When Matthew Fontaine Maury came to Richmond, Virginia, on the first Sunday after Virginia’s vote for secession, he was armed only with knowledge gained from decades of scientific work at the National Observatory and a deep, if theoretical, understanding of naval warfare.
To some, this short, paunchy, middle-aged man might have been another armchair admiral. But his grasp of waging technological war at sea and on rivers proved masterful. Small ships, big guns summed up his creed afloat. More important, Maury was no stranger to the progress of Robert Fulton and Samuel Colt in mine warfare—the weapons that wait.
During the 1860s, Maury was in the vanguard of a naval revolution that radically changed ship design, armament, and land and sea defenses. He boasted of making war a science, not an art. In the ruins of the Civil War, he first used this knowledge as a ticket to gain entry to Mexico’s imperial court. For a time, European governments courted him with titles and positions. In London, he opened a Torpedo School where for 500 pounds he lectured on the latest advances in hidden war.
A man without a country following the Confederacy’s collapse, Maury was willing to sell everything he knew about mines, gunboats, ocean-going ironclads and submarines to almost anyone, including the governor general of Canada. While his expertise in shipbuilding was costly, in mines he held the keys to the kingdom of cheap and deadly defense.
All this, however, was in the future.
When Maury came to Richmond in 1861, Governor John Letcher had much more than secessionist firebrands to contend with. Western delegates to the secession convention were grumbling about a hush-hush rush to treason. In the east, the guns of Fort Washington on the Maryland side of the Potomac and Fortress Monroe at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula menaced the state’s network of river highways.
Even to the landsman Letcher, it was evident that Virginia’s rivers, the couriers of the state’s wealth, were also the Appian Ways for invaders. The waterways became Maury’s special charge, when the governor appointed him to a special advisory council. In some ways, the council acted as a precursor of today’s Department of Defense in organizing a state army and navy.
For Letcher, the council, and Robert E. Lee, commander of the state’s forces, the days following secession were a maddening rush.
Maury jumped in feet first. On 22 April, in addition to placing gun batteries on the York and James rivers, he began to close the rivers with electrically-detonated mines—called torpedoes at the time. To do this he needed insulated wire, a commodity not readily available in Richmond. In the confusion of the early days of the war when old acquaintances were not necessarily friends, Maury used the chaos to send a merchant northward to buy as much wire as he could without saying what use it would serve. This was only a start. The council next asked Professors Socrates Maupin and James Lawrence Cabell at the University of Virginia to create a special laboratory to do more research on this type of warfare.
Back in Richmond, Maury was living with a banker cousin, Robert H. Maury, in a townhouse at 1105 East Clay Street, and this house became Maury’s torpedo laboratory. In an upstairs bathtub, when he was not doing the council’s work, he tested and retested his ideas on electrical current, fuses and gunpowder sending small geysers of water ceiling-ward when he was successful.
That spring, the state offered Richmond to the Confederate government as its new capital, an offer that was quickly accepted. In late May, President Jefferson Davis arrived; and as more Confederate military officials arrived, the day grew nearer when the state’s forces would have to be incorporated in the Confederacy’s new military.
Negotiations did not go smoothly in integrating Virginia’s paper navy and raw army with the new government’s forces. The protracted talks magnified the new Cotton Kings’ disdain of Virginia’s defensive efforts. As events unfolded, Maury in particular grew increasingly bitter, saying the Confederate government was riddled with “small men.”
Before the First Battle of Manassas, the new Confederate capital was full of naval officers, like Maury. They were men without assignments or ships, having volunteered to a nation that did not have a navy and serving under a president who often did not think he needed one.
Maury itched to be engaged, but for the time being, in his cousin’s house, all he could do was research mines. Still working in the bathtub, he was succeeding regularly in setting off small but noisy explosions. As his confidence grew, Maury intended to force his services on Davis and Secretary of the Confederate Navy Stephen R. Mallory.
In early summer 1861, the strongest Union presence in Virginia was at Fortress Monroe and in the ships, such as the Minnesota and Roanoke, blocking the Chesapeake Bay. They would be his targets.
