In 1864, the Confederate States submarine H. L. Hunley rammed the USS Housatonic with a sparborne torpedo. But the Hunley’s fate and the story of the man for which she was named still remain a bit turbid.
While the mystery of what became of the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley is semi-solved, other mysteries about her and her designer abide with us still. Who was Horace Lawson Hunley, and why did he do the unusual things he did?
On 15 October 1863, Hunley drowned on a trial run of his undersea vessel with seven other brave sons of the South, each well aware of the danger. On 29 August, seven others, along with Army Lieutenant John Payne, had dived the Hunley with a passenger. Lieutenant Charles E. Hasker, on board. Only Payne, Hasker, and two of the crew survived the ensuing disaster.
Payne had to conn, steer, navigate, and dive the boat alone in the forward hatch station. On the surface, with the after hatch open, he became fouled in a hawser and hit the diving planes’ control. With a down angle on the boat and so little freeboard, the Hunley quickly filled with water pouring in both hatches. Payne freed himself and scrambled out forward; two crewmen struggled clear aft. Hasker fought his way up through the forward column of water, but the closing hatch plate caught his left leg. The boat carried him down 42 feet to the bottom, but the impact helped free his leg, and he swam to the surface.
The Hunley was raised; the five drowned volunteers were buried with honors; and the unlucky submarine was refitted for a fresh try with her creator on board.
Captain Hunley has been credited with the submarine’s design, but James R. McClintock directed her construction and had charge of operations until the appointment of Payne. Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, commanding Charleston’s defenses, seized the Hunley, making her in effect a Confederate States ship.
Beauregard enthusiastically supported the submarine idea; Confederate President Jefferson Davis did not. Jealousy between the two may have fueled the former’s impatience with McClintock. By appointing Payne, Beauregard cashiered McClintock. The general and his staff had concluded that “timidity” was the reason for McClintock’s inaction, but it would appear more a case of discretion being the better part of valor.
To carry out the original Hunley plan of attack required more valor than common sense. The intent was to attach an explosive device to a 200-foot towline, dive beneath an anchored enemy ship, haul the charge against its hull, surface on the far side and detonate the infernal machine by pulling on a lanyard. The method had worked with test targets, but the reason for McClintock’s honoring of valor’s better part must have been his knowledge that water depth under ships on the blockade line was insufficient for passage beneath them.
An even better reason for McClintock’s “timidity” could have been the alternate attack plan, which was to ram an iron spike with an explosive attached into the adversarial hull. The charge was to be fixed firmly to the end of a 22-foot wooden spar jutting from the Hunley's bow. A tug on a lanyard would detonate the infernal machine after the attacker backed well clear. Whatever the rationale, McClintock was replaced by Lieutenant Payne, who later perished, while civilian engineer McClintock more or less faded into obscurity.
Hunley and McClintock anticipated neither obscurity nor disaster when in 1861 they began work in New Orleans on their novel submersible warship. No more did they foresee Admiral David G. Farragut’s and General Benjamin Butler’s capture of the city, which forced them to flee to Mobile.
Although Hunley was educated as a lawyer, McClintock a self-taught engineer and machine tool operator, some who knew them both asserted that Hunley designed the submarines that McClintock and his partner, Baxter Watson, built. Hunley and McClintock both had nautical experience, Hunley the more on salt water. Reputedly, McClintock ran away from his Pennsylvania home at age 11 to be a cabin boy, later becoming a riverboat captain.
Watson and McClintock had gained fame by inventing a process that turned out the devastatingly vicious Minie musket “balls” at the rate of 10,000 per hour. Minie bullets were of lead, but the pair also knew how to work iron. They fashioned an old iron boiler into the Hunley's hull.
H. L. Hunley put up a small fortune, for the times—$5,000—toward the Hunley's construction in New Orleans. This was cash, not a surety bond of earlier efforts in Mobile. His faith was unshakable, but what was his objective? A passionate believer in the Southern Cause, he was acutely aware of the Northern blockade’s crippling effects. As a cotton broker, he knew what was at stake.
Hunley also was a lawyer, a graduate of Louisiana Law School, which later became Tulane University, “Harvard of the South.” His title of captain was not a naval rank, but derived from his having commanded the Adela, a seagoing sailing vessel originally named the W. R. King. Although he searched for but found no Yankee commerce in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and the South Atlantic, he saw the potential of routing goods between Europe and the South via neutral ports, such as Havana. No doubt he also knew the Union was experimenting with submarine design and construction, and it was obvious what destruction such craft could wreak.
