Keeping the James River in Rebel Hands

Union Navy fails to fight past  Drewry's Bluff below Richmond in May 1862. 

Nowhere did Matthew Fontaine Maury best deliver his service in coastal defense to the Confederacy than at Richmond during the Peninsula campaign.  His torpedoes [mines] and coastal batteries ultimately forced the Union to keep to the land as its soldiers drew closer and closer to the capital.  He had made the river a death trap for the Union Navy. The few poor roads, thick woods, and swamps to the east proved natural chokepoints and lines of defense. The fortuitous finding of miles of insulated telegraph cable along Willoughby Spit in Hampton Roads in February 1862 allowed Maury, not President Jefferson Davis or Navy Secretary Stephen  Mallory, to make the James River near the capital impenetrable by the summer of 1862, indeed for the remainder of the war.  While the press clamored for stout defenses, Maury quietly provided them.

            About six miles downstream of Rocketts Wharf, the Confederate Navy’s shipyard, Maury and his assistants, notably Hunter Davidson, like Robert Minor and John Mercer Brooke, a member of the Naval Academy’s first graduating class with service at the observatory, set their mines in the narrowest and shallowest part of the river.  They placed the mines in mid-channel at between three and a half and seven and a half fathoms of water.

            The place for the "ranges” selected was under the cover of the guns on Drewry's Bluff on the south bank 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,” Maury later reported.

            By June 1862, Maury and Davidson, who had served aboard CSS Virginia, had fifteen casks in the river, arranged in rows and spaced about thirty feet apart.  They transformed Samuel Colt’s minefield concept from an art to a science. The Confederates in Richmond were making “submarine warfare an extremely important and feared tool of war.”  Again, Maury relied on stealth to hold off  nosy Union gunboat commanders. If the Navy or Virginia Governor John Letcher had more powder, Maury and Davidson would have deployed more mines.

            The Union Navy on the James River and in Hampton Roads wanted Maury’s plans for river defense.  With them, they would know the “ranges” of torpedoes, sunken vessels, and other obstructions, and the large gun emplacements.  They reasoned snipers from the shore would be a manageable risk. This summer, they were living in the shadow of Captain David Glasgow Farragut’s daring rush up the Mississippi River with his ocean-going frigates and sloops that led to the fall of the South’s largest city and busiest port, New Orleans.

            Even after the Battle of the Ironclads in Hampton Roads, Union Navy officers in the East, unlike their Army counterparts, were used to having their way. Cape Hatteras, Port Royal, Roanoke Island, and New Bern kept hopes for a short, victorious war.  But now, they were constantly being stymied.  The ironclads were not enough to force the Union Navy’s way to attack the city and the Army of Potomac for now was operating too far  north of the river for their guns to offer support.

Union Navy Fends Off Mine Attacks in Hampton Roads.

Early in the Civil War, it wasn’t the electrically-triggered torpedoes set up in long and deadly water ranges that later so troubled Union Navy officers in the upper James River, on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, or just outside the port cities of Charleston and Mobile. Their concerns in Hampton Roads centered on floating torpedoes or mines in wooden casks and the use of the tides and currents to carry them into their anchorages. For almost a year, mines in Hampton Roads were never far from Union Navy leaders minds – first in how to defend against them and later how to employ them to destroy the greatest menace they would face in the war.

Matthew F. Maury

The Union Navy had escaped disaster in July before the Battle of Bull Run when Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury and his raiding party had floated a number of mines toward the anchored fleet off Fortress Monroe in Hampton Roads. Maury's idea was to let the tide and current carry the powder-laden oak casks toward the ships. The pairs of casks were connected by a span of rope about 600 feet in length, and corks kept the span afloat. The explosives, contained in the barrels, were submerged, and the triggers were in the barrelheads.

The idea behind the plan 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.

When he thought he was in correct position, Maury quietly ordered the first mines released. Then the next set. Finally, all were safely off. The twenty-five Confederates tensed, waiting to hear the explosions as they hurriedly rowed back toward Sewell's Point stillunchallenged by any Union patrol vessels.

As they drew closer and closer to safety, the Confederates heard only their muffled oars. There were no shattering blasts, secondary explosions, and alarm bells and trumpet calls, only the sounds of a summer Tidewater night.

All knew the raid had failed. Ashore, Maury scrutinized each detail to pinpoint what had gone wrong. "I attributed it to the fact that such a fuse would not burn under a pressure of 20 feet of water” and vowed to try again. When Union forces found the washed ashore mines later, they had another explanation: wet powder.

In late October, another Maury-designed raid again used floating mines to attack frigate Congress off Newport News in Hampton Roads, but it too had gone awry. Nonetheless, Captain Louis Goldsborough, the senior Union officer in the area, warned the skipper of Congress, Commander William Smith, a week after the latest attack to “be on the alert for submarine infernal machines” that could be rowed close to the ship and set adrift to become ensnared in its propeller and set off the explosives in their casks.

Smith wrote back in early November that he was protecting Congress as best he could with a frame in the shape of the letter A floating nearby, placing booms alongside it at night, and keeping grapnels at the ready in case a floating mine came near. Yet with all this attention paid to mines, Smith admitted that the most dangerous challenge to his ship, the raised Merrimack being outfitted with railroad iron and new powerful guns a few miles away in Portsmouth, was receiving scant attention.

“I have not yet devised any plan to defend against Merrimack unless it be with hard knocks.” - Commander William Smith