ship Island on March fifth, and three days later was
crossing the bar at the mouth of the Mississippi. She performed
patrol and recon functions and occasionally mixed it up with
Confederate vessels.
She
really got her baptism of fire as the Battle of New Orleans
approached. She and another Unadilla
class boat, USS Wissachickon, made a recon sortie to check out
the obstructions setup to bar Admiral Farragut’s fleet from
steaming towards New Orleans. The obstructions were made by partially
sinking the hulks of old schooners then linking them together using
cable. They had to steam almost right under Fort Jackson’s guns to
take a look at the obstructions, and while their officers were
brainstorming the best way to get rid of them, the gun crews at Fort
Jackson realized that yes, indeed, there were a pair of Union
gunboats almost within rock-throwing range of them, and they knew
how to take care of that problem.
As
the officers of the two gunboats ruminated upon ‘How To Get Rid Of
The Obstructions', their thoughts and discussions were
interrupted by the consciousness-shocking ‘BOOM!!’ of heavy
cannon fire from Fort Jackson, the piercing scream of big shells
streaking past close aboard, and shell splashes blooming from the
river far closer than anyone was comfortable with. It's a good bet
that Fort Jackson’s gunners loaded the first volley en masse, and
were now firing one at a time so the later gun crews in the sequence
could adjust elevation and train by watching the shell splashes from
the earlier shots, giving Kennebec's
crew
the dubious privilege of watching the shell splashes walk closer to
them with each successive shot.
Kennebec’s
and
Wissachickon’s
crews
decided that where they were was not
the place to be and retired down river, both escaping any damage or
casualties. Kennebec
wouldn’t be so lucky in her next encounter with Union cannon fire.
On
April 18th, Union Commander David Porter’s Mortar
Bombardment Squadron opened up on Forts Jackson and St Phillip, the
throaty, echoing ‘BOOM’s of the big 10 inch bombardment monitors
echoing across the delta, followed by the ‘Whump-WHOOM of the big
shells hitting. The forts were pounded by the mortar-boats for a
week, and they really ramped it up on the night of the 24th,
when Admiral Farragut planned to take his fleet past the forts and on
to New Orleans.
Kennebec,
Itasca, and
Winona
were tasked with taking out the obstructions, and they opened a hole
big enough for the main assault and invasion force to pass through a
couple of times over. Unfortunately, Kennebec
also managed to get tangled in the cable linking the sunken
schooners, and as she tried to free herself she only managed to
swing herself into one of the hulks. The other two gunboats attempted
to assist her, and found themselves the subjects of the Confederate
gunner’s ire as Admiral Farragut’s fleet sailed through the hole
in the obstruction and headed for New Orleans.
Though
it isn’t stated anywhere that I could find, Kennebec’s captain
probably sent someone over the side to disentangle her from the
cable, and as dawn broke and the Confederate gunners got a good bead
on her and her sister ships, her captain told his crew to lie
low on the deck as they drifted down stream, out of range…and out
of the action. She sustained some damage and casualties, but her crew
did get to see the Stars and Striped raised over Fort Jackson four
days later.
She spent the next
two months on convoy escort and patrol duty on Old Man River. She got
in the middle of the river-borne action at Vicksburg as she and USS
Brooklyn pounded the
gun emplacements there as Admiral Farragut steamed past, then resumed
her former convoy and patrol duty. In August 1862 she was reassigned
to Blockade Duty on the Gulf, and it was here that she and her crew
really hit their stride. Over the next year and a half, she captured
or assisted in the capture of six blockade runners, the final one,
the schooner John Scott
on January 7th,
1864 after chasing her for 8 hours
.
She
was assigned to the blockade of Mobile at the beginning of the
summer of 1864 as Admiral Farragut began the planning and build up
for the assault on Mobile Bay. On August 5th
she entered the bay lashed to USS
Monongahela’s port
side, and became possibly the only ship that CSS
Tennessee
managed to ram…barely…when Tennessee
overshot Monongahela
and
glanced off of Kennebec.
Tennessee
also managed to get off a broadside, firing into Kennebec’s
berth
deck and injuring four of her crew but only causing minor damage to
the ship.. After the battle Kennebec assisted in the rounding up of
Confederate merchant vessels, shelling of the forts, and generally
making herself a thorn in the side of all things Confederate.
