 In the spring of 1861, the newly formed Confederate government had no navy, but their eastern coast needed protection, especially in the state's closest to Washington, D.C. But at this time, individual states could have their own navy and North Carolina had one. But the North Carolina Navy amounted to a total of five ships, all of which were small steamers with one or two cannons. In fact, only one of them had two cannons. This fleet was barely a navy, but it was all that existed at the time to protect North Carolina from the United States Navy. Because of its size, it became known as the Mosquito Fleet. Having this small fleet of ships seemed to be a little better than having those ships at all. The Confederate general who commanded the Northern Coastal District, D.H. Hill, said this about North Carolina's navy, quote. In the absence of a regular supply of coal, they frequently had to tie up on shore and cut green wood to keep steam in their boilers. Their crews were not gunners, but fishermen, soldiers, or farmers hurriedly taught to fire a gun. Their fuses were uncertain, and their guns liable to burst after a few rounds. If the stakes had not been life and the issues desperation, blood, and death, the laugh of the satirist would have driven the Mosquito Fleet from the waters, end quote. This quote gives very clear description of exactly what the Confederacy was facing at the outset of the Civil War in terms of naval warfare. They had next to nothing at their disposal to combat the U.S. Navy, but the stakes were high, and they had to make do with what they had. Because of the small size of the ships of the Mosquito Fleet, they were more valuable attacking Northern trade ships than anything else. Three of the vessels in the Mosquito Fleet made the first attempts at privateering, and they were initially quite successful. Their first prize was a ship carrying valuable Cuban sugar, and the next ship they captured was carrying a load of Cuban coffee. These fetched a handsome price. Over May and June, the fastest ship of the Mosquito Fleet, and the only one with two guns, was the Sidewell Steamer, the CSS Winslow, and it captured five ships. Sidewell Steamers were hardly suitable for naval combat, by the way, as the giant water wheels on each side meant that cannons had to fire through them, and deep waters, rough waves, might tilt them, so that one wheel would be completely out of the water, making it impossible to steer. But it was steam powered, and the light, and with steamships being relatively new, it proved to be an effective privateer in the early months. These prizes brought bounties that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars for the Confederacy. By the end of July, civilian privateers were joining them off the North Carolina coast, and even though a handful were captured by the Union and their crews thrown into shackles with the threats of being executed that I talked about in the previous episode, these privateers were causing enough headaches for the Union traders that on August 9th, six of the biggest insurance companies for maritime trade petitioned Gideon Wells to do something about the quote unquote nest of pirates around Hatteras Inlet in North Carolina. The next day, Wells received a report from the blockade ship the USS Cumberland, the report read quote. It seems that the coast of Carolina is infested with a nest of privateers that have thus far escaped capture and in the ingenious method of their cruising are probably likely to avoid the clutches of our cruisers. Hatteras Inlet, a little south of Cape Hatteras Light, seems their principal rendezvous. Here they have a fortification that protects them from assault. A lookout in the lighthouse proclaims the coast clear and a merchantman in sight. They dash out and are back again in a day with their prize. So long as these remain, it will be impossible to entirely prevent their depredations for they do not venture out when men of war are in sight. And in the bad weather of the coming season, cruisers cannot always keep their station off these inlets without great risk of going ashore. End quote. But by the time this report was being written, the Union blockade board was already eyeing Hatteras Inlet as an important strategic point from which they could launch their attack on Port Royal Sound in South Carolina and move farther south along the east coast. On August 20th, the Winslow would claim its last prize. A week later, a Union fleet would be moving in to take the Inlet. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. In the previous episode, we talked about the initial efforts to build a Navy on both sides where the U.S. Navy was weak, but the Confederate Navy was non-existent. We also looked at the initial Anaconda plan aimed at blockading the Confederate coast and both the traditional and more innovative efforts that the Confederacy made to combat a naval power that they knew they could never fully catch up with during the war. In today's episode, we will look at some of the earliest coastal operations that were part of the Union's Atlantic Campaign, which are easy to overlook because they were small victories and nobody at the time considered them to be very significant. However, they served to illustrate two important points that are easy to miss. The first is that, similar to the rifle and mini-balls in land warfare, new naval technology