(Image from United States Navy Library)
Glassell first tried to attack New Ironsides from a rowboat, but the development of the Davids held far more promise of success in destroying the Union's largest warship in Charleston.
Navy Lieutenant W.T. Glassell was furious that his faithful
service was being questioned when he landed in Philadelphia in early 1862. He was coming off a long tour that had taken
him and the crew of 25-gun screw sloop Hartford to the East Indies Squadron.
Even when threatened with imprisonment, he insisted that the oath he already
had taken to uphold the Constitution was more than sufficient for now.
Although he wrote out a letter of resignation
dated Dec. 4, 1861, it was never delivered. In these testy days following First
Manassas and Ball’s Bluff, a Virginia-born officer’s word was not good enough. He was “dismissed” from the Navy in December.
Little could the Union authorities who cashiered him after 15 years of service and
sent Glassell to Fort Warren in Boston harbor without trial know that they soon
would be fighting one of the Confederacy’s most daring officers in a nasty new
kind of war.
Long after the war, Glassell wrote that those eight months
hardened him in such a way that “even President Hayes would now acknowledge
that it was my right, if not my duty
to act the part of the belligerent” after being exchanged as a prisoner of war
in a conflict he hadn’t then joined.
Now, the 30-year-old left the rank of the neutrals and
accepted a lieutenant’s commission in the officer-rich and ship-poor
Confederate Navy with orders to report to Charleston. From the time when the South Carolina port city hosted the convention that took the
state out of the Union in December 1860 through the almost 34-hour bombardment
of Fort Sumter in April 1861, punishing and recapturing Charleston assumed an
intensity in the Lincoln administration’s war plans that rivaled the “On to
Richmond” cry of the North’s newspapers.
Glassell was entering the cockpit of the asymmetric
defensive strategy of the chastened Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, still a hero in the
Low Country for Sumter and his victory at First Manassas. President Jefferson
Davis had found Beauregard irritating as a commander outside of Washington and
irascible as a commander in the West. He
used the general’s unasked for leave to recuperate from the battle strain of
Shiloh and the evacuation of Corinth as the reason to oust him from command of
the Army of the Mississippi in late June 1862.
The “Little Creole” took his time that September in studying
the defenses already in place after being ordered to what seemed a backwater in a
shooting war. But the reception he received upon his arrival from citizens and
authorities like Governor Francis Pickens soothed his feelings. He would do his
best in Charleston until he received orders to again lead troops into battle. Barely
waiting for his predecessor John C. Pemberton to take command of forces near
Vicksburg, Beauregard wanted more and better obstructions – from ripping up the
city’s cobblestone streets to slow down invaders on the water to laying mines
carefully to channel old and new classes of “iron sea elephants” into the large
guns of expanded batteries and reinforced forts to running rope lines from land
point to land point to snarl screw propellers in the harbor.
Somewhat surprisingly from a career Army officer, an
artillerist and engineer, he had an open mind when it came to almost all things
naval – be they ideas on mounting spar torpedoes on row boats, building submersibles,
and submarines to attack blockaders, and sending the city’s two harbor
defending ironclads on a daring night attack on the Union fleet. Following the
military dictum, when in charge, be in charge, he didn’t hesitate to wrest
control of men and equipment when he believed it necessary to defend not only
Charleston, but Savannah and coastal Georgia, and Florida.
One middling young naval officer, Glassell, played a leading
role in many of these episodes. His entry into the world of “destructionists
and capturers” began conventionally enough as deck officer in charge of
ironclad Chicora’s first division. In a
combined attack with ironclad Charleston Jan. 30, 1863, on the Union fleet to
raise the blockade at least temporarily.
If he had been asked how to attack under the cover or darkness in an
ironclad, Glassell’s answer would have been simple. Ram the wooden blockaders
at “full speed.” Instead “older and perhaps wise officers” ordered him to fire
on Keystone State as it was bearing down on Chicora. His division’s shot killed
21 Union sailors, wounded another 15, and Keystone State’s flag was taken down
in surrendering, but in the fighting was raised again and ship sailed away.
Glassell and Captain Francis Lee, an Army engineer, realized
that time was not on the side of the Confederacy in Charleston harbor. As shipyards in and around the Ashley and
Cooper rivers struggled to find engines, armament, and iron plating for
Southern ironclads like Chicora, that the Union could build 10 ironclads “of a
superior class almost invulnerable to shot or shell.” Lee by then was experimenting with a spar, a
long pine pole, attached by socket to a rowboat, making it maneuverable; and at
the end of the pole was a torpedo with “thirty or fifty pounds of explosives” that
was under six to seven feet or water.