She
was finally sent to Pensacola for repair, and then rejoined her
squadron for patrol and blockade duties off of the Texas coast. One
of her very last victories was a biggie. There was one blockade
runner that had been a thorn in Admiral Farragut’s side, and her
name was the Denbigh, a small British built, civilian owned
iron hulled side-wheel steamer. She made over half a dozen runs
between Mobile and Havana, handily eluding the Union blockade each
time, before the capture of Mobile Bay sealed off Mobile as a
Confederate port. Denbigh shifted her base of operations to
Galveston after the Battle of Mobile Bay, made another half dozen or
so runs to Havana, and was trying to enter Galveston during the
Oh-Dark-Thirty hours of May 24th, 1864 when she ran
hard aground on Bird Key, to the north and east of Galveston. She was
spotted shortly after dawn, and Kennebec, along with
three other gunboats including USS Seminole, wasted no time in
turning her into scrap metal.
After the war
Kennebec continued occupation patrol in the gulf until July
6th, when she sailed for Boston, stopping at both
Pensacola and Norfolk while enroute. She reached Boston on August
1st, 1865, was decommissioned on August 9th,
and was sold on November 30th.
USS Itasca
USS Itasca was
the second of the Unidilla
class gunboats attached to Admiral Farragut's Mobile Bay Invasion
Force, She was identical to USS Kennebec (And
her twenty-one other sister ships) dimensions and specs wise, and was
launched in October 1861, commissioned the next month, and was
assigned to the Gulf Blockading Squadron as soon as she finished her
shakedown cruise.
She arrived in the Gulf of Mexico around Christmas,
and began racking up an impressive score of prizes right out of the
gate, capturing a pair of ships in January 1862. One of them...the
steamer Magnolia...had
a bonus on board when Itasca
assisted USS Brooklyn
in chasing her down. Magnolia
had on board letters and documents outlining Confederate plans to
import arms and ammunition. This documentation included dates,
time-frames, ships, sailing schedules...the works, The Union brass
were likely collectively all but drooling when they received news of
it's capture.
Also in this
intelligence haul were plans on how the Confederate Navy planned to
assist the 'Phantom CSS Tennessee' ...the
side wheel blockade runner that no one ever talks about...escape
through the blockade at New Orleans. CSS Tennessee,
the Forgotten Blockade Runner, never made it out of New Orleans.
The Gulf Blockading
Squadron was split into East and West squadrons on January 20th,
1862 and Itasca was
assigned to the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, specifically to the
task force that would attempt successfully to retake New Orleans,
then proceed northward up the Mississippi, wreaking havoc on
Confederate forces and towns as they went.
She got right smack in
the middle of the bombardment of Forts St Phillip and Jackson on
April 20th,
then the next day she steamed in close to the forts along with two
other Unidilla class
boats, the gunboats' own guns firing to keep the Confederate gunners'
head down and assisted in taking out the obstructions that were
blocking the fleets passage upriver to New Orleans.
As the fleet passed the fort, a shell from a Rebel 42
pounder ripped through Itasca's engine room, taking
out one of her boilers and filling her machinery spaces with steam.
She was hit no fewer than 14 more times as she drifted past the
forts, by sheer luck receiving only moderate damage and few
casualties. She was repaired...probably at Pensacola...then returned
to the Mississippi, where she saved Hartford's and Admiral
Farragut's bacon at one point when Hartford grounded. Working like crazed banshees alongside Hartford's crew,
Itasca's crew refloated the flagship in three days.
Itasca
was reassigned to the blockade of Galveston in early 1863, where she
continued to be a thorn in the Confederate navy's side as she
harassed blockade runners, capturing two that were inbound with vital war
materials and supplies. By June 30th
1863 she was desperately in need of an overhaul and general
repair...she steamed to New Orleans for temporary repairs to make her
seaworthy, then sailed to Philadelphia, where she was decommissioned
for a three month stretch in dry dock. She left Philly on the day
after Christmas, 1863, and arrived back in New Orleans on New Years
Eve. She was assigned to the Blockade of Mobile, harassing blockade
runners trying to enter and/or leave Mobile Bay until August 5th
1864, when she steamed past Fort Morgan lashed to USS
Ossipee's port
side.
After the Battle of Mobile Bay, she returned to the
blockade of Galveston, and took up right where she left off,
capturing one British blockade runner (The Carrier Mair) and
chasing the sloop Mary Anne into shallow water, where she
grounded. Itasca's gunners then set to work methodically and
loudly pounding her into kindling wood and scrap iron.
