BATTLE OF ELIZABETH CITY (cont. from 8 FEB)

Union forces from the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron had driven a Confederate “mosquito fleet” from Roanoke Island, and at 1430 on the afternoon of February 9^th, CDR Stephen C. Rowan pursued.  Rowan weighed anchor in the schooner-rigged sidewheeler USS DELAWARE and rallied UNDERWRITER, COMMODORE PERRY, and MORSE in a van leading 10 smaller gunboats in column.  Upon entering the Albemarle Sound they sighted the smoke of the enemy escaping up the Pasquotank River.  Rowan followed, but nightfall stopped his progress 10 miles below Cobb’s Point, where the Confederates had built a battery on the riverbank.

Shortly after 0800 this morning, Rowan sighted the Confederates, whose gunboats had taken refuge under the four 32-pounders of Fort Cobb.  On the opposite bank, the schooner BLACK WARRIOR was moored, bringing her two 32-pounders to the action as well.  Rowan signaled a dash for the enemy, and the Rebel batteries opened.  Shot and shell pierced the air, many arching over Rowan to strike his following column.  Rowan’s flotilla closed regardless, holding their fire and keeping formation.

The specter of the opening Union cannonade at 600 yards struck panic into the Confederates!  Those serving the shore battery fled after firing only their initial volley.  The few dozen local militia that had shown up sheepishly the day before, broke formation and deserted.  Individual Union gunboats now paired off against Rebel steamers.  USS CERES grappled the Confederate CSS ELLIS and swarmed boarders across.  Rebel skipper, CDR James W. Cooke, ordered his men to abandon ship over the side, while he and a few loyal sailors held up the Yankees with cutlasses.  In a final act, he set ELLIS ablaze, only to the fires extinguished by the onrushing Union sailors.  The gunboat was captured by the Yankees.  Most of the other Rebel crews fired their ships as well and fled overboard.  CSS FANNY, SEA BIRD, and BLACK WARRIOR were burned or scuttled.  BEAUFORT and RALRIGH escaped up the canal to Norfolk.  Had not CSS APPOMATTOX been just two inches too wide, she might have escaped up the canal as well. 

In short order Rowan’s force routed what feeble resistance remained.  Shore parties destroyed Confederate warehouses, war matériel, and several gunboats still under construction.  Two schooners were found to be moored to the city’s wharf, one loaded with furniture and the other with grain.  These were towed into the North River cut and scuttled to block access to the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal.  Having crushed enemy naval strength in the area and secured Union control of North Carolina’s sounds, Rowan turned back for the Fleet.

Watch for more “Today in Naval History”  17 FEB 24 

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Civil War Naval Chronology 1861-1865.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1961, p. II-20.

“Detailed report of Commander Rowan, U.S. Navy, commanding second division in the sounds of North Carolina.”  IN:  Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol 6, North Atlantic Blockading Squadron from October 29, 1861, to March 8, 1862.”  Washington, DC: GPO, pp. 606-09.

“Report of Lieutenant Chaplin, U.S. Navy, commanding U.S.S. Valley City, transmitting surgeon’s report of casualties.”  IN:  Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol 6, North Atlantic Blockading Squadron from October 29, 1861, to March 8, 1862.”  Washington, DC: GPO, pp. 614-15.

Trotter, William R.  Ironclads and Columbiads:  The Civil War in North Carolina, The Coast.  Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair Pub., 1989, pp. 88-91.

Silverstone, Paul H.  Warships of the Civil War Navies.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1989, pp. 81, .

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  CDR Cooke above would later captain the infamous Confederate ironclad CSS ALBEMARLE on her successful sortie against the Union squadron at Plymouth, North Carolina.  The Union gunboat UNDERWRITER would earn even greater fame later in the war as a platform for raids up North Carolina’s rivers.

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                                  CAPTURE OF ROANOKE ISLAND

Fortress Monroe, situated at the entrance to Hampton Roads, was one of three forts south of the Mason-Dixon Line that remained in Union hands throughout the Civil War.  Confederate lines of communication were thus compromised in the Virginia region.  For the duration of Rebel occupancy of Norfolk, the city was necessarily supplied from the south, via North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound and its tributary rivers and canals through the Great Dismal Swamp.  One such viaduct, the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal, connected Norfolk to Elizabeth City, on the Pasquotank River, a transit point for goods smuggled across the Outer Banks.  One of the first Union efforts of the war was the capture of Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks that fell after a day’s siege on 29 August 1861.  Should Roanoke Island at the mouth of the Albemarle Sound now be captured, the supply lines to Norfolk’s Rebels might be completely severed.

Roanoke Island’s defending Confederates had constructed earthen breastworks, Fort Bartow, on Pork Point about midway up the landward shore.  A small fleet of seven converted ferries, armed tugboats, and shallow draft coastal steamers, mounting nine guns in total, had been assembled as well, under the command of Confederate Navy Flag Officer William F. Lynch.  Chief among these was CSS FANNY, a former Union Army screw steamer whom the Rebels had captured four months earlier.  These gunboats held a position behind a line of obstructions blocking the north end of the channel at Roanoke Island.