completely changed the way ocean warfare would be waged. And this was not realized until after the first couple of naval battles. Second, these minor Union victories were largely strategic victories, giving the Union access to important points that allowed them to conduct further operations in the first six months of 1862 that would prove to be hugely important in the Union war effort. These operations were part of a long game strategy that even through 1862 were largely overlooked as all eyes were on the armies in eastern Virginia. But with the benefit of hindsight, we can see how crucial these operations were to the Union's turnaround in 1863. The original proposal made by the Blockade Board was actually to leave the coast of North Carolina alone. The North Carolina privateers were not seen as an issue worthy of serious attention. But when maritime insurance rates started to skyrocket, the attitude of the Blockade Board changed. The Union General Benjamin Butler was already submitting proposals to command an operation against a terrorist inlet. Butler was looking for an opportunity to restore his reputation, which had been harmed by his embarrassing defeat in the minor battle of Big Bethel, which I talked about several months ago in the first episode on Virginia, right before the series on Bull Run. Even before the first battle of Bull Run, which was such a large Union disaster that the embarrassing performance at Big Bethel was largely forgotten, General Butler was already proposing an assault on a terrorist inlet. But after Bull Run and Wilson's Creek, the Northern press was growing increasingly critical and demanding action. Union leaders then wanted to find a vulnerable area of the Confederacy where they could claim an easy victory. The coast of North Carolina started to look more appealing, partly due to the information that the Union received from Northern merchants who had been captured, imprisoned, and then released. These two sea captains, Daniel Campbell from Maine and Henry Penny from New York, had spent some time in prison in one of the two forts guarding Heteros Inlet. There was Fort Heteros and Fort Clark. While imprisoned, they were free enough to snoop around the fort and observe its weak defenses. Their freedom in this regard was probably a combination of the weak garrison and the loose monitoring of prisoners in the early months of the war, before prisoners of war became numerous enough to pose a significant resource drain on both sides. After the two men were released during a prisoner exchange, they immediately brought their information to Commodore Silas Stringham, the commander of the Union Atlantic blockading squadron. The defenses at Heteros were weak. They were held by only three companies of men and their supplies were a joke. Their gunpowder was damp because of its exposure to the coastal air. They only had a small supply of ammunition anyway, and morale was low. They didn't have enough men to regularly patrol the beaches along the coast, so a Union landing force could likely come ashore without any issue. So now the Inlet looked like the weak point in the Confederacy that the Union leaders were looking to exploit, and this fit nicely with the strategic advantages of combating the privateers and establishing the Eastern blockade. The proposals that Benjamin Butler had been submitting for more than a month now started to look more appealing. The fleet sent to Heteros was the largest yet assembled by the North for a single naval operation. It consisted of seven ships, two steam frigates, which were the most powerful warships at the time, one sloop, which was an older wooden sailing ship, three gunboats, which were smaller wooden ships designed exclusively for bombardment that were not made to carry troops, and a single side-wheel steamer similar to the Winslow I described in the introduction to this episode. These ships were under the command of Commodore Stringham. In addition to these seven military ships, were a handful of civilian vessels contracted to carry roughly 900 New York infantry. This landing force was under the command of Benjamin Butler. On the coast, the Confederate commander of both Fort Clark and Heteros was Colonel William F. Martin. He had already been pleading for Richmond to send him more supplies, but instead all he'd received were assurances that the Union wouldn't bother to make any serious assault on the Inlet. He did not share Richmond's confidence, and upon spotting the Union fleet on the morning of August 27th, he was not happy to be vindicated. With pitiful supplies and only 300 men, he was in a poor position to defend the Inlet. Now it's worth pausing here to talk a little bit about the naval innovations that had taken place over the past few decades. In previous wars, Coastal Forts had the clear advantage against naval bombardments. The Confederate idea was to depend on the Coastal Forts to keep the Union Navy from taking coastal territory. In previous wars, where defenders had a distinct advantage in coastal battles with their fortresses, the strategy made a lot of sense. But even though nobody could fully anticipate it, technological changes had shifted the balance of power more in favor of attackers. This was due to two significant technological innovations that were already impacting the land war, steam power and rifling. In the first battle of Bull Run, we saw how decisive