USS SASSACUS vs. NUTFIELD

Blockade running was a complicated pursuit even for the most skilled of seamen.  European goods were shipped to staging points in Bermuda, the Bahamas, or the Caribbean.  Here, smaller, sleek, fast ships would load for the dash into Southern ports.  Runners would skirt Union blockaders as best they could, then run close inshore where their shallow draft proved an advantage.  Only the luckiest threaded the thin line between uncharted shoals and dogged blockaders.  The paddle-wheel steamer Wild Dayrell for example, ran aground the night of 31 January 1864 at New Topsail Inlet, North Carolina, where she was discovered the following day by LCDR Francis A. Roe in USS SASSACUS.  Roe worked in vain until the 3^rd trying to free the steamer but ultimately had to burn her.

By 0700 this day SASSACUS had returned to her station on the Bermuda Line when she sighted another suspicious vessel about 12 miles to the northwest.  Roe fired his boilers and set his 205-foot, double-ender sidewheel gunboat in hot pursuit.  Through the morning, SASSACUS sustained 12.5-13 knots, enough to steadily gain on the blockade runner.  This was obviously noted aboard the pursued vessel, for through his spyglass Roe observed cargo being thrown overboard to lighten ship.  Around noon SASSACUS had closed within range of her forward 100-pounder.  Union shells began splashing around the still fleeing runner.  Tellingly, she turned sharply toward shore to duck into shallower water.

Perhaps accidently, perhaps not, the mystery ship ran aground at New Inlet, North Carolina.  Her crew set her aflame and fled to the lifeboats, leaving her engines running.  As SASSACUS pulled to within musket range one of the lifeboats capsized, spilling rebel crewmen.  Roe lowered a boat but was only able to save the blockade runner’s purser.  From him he learned the vessel was the brand-new iron-hulled steamer Nutfield, making her first run from Bermuda.  She measured 750 tons burden and carried munitions, Enfield rifles, a battery of eight Whitworth rifled cannon, quinine, assorted merchandise and a quantity of pig lead to be recast into musket balls.  The cannon and the lead had been the cargo Roe observed being thrown overboard.

Recognizing Nutfield to be one of the newest and best steamers off the Thames ways, Roe worked through the night to free the runner.  But alas she was too fast to be re-floated.  Roe off-loaded the Enfield rifles, the quinine, and several compasses, then set her afire.  USS FLORIDA shortly arrived, and together they pummeled the stranded runner with gunfire.  Finally, convinced the steamer was completely wrecked, SASSACUS departed about 1900 the evening of the 5^th.

Watch for more “Today in Naval History”  9 FEB 26

CAPT James Bloom, Ret

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Civil War Naval Chronology 1861-1865.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1961, pp. IV-12, IV-15.

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 6 “R-S”.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1976, p. 350.

“Report of Commander Crosby, U.S. Navy, Commanding U.S.S. Florida.”  IN: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol 9, North Atlantic Blockading Squadron from May 5, 1863, to May 4, 1864.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1899, pp. 460-61.

“Report of Lieutenant-Commander Roe, U.S. Navy, commanding U.S.S. Sassacus.”  IN: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol 9, North Atlantic Blockading Squadron from May 5, 1863, to May 4, 1864.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1899, pp. 459-60.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  SASSACUS survived the war, seeing subsequent duty in North Carolina’s sounds against the Confederate ironclad CSS Albemarle.  She participated in the siege of Fort Fisher and patrolled the Chesapeake in April 1865 in search of conspirators in the Lincoln assassination.  She was sold in 1868.  Sassacus remembers a great sachem of the Pequot tribe of Massachusetts in the early 1600s.  He endured the rebellion of the Mohegans, a subjugated tribe, who eventually defeated Sassacus with the help of the English and Narragansett Indian allies in what is known today as the Pequot War.  Sassacus fled to Iroquois lands near present-day Long Island, New York, but there was betrayed and killed by the Mohawk of the Iroquois Confederation.

The wreck of Wild Dayrell was surveyed in 2006 by Tidewater Atlantic Research, Inc., as a North Carolina cultural resource.  She lies in Rich Inlet, about 20 miles north of Fort Fisher.  The wreck of Nutfield has not been surveyed to this writer’s knowledge.

Pig lead is lead in ingot form.  Molten lead is smelted from lead ore, galena.  A channel conducts the molten lead from the smelting furnace and into multiple side channels coming off perpendicularly, all in the same direction.   As such, the side channels resemble piglets suckling from a sow.

