The U. S. Navy formally abandoned the USS Harvest Moon on 18 February 1964. It had been exactly one hundred years to the day since the converted merchant steamer had gone to sea for the Union during the Civil War as the flagship of Rear Admiral John Adolphus Dahlgren, U. S. Navy, Commander, South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. All but one of those hundred years was spent rather ingloriously.
On 1 March 1865, the Harvest Moon, with Admiral Dahlgren on board, ran on to and detonated a crude Confederate mine (called torpedoes in those days). Within a very few minutes, she was resting in two and one-half fathoms of water on the bottom of Winyah Bay, three miles from Battery White near Georgetown, South Carolina.
From that day until the present, the Harvest Moon has been a familiar landmark to Georgetown area residents, with as much as seven feet of her rust-rimmed stack exposed at low water. Now, after a century, the Navy has resigned its claim, leaving the way open for interested parties to salvage the apparently well-preserved Union blockade flagship. Should they succeed, the nation will again be able to view a ship of a type which played a vital role in one of the most significant eras in naval warfare.
On 15 April 1861, President of the United States Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to serve for three months with the then growing Union Army. Two days later, in protest, Confederate President Jefferson Davis offered letters of marque to mariners wishing to prey upon Union commerce. Lincoln’s rebuttal was a formal Union naval blockade of the southern coast. As a result, the U. S. Navy found itself, in the spring of 1861, obligated to deny waterborne trade with the Confederacy in some 180 harbors and navigable inlets along 3,500 miles of southern coastline with only 42 vessels in commission— an obvious impracticability. The need was evident for a group of shallow-draft gunboats that could probe into every river, stream, and tidal marsh between Texas and the nation’s capital. The answer in part was the acquisition of small merchant vessels already afloat which could be refitted to fill the need for blockade ships. The changeover was not an easy one, observed Union naval officer Captain Samuel DuPont, but rather “like altering a vest into a shirt.”
The Harvest Moon was one of these ex-merchantmen turned gunboat, and was purchased at Boston on 16 November 1863 by Commodore J. B. Montgomery from one Charles Spear. She was a side-wheel, woodenhulled steamer of 546 tons. The Navy paid $99,300 for the future flagship’s 193-foot frame. She drew about eight feet of water and could steam at 12 knots. At the time of her sinking, the Smithsonian Institution recorded her armament as four 24-pound howitzers, one 20-pound Parrott rifle, and one 12-pound rifle.
After three months’ fitting out at the Boston Naval Shipyard, the Harvest Moon was commissioned on 12 February 1864, and was assigned duty with the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. On 18 February, she got underway for the first time as the USS Harvest Moon, with Acting Volunteer Lieutenant J. D. Warren in command. On 24 February, the Commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, Rear Admiral Dahlgren, visited the ship and, on the following day, transferred his flag on board.
From the time of her arrival in Port Royal, South Carolina, 7 June 1864, until she was put out of action, the Harvest Moon was actively employed in Confederate waters as a picket and dispatch boat, and on blockade duty. During that time, she served periodically as the Commander’s flagship. The Admiral was on board and in his cabin awaiting breakfast at 7:45 a.m. on 1 March 1865. A group of Georgetown citizens, whose contribution to the South’s cause was the building and placing of “torpedoes,” denied him that morning meal.
Rear Admiral Dahlgren’s place in naval history is as the father of certain types of naval ordnance, not as a fleet commander. The deadly accurate, bottle-shaped Dahlgren cannons graced most new warships of the era, including both the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (Merrimack), and are recognized as having revolutionized seagoing ordnance. This slim, pale, sandy-haired, mustachioed, undeniably correct naval hero would probably never have gone to sea in the Harvest Moon if it had not been for the intervention of his Commander-in-Chief and personal friend, Abraham Lincoln.
Dahlgren received command of the Washington Navy Yard unexpectedly at the beginning of the Civil War, when all of those senior to him at the yard chose to join the Confederate cause at Richmond. While Dahlgren was in command at the Navy Yard, the President frequently consulted with him on naval matters. The friendship between the two men of the same age grew, and Lincoln occasionally invited his naval advisor to join the First Family on outings along the Potomac.
The thinking was almost universal within the Navy that scientist sailors could not be effective fighters. It was only through the personal intercession of President Lincoln with Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, who believed with the majority that the ordnance expert was unsuitable for sea command, that Dahlgren was appointed Commander, South Atlantic Blockading Squadron in July 1863. Lincoln’s judgment proved sound; Dahlgren convinced his naval contemporaries that he was a capable fighter as well as an ordnance genius.