the railroads were in transporting Confederate reinforcements and how the rifling of muskets gave greater range and accuracy to infantry that substantially altered battlefield tactics. Cavalry were only really useful against retreating soldiers. Napoleonic artillery charges were no longer effective because artillerists were more susceptible to infantry fire and bayonet charges were likewise less effective as rifled guns made it easier for soldiers to shoot down charging regiments. On the waters, these two innovations of steam and rifling brought about similarly unanticipated changes. Steam power itself was still being perfected for naval ships. Refueling stations posed difficulties that trains could more easily solve so many early steamships still had sails. And the steam power mechanism to move the ship through the water was not fully established. The screw propeller was a significant innovation that made vessels faster and more maneuverable which would prove to be a gigantic advantage in naval operations. But this was still being experimented with as many steamships were sidewheel steamers like I've already mentioned where they moved by two giant water wheels on either side of the ship. Sidewheel steamers were less maneuverable and more difficult to effectively arm but these disadvantages were only significantly noticeable in times of war. So the propeller was not yet widely employed in naval ships. Nonetheless, a steamship of any sort offered a lot of advantages over the more antiquated sailing vessels. But even though historians have always noted how unprepared for war the US Navy was in 1861 they often overlooked the significant expansion that actually did take place between 1854 and 1859. During these years the US Navy purchased 24 propeller driven steamers. So even though they only had 90 ships total many of which were not immediately available at the outset of the war the sheer numbers do not reflect the advanced technology that some of the new ships were taking advantage of. The two steam frigates that were approaching Heterra's Inlet on August 27th the Wabash and the Minnesota were among these 24 new propeller driven steamers. Advancements in naval guns were probably even more important in shifting the advantage to attackers and coastal operations. For nearly a full millennium the technology of naval weaponry had hardly changed at all. Muzzle loaded iron cannons used black powder to shoot iron balls. The only changes over the course of several centuries were in terms of the size of the guns and the reliability of the powder but no significant technological advancements were made until the mid 19th century. But in the 1820s a French engineer whose name I won't attempt to pronounce designed an explosive shell that had gunpowder inside a hollow iron ball with a fuse that would burn while the shell was in the air so that it would explode after impact. This meant that naval artillery was suddenly far more destructive. Even wooden ships could often survive several hits of solid iron balls. You won't sink a ship by blowing a hole in a part of the ship that isn't exposed to water. So the biggest danger was that the iron ball would send flying shards of wood that were known as splinters but were far scarier than modern splinters. But the ships themselves could literally survive dozens of hits from iron balls without sinking. With the exploding shells wooden ships now could suffer holes large enough to fill the ship with water sinking it and if not that it could set it on fire. In 1853 a Russian fleet demonstrated exactly how monumental this change was in naval warfare when they used these exploding shells to completely destroy a fleet of Turkish wooden ships during the Battle of Sinope during the Crimean War. But these were still fairly short range and inaccurate at the time but with rifling technology both solid shots and shells became far more powerful. Smoothbore cannons had to use ammunition that was smaller than the gun tube to avoid jamming. So when the shot actually cleared the cannon nobody had any way of knowing exactly where the shot would be headed. Rifling puts a spin on the ammunition which allowed them to use ammo that fit more snugly in the gun tube and would therefore exit in the direction that the gun was aimed. With smoothbore cannons the optimal range for naval warfare was between 60 and 100 yards. With rifled cannons it extended to 2,000 yards or more. Unlike rifled infantry weapons this didn't guarantee accuracy as much as land combat because naval cannons that were shot at a flat trajectory actually operated kind of like a skipping stone where the balls would bounce off the water which is hardly something that we consider when we think about this kind of technology but when the shot hit the water the spin would be disrupted so it could ricochet in unpredictable directions. So the rifling of naval guns was still an important innovation but it would be wrong to think of it as simply a larger translation of rifled infantry in its operation. The cannons were also significantly larger so much so that the way people referred to cannons changed. You've heard me refer to cannons as being six pounders or 24 pounders which of course refer to the weight of the ammunition it used but once naval guns started using shots that weighed more than 100 pounds they began to be referred to by the diameter of their bore. 15 inch