Mines have been used in every American naval conflict since the Revolutionary War, and many famous American inventors and entrepreneurs focused on mine technology, including David Bushnell, Robert Fulton, and Samuel Colt. Mine warfare has long been the province of innovators cobbling together new types of weapons to hold off an invading or blockading force.
The ongoing naval contest in the Black and Red Seas is the latest demonstration of how innovators combine different weapons to keep enemy naval forces away from ports and coastal shipping. As in other domains, Ukrainian forces in the maritime fight have exhibited remarkable ability to integrate disparate technology, often from the commercial sector, to create effective antiship weapons. As of late 2024, Ukrainian forces were managing to keep Russian forces away from a narrow littoral lifeline and defend the port of Odessa, while Houthis were disrupting Red Sea shipping with improvised sea-denial weapons.
In the late 19th century, it was Americans who were the world’s leading innovators in mine warfare and coastal defense. This expertise was hard-won in the Civil War and resulted from grassroots efforts. And in the decades that followed the defeat of the Southern rebellion, the expertise gained by officers on both sides of that conflict was highly sought on the international market.
Origins of an Expert-for-Hire
Alexander Macomb Mason is a largely forgotten figure in American naval history, but his story weaves together a remarkable number of key battles that showcased innovation in the littorals. Mason descended from famous families, rubbed elbows with some of the 19th century’s most remarkable figures, turned up in the background of a surprising number of legendary naval battles, and witnessed America’s global debut.
He also turned his back on the United States while a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, applied his considerable technical skills in the service of the Confederacy, and became a coastal defense expert-for-hire after the war.
He was the great-grandson of Founding Father George Mason and grandson of General Alexander Macomb, a hero of the War of 1812. Alexander Mason first went to sea at age 17 in the USS Niagara, crossing the Atlantic and witnessing firsthand the laying of the first transatlantic cable. This experience launched his naval career and put him in the orbit of a leading scientific mind: Navy Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury. Maury was an expert in technologies essential to seabed cables and mine warfare, such as instruments to measure the water column, ruggedized equipment, and new kinds of insulation for transmitting current underwater.
Following this high seas experience, Mason reported as a midshipman to Annapolis, where he lived and studied with many future U.S. Navy legends. (Alfred Thayer Mahan was two classes ahead.) Mason earned respectable grades in technical subjects and participated in the 1859 and 1860 summer midshipman cruises to Europe.1
He identified with his Virginian relatives on the Mason side of the family, however, and when war came in April 1861, he joined the majority of the Southern midshipmen in resigning to join the rebellion.
He was young but experienced, having crossed the Atlantic three times already, and his abilities were in high demand with the fledgling Confederate States Navy. At Norfolk, Mason was assigned to serve under Commander John Randolph Tucker on board the CSS Patrick Henry. Maury, Mason’s earlier mentor, also had turned southward and was a presence on the James River, tinkering with new designs, scrounging insulated wire, and deploying both electrically detonated moored mines and drifting contact mines.2 Maury helped establish an organization for resourcing mine development, the Submarine Battery Service, and the Confederate Navy became committed to mine warfare: Many officers became like Tucker, who was described as having “torpedo on the brain.”3
The Patrick Henry was the command ship for several early mine tests, and Mason was one of the officers who trained on the innovative new weapons. On 9 October 1861, he and another volunteer from the Patrick Henry participated in one of the first mining operations of the war: attacking the USS Savannah at Hampton Roads, Virginia.4 An official report to Maury commends Mason’s bravery in the nighttime approach by small boat to the Newport News anchorage to deploy improvised drifting mines containing hundreds of pounds of gunpowder. The mines were designed to snag the target with floating lines and then be triggered by a complicated contact mechanism, but they failed to explode.5 A modern historian concludes that many men had a role in mine development but that Maury was “the Confederacy’s most persistent advocate of electric torpedoes.”6
‘The Day the Wooden Navy Died’
Mason then participated in a more famous example of naval innovation, as the North and South fought for control of the James: The Patrick Henry supported ironclad CSS Virginia’s attack on the U.S. squadron, trading fire with shore batteries and giving Mason a front-row seat to “the day the wooden navy died.” When the ironclad USS Monitor arrived the next day, all the other Confederate warships kept their distance, and Mason watched the Monitor and Virginia fight to a standstill.7
Union Major General George B. McClellan’s forces soon moved up the Virginia Peninsula toward Richmond, making Norfolk indefensible. Mason and the crew of the Patrick Henry traveled up and down the James River to move critical supplies and establish a new blocking position at Drewry’s Bluff, just south of Richmond, including more mines placed by Maury.