Maury arranged with the Tredegar Iron Works and Talbott Brothers Foundry for tanks and casks, received batteries from the medical college and scrounged enough wire to detonate the mines. Finally, Letcher provided the gunpowder from the state’s stocks.
On 3 July, with Mallory’s approval, Maury left Richmond secretly for Norfolk. The attack was to be coordinated with another blow using mines against the frigate Pawnee, then guarding a tributary of the Potomac.
For at least two nights, Maury and his small party scouted the Union fleet. He planned to use five boats, each holding two mines with 200 pounds of explosives during the Sunday nighttime attack. The covert activity troubled some in the raiding party, especially using the cover of the Sabbath to wage war, but Maury stoutly defended the stealthiness, saying Lincoln had “set at nought our principles of honor and humanity.”
At 2200 on 7 July 1861, the boats with five men in each shoved off from the Norfolk shore on such a calm night that the attackers could hear the ships’ bells. They rowed with muffled oars toward their targets, using the light of Thatcher’s Comet as their guide. It seemed like an omen from heaven.
Maury planned to use the tide and current to carry the powder-laden oak casks toward the waiting ships. The pairs of casks were connected by a span of rope about 600 feet in length, and corks were used to keep the span afloat. The explosives contained in the barrels were submerged, and the triggers were in the barrel heads.
The idea was this: As the span became entangled in the ship’s hawse and the barrels were pulled alongside by the tidal wash, the tightening line would activate the triggers, setting off a fuse igniting the powder that would explode below the vessels’ waterlines.
So far, the Union patrol vessel assigned to protect the anchored fleet had not challenged the rowboats. When he thought he was near enough, Maury quietly ordered the attack to begin. The first mines were released. Then the next set. Finally, all were off, carried on the tide toward the unsuspecting Union ships.
The tension among the 25 raiders had to be rising in the next hour on the water; but as they rowed closer and closer to the safety of the Norfolk shore, all the men heard was the noise of the muffled oars on a summer’s night.
Back ashore, Maury “attributed it (failure) to the fact that such a fuse would not burn under a pressure of 20 feet of water.” He might have been wrong. When Union forces found the mines several weeks later, the powder was wet.
On Aquia Creek, the mines launched at the Pawnee were spotted and disarmed before they got close enough to explode.
Despite the two failures, Maury’s and Letcher’s faith in the torpedoes’ effectiveness remained unshaken. The commander, however, now had to prove his point to a doubting Confederate administration and so arranged for a demonstration in the James River.
With his son Richard, Maury rowed from Rockett’s Wharf toward the middle of the James on a hot August day and set two kegs filled with rifle powder afloat. The kegs floated down toward a buoy; but as in Hampton Roads, nothing happened even though the kegs were ensnarled.
Maury, however, would not admit defeat and told his son to row toward the buoy. Again in the middle of the river, on his father’s command, Richard pulled the rope to the trigger. The torpedo exploded as soon as the younger man began tugging, drenching the Maurys in the baptismal water of modern mine warfare. “Up went a column of water 15 or 20 feet,” Richard Maury wrote years later. “Many stunned or dead fish floated around.”
The demonstration convinced Mallory to ask for $50,000 from the Confederate Congress to give Maury’s mines another try. The secretary also placed Maury in charge of coastal defenses and detailed a few men to work out of an office at 9th and Bank streets to perfect the South’s secret weapon.
In September, following the Confederate victory at Manassas, Maury had the go-ahead for a new attack. This time, however, Lieutenant Robert D. Minor, was to command a scaled-back raiding party to attack the USS Congress, anchored off Newport News. The rain and mist as well as encroaching night of 10 October provided cover for the Confederates who left in rowboats from a converted paddlewheeler on the James.
As Minor reported:
The boats were then allowed to drift with the rapid ebbtide, while the end of the cork line was passed over to Mr. Dornin, and the line tightened by the boats pulling in opposite directions. The buoys were then thrown overboard, the guard lines on the triggers cut, the levers fitted and pinned, the trip line made fast to the bight at the end of the lever, the safety screw removed, the magazine carefully lowered in the water, where they were well supported by the buoys, the slack line (three fathoms of which was kept in hand for safety) thrown overboard and all set adrift within 800 yards of the ship.