guns being the largest to be put on a ship. This was pioneered by US Navy Lieutenant named John Dahlgren who perfected large caliber naval guns by building them with thicker tubes to prevent their fracturing and later other people came up with other methods of reinforcing the gun tubes to allow for the use of significantly larger guns as well. So by 1861 we had naval guns that could be effective thousands of yards from their target and did substantially more damage and they could be placed on ships that were significantly faster and more maneuverable. All of this meant that a fleet of ships attacking a fort would not have to suffer cannon fire as they moved slowly and awkwardly to within a hundred yards of a fortress to position itself to even begin to wage an attack. Now they could get in place much more quickly and at a much greater distance effectively attacking an enemy fortress without having to withstand ridiculous amounts of damage before doing so. So all of this technology screw propellers, exploding shells, rifled cannons was being perfected over the course of the first half of the 19th century. In 1861, the US Navy, as small as it was had a number of ships that were already employing these innovations. Through the course of the war even more innovations would come into play in naval warfare which we will talk about later but as the Union fleet approached to tear as inlet the Confederacy was in no position to deal with the new technology that already existed. Stringham also took advantage of the new technology with innovative tactics that would not have been effective with older ships and guns. This is not common as military leaders tend to be notorious for not knowing how to deal with new technology when it is first introduced as they tend to stick with antiquated tactics. But the old tactic of naval combat was to anchor your ships and fire from a stationary position. This made you an easy target but with the poor maneuverability of old ships and the short range and inaccuracy of smooth war cannons, it was what you had to do. Stringham instead seemed to fully anticipate the tactical advantages of his modern fleet. So when the attack started on the morning of August 28th he ordered the ships to move in a circle around the harbor alternating firing their cannons at Fort Clark as they came into position and then reload as they circled back around. This tactic had never been used before but it would be effectively repeated in later battles. In contrast, the poorly equipped Confederate defenders fired off their cannons with the result of eliciting laughter from the Union sailors who watched as the cannonballs fell harmlessly in the water a full half mile from the Union fleet. The Union kept up its barrage for the rest of the morning even after the smoke became so thick that Fort Clark was no longer visible. Around noon butler's landing force unloaded under the protection of the three gunboats. This was not as impressive as Stringham's performance and unfortunate gust of wind sent the landing boats rocking hard enough that some of the men were tossed into the water soaking their uniforms and ruining their food and ammunition. They also spotted and fired on what they believed to be Confederate cavalry and they reveled in the way that the cavalry scattered in fear but what they were firing at was actually only a herd of wild ponies. But when they moved to Fort Clark they didn't even need their wet ammunition. The meager garrison had already run out of ammunition themselves sometime during the bombardment and had already retreated to Fort Heterus. Butler, in another mistake saw a handful of boats with men pulling away from Fort Heterus so he assumed that it had also been evacuated but Butler had simply spotted the last handful of men from Fort Clark so when Stringham sent one of his ships to take Fort Heterus it found itself taking close range Confederate fire. The ship sent to take Fort Heterus was a shallow draft steam powered gunboat called the Monticello and it had difficulty maneuvering in the narrow channel so it was basically a sitting duck. The Confederates took advantage of the opportunity landing five solid hits against the ship doing considerable damage to the Monticello before it was able to make its way back to safer waters. As the sun set, Fort Heterus was still occupied by Confederates and reinforcements from the nearby Fort Portsmouth were finally arriving. Colonel Martin had sent for them as soon as he realized he was going to be attacked to the day before Stringham opened fire but there was no telegraph connection between the two forts so the messenger had to make the journey in a small boat, the only thing available so it took the reinforcements a full day to arrive but the reinforcements wouldn't amount to anything for the Confederacy. At 730 on the morning of August 29th Stringham began his bombardment of Fort Heterus. More than 3000 rounds of cannon fire were sent at the fort at a rate of up to 28 per minute. The soldiers there had never experienced anything like it. One survivor said quote, the firing of shells became literally tremendous as we had into and immediately around the work not less on average of 10 a minute and the sea being smooth the firing was remarkably accurate, end quote. The garrison ran up the white flag nearly an hour before noon. Butler sent an aide to discuss terms of surrender but he