CSS NEUSE
27 APRIL 1864
CSS NEUSE
Union forces gained control of North Carolina’s shoreline south of the Virginia border during the first year of the Civil War. By late 1862, Union troops were garrisoned at New Bern on the Neuse River, Washington on the Tar River, and in Plymouth on the Roanoke River. This Union presence on key commercial waterways constantly irritated, if not outright threatened, North Carolina’s governor. Late in 1862 contracts were let for five ironclad gunboats intended to help North Carolinians retake their rivers. The gunboats were to be constructed at inland towns many miles upstream, with the intent to attack downriver, hopefully in conjunction with Confederate land forces. Two of these were to be nearly identical 150-foot, 600-ton ironclad sister ships, each mounting two rifled cannon and an iron ram under the bows. CSS ALBEMARLE was laid down at Edward’s Ferry on the Roanoke River, and CSS NEUSE was started at Whitehall (modern Seven Springs) on the Neuse River south of Goldsboro.
ALBEMARLE slid off the ways first and proved a decisive factor in Confederate MGEN Robert F. Hoke’s successful attack on the Union garrison at Plymouth, NC, on 20 April 1864. Hoke’s victory encouraged a similar operation a week later against New Bern on the Neuse. MGEN George E. Pickett’s (of Gettysburg fame) force was based at Kinston, 30 miles upriver from New Bern. CSS NEUSE had barely been completed when she was ordered from Kinston in support of Pickett’s attack. To complicate matters the Spring rains had ended, and the level of the river was dropping daily. NEUSE drafted eight feet, and sensing he must get underway with haste or be trapped in Kinston, LT Benjamin Loyall, CSN, decided he could await his pilot no longer. The ironclad got underway this day. NEUSE had two 6-foot diameter screws, but by shortsighted design, both were driven by a single shaft. The screws could not be used to assist in steering, and predictably, at a bend in the river only 1/2 a mile downstream, NEUSE ran hard aground.
Without his ironclad support Pickett postponed his attack. For weeks Loyall and his crew labored to refloat the ironclad but succeeded only in returning her to her berth at Kinston. ALBEMARLE was ordered from the Roanoke as NEUSE’s replacement but was interdicted in transit. Pickett’s opportunity at New Bern passed, and as Union troops moved into Kinston shortly thereafter, NEUSE was fired and scuttled to prevent her capture.
CSS NEUSE lay undisturbed for a century. Then in 1961 local Kinstonians began an effort to salvage her wreck. She was damaged considerably in the process, but her preserved hull can be seen today at a historical site off State Route 70 in Kinston.
Watch for more “Today in Naval History” 2 MAY 26
CAPT James Bloom, Ret.
Department of the Navy, Naval History Division. Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 2 “C-F”. Washington, DC: GPO, 1977, p. 552.
Site visit. CSS Neuse historical site. Kinston, NC, 15 January 2002.
Still, William N., Jr. Iron Afloat: The Story of the Confederate Armorclads. Columbia, SC: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1985, pp. 91, 158-63.
Trotter, William R. Ironclads and Columbiads: The Civil War in North Carolina, The Coast. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, Pub., 1989, p. 234.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: Today it is possible to wade across the Neuse River in many locations, and as such, it’s hard to imagine an ironclad gunboat operating in her upland reaches. But in the early 19th century our coastal rivers represented major routes of commerce, and the Army Corps of Engineers continuously dredged the Neuse, Tar, and Roanoke rivers. At one point in the late 1800s the Neuse was navigable as far inland as Smithfield, NC, 75 miles upstream. In the 1920s however, the development of efficient railroads obviated the need for river transport, and dredging in the Neuse above New Bern was abandoned.
The other three ironclads contracted in 1862 were all laid on the Cape Fear River at Wilmington; CSS RALEIGH, CSS WILMINGTON, and CSS NORTH CAROLINA. WILMINGTON was not completed before the war’s end. NORTH CAROLINA and RALEIGH both reached the mouth of the Cape Fear River, where RALEIGH made an impotent, 6 May 1864 sortie against Union blockaders offshore. It was the only combat any Wilmington ironclad saw other than service as a floating artillery battery.