The day before his flagship was lost, Admiral Dahlgren left Georgetown and sailed several miles down Winyah Bay to examine a Confederate fort, Battery White, which his Marines, under the leadership of Marine Lieutenant Stoddart, had taken on 28 February, following the surrender of Georgetown. The next morning, having inspected the fort, he was again underway when the Harvest Moon met her abrupt end.
“. . . She had not proceeded far when the explosion took place,” explained the Admiral that same morning in a letter to Secretary Welles. “It was nearly 8 a.m., and I was waiting breakfast in the cabin when instantly a loud noise and shock occurred, and the bulkhead separating the cabin from the wardroom was shattered and driven towards me.”
A variety of the Admiral’s personal belongings were hurled about his quarters, and he thought that his ship’s troublesome boiler had ruptured. The smell of powder then led him to believe that the ship’s magazine had exploded. The Admiral was probably not too surprised when he found out that his flagship had been the victim of a Confederate mine, for unlike many of his contemporaries, he correctly judged the mine’s potential. On 20 February 1864, writing of the sinking of the USS Housatonic by the Confederate “submarine” Hunley, which rammed the Union gunboat with a mine attached to a large spar on her bow, Dahlgren said, “Torpedoes have been laughed at, but this disaster ends that.” He reiterated his opinion of mines in that letter to Welles the day the Harvest Moon went down.
“It had been reported to me that the channel had been swept, but so much has been said in ridicule of torpedoes that very little precaution is deemed necessary, and if resorted to is probably taken with less care than if due weight was attached to the existence of these mischievous things.” The Admiral’s interest in mines and their mischief lasted until his death.
The only casualty in the sinking of the Harvest Moon was wardroom steward John Hazard, who was in the hold when the incident occurred. His body was recovered the next day. Immediately following the explosion, the tug Clover came alongside and removed the Admiral and his staff. The ship’s officers remained on board the stricken vessel until the last, trying to save what they could. The Harvest Moon's rough log closed with the entry, “April 21, at 2 p.m., abandoned the wreck and moved to Battery White.”
On 27 April 1865, the court of inquiry which had been convened to investigate the sinking of the gunboat reported, “That said vessel was sunk by a torpedo, and that no blame attaches to any of her officers.” The Union’s books were closed on the Harvest Moon, and all thoughts of the old side-wheeler were cast out of mind by Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
Thus the Harvest Moon has rested for almost a century, with her uppermost deck under three to six feet of mud, and her stack thrust from the shallow but concealing waters of Winyah Bay. Many people have passed and pointed her out during those one hundred years, but only recently has this page from the old Navy been turned for re-examination.
In the fall of 1963, a field unit from the New England Naval and Maritime Museum, Newport, Rhode Island, visited the Harvest Moon and began an investigation that has aroused curiosity—but not capital—throughout South Carolina. The findings of the Newport group have been optimistic. Initial studies indicate that the Harvest Moon lies extraordinarily well preserved in its cocoon of mud on the bottom of Winyah Bay. A group of Georgetown residents have formed the Southern Explorations Association, which has been chartered by the state, and whose primary mission is the salvaging and restoration of the old gunboat as a tourist attraction. Talk of raising and refurbishing Admiral Dahlgren’s blockade flagship has brought her to the attention of present-day sailors, whose interest in missiles and nuclear warships long ago displaced any reminders of the Harvest Moon.
The final release of the wooden warship came on 18 February 1964, when Assistant Secretary of the Navy Kenneth E. BeLieu signed the formal abandonment document. Thus, after 99 years on the bottom of the Bay, the Harvest Moon left the service of the U. S. Navy and became available for private salvage. To date, she remains unclaimed.
Abandonment of the gunboat by the Navy was followed closely by abandonment of plans by the Georgetown group to salvage her, due to lack of financial backing. (The salvage and restoration of another Civil War torpedo-destroyed gunboat, Cairo, from Mississippi’s Yazoo River was estimated to cost from three to five hundred thousand dollars.)
Whether the Harvest Moon will rise again to serve the South is not known, but one thing is certain: As a representative of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, she belongs to an era that saw the U. S. Navy begin an ascension which has placed this nation at the pinnacle of sea power. The Harvest Moon remains a tribute to that era.