She remained in the Gulf until August of 1865, when she
returned to Philadelphia for decommissioning, The Navy wasted no time
getting rid of her...she was sold on the last day of November 1865,
and her new owners renamed her Aurora...so we know that she
wasn't scrapped. The trail goes cold in 1867, when she was sold
abroad.
USS Galena
USS
Galena not
only had a career deserving of her own blog post, she already does
have
her own article on this here very learned cyber-tome you’re now
reading (I know…I know…control the ego, Rob!)
In
all seriousness though…for a detailed report on USS
Galena CLICK HERE.
To
hit the high points, Galena started life as a wooden hulled ironclad
six gun steam sloop. She was 210 feet long with a beam of 36 feet, a
draft of 11 feet, and a displacement of 950 tons, 200 tons of which
was her armor. When she was commissioned she mounted four 9”
Dahlgren smoothbores and a pair of 100 pounder Parrott rifles. She
had a larger version of USS Monitor’s vibrating lever steam
engine turning a single screw, and was capable of 8 knots . She also
featured a radical ‘Tumble Home’ hull design, with the sides of
the hull curving inward as they rose and making her main deck a good
bit narrower than her beam.
USS Galena, anchored in Hampton Roads. |
Galena
was the second iron-armored warship built for the U.S. Navy, was
commissioned by shipbuilder Cornelius Bushnell, designed by
noted naval architect Samuel Pook…and failed dismally as an
ironclad. She was basically a wooden warship disguised as an
ironclad, with an experimental armor scheme consisting of about three
inches of interlocking plates tacked on to the wooden sides of her
hull, a scheme that may have worked had they given her enough armor
to actually stop
an enemy shell.
She
was built to counter the threat posed by CSS
Virginia, and
was laid down in September 1861, launched in February 1862, and
commissioned in April of the same year…a month after CSS
Virginia
and USS
Monitor mixed
it up in arguably the most famous naval battle of all time. By the
time she departed for Hampton Roads at the end of April, almost two
months
had passed since that epic battle. Considering that Virginia
would have very likely pounded her into scrap due to her ineffective
armor, it's probably a Very Good Thing for both the Union blockade of
Hampton Roads and USS Galena that (A) Monitor
was
commissioned first and was the ship that CSS
Virginia
tangled with, and (B) Galena never did actually engage the iconic
Rebel ironclad.
She
arrived at Hampton Roads on the twenty forth of April, and exchanged
exactly one shot with CSS Virginia several days later
during one of the Confederate ironclads many unsuccessful attempts to
entice Monitor to come out for a rematch. The single
shot Virginia fired at her seemed almost more
like an explosive flipping-of-the-bird than the opening of a battle.
Galena may or may not have answered with a single shot
of her own depending on which source you read and believe. If she
did, her shell simply splashed into the waters of Hampton Roads far
short of Virginia.
On
May 8th
, with it obvious that she really wasn't needed in Hampton Roads,
Galena
was
assigned to assist General McClellan on The Peninsula Campaign…his
attempt to take the Confederate capitol by advancing up what
was then and is still today known as The Peninsula. Galena kicked
considerable Confederate butt during the first part of the campaign,
taking out an 11 gun battery at Rock Wharf Point and engaging another
at Mother Tynes Bluff, She also managed to run aground during the
trip up-river, and it took the effort of both of her escorts…USS
Port Royal and
USS
Aroostook…to
refloat her.
On
May 15th her crew found out just how crappy her armor was
when she, Monitor, and several other Union warships
tried…and the operative phrase here is ‘Tried’ ...to
take out Fort Darling, which
is located on 80 foot high Drewry's Bluff at Dutch Gap, about
eight miles south of Richmond. The fort had a trio of big guns, all
Colombiads, a ten incher and a pair of 8 inch guns. The ten incher
cracked her gun carriage the first time she fired, but the eight
inchers proved to be more than up to the task at hand.
Galena
ended up being the only one of the five ships at Drewry's Bluff that
morning whose guns were capable of elevating enough to fire on the
fort effectively, and when she swung broadside to the channel and
began firing, the Confederate gunners demonstrated just how easily
their eight inch shells punched through Galena’s
less than adequate armor. Confederate shells penetrated her armor13
times, killing 14 of her crew and injuring 10. Fort Darling lost 8,
with 10 injured and minor physical damage. Fort Darling would
ultimately be a major military installation with about three times as
many guns, but this battle would be the only time that an assault on
Richmond via the James would be attempted, and the only time the
fort’s guns fired in anger.