Again, nothing happened, although the mines were “planted fairly and in good drifting distances."
Although the raids had not succeeded, the demonstration in the James had captured the attention of hard-pressed Confederate army officers. Leonidas Polk, a Confederate general, pleaded with Richmond to send Maury to help hold the Mississippi.
Writing from Columbus, Kentucky, the day after the second abortive attack, Polk said, “I feel constrained to urge upon you the necessity of at once furnishing me an officer familiar with the subject of submarine batteries and capable of a practicable application of this species of defense to the Mississippi River.” Earlier, apparently outside channels, Maury indicated to Polk that he intended to take charge of mining the Mississippi. But it would be December before Polk received help, and it was not from Maury. By then, the “fighting bishop” had lost the river all the way to Memphis.
What provided the final split between the “Cotton Kings” and Maury, however, was not his advocacy of mines, but his constant sniping over the efficacy of small, wooden gunboats. Maury believed, as President Thomas Jefferson had, that gunboats could play a critical role in coastal defense, especially when incorporated with mines. Never trusting Mallory, Maury turned again to Letcher with his version of the “big-gun-and-little-ship” idea. To prepare the way further, Maury, writing as “Ben Bow,” was using the press to hector a secretary committed to a different kind of naval war.
As Chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, Mallory had survived such a press war with Maury in the 1850s, and he would not countenance another. In retaliation for the articles, the secretary angrily ordered Maury to Cuba. When Congress objected, Mallory gave the commander what turned out to be a stay of execution. Although Maury eventually won approval to build 100 gunboats, events in Hampton Roads soon put a hold on their construction.
Mallory’s wholehearted shipbuilding support had gone into resurrecting the Merrimac, to be re-christened as the iron-sheathed CSS Virginia, and not a fleet of shallow-water gunboats. What the secretary wanted was a class of ships, “built exclusively for ocean speed, at a low cost, with a battery of one or two accurate guns of long range, with an ability to keep the sea upon a long cruise and to engage or to avoid an enemy at will.”
In the Virginia he received a cumbersome and deep- draught vessel, unable to keep the sea or even operate in many spots on the Chesapeake Bay. But on 8 March 1862, the ship, covered in two-inch thick armor-plate and outfitted with newly developed Brooke guns, did what Maury only dreamed of doing. The Minnesota and three other ships were aground; the Congress and Cumberland were destroyed.
After the battle, legislators on both sides of the Potomac were convinced that ironclads were the ships of the future. Maury, however, had not given up on his gunboats. Nor had he given up on mines. This time he argued to continue construction by coupling the mine’s power with the gunboat’s speed—-even if it was to be wrapped in iron. He figured by adding a spar carrying explosives, he would overcome the detonation problem. In this scheme, the gunboat would ram the spar through the outer sheathing of an enemy vessel and set off the charge as it backed safely away.
While Maury reworked his plans, the Monitor’s success the next day in staving off the Virginia ironically opened the way for the most convincing display yet of the mines’ effectiveness.
By spring 1862, thousands of additional Union troops and dozens more warships, gunboats, barges, and transports had arrived at Fortress Monroe. When this force was assembled, the Union commander, Major General George B. McClellan, moved across Hampton Roads to take Norfolk. The day after the city fell, the costly Virginia, which could not escape to Richmond or brave the ocean, was scuttled.
For all Mallory’s expenditures on ironclads, the Richmond press was complaining bitterly, “The enemy commands the water” from Hampton Roads to the Mississippi.
The fortuitous finding of miles of insulated cable along Willoughby Spit in Hampton Roads in February 1862 allowed Maury, not Davis or Mallory, to make the James River near the capital impenetrable.
About six miles downstream of Rockett’s Wharf, Maury and his assistants, notably Hunter Davidson, began setting their mines in the narrowest and shallowest part of the river. They placed the mines in mid-channel at between 3 1/2 and 7 1/2 fathoms of water.