The idea was ram the spar into a ship below its waterline and the iron
plating the operator in the boat’s front would be shielded by iron from
expected gunfire from the ship’s deck, then set off the torpedo and safely back
the boat away.
“I believed it should be our policy to take immediate steps
for the construction of a large number of small boats [with engines] suitable
for torpedo service and make simultaneous attacks … before the enemy should
know what we were about.”
At 61 and with more than half a century in the Navy, Commodore
Duncan Ingraham, commander of naval forces in Charleston, dismissed Glassell’s
“new fangled notions” out of hand. But the lieutenant pressed on – knowing
where he could find the money in Charleston to build those deadly rowboats. He
went to “my friend,” George A. Trenholm, one of the wealthiest men in North
America and the head of the South’s largest trading firm and its financial
agent in Europe.
While Trenholm provided the money for the rowboats, Ingraham
held firm against wild notions of any kind.
This time, citing Glassell’s age and rank, the commodore said he was not
qualified to lead an expedition of this size.
He could command a boat in Ingraham’s view, but still the ranking officer
did not authorize an attack on the lieutenant’s target of choice, Powhatan, an
11-gun paddle steamer. Glassell’s persistence eventually paid off on March 10,
1863.
At 1 a.m. with “the young moon gone down,” he and six other
men set off on the “ebb-tide in search of a victim.” He ordered his men to keep rowing even if
they were discovered “until our torpedo came in contact with the ship.” Several hundred yards away from the target,
voices from the deck demanded to know “What boat is this?” Glassell shouted back nonsense “and stupid
answers” as he ignored repeated orders to stop or they would be fired upon
. “I trusted they would be too merciful
to fire on such a stupid set of idiots as they must have taken us to be.”
As they closed within forty yards, aiming for the a spot
just below the gangway on Powhatan’s port side, James Murphy suddenly backed
his oar stopping the rowboat. At that instant, Glassell didn’t know why Murphy
did what he did, but soon enough the other men stopped rowing and the rowboat
“drifted with the tide past the ship’s stern.”
The Union deck officer and sailors now armed with rifles were taking no
chances and kept shouting to Glassell to stay where he was and were ready to
launch a boat of their own.
Murphy, who a few weeks later deserted, threw his pistol
overboard and scrambled to grab the pistol of the man next to him but failed. Glassell believing he “never was rash, or
disposed to risk my life or that of others” drew his weapon and ordered the men
to cut loose the torpedo so they could escape.
The men quickly followed his command and began rowing quietly but “with
all their strength” away from their intended target.
Back in Charleston shortly after daylight, Glassell believed
that spies ashore had tipped the Union Navy off to the torpedoes but counted
himself lucky that he had only lost one torpedo and no men. Steam power was the way to attack. He didn’t want to take a chance on having
another Murphy, who at first appeared ashamed, foil well-laid plans. For now,
Glassell’s work in the Low Country was done as he was ordered to Wilmington to
complete the ironclad North Carolina.
While Ingraham moved into more administrative duties,
Glassell’s commander aboard Chicora, Captain John Randolph Tucker, took over
active operations. About a decade
younger than the commodore but with 37 years of naval service, Tucker believed
in the spar torpedo, especially against the gathering number of Union monitors.
Thirty miles up the Cooper River from the city on Dr. St.
Julien Ravenel’s hidden away plantation, Theodore Stoney, another of the
principals in the Southern Torpedo Company, was rushing to complete the privately-built
and paid for but with Beauregard’s blessing cigar boat. Named David, the
submersible with its discarded locomotive coal-burning engine, unseasoned wood
covered hull with metal plating wasn’t a work of art, but its stealth on dark
nights and armed with a spar torpedo made it a formidable opponent of even the
Union’s most powerful ship New Ironsides,
which repeatedly pounded Confederate fortifications during the siege.
Stoney’s and Ravenel’s work may have been isolated, but
there were others like James McClintock and Horace L. Hunley in Charleston
busying themselves in constructing special “torpedo-boats” whose work “were
curious things to a landsman’s eye” in and around the city. As patriotic as
they were, the private inventors also had a $100,000 incentive provided by
Trenholm’s company to sink New Ironsides or Wabash and $50,000 to sink any of
the monitors.