She
stayed on the James River, supporting McClellan’s retreat,
harassing Confederate positions and performing escort duty for supply
ships and transports until September, when she returned to Hampton
Roads to assist in the defense of the now all Union military
installations there.
A
year after her pounding at Fort Darling, and after a good bit of
pondering by the Navy brass RE: the epic crappyness of her armor,
Galena was sent to Philadelphia Navy Yard, and when she
arrived there on May 21st, 1863 repair and refurbishment
began immediately. Almost all of her armor was stripped off of her,
leaving her hull armored only in the area of her engine room
and boilers, her armament was increased to nine guns with the
addition of four more nine inch Dahlgrens, (but the removal of one of
100 pounder Parrott Rifles) and she was generally refurbished and
repaired.
She
was recommissioned on Feb 15th, 1864…and promptly got
trapped in ice off of New Castle, Delaware and had to be chiseled,
towed, and worked free before she could continue to Norfolk, where
she was promptly dry-docked to repair the hull damage that the ice
had caused. Thankfully for her and her crew, Galena's pumps
proved themselves more than worthy of the job during the trip,
running just about full time the whole way to Norfolk.
USS Galena after her refurb |
As
soon as her repairs were complete she was assigned to the West Gulf
Blockading Squadron, specifically to Mobile Bay, Leaving Norfolk on
May 10th,
and arriving in the Gulf on May 20th.
She was immediately put to work, tangling with several blockade
runners before The Battle Of Mobile Bay on August 5th.
She
passed Fort Morgan lashed to USS Oneida’s port side, and
proved that tactic more than valid when Oneida took one
through her starboard boiler, and was towed out of range by Galena.
Galena’s
rigging
was torn up and she took several hits, but her damage was relatively
minor and in the days and weeks after entering Mobile Bay, she got in
on the shelling of Fort Morgan and performed patrol duties in and off
of Mobile Bay. She was reassigned to the East Gulf Blockading
Squadron in August of 1864, then sent to Philadelphia Navy Yard for
repair. Work didn’t begin until November 22nd,
continuing
until March 1865. She was then assigned to her original home
squadron…The Norfolk based North Atlantic Blockading Squadron.
For the remainder of the war she patrolled the Nansemond
River as well as the lower part of the James. She left Hampton Roads
for Portsmouth, New Hampshire on June 6th, 1865, was
decommissioned there on June 17th, and was in ordinary
until April 9th, 1869. On that date she was recommissioned
just long enough to steam to Norfolk Navy Yard where she was again
decommissioned on June 2nd. She was condemned the next
year, and moldered at a backwater dock until 1872 when she was
finally broken up for scrap.
I just slapped the high points of Galena's
uber-interesting and historic story really quickly here.
here...again, to read my article about her on this blog<<<-
CLICK
An excellent article about Hartford's career from the archives of the University of Hartford.
********************NOTES, LINKS, AND
STUFF********************
This one was a challenge at times because of the number
of ships involved, the disparity in the amount of information
available for them, and, especially, the conflicting information that
all but inevitably crops up when you're dealing with events from a
century and a half or so back.
As I noted when I kicked this one off, the battle itself
was the career highlight for the majority of the 18 Union ships
involved in The Battle Of Mobile Bay. Five or so of them had careers
that were memorable because of events other than the battle. The
rest, along with their crews, did their job and did it competently,
but really didn't do anything that'd make their careers memorable in
a historical sense. Because of this, information about several of the
ships was either sparse, not all that blog-worthy, or both. As in
'Their Wikipedia Article was all I could find'.
This is why few of the posts read like all but reworded
Wiki articles...that's exactly what they are. I don't know about you
guys, but I really hate clicking on a blog article and
discovering it's nothing more than a cut-and-pasted Wikipedia
article. Don't get me wrong, Wikipedea's an awesome resource, one
that I wish had been around, along with the Internet, back when I was
in school. But if I want to read a Wiki article, I'll go to
Wikipedia. If a Wiki article on any subject I'm including in any of
my blogs is all I can find, I always rework it, using my own style,
and I try to find something, somewhere that the article
doesn't include. That in itself was a challenge with several of the
ships in this post.