How Hunley and McClintock first met is not known, but their fateful association began in New Orleans with construction of the aptly named submarine boat Pioneer. McClintock and partner Watson did the work in the New Basin naval yard. A letter of marque lends credence to the intention that the vessel was to be a privateer. Letters of marque and reprisal were legal devices well understood by Hunley as a seafaring lawyer. They legitimized what would otherwise have been pure piracy. Aside from noble support for the cause, the providers of funds for the submarine’s construction hoped also to profit from Confederate government bounties: a percentage of the value of each enemy vessel sunk or cargo destroyed.
For no apparent reason, the surety bond required to accompany the application for a letter of marque for the Pioneer was in the same amount as Captain Hunley’s share of the Hunley's funding: $5,000. A close friend, Henry J. Leovy, guaranteed the surety, but put up no money. Hunley’s personal as well as official ties to Customs no doubt helped secure legal status for a strange vessel not only untried but unbuilt. The captain’s cash investment in the Pioneer was only $400. A similar amount came from his brother-in-law, wealthy plantation owner and neighbor, Robert Ruffin Barrow. John K. Scott filed the application, was named an owner, and later commanded the Pioneer in trials. Other owners named were Hunley and machinist-engineers Watson and McClintock.
Newspaper stories muddy the waters of the Pioneer's activities after her February 1862 launching. Successful trials in Lake Pontchartrain were cut short by Admiral Farragut’s and General Butler’s taking of New Orleans in April 1862. The disappointed promoters fled to Mobile, but without their submarine.
Conflicting, confusing stories abound about the Pioneer's fate. The truth is that she was scuttled to prevent capture by the Federals. She did fall into Yankee hands, but not until 1878, when they pulled her from her shallow canal grave and sold her for scrap for $43.
For many years another “fish boat” (the derisive term coined by skeptics of the submarine idea) was believed to be the Pioneer. Found on dry land by New Orleans canal diggers, she was cast aside until she was rediscovered in 1878. She resembled the Pioneer but had different dimensions. Unconfirmed reports of such a craft carrying two men to their deaths instigated false rumors of Pioneer fatalities. Displayed at various sites at one time or another, this unidentified relic came to rest in Jackson Square in New Orleans, perhaps a monument to another genius ahead of his time, but forever to be unknown.
Near the turn of the century, submarine inventor and historian Simon Lake critiqued a plan said to be from the relic in question. He pronounced the craft so badly designed as to be incapable of floating on the surface, although navigable below it.
But Lake could not have been assessing the Pioneer. She floated, dived, maneuvered both surfaced and submerged; she even destroyed a tame target vessel and survived. Unanswered is the question of how she would have performed had she gone onstage to play the role that brought the curtain down on the H. L. Hunley.
Hunley the man was a doggedly persistent person. The Hunley was not the only submarine he and his determined partners funded and built in Mobile, despite their New Orleans setback.
The American Diver was the first Mobile boat. Inaccurate news stories claimed there were two Divers and that lives were lost in one. More accurate accounts describe successful trials of a known craft of that name and of its being towed across Mobile Bay to a point off Fort Morgan with intent to attack Farragut’s blockaders outside the harbor entrance. Rough seas caused the American Diver's last dive. No lives were lost, but making naval history was left to the less benign H. L. Hunley.
In mid-1863, much more than his submarines weighed on Captain Hunley’s mind. Again, detail is scant, but this enigmatic southern gentleman and innovator was also a secret agent of the Confederacy. His mission was to acquire and convey arms, ammunition, and supplies to the South. His early Caribbean foray with the Adela obviously laid the foundation for trafficking materiel from England via Havana. Louisiana destinations such as Bayou La Fourche were prime; the Hunley and the Barrow plantations were there. The full story of his clandestine activities may never be told, but biographer Duncan’s opinion was that secret work was the reason he was exempt from uniformed service, even though he was unmarried.
Mississippi was the center of manufacture and supply of fundamental war materials for the Confederate armies. Hunley spent much time there, writing letters to Mobile to bolster McClintock’s and Watson’s morale and to keep his finger on the pulse of the enterprise. Some encouragement came in March 1863, when Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon ordered a company of Alabama Engineers to support the submarine construction with “arms and ammunition” but no pay for the builders.
