30-31 JANUARY 1863 BULLS ISLAND INCIDENT Bull Island is a low coastal island 10 miles north of Charleston Harbor separated from the mainland by the Intercoastal Waterway. Today a national wildlife refuge, in antebellum times it was owned by a family Read More
9-11 JANUARY 1863 REDUCTION OF ARKANSAS POST Arkansas sided with the South in the Civil War, and after the firing on Ft. Sumter, Arkansans prepared for an expected Union invasion. Their capital, Little Rock, and the Fort Smith arsenal lay on Read More
25 DECEMBER 1863 CHRISTMAS DAY ATTACK! Our first warship named MARBLEHEAD was one of 23 Unadilla-class wooden gunboats built in the first year of the Civil War. Looking outwardly like a two-masted sailing brig, a single stack amidships revealed her steam Read More
10 NOVEMBER 1822 USS SHARK VS. Caroline Officially, the US government banned American participation in the African slave trade in 1808, although enforcement was not attempted until our Navy began patrolling off West Africa in 1820. Two years later those patrols Read More
TODAY IN NAVAL HISTORY 4 SEPTEMBER 1887 RADM GEORGE BROWN On the moonless night of 14-15 February 1863, 27-year-old LCDR George Brown of the Union Navy’s Mississippi River Squadron took the sidewheel ironclad gunboat USS INDIANOLA south toward Vicksburg. His Read More
28-29 JUNE 1861 ST. NICHOLAS HIGHJACKING At 1600 on Friday, June 28th, the civilian steam packet St. Nicholas left Baltimore on her regular run to three stops in the District of Columbia. She carried her usual fare of freight as well Read More
25 JUNE 1859 “BLOOD IS THICKER THAN WATER” During the first half of the 19th century several Western nations, particularly England and France, opened trade with China. Several, including the United States, maintained naval forces in the region to protect Read More
15 MAY 1812 PRELUDE TO THE WAR OF 1812 At the turn of the 19th century the territory that is now Florida was Spanish. This fact was of no reassurance to the administration of President James Madison in 1811. Spain was Read More
28 FEBRUARY 1803 THE GUNBOAT NAVY “We are sacrificing everything to navigation and a Navy,” was candidate Thomas Jefferson’s slogan in the presidential election campaign of 1799-1800. Jefferson was an agrarian Southerner, distrustful of New England merchants and skeptical of our Read More
17 OCTOBER 1858-FEBRUARY 1859 PARAGUAY PUNITIVE EXPEDITION At 1325 the six guns of Fort Guardia Cerritos erupted! USS WATER WITCH was struck ten times. Three of her Dahlgren howitzers answered only once as the fort’s barrage chased her sailors from their Read More