Thankfully, there are a number of Naval history sites
that include reams of information about the ships that have served in
the U.S. Navy, their captains and crews, and their careers. While
we're at it, let me throw in a word on conflicting information...If I
have a choice between info found in a Wiki article, and info from one
of the Naval history sites, the Naval history site wins hands
down...especially if they cite official Naval Archives as a source.
I got lucky and found a few interesting little tidbits
that I didn't include in the main posts (That's what my 'Notes'
section's for.
Hopefully I made this thing interesting and a fun read.
So...On to the notes!
<***>
Here's an interestin' little tale about the USS
Manhattan's post war career, and better yet, it happened right
here in Richmond...see, for a couple of years Richmond was home of
one of the very first Naval History Museums, complete with the first
six museum ships...even if it was unofficial
After
the war the Navy placed six Canonicus
class monitors...Ajax, Canonicus, Catskill,
Lehigh, Mahopac, and Manhattan...in
reserve, and decided to moor them on the waterfront in the Prince
George County, Va town of City Point (Now part of Hopewell), right at
the confluence of the James and Appomattox Rivers.
This
wasn't a 'Ghost Fleet', and the ships weren't mothballed. All six
monitors had skeleton crews assigned to them, and were capable of
steaming under their own power, and these crews were not
happy. Back in the late 1800s,
City Point was about as remote an area as you could find in Central
VA. The City of Hopewell didn't even exist yet, and wouldn't for
several more decades, and City Point was surrounded by farm land.
There was no need for the crews to go on liberty because there was
absolutely nothing for them to do. In technical terms, they were
bored out of their minds.
Now, about twenty miles or so up-river, in Richmond...
The small squadron's commanding officer was a gentleman named Felix
McCurley, and he was apparently the kind of officer all enlisted
personnel would like to have. He was just as bored as his crews,
probably called a meeting of the minds to figure out just how to
defeat said boredom, and all came to the same conclusion...Richmond.
So
McCurley wasted no time in sending off a request that the squadron be
transferred to Virginia's Capital City, and they steamed up-river to
Richmond, likely mooring in the vicinity of what's now Warf Street,
near the present day Great Shiplock Park. And what happened next is
the interesting part...the six ships became, unofficially, the first
museum ships.
USS Manhattan while she was moored in Richmond during the 1880s |
The citizens of Richmond were intrigued that these six ships, all of
which had still bore scars from combat in the late war, were docked
in their city, and wanted to take a look. And Commander McCurley had
no problem accommodating them. The flotilla was apparently mobbed
during the weekends, with excursion boats bringing crowds from
further up and down river, and others making the then kind of long
journey from Richmond's residential areas, and even the definitely
long trip from Petersburg (An hour or less away by train, 2-4 hours
by boat, as much as 8 hours by stage or on horseback) to the mooring.
Crowds would walk the decks, and tour below, and the flotilla was
described in a couple of publications as a ''Resort for the resident
of The Capitol City'
All
was well with the world until sometime in 1891, when McCurley was
promoted and given command of the Philadelphia Navy Yard. He was
replaced by an Naval Academy grad by the name of James D. Graham who
was the Polar opposite of McCurley, and the absolute epitome of the
By The Book, The Rules Are The Rules Are The Rules type boss all
of us just...er...love so much.
One
of his first acts as the squadrons new commander was to make the
ships off-limits to civilians. The Citizens of Richmond and environs
there-of were not
amused. They'd come down river in the afore-mentioned excursion
boats, and all but ask for Graham's head on a platter...to the point
that he moved his family out of the area, and requested assistance
and guidance from the Navy Department.
All six ships were transferred to The Norfolk Navy Yard for minor
repair and overhaul, then to Philadelphia Navy Yard for their
permanent mooring spot. Other than a brief period during the
Spanish-American War when they were recommissioned for Coastal
Defense duties this is where they stayed until they were scrapped.
Of
course, Graham's only mistake was being a Naval officer who took his
job and duties seriously and didn't feel that the ships under his
command were there for the entertainment of civilians...and to be
honest, other than special occasions, warships are not
generally open to the public. But lets be honest here...if any of us
had been citizens of Richmond in the 1880s, we would have taken
advantage of McCurley's hospitality on at least one or two warm
spring weekends. Don't deny it...ya know
ya would have!