At this point, the evidence is clear that H. L. Hunley’s character included putting his money where his mouth was. When he funded the Pioneer, his $400 may have seemed paltry, but at the time, his annual salary was only $1,500. General Butler’s Union Army confiscated his plantation’s cotton and tobacco outputs in 1862. He did manage to save some sugar, but his private means must have been considerable for him to come up with the $5,000 he put toward the Hunley project.
Since that sum would hardly suffice, he persuaded other investors to add $10,000 more. This time brother-in-law Barrow was conspicuously absent, having had his holdings seized as well. Hunley had great cause to be depressed. The Pioneer's untimely demise preceded the Confederacy’s loss of Vicksburg, one of the captain’s junket destinations. Barrow’s defection surely augmented Hunley’s depression, but Hunley was a man of apparent iron will. He would have his submarine. His money and that of the other investors were consecrated to paying the costs not funded by the Confederate States of America.
Captain Hunley’s professional and family connections with Customs must have helped get the Pioneer's letter of marque. And an inside track at the Customs House would have been a season ticket for a secret agent’s arms importation; at least he would be familiar with the trade’s intricate tricks.
By authority of the Pioneer's papers, the patriot investors counted on entitlement to cash for covering expenses and turning a profit. No one knows whether the papers were extended to the American Diver and the H. L. Hunley. The point is moot; the Diver sank, and the seizure of the Hunley made her a Confederate vessel.
The letters of Volumina Washington Hunley Barrow contain almost no reference to the detailed doings of her brother, his submarine building, and certainly nothing of his secret work. They do reflect her admiration of and loyalty to him and to their common cause. Mrs. Barrow’s sisterly love for her only brother was strong and profound. She fell ill when he was lost and never fully recovered, leaving her shattered world and her two children in 1868. She was 43.
When Volumnia’s stubborn big brother began anew in Mobile what he was forced to abandon in New Orleans, he had new financing, and, as their orders read, “25 or less” Alabama soldier-engineers to help McClintock use the experience gained with the defunct Pioneer. The American Diver's short life was useful, too, if not very distinguished, and the men at work then knew their product Would be capable of performing her mission. Simon Lake’s future assessment of the results of their kind of production would prove right in one respect, wrong in another: The Hunley would be navigable under water, but barely so. Like the Diver and the Pioneer, she could float on the surface—again, just barely.
Two Army engineers from the 21st Alabama, Lieutenants George B. Dixon and William A. Alexander, received orders to the Parks-Lyons machine shop, then a submarine building yard in Mobile. Alexander later wrote eyewitness accounts of the Hunley's performance. Dixon perished in command of the third, fatal but glorious Hunley adventure. McClintock’s partner. Parks, also became a martyr to naval technical progress, going down with his leader. Captain Hunley, on the second dive of the three.
A cruel, black-humor “joke” of the day had it that the Hunley went down three times and came up twice. This of course took no account of her numerous successful trial divings and surfacings in Mobile Bay. She also did well in Charleston Harbor after being shipped there under a veil of as much secrecy as could be accorded such freight. In Charleston, General Beauregard and the other authorities were alarmed by the Union Navy’s blockade of their vital southern seaport. The Hunley was an available straw to grasp and Beauregard literally seized it.
After Lieutenant Payne’s unhappy experience in the first of the Hunley's three sinkings, Captain Hunley painfully tore himself away from other preoccupations. Already burdened with his secret-agent tasks, his mind was easy prey for the mistakes that brought a second disaster to his little submarine. Hunley was neither careless nor reckless, but fatigue and distraction, relentless evil foes, caused him to fail in closing the seacock admitting water to the forward of the two ballast tanks, jam the diving planes at “down” with the boat under way, leave the forward hatch open as she submerged, forget or fail to light the candle that was to burn until the interior air became foul. (The Hunley had a primitive snorkel to raise submerged, but its 1 1/2-inch diameter was too small for air supply.)
No one knows who rallied the troops after the tragic loss of their leader and seven valiant crewmen, but Lieutenant Dixon and seven more assumed the mantle of hero when the Hunley was once more resurrected and restored.
On the dimly moonlit night of the 17 February 1863, the dauntless Dixon and his equally intrepid crew set out on their historic last voyage. They were fated not to survive, but they vindicated their gallant captain and validated his concepts by presenting the USS Housatonic with the unsolicited distinction of being the first man-o’-war sunk by submarine attack.