refused them all anyway even though they were relatively standard terms for these situations. The Confederacy was in no position to negotiate and they didn't bother trying. The union took more than 600 Confederate prisoners. Essentially the only effect of the reinforcements from Fort Portsmouth was to double the number of prisoners the union was able to capture. Aside from prisoners, casualties were light which was typically the case with naval battles where far fewer people were killed than land battles. The union didn't lose a single man and only one was seriously injured. The Confederacy saw a few killed, you could count them on both hands and a few dozen injured. But even more significant that the 600 prisoners the union claimed was the strategic benefits of controlling Heterocinlet which can now serve as a launch pad for their Atlantic coastal operations as well as the potential for inland invasions. The Confederate reaction was to abandon two other small forts and inlets that gave access to even more waterways. This victory was the first real victory that the union enjoyed in the war and it was badly needed. It also was a major blow to privateers. This often overlooked naval battle, hardly exciting enough to give much attention to was strategically very important. Butler left to Terra's Island under the command of Colonel Rush Hawkins and while there Hawkins and his men strengthened Fort Heteris and conducted basic reconnaissance through the month of September. But on October 1st, he would set off the minor fiasco known as the Chickama Comaco races. Hawkins believed that the Confederate forces on Roanoke Island were getting ready to attempt to retake Fort Heteris with a land-based attack. He wanted to nip this in the bud so he sent a small tugboat called the Fanny to take supplies to a new outpost at the beach hamlet of Chickama Comaco. The supply mission was expected to be rather uneventful but three ships from the mosquito fleet were ready for her. The mosquito fleet had been expanded from its original five ships at this point. These ships were under the command of a Virginian, Commodore William Lynch. The three ships from the mosquito fleet surrounded the Fanny and engaged her in a half hour chase that ended when one of the ships landed a shell on the deck of the Fanny where it exploded. The ship didn't sink and the Fanny was captured providing a bounty of roughly $100,000 worth of much needed supplies to the Confederates. They also obtained some valuable information from the captured Yankees. The 20th Indiana regiment had set up camp at Chickama Comaco. The commander of the 20th Indiana, Colonel W.L. Brown, saw the capture of the Fanny from his position on the beach so he was fully aware of what had happened. But with the Confederates now aware of his position, they quickly mobilized every soldier on the island to have two groups of soldiers pin the 20th Indiana between them while another group of Confederates reclaimed control of Forts, Clark, and Heterus. Preparation took three days, so this attack started on October 5th. The Confederates started toward Chickama Comaco on barges pulled by six armed steamers, one of which was the Fanny, which now flew a Confederate flag. Colonel Brown saw the rebels coming and ordered his men to fall back to Fort Heterus. So this was the start of the Chickama Comaco races. In the lead were the civilians who lived in the small village at Chickama Comaco who didn't want to find themselves caught in the crossfire or take punishment from the Confederates because they were largely sympathetic to the Union. Behind them were the members of the 20th Indiana Regiment. As they ran, the sun was scorching to the dehydrated and often barefoot soldiers running across the beach, which if you've ever run on a beach, you know how much more exhausting it is compared with running on flat land. The small villages water reserves had already been largely depleted due to the influx of 600 Union soldiers and new supplies of water were interrupted by the capture of the Fanny. So these Union soldiers were running across a beach, many of them without shoes, under the hot sun with dry canteens. Behind them were the Georgians who occasionally dropped one of the Indiana soldiers in front of them with a well-aimed mini ball. But the Confederates faced their own troubles. The landing port dropped off the wrong spot two miles from Fort Heterus. The North Carolinians, still reeling over their previous defeat, wanted to try to take it anyway, but their commander called the assault off. The 20th Indiana did eventually make it to the Cape Heterus lighthouse at midnight, exhausted and dehydrated and thinking that an attack was going to come. But thanks to the botched landing, giving the Confederate commander cold feet, the attack never came. The Georgians could have still attacked, but they were too tired from chasing the Indianans and they still believed the other regiments were going to execute the attack. They didn't find out that the plan had been a failure until the next morning, taking solace in the fact that they managed to kill eight Union soldiers and capture about 40 others who couldn't make the run back to Cape Heterus. But as the Georgians were retreating on October 6th, the Union shipped the Monticello, set up offshore and started to fire on them. The infantry had no recourse against the bombardment from the