<***>
Several of the ships of the line spent part of their
post-war careers as training ships, and all facets of Naval
seamanship were covered...including gunnery. By the late 1800s
(Definitely by the 1890s) the muzzle loading naval cannon had
disappeared from the decks of U.S. Navy warships, meaning that
midshipmen needed to be trained in the use of modern naval artillery.
This of course meant that many Civil War era sloops of
war were actually armed with modern (For that era) breech loading
rapid fire 5 inch...and occasionally larger...guns in their later
years. These were, of course, for training purposes only as the idea
of a wooden hulled sloop of war tangling with a modern steel hulled
cruiser or battleship pretty much redefined ludicrous, not to mention
suicidal.
While we're on the topic of gun decks on these training
ships...as originally built the spar decks (Or main deck) of these
sloops of war also doubled as the gun deck, with their big Dahlgrens
and Parrott Rifles open to the weather and firing through ports cut
in the rail.
Many if not most had a complete spar deck added during
one of their post war refits, with a new main deck being built above
the old spar deck, giving them an enclosed gun deck.
I believe that the only one of the fourteen ships-Of The
Line and gunboats in Admiral Farragut's fleet at Mobile Bay to be
designed and built with an enclosed gun deck from the git-go was The
Forgotten Ironclad...USS Galena
<***>
Over
the course of a century and a half, Fredeiksted,
St Croix has grown and become a tourist destination of choice, but
something still remains from that long-ago day when USS
Monongahela was carried ashore
the way a kid carries a tow boat away from the beach when he heads
home. Five bottles from the late 1860s inscribed with 'U.S.Navy' and
their contents, have been recovered from under the pier at
Fredeiksted., harking back to the time when Diplomatic actions, the
purchase of the Dutch West Indies by the U.S., and a Hurricane
collided.
<***>
As noted in the post on the Hartford, the term
'ships bridge' originated during the Civil War...but it was the
gunboats that caused the term to come about...the 'bridge' was
actually just that. Originally, a ships captain gave orders
from the quarterdeck, the aft most, and highest deck on a sailing
ship. When the side wheel gunboats began appearing, the wheel boxes
were the highest structures on the ship. This caused them to block
the captain's view to the sides, and the 'quarters' of of the
bow...if he moved his command platform forward, his view aft would be
obstructed.
To remedy this, a 'bridge' connecting the wheel boxes
was added, and this became the Captains command platform. Bridges
were retrofitted to many of the sloops of war during refits, and
became features of all ships well before the end of the 19th
Century.
Another item that began appearing as a standard feature
on ships was the enclosed pilothouse, though that was already a
feature of many smaller steamboats, and had been a fixture on
riverboats for a couple of decades already by the time the Civil War
started...in fact by the time the war ended few ships were being
built with open helms except for ships such as small schooners that
were still all sail. Pilot houses were even added to several of the
sloops of war in later refits.
<***>LINKS<***>
First up, the Wikipedia articles of all eighteen of the Union Navy ships involved in the Battle of Mobile Bay.
Monongahela
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Monongahela_(1862)
If it floated and was at some point in time on the rolls of the U.S Navy, It 's a pretty good bet that info, including history. photos, and commanding officers will be included on this profoundly awesome resource for Naval History buffs and researchers. The website?
Navsource.org
http://www.navsource.org/
The Navsource posts for almost all fo Admiral Farragut's ships...the only one that didn't have a article on the site were Manhattan and Seminole.
Galena
http://www.navsource.org/archives/09/86/86037.htm
A article from NAvsource.org about Norman Rockwell's career aboard Hartford when she was the receiving ship at Charleston.
A article from NAvsource.org about Norman Rockwell's career aboard Hartford when she was the receiving ship at Charleston.
The text of a period New York Times article raving about USS Hartford's low-maintenance Mississippi River battle record.A quick and interesting little read that also accurately outlines her armament during the Mississippi Campaign
An excellent article about Hartford's career from the archives of the University of Hartford.
Another Blogspot blog (Historic Ships) post about FDR's proposed and sadly unrealized Naval History Museum, and the end of USS Hartford.
Check his entire blog out, BTW...it generally rocks!
While this article from the Naval Historical Foundation is actually about the historic cruiser USS Olympia,it's an in depth article about FDR's Naval History Museum that shows how painfully close it actually came to being built.
Modern article from the 'St. Croix Source' looking back on the 1967 earthquake and Tsunami that carried Monongahela inland.
Text of a period newspaper article about the sinking of USS Oneida.