On 15 May 1862, Mason watched a U.S. Navy squadron under Commodore John Rodgers—a squadron that included the Monitor—steaming upriver to test the defenses. The crews of the Patrick Henry and Virginia had mounted their heavy guns on the bluff and put a plunging fire into the U.S. Navy ships below. Rodgers withdrew to City Point and did not attempt to test Drewry’s Bluff again.8
Following these battles, Tucker and Mason left for Charleston, South Carolina, and the newly built ironclad ram CSS Chicora. Mason wrote to his mother after arriving in Charleston and reflected on the relative success of the Confederate Army and the poor state of the Southern naval forces: “Had we a Navy anything like our Army, our case would be far, far different. We could thus meet our foes with some show of equality on every point, they would not be able to hold our entire seacoast as they now do.”9
Soon enough, Mason had another chance to test innovative sea-denial weapons against the superior U.S. Navy. The steam-powered Chicora, a smaller version of the Virginia, and her sister ship Palmetto State slipped out of Charleston Harbor on 31 January 1863 to attack the USS Mercedita and Keystone State.10 The targets escaped, and the Chicora ventured several miles into the Atlantic to trade fire with the blockading squadron—the “only time during the war in which Confederate ironclads successfully engaged the enemy on the open sea.”11
Twilight of the Confederacy
The Confederacy’s strategic objectives were similar to those of Ukraine today: The Chicora’s raid sought to demonstrate to foreign trading powers that the blockade was ineffective and that trade could flow through Charleston. In the months that followed there, both sides prepared for the coming U.S. Navy attack on the city.
Mason could take pride in the strength of the city’s defenses: As a young officer his grandfather, Alexander Macomb, one of the first engineers trained at West Point, had overseen the construction of Fort Moultrie more than five decades earlier.12 The Chicora and Palmetto State lay inside the harbor, waiting to attack Union vessels that made it past Forts Sumter and Moultrie, and a new gauntlet of mines lay across the harbor entrance.
The attack came on 7 April 1863, with John Rodgers leading the assault, as he had at Drewry’s Bluff. He now commanded the new ironclad USS Weehawken, which was rigged as a primitive minesweeper with an extended wooden raft on the bow.13 She and eight other ironclad warships trailing her took fire as they passed buoys placed to register the range of shore guns, and an exploding mine lifted the bow of the Weehawken out of the water, prompting Rodgers and his fellow commanders to withdraw from the minefield under fire.14
The U.S. squadron was fortunate it did not suffer greater damage as mines started to explode. The largest mine—with 3,000 pounds of gunpowder—lay directly under Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont’s flagship USS New Ironsides for several minutes but failed to detonate because of a broken trigger wire. The multilayered defense of Charleston Harbor proved too formidable for Du Pont, who broke off the attack after only a few hours and before reaching the inner harbor where the Chicora and Palmetto State lay waiting.15
Mason spent the next chapter of the war engaged in the diplomatic struggle abroad. He ran the blockade to travel to London and serve as secretary to his uncle James Murray Mason, the Confederate envoy in London. The Masons had little success in convincing the British government that the U.S. Navy’s blockade was ineffective or that Britain should enter the war in support of the Confederacy, but Confederates in Europe had some success acquiring ships and naval technology under a variety of commercial guises.
Mason also was on hand at the culmination of the Confederacy’s commerce raiding campaign. While he was traveling in France, the USS Kearsarge defeated the most feared Confederate raider, the CSS Alabama, within sight of Cherbourg. Mason was probably among the crowds that watched the well-advertised battle, and he escorted several of the rescued Alabama sailors home in August 1864, crossing the Atlantic and again running the blockade via Bermuda and Halifax.16
The U.S. Navy by now had overwhelmed the Southern coastal defenses. Mason’s war ended with him serving as an infantryman in John Randolph Tucker’s Naval Brigade at the last-ditch Battle of Sailor’s Creek, three days before Appomattox. Captured by Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer’s division, Mason was transported to his hometown, where he was in the Old City Prison the night of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
Have Mine-Warfare Expertise, Will Travel
Mason then transferred to the prison camp at Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie. Released shortly after the war, and with no prospects in America, he set his sights abroad with other former Annapolis midshipmen who had cast their lots with the South. There was a market for their skills. A Chilean agent recruited Mason and his friends to lend their mine-warfare expertise to the brewing conflict with Spain on the Pacific coast of South America—the Chincha Islands War.17
The Spanish fleet had not yet attacked when Mason and his friends traveled to Peru and then Chile in January 1866. In meetings with senior Chilean officials at Santiago and Valparaiso, the Americans agreed to put their talents to producing and employing “torpedoes” (mines) against the Spanish.