On the morning of 7 February, a combined Union Navy and Army force led by Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough and BGEN Ambrose Burnside opened a naval bombardment of Fort Bartow.  Nineteen warships mounting over 50 guns, not the least of which were 100-pounders and 9″ rifles, pounded Fort Bartow for seven hours with 2600 projectiles.  The bombardment covered the landing of Burnside’s 4000 troops and six artillery pieces at Ashby’s Harbor to the south that afternoon.  After slogging through a swamp, Burnside’s troops enveloped the fort that fell to a charge of the 9^th New York Regiment this morning.

The Confederate “mosquito fleet,” as it was derisively called, was overwhelmed from the start and could only muster a long-range pestering fire.  CSS CURLEW was hit below the waterline by a shot from USS SOUTHFIELD and was run aground and set afire near a Rebel battery.  CSS FORREST was disabled with a shell through her engine, but she was towed safely behind the Confederate line.  Though Goldsborough’s ships were hit 27 times, none were lost.  With the fall of Fort Bartow, and the clearing of the obstructions by Union engineers, Lynch ordered his remaining gunboats to scurry up the Pasquotank River to Elizabeth City, where he would stage his next defense of the canals to Norfolk.

Continued 10 February…

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Civil War Naval Chronology 1861-1865.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1961, pp. II-19-20.

Silverstone, Paul H.  Warships of the Civil War Navies.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1989, pp. 237, 239.

Site visit, Fort Bartow site, Roanoke Island, North Carolina, 6 May 2006.

Sweetman, Jack.  American Naval History:  An Illustrated Chronology of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 1775-Present, 3^rd ed.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 2002, p. 62.

Trotter, William R.  Ironclads and Columbiads:  The Civil War in North Carolina, The Coast.  Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair Pub., 1989, pp. 75-88.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  The other southern forts that remained in Union hands throughout the war were Fort Jefferson, off the southern tip of Florida, and Fort Pickens near Pensacola.

Considering the vital importance of Hatteras to the security of Norfolk, historians have noted how lightly defended were the Confederate forts on that island in August 1861.

CSS CURLEW was hit by a plunging shot that penetrated her upper deck and crashed out the bottom of her hull.  Her skipper, LT “Tornado” Hunter, beached her successfully, but in doing so blocked the guns of a Rebel battery known as Fort Forrest.  She was fired both to prevent her capture and to unmask the battery’s guns.

Only six Union sailors were killed in this battle and 17 wounded.  Burnside lost 37 killed and 214 wounded ashore, however the Confederates lost 23 killed, 58 wounded, and an insufferable 2500 captured.

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                    FORT STOCKTON, SAN DIEGO

On the morning of 29 July 1846, the sloop USS CYANE, 20, dropped anchor in the quiet Mexican harbor of San Diego, whose peacefulness belied the war then raging between the US and Mexico.  Navy LT Stephen C. Rowan and a Marine party under a LT Maddox were sent ashore to take possession of the Presidio (in modern Old Town).  This was accomplished without a fight, and the Marines held the town for eleven days until being relieved by troops of John C. Fremont’s Bear Flag battalion on August 9^th.  CYANE then departed, and all was well until October, when a Mexican force under Serbulo Varela moved to recapture San Diego.  Fremont’s outnumbered 15-20-man garrison fled to the safety of Stonington, a whaler lying in San Diego Harbor under US charter.  As US Army CAPT Ezekiel Merritt watched the Mexican flag being run up over San Diego’s Presidio, he began to worry that the Mexicans would use the two cannon that had been left in haste to bombard Stonington.  A request for help was sent to Navy Commodore Robert F. Stockton in San Pedro, who dispatched the 54-gun frigate CONGRESS.

Meanwhile Merritt took matters into hand locally.  A volunteer soldier, Albert B. Smith, was put ashore at La Playa (Point Loma), and using a circuitous route, he succeeded in sneaking into the Presidio and spiking the two cannon.  A heartened Merritt then re-landed his small force and attacked.  The routed Mexicans fled to the hill immediately overlooking Old Town while Smith climbed the courtyard’s staff himself and returned the American flag.  Over the next weeks the Mexicans were reinforced with 100 men and a cannon from Los Angeles.  A tense siege developed.

On this day, Stockton arrived in CONGRESS to a sorry situation.  Most of San Diego’s civilians had abandoned the town, and those who remained were nearly starving.  Stockton promptly sent Army CAPT Samuel Gibson in Stonington to Ensenada, from whence 200 head of cattle were driven north.  Next a brigade of Marines, bluejackets, and local volunteers stormed the Mexican siegeworks in a bold frontal assault.  The lone cannon was captured and turned on the enemy, who were driven from their trenches and up the valley toward Mission San Diego.

Stockton’s sailors now began speedy improvements to the breastworks above Old Town.  A perimeter ditch was dug, behind which were placed casks filled with earth at two-foot intervals.  Twelve guns from CONGRESS were landed to command the approaches from Los Angeles and Mission Valley.  Remnants of these fortifications, named Fort Stockton in the Commodore’s honor, can still be seen above Old Town today.  The American ensign has flown uninterrupted over San Diego since.

Watch for more “Today in Naval History”  28 NOV 22

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

Site visit.  Old Town (Fort Stockton) Historical Site, San Diego, California, 15 July 1995.

Smythe, William E.  History of San Diego, 1542-1907.  The History Company, San Diego, CA, pp. 201-06, 1907.

Fort Stockton in modern times

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