The “killing ranges” were under the cover of the guns on Drewry’s Bluff on the south bank of the river and Chaffin’s Farm on the north. “They were ignited by a bit of fine, platinum wire, heated by means of a galvanic current from a galvanic battery on shore. The conducting wire having been cut, the two terminals were then connected with the platinum wire making a span between the terminals of say one-half inch. They were then secured firmly in a small bag of rifle powder to serve as a bursting charge.”
By June 1862, Maury reported 15 casks in the river. Four held 160 pounds of powder and the other 11 held 70 pounds. They were arranged in rows and spaced about 30 feet apart. Only a lack of powder prevented Maury from laying more mines.
On 4 July, Davidson’s ship, the Teaser, ran aground and was captured; soon, Union Army officers had Maury’s diagrams and also his memoranda on mine research. But the information did McClellan little immediate good, because by then the river was sealed. In the Seven Days fighting around Richmond, the Army of the Potomac was on its own. The Union Navy could not run the obstructions, torpedoes, and gun batteries on the James. In effect, Maury’s mines had saved the capital.
After the war, Jefferson Davis hailed the mines in defending Confederate ports, but he never acknowledged Maury’s contributions. In fact, by the summer of 1862, if Davis had been honest in his memoirs, he would have said he and Mallory were totally exasperated by Maury.
This time, for the “small men,” even Cuba was too close a place to exile Maury. Mallory handed Maury orders, dispatching him an ocean away to work with the Confederate Secret Service in Europe.
In late 1862, Union detectives and agents were shadowing Confederate spies and arms buyers as they made their rounds of Europe’s shipyards, armories, arsenals, laboratories, ministries, newspapers, and banks. Maury was one of those spies, but his profile was often anything but low. He spoke to scientific gatherings, wrote for the British press, worked with pro-Southern groups and also engaged in clandestine ship-buying and refitting. For months, however, his studies in mine warfare were a peripheral concern.
What probably intrigued Maury the most then was the possibility of commanding one of a new, more potent kind of ironclad ocean-going warship to be built in France.
What James D. Bulloch, head of the secret service, Maury, and Marin Jansen, of the Royal Dutch Navy and a longtime friend of Maury, envisioned was a class of ironclads, drawing about 15 feet, that could cross the ocean and destroy Northern ports as well as shipping. The French- built ironclads were designed to smash through the Union Monitors. In addition to their eight guns, Maury wanted to make the twin-screwed vessels even more deadly, again by attaching a spar carrying a torpedo for close-in fighting.
Because the money was to come from the Erlanger loan fund, Maury needed the permission of the Confederate commissioners to pay for the ships.
The commissioners, diplomats trying to win European recognition for the Confederacy, agreed to provide the money if Napoleon III openly acknowledged that the ships were for the South. In the Tuilieries on 18 June 1863, the man who ruled an empire stretching from North Africa to Tahiti to Indochina politely refused. Try as he might in other ways, Maury could not get the funds, even from the new sale of cotton certificates, to proceed.
Back in London, he brooded over his failure. Coupled with this misery was knowing his son, John, was missing in action at Vicksburg. Maury’s vigor was faltering. In those troubling days, he looked to the development of two weapons, which if used quickly with the oceangoing ironclads, might stave off the final plunge toward defeat and ruin of the South.
He wrote Jansen:
I must repeat my request that you will furnish me with any thing useful which you may find upon the use of submarines (mines) and submarine boats. We are, I am convinced, far ahead of the outside world with the three devices, simply because our attention has been directed to their development while they encountered prejudices elsewhere.
Because of his time spent in ship buying and ship building, it was August 1863 before Maury renewed his torpedo warfare research, this time with a special interest in testing a new magnetic exploder and phosphide fuse. As he made progress on these, he routinely sent samples and information back to Richmond for use in harbor and river defense. In 1864, he argued in letters to a host of Confederate officials to use the mines also to defend land fortifications. All they had to remember, Maury said, was what happened in the James River when a Union vessel tried to cross an electrically operated minefield. “The boiler, engine and smoke stack went up about 20 or 30 feet, the boiler bursting at the time, and the hull of the vessel was reduced to fragments. Strange to say a few of her people escaped alive.”