The most feared warship in the Pacific was Spain’s advanced ironclad Numancia. Mason spent several weeks traveling back and forth between Santiago and Valparaiso, working to prepare improvised mines. But a tense diplomacy between Spain and Peru and Chile continued through the early months of 1866, and Chile declined to emplace its new weapons, so Mason returned to Peru to help strengthen defenses there.
Then, on 31 March 1866, the Numancia and the unopposed Spanish fleet bombarded Valparaiso, setting fire to the town and devastating the Chilean fleet. The Spanish then promptly steamed north to attempt the same against Peru’s principal port.
Meanwhile, with the techniques they had developed on the James and at Charleston, the Americans had been helping the Peruvians bolster the defenses at Callao. Forty barrels filled with gunpowder were anchored in the harbor and connected to batteries on shore.18 On 2 May 1866, the Spanish fleet approached, trying to navigate around the mines, which were intermixed with painted buoys placed to mark the ranges for shore batteries. The layered defense of mines saved Callao from the fate of Valparaiso, forcing the Spanish fleet to stay offshore and withdraw after an ineffective bombardment.19
The Battle of Callao surely reminded Mason of Drewry’s Bluff and Charleston—and he was not the only veteran of those clashes present. John Rodgers—who twice had led Union attacks on fortifications defended by Mason—was in command of a U.S. squadron observing the battle (he was also the senior American negotiator during the Chincha Islands War).
Not only was this the third time Mason and Rodgers had found themselves on the scene of a naval attack on a well-prepared fortification, but there also was a distant family connection between the two men. Rodgers was from one of the most prominent families in the U.S. Navy, and in 1850 his sister, Ann, had married the Army officer John N. Macomb Jr.—a graduate of West Point, a nephew of General Alexander Macomb, and a first cousin (once removed) of Alexander Macomb Mason. (Before the Civil War interrupted, John N. Macomb Jr. had famously led exploring and road-building expeditions in the American West in the late 1850s.)
With ‘Chinese’ Gordon in Egypt
Mason left Peru to wander the world for several years, first as a merchant seaman in the Pacific and then as a mercenary in Cuba. In 1870, alongside dozens of other Civil War veterans, he was recruited to join the Egyptian General Staff. The Khedive of Egypt, rich from inflated cotton prices and the opening of the Suez Canal, was building up his military power. The Americans he contracted went to work on two strategic priorities: coastal defense and the exploration of the vast stretches of northeast Africa ostensibly ruled from Cairo.
Mason would spend the next decade on the latter mission, serving as chief of staff to the legendary British General Charles “Chinese” Gordon, while also becoming a prominent explorer. Mason surveyed desert navigation routes, mapped Darfur, charted Lake Albert, and discovered the Semliki River. Egyptian history might have been different if these talents had instead been applied to coastal defense and mine warfare.
In 1882, nationalist Egyptian officers who resented the effort to Europeanize their country—and the privileged status enjoyed by foreigners such as Mason—launched what became known as the Urabi Revolt. A combined British and French fleet soon arrived, bombarded Alexandria, and put an expeditionary force ashore to defeat the nationalist forces at the Battle of Tel el Kebir. The Egyptians had a stockpile of hundreds of mines and detonating apparatuses. But they did not mount an effective coastal defense and were unable to repulse the enemy fleet like the defenders of Drewry’s Bluff, Charleston, and Callao had done.
Lieutenant Commander Caspar Goodrich, a leading American expert on mine warfare sent to observe the campaign, noted that the defenders had failed to disrupt and disorganize the British attack with the mines later discovered in storage in Alexandria.20 (Goodrich also expressed professional regret that the Egyptians had not made better use of these weapons so that the U.S. Navy could study their effectiveness against the Royal Navy.21)
A Littoral Legacy
Granted the honorific “Bey” for his service to Egypt, Mason ended his career serving as the Governor of Massawa and negotiating Anglo-Egyptian treaties with Abyssinia. During these years he was known to be an expert navigator of the shipping lanes and ports of the southern Red Sea—the area so hotly contested by the Houthi rebels of late.22 Mason helped organize an Egyptian pavilion at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and he no doubt marveled at the advancements in technologies he had worked with so closely: electricity, communication, and artillery.23
Mason died in 1897, just days after President William McKinley’s inauguration, and is buried in Georgetown, D.C., in his Egyptian uniform, less than a mile from where he was born.