Peering from the forward hatch, Dixon found the Housatonic to be a dim silhouette. Visibility was poor, but a Yankee lookout spotted the sub, a mere bump moving in the water. His watch officer declared it a floating log until the courageous subordinate dared to explain patiently, no doubt respectfully, that logs do not move against the current. By the time this elementary fact had penetrated, so had the sharp spike on the powder charge at the forward end of the wooden spar.
Not only was the “log” observed to be backing clear before the explosion, but musket and pistol shots were fired at it when cannon could not be sufficiently depressed.
Long after the explosion, the little submarine somehow met the same untimely, ugly end as the American Diver.
How and why did the Hunley get to the point near the harbor mouth where she and her crew died? Early 19th-century iron boiler-boats, guided only by magnetic compass, were known to wander as wildly as their compass needles. The conning officer, who was also the helmsman, navigator, and diving officer (not to mention his ordnance duties) had for illumination only the flickering light of the feeble candle, the primary purpose of which was to monitor air quality. If modern submarines, with all their technology, were exasperating meanderers, think of poor Dixon’s travail.
Blinded by the explosion, disoriented in the dark, groping about Charleston Harbor, blundering into swamping seas near the harbor mouth—he lies now where the vessel was originally found after 130 years. As for the candle, it is a matter of record that when Captain Hunley’s body was brought up with his craft and his unlucky shipmates, he had not even lit the taper clutched in his hand.
God only knows how and where the Hunley went astray in the February darkness, guided only by George Dixon in the forward hatch, with much more to do than should ever have been the lot of a seaborne Army lieutenant.
One more grim theory should be considered:
The Hunley's crew sat on the port side of a bench running lengthwise of the interior. Facing to starboard, each man acted as a cylinder and piston to turn an engine crankshaft. The after end of the shaft they cranked was the actual propeller shaft, rotating the screw without gears. Primitive it was, but more effective than the crude electric motors McClintock had tried with no success. Top speed was 4 knots.
The crew seats were difficult to enter and more so to exit, as proved by the contorted positions in which some of the victims were found. Before the spike went home and the explosion followed, Dixon would have been looking through the narrow, thick glass port of his rudimentary conning tower, aiming his clumsy vessel at the Housatonic. Both warring sides used Minie bullets like those McClintock and Watson turned out prolifically. One might well have blasted through Dixon’s glass, Dixon himself, his pitiful candle, and sundry navigation mechanisms.
Trapped blind in the stygian darkness of their clammy iron boiler, crewmen would have had no choice but to keep cranking as they backed away from the sinking Union ship. If Dixon were wounded or killed, and jammed in the forward hatch, escape would only have been possible aft. Even if someone could have struggled forward to take Dixon’s place, no one else was qualified to guide the boat to safety. Dixon’s hatch may have been open; even cracking the other could have been fatal. Panic may have set in as the Hunley wandered. In time, with either or both hatches open in even a moderate chop, the sea would have poured in. Lieutenant Hasker’s escape against an inrushing column of water was almost miraculous. This time, for the Hunley's heroes, no miracle came to pass.
Was Captain Hunley, like Captain Ahab with his great white whale, destroyed by his own obsession? He was not an engineer, but still the evidence points to his having designed the submarines McClintock and Watson put together. He was certainly a most remarkable man; a visionary. He looked far ahead of his time and took bold steps to bring into being the solid embodiment of an advanced idea. The idea was old, the realization was new. McClintock was the hands-on craftsman. But not forgotten should be the lesser-known team member, Watson, nor the sacrificial devotion of Parks. Remembered, too, should be the fact that all the crankmen were volunteers.
Three consecutively doomed crews manned the H. L. Hunley. What motivated the second and third, who were well aware of the fate of the first? Devotion to the cause? Hope of financial gain? No sailor got submarine pay; no other submarines yet existed. There was no coercion; all were volunteers. Here must lie the key to this man.
Other than the evidence of his results, little exists to allow a fair evaluation of him as a leader. But surely the evidence strongly favors the conclusion that something about him must have inspired valorous devotion.
Nothing he wrote is revelatory, nor is anything written by others. But few can doubt that H. L. Hunley was one of the great figures of naval history.
Commander Cornelius is a frequent contributor to both Proceedings and Naval History.