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                               FT. FISHER FALLS (cont. from Dec 25)

After MGEN Benjamin Butler’s Christmas assault was rebuffed, RADM David Dixon Porter returned off Fort Fisher on the 12^th of January.  Two lessons had been learned in the failed attempt–the naval bombardment would have to be more effective, and the land assault would have to be more aggressive.  Even GEN Ulysses Grant recognized the importance of closing the last Confederate port and this time sent a new Army commander, MGEN Alfred J. Terry, with 12,000 troops and a siege train.

This morning, Porter moved the ironclad NEW IRONSIDES and four monitors to within 700 yards of the fort.  The gunners had orders to avoid random shots or vain attempts to carry away the flagpole, rather they were to dismantle the fort’s guns.  This time their work was effective, and by afternoon Terry was landing troops out of range onto the river shore.  To be sure, in these days the Army enjoyed primacy as a US military force, the Navy often being envisioned simply as a supporting force.  Porter probably knew that if Terry took the fort the Army would get sole credit for the victory.  Against this possibility Porter issued General Order 81 which instructed 1600 bluejackets and 400 Marines from Porter’s ships to take the fort by assaulting up the sloping sea face:

“The sailors will be armed with cutlasses, well sharpened, and with revolvers…When the signal is made to assault, the boats will pull around the stern of the monitors and land right abreast of them, and board the fort on the run in a seaman-like way.”

Late in the afternoon of the 15^th, 2000 sea-servicemen, who had never before fought as a unit, landed on the sea face under the command of LCDR Kidder R. Breese.  Unfortunately, the inclined wall turned out to be nearly vertical, ringed at its base by a breakwater of rocks.  There was little cover, and the Confederates rained down a hailstorm of canister and rifle fire.  Three unsuccessful charges cut the bluejackets to pieces, 350 of the landing party were killed or wounded.  Unable to advance or withdraw, they hunkered behind rocks through the cold night.  Exposure and sniping claimed more.  Thought this primary assault failed, the brave action at the foot of the wall diverted Confederate attention, allowing Terry to breach two gun traverses in the northwest corner before being discovered.  The fort fell.

The subsequent surrender of Wilmington validated GEN Lee’s dire prediction.  His defense of Richmond was fatally starved of supplies, and the Confederacy fell within four months.

Watch the POD for more “Today in Naval History”

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

Rehabilitation Medicine

Anderson, Bern.  By Sea and by River:  The Naval History of the Civil War.  New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1962, pp. 276-84.

Fowler, William M., Jr.  Under Two Flags: The American Navy in the Civil War.  New York, NY: Avon Books, 1990, pp. 263, 266-72.

Gragg, Rod.  Confederate Goliath:  The Battle of Fort Fisher.  Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1991.

Page, Dave.  Ships Versus Shore:  Civil War Engagements along Southern Shores and Rivers.  Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 1994, pp. 82-102.

Reed, Michael and John T. Kuehn.  “Triumph of Civil War ‘Jointness.'”  Naval History, Vol 27 (6), December 2013, pp. 32-39.

Robinson, Charles M.  Hurricane of Fire:  The Union Assault on Fort Fisher.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1998.

Site visit, Fort Fisher State Park, Kure City, North Carolina, 8 December 2001.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  Historians agree that one of David Dixon Porter’s shortcomings was his strong desire to achieve personal glory in battle, even at the cost of sailors’ lives.  Above is one example often cited from the Civil War.

Our WWI destroyer USS BREESE (DD-122) remembers LCDR Breese above.  David Dixon Porter and his father David Porter are remembered with five warships; TB-6, DD-59, DD-356, DD-800, and DDG-78.

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                                 INTERCEPTING THE MEGA-GUNS

When South Carolinians fired on Fort Sumter to start the Civil War, all but one of the foundries in the United States were in the North.  Only the Tredeger Iron Works in Richmond could bore cannon for the South.  Jefferson Davis was forced to purchase cannon abroad, Britain becoming one of the major suppliers.  The English-made Armstrong, Whitworth, and Blakeley muzzle-loading and early breech-loading rifled cannon became popular with Confederate fighters.  All three were similarly designed cast iron tubes over which multiple heavy iron reinforcing bands were pounded while still red hot.  The result was a gun whose firing chamber could withstand the higher pressures necessary for large, rifled shells.  The largest of these guns weighed four tons and fired conical projectiles weighing 80 pounds.

On the 3^rd of July 1863, Union agents in Liverpool reported that the British steamer Gibraltar, the former CSS SUMTER, had left that port carrying two Blakeley guns.  What was unusual about this particular shipment was the massive size of the two Blakeley’s.  They had been specially cast for the Confederacy; enormous, breech-loading, and each reportedly weighed 22 tons.  They fired rifled, steel-tipped shells of 750 pounds.  Intelligence indicated the guns were bound for Charleston, the hotbed of