With a new land and sea attack likely on the sea island
batteries and forts and Charleston itself, Glassell was ordered back South, not
for his services but to return the eight men he had with him to service on the
gunboats in the harbor. “There was
nothing in particular for me to do.”
How Glassell knew Stoney he doesn’t make clear, but it was
probably through Francis Lee.
Nonetheless, he called him “my esteemed friend.” At a meeting in Charleston, Stoney said that
the David had been shipped to the city by rail and was being finished in the
port. James Stuart, who used Sullivan as
his last name to conceal his identity,
agreed to be the fireman. J.W.
Cannon came aboard as pilot.
Glassell volunteered to help with the trial work. Already, J.H. Tomb volunteered his engineer
services. Lee was available to work on the copper torpedo that was to be loaded
with 100 pounds of rifle powder and “provided with four sensitive tubes of
lead, containing explosive mixture.” The spar projected about 14 feet from the
front of the now bluish painted submersible.
Being the prepared commander, he took on four
double-barreled shotguns and as many revolvers as extra armament and four cork
life preservers as they began their trials.
The David reached speeds of six or seven knots. He also knew from the interrogation
of deserters and prisoners that the fleet was expecting some kind of torpedo
attack, likely based on his attempt on Powhatan and earlier try at New
Ironsides. That meant the shotguns would likely have to take out the officer of
the deck to succeed. There also would be riflemen rushing to the vessel’s side
and possibly canister or grape shot as the attack rolled on With all that in
place, Tucker signaled his approval of an attack at Glassell’s discretion, so
did Beauregard. But a rocket from
Richmond landed ordering the lieutenant back to Wilmington. “This was too much!,” and he now let Tucker
“make my excuses to the Navy Department.”
Shortly after a starlight night fell on Oct. 5, 1863 and on
the ebb-tide with a light breeze from the north, Glassell and his men headed
out from the Charleston wharf. The water
was smooth as he headed for New Ironsides attack. They slipped unseen past the picket boats
near Fort Sumter, and Glassell could see the Union armada at anchor between the
David and the camp-fires of 20,000 Union soldiers on Morris Island. This was what he had imagined in the aborted
rowboat attack. The damage that could
have been done then couldn’t compare to the havoc ten to a dozen Davids armed
with spar torpedoes could have done this night. It was what he was thinking as
he waited for the 9 p.m. signal gun firing to launch the attack on “the most
powerful vessel in the world,” an exaggeration.
The David was off the ship’s starboard side. Glassell took
charge of the helm from the pilot. He was sitting on the deck and working the
wheel with his feet aiming for a spot near the gangway and a shotgun at the
ready. He handed the pilot a double-barreled shotgun. He ordered the engineer
and fireman to stay below and give the David as much steam as possible.
About 300 yards away, a sentinel spotted the David and began
hailing it. “I made no answer.” The
officer of the deck demanded, “What boat is that?” as the submersible closed to
within 40 yards. Glassell fired the shotgun
severely wounding the officer named Howard in the groin and the acting ensign died
three days later. He then ordered the
engine stopped. “The next moment the
torpedo struck the vessel and exploded” then the David plunged violently. But instead of going off at six to seven feet
under water, the torpedo exploded about three feet below the waterline where
the iron was 4 ½ inches thick backed by 27 inches of wood. The explosion,
however, caused a huge column of water to wash over the deck and down the hatchway
dousing the fires. Glassell told his men that their only chance for escape was
to don the life preservers and swim for it.
Rifle and pistol fire rained down from the New
Ironsides. A nearby monitor now joined
the fight. For more than a hour, Glassell
struggled with the cold and the wind when a boat from a transport hauled him
out of the water and “to their surprise” found “they had captured a rebel.”
They took him to Admiral John Dahlgren, the ordnance genius now commanding the
Union Navy at Charleston who sent him to Ottawa. Glassell was immediately recognized there by
its commander, William Whiting. Whiting explained that his orders were to put
Glassell in chains and double irons if he was obstreperous. Glassell said that
he would adjust to the circumstances of his capture. Whiting appealed to
Dahlgren to give the Confederate a parole on the promise not to escape.
Sullivan got to the chains of New Ironsides where he was rescued and then
imprisoned.