In the last winter of war, the British government came to Maury with an offer to share its researches in mines. All would be in the name of science, but nothing official would be noted. What Maury discovered was that gunpowder, cotton, and better fuses made the mines even more lethal.
As dismal as Confederate prospects were in 1865, Maury made plans to sail on 2 May from Britain to Cuba and from there to Texas. He would take the exploders and other devices he had perfected with him to keep Galveston and other Texas ports open. By the time he reached Cuba, the man who had given so much to Virginia knew the war was lost. The good Southern secret agent, however, did not want the equipment he had in his possession to fall into Union hands, so he stored it in Bulloch’s name in a Havana warehouse.
For Maury, “all was lost—save individual honor.”
The Maury Legend Lives On
By David K. Smith
Matthew Fontaine Maury’s legend lives on through a special program held every summer at the U.S. Naval Academy—the Maury Project.
Established in 1994 as a joint effort between the Academy’s department of oceanography and the American Meteorological Society, with funding from the National Science Foundation, the program is designed to provide teachers with a background in the physical foundations of oceanography.
Why physical oceanography? This is probably the area studied least by most teachers and their students. Mention of the word oceanography tends to conjure visions of exotic sea creatures. The physical aspects of the oceans themselves, however, determine why certain marine animals reside where they do. Physical oceanography also helps explain the relationship between winds and weather and their effect on the oceans, causing the formation of waves.
Why the U.S. Naval Academy? The Academy emphasizes both physical oceanography and meteorology, teaching midshipmen about the environment that will affect virtually every military activity of their professional careers. In addition, the oceanography department has an arsenal of instruments and a specially equipped vessel (YP-686) to gather data on the Chesapeake Bay.
Why the American Meteorological Society? This is a professional scientific association devoted to enhancing atmospheric and related sciences by fostering research, education, and practical applications of the discipline. Physical oceanography is a related science, since the atmosphere and the oceans are linked inextricably at the boundary where the winds drive waves across the sea. One of the fundamental responsibilities of the society is to promote educational opportunities in weather and sea sciences, not just to the meteorologists and oceanographers of tomorrow, but to the general public as well.
In summer 2000, the Maury Project conducted its seventh summer workshop—two weeks of instruction funded currently by two government agencies with a vested interest in the subject: the U.S. Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Each summer, 25 educators from across the country and beyond cover ocean structure, waves, tides, currents, acoustics, measuring sea level from space, and other topics. The teachers receive lecture and laboratory instruction from the U.S. Naval Academy oceanography faculty, take measurements in the Chesapeake Bay using instruments on board the YP-686, conduct a beach profile study, visit operational and research oceanography facilities, hear guest lectures from prominent scientists, and share personal anecdotes and helpful hints from their own teaching experiences. To date, approximately 175 teachers, from kindergarten to college level, have participated. At least one has come from each of the 50 states, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa, along with Department of Defense teachers from Great Britain, Germany, Guam, and Okinawa. In addition, foreign teachers from South Africa, Britain, Australia, Mexico, and Canada have participated.
A major part of the workshop is training on specially developed educational modules that provide teachers with instruction and classroom-ready activities on a variety of ocean topics. Participating teachers then use the modules to conduct peer-training sessions for their colleagues.
A positive effect of this process is that Maury Project participants often become recognized in their home states as experts on oceanography. The Maury Project is as much a program for leadership training as it is science education, and participating teachers often become agents of change in their respective school systems. Several Maury participants have been selected as science teachers of the year in their home states.
The Maury Project is a unique program that promotes greater understanding among teachers about the fundamental physical characteristics of the sea as a tool to help enhance the study of science, mathematics, and technology. In addition, the study of the oceans also can provide the skillful teacher with a wide range of activities that can be used across curricula, in science, mathematics, geography, history, art, and other disciplines. The Maury Project can provide a path for teachers to stimulate their students to learn more about their world, using the oceans as a vehicle.