water, except to scatter. The Confederates failed to retake Heterus inlet and Hawkins believed that he could convince many of the civilians in the area to join the Union cause. The majority of the people there were Union sympathizers, though this was likely largely due to the fact that the people who favored the Confederacy had already left to fight. But his attempts at recruiting were not successful. It wasn't helped by the fact that after he passed out a flyer titled and addressed to the people of North Carolina that assured civilians that Union soldiers were there to restore peace and order, the locals instead found them plundering everything in sight. Even Hawkins referred to his men as vandals for their looting and Union sympathy quickly dried up. A couple of political opportunists also tried to take advantage of the desire from Washington to establish Heterus as a Union stronghold in the South. They called the Heterus Convention together on November 18th and held elections for the vacated federal offices for the US government. They were hoping to establish themselves as congressmen representing North Carolina similar to Andrew Johnson in Tennessee or the Union representatives from Western Virginia. Only 400 of the 9,000 registered voters in the district showed up to participate in the farcical election. But it was enough for one of the men, Marble Nash Taylor, to try to appoint himself provisional governor for North Carolina. And when the 400 people voted his partner, Charles Henry Foster, as their US representative, Foster attempted to take his seat in Washington. But even for Washington, where they were eager to claim any of the border states is still being part of the Union. The fraud from Taylor and Foster was too obvious and Congress refused to let Foster take his seat. After the success at Heterus, leadership of the Atlantic operations was taken over by Captain Samuel Dupont who I talked about in the previous episode as the president of the blockade board. His target was Port Royal, South Carolina, one of the earliest points identified as being strategically crucial for the establishment of the Eastern blockade. But this was far more defensible than Heterus Inlet. Although he would have liked to attack sooner, Dupont was delayed by bad weather and other hiccups. But he finally attacked on November 7th. His force was stronger than the one that took Heterus consisting of 13 ships, many of which were the same ones that took Heterus. Port Royal Sound was protected by a fort on either side of it, Fort Walker and Fort Beauregard. I'll spare you some of the details because the situation was similar to what we saw in Heterus Inlet. Dupont's strategy was to employ a modified version of Stringham's tactic, sending his ships to run ellipses between the two forts, alternating their fire between them as they circled around. And just as before, the Confederate defenders were low on ammunition. They didn't stand a chance. And by early afternoon, the Confederates abandoned Fort Walker having suffered roughly 100 casualties compared to the Union's eight dead and 23 injured. Perhaps the most interesting outcome of the capture of Port Royal Sound was what is known as the Port Royal Experiment. When the civilians fled the area, they left behind roughly 10,000 slaves. The Union army allowed them to take over working the land as independent farmers and Northern charities sent people to educate them. The experiment was entirely successful. And the only reason that is surprising is because at this point in the war, Union policy was actually to return slaves to their owners. But since these weren't runaway slaves and the policy of treating slaves as contraband of war had already been established by Benjamin Butler, there seemed to be little reason to stop the slaves from taking over the land now that their owners had essentially left it to them. In 1865, Andrew Johnson would return the land to its previous owners, putting an end to the Port Royal Experiment. This essentially concludes 1861 for us. And we've covered far more information than you'll find in any single narrative of the Civil War. This is the 35th episode of season three of the podcast. Season two, by contrast, was 24 episodes. And season one was only 12. So we should have a pretty good idea of what a long haul this season is going to be for those of you who stick with me. Partly because of the massive scope of this history and partly to give myself a break, the next episode is going to be a review episode where I will briefly recount the significant events, themes, and takeaways from the first year of the war. For people who don't listen to every episode of the podcast, this will be a good way to quickly catch up on the important bullet points of 1861. And for everybody else, it'll be useful to underscore the important elements of the first year of the war, which can easily get lost in the details I enjoy including. Either way, a quick look back on 1861 will be worth our time in the next episode. ["Historic Controversies"] Historical Controversies is a production of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. If you would like to support the show, please subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher, and leave a positive review. You can also support the show financially by donating at Mises.org slash SupportHC. 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