Unknown to Glassell, Cannon, who could not swim clung to the
David as it drifted slowly away from the large warship. “Seeing something in the water, he hailed and
heard, to his surprise, a reply from Engineer Tomb.” Tomb reported that he
found “no quarter would be shown, as we called out that we surrendered.” They re-started the fires and Cannon, winning
for “himself a reputation” as a heroic pilot, headed for the city. Even though
they were fired upon several times, they made it safely to Atlantic Wharf about
midnight.
Glassell was on his way back to Forts Lafayette and Warren
where he was held for more than year.
During this yearlong confinement, he was promoted for “gallant and
meritorious service” as the Confederacy was sinking inexorably into
defeat. New Ironsides was pulled off
station and spent months in dry-dock repairs. As Beauregard’s biographer wrote,
“The Ironsides never fired another shot (on the coast of South Carolina) after
this attack upon here,” but it returned in time to attack Fort Fisher and close
the port of Wilmington.
Like Admiral Samuel F. DuPont before him, Dahlgren never
succeeded in blasting Charleston in submission.
Long after the war, Glassell who remained a bachelor and moved
in 1866 to a quiet life raising citrus in California wrote, “The time has
arrived when I think it my duty to grant pardon to the government for all the
injustice and injury I have received.”
Sources:
George E. Belknap, “Reminiscent of the Siege of Charleston,
Papers of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, Vol. 12, Google
e-Book, pp. 190-198
Donald J. Caney, The U.S. and Foreign Navies in 1860,”
excerpted from Mr. Lincoln’s Navy, www.navyandmarine.org/ondeck/1862foreignnavies.htm.
Jefferson Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate
Government, Vol. 2, DaCapo paperback, 1990, p. 175.
John Witherspoon Dubose, Lieut. William T. Glassell of
Alabama, Confederate Veteran, May 1916, google e-Book, pp. 193-195.
S.F. DuPont, Official Dispatches and Letters of Rear Adm.
S.F. Dupont, Google e-Book.
David C. Ebaugh, “On the building of ‘The David,”’ South
Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 54, No. 1, January 1953, pp. 32-36.
W.T. Glassell, “Reminiscences of Torpedo Service in
Charleston Harbor,” Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. 4, pp. 225-235.
W.T. Glassell, W.T. Glassell and the little torpedo boat
“David,” Los Angeles, 1937 in Museum of the Confederacy collections in
Richmond.
John A. Hamilton, “General Stephen Elliott, Lt. James A.
Hamilton and Elliott’s Torpedoes,” Southern Historical Society Papers,Vol. 10,
April 1882, pp. 183-186.
Johnson Hagood, Memoirs of the War of Secession, Google
e-Book, 1916, pp. 191-193.
Horace Edwin Hayden, A Geneaology of the Glassell Family of
Scotland and Virginia, Google e-Book, pp. 30-32.
John Johnson, The Defense of Charleston Harbor 1863-1865,
Google e-Book, Appendix B and F.
Isabella Middleton Leland, editor, “Middleton Correspondence
(Continued),” South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 4, October 1963,
pp. 212-219.
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Ser. 1, Vol.
14, pp. 610-640 (Union and Confederate accounts).
William Harwar Parker, Recollections of a Naval officer,
1845-1861, Google e-Book, pp. 27-32, 311-316.
Alfred Roman, Military Operations of General Beauregard,
Vol. 2, DaCapo Press, 1994 reprint, pp. 12, 2123, 31, 58, 73, 77-80, 181-183,
445.
B.J. Sage, Organization of Private Warfare, Bureau of Destructive
Means and Measures, Bands of Destructionists and Captors, privately printed,
probably late 1863, Library of Congress Rare Book Collection.
J. Thomas Scharf, History of the Confederate States Navy,
Random House Value Publishing, New York, 1996 reprint, pp. 758-760.
Augustus T. Smythe, “Torpedo and Submarine Attacks on the
Federal Blockade Fleet of Charleston during the War of Secession, 1907 Yearbook
of the City of Charleston, Google e-Book, pp. 53-64.
“St. Julien Ravenel, M.D.” Proceedings of American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, Google e-Book, pp. 437-438
Lyon Gardiner Tyler, editor, “Glassell, William Thornton”
entry Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography, Vol. 3, Google e-Book.
Stephen R. Wise, Gate of Hell, Campaign for Charleston
Harbor 1863, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1994, pp. 163-164.