Alexander Macomb Mason’s story provides a useful reminder that mines are central to campaigns to contest the littorals. The United States must pay greater attention to mine warfare, empower innovative champions for mine warfare, and draw on its own history to inform decisions on allocating resources.
Mason’s story also is a reminder that the lessons of mine warfare always have traveled quickly around the world—and that the U.S. Navy must study grassroots innovators globally to bring new capabilities to the 21st-century fleet.
1. Annual Register of the U.S. Naval Academy (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Academy, 1859, 1860).
2. John Grady and David K. Smith, “Maury Perfects Mine Warfare,” Naval History 15, no. 4 (August 2001): 42–47.
3. Richard L. Maury, A Brief Sketch of the Work of Matthew Fontaine Maury During the War 1861–1865 (Richmond, VA: Whittet and Shepperson, 1915), 28–29; J. Robin Moorhouse, “‘Damn the Torpedoes’: Confederate Submarine Warfare in the American Civil War,” The Mirror—Undergraduate History Journal 19, no. 1 (February 1999): 196–224, ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/westernumirror/article/view/16143.
4. Louis Schafer, Confederate Underwater Warfare (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1996), 12–18.
5. “Report of Lieutenant Minor, C.S.S. Patrick Henry, Off Mulberry Point Battery, October 11, 1861 (addressed to Commander M. F. Maury, C.S. Navy, Fredricksburg, VA),” Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (ORN) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), ser. 1, vol. 6, 304a–304b.
6. Timothy S. Wolters, “Electric Torpedoes in the Confederacy: Reconciling Conflicting Histories,” The Journal of Military History 72, no. 3 (2008): 755–83.
7. David P. Werlich, Admiral of the Amazon: John Randolph Tucker, His Confederate Colleagues, and Peru (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 32.
8. James Henry Rochelle, Life of Rear Admiral John Randolph Tucker (Washington, DC: Neale Publishing Co., 1903), 40–43.
9. Alexander Macomb Mason to Catherine Macomb Mason, 28 October 1862; reproduction of original from Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Alexander Macomb Mason research file, Gunston Hall. (Only a small number of Mason’s letters survive.)
10. Robert M. Browning, Success Is All That Was Expected: The South Atlantic Blockading Squadron During the Civil War (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2002), 138–41.
11. Werlich, Admiral of the Amazon, 43.
12. George H. Bangs, Memoir of Alexander Macomb, the Major General Commanding the Army of the United States (New York: McElrath and Bangs, 1833); Alexander Macomb, “A Plan of Fort-Moultrie on Sulivan’s Island in the Harbour of Charleston, 1808,” Record Group 77, ARC 102280076, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD.
13. “The Ironclads at Charleston,” Harper’s Weekly, 25 April 1863.
14. Werlich, Admiral of the Amazon, 46.
15. Craig Symonds, Lincoln and his Admirals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 215.
16. “Navy Department Correspondence 1861–1865,” ORN, ser. 2, vol. 2, 816–17.
17. Angela A. Trigg, “A Romantic Adventurer Comes of Age: The Life of Daniel Trigg of Abingdon, Virginia,” master’s thesis, Georgia State University, 1997.
18. Trigg, “A Romantic Adventurer Comes of Age,” 81.
19. Kevin Culhane and Bill Huntington, “From Bay to Bey: The Odyssey of a Confederate Sailor,” Gunston Grapevine, Spring 2015.
20. LCDR Caspar F. Goodrich, USN, Report of the British Naval and Military Operations in Egypt, 1882, Office of Naval Intelligence, Bureau of Navigation (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1885), 21.
21. Goodrich, Report of the British Naval and Military Operations in Egypt, 23.
22. Augustus Blandy Wylde, From ’83 to ’87 in the Soudan (London: Remington and Co., 1888), vol. 1, 105.
23. John P. Barrett, Electricity at the Columbian Exposition (Chicago: Donnelley, 1894); “The Krupp Exhibit at the Great Fair,” Scientific American, 15 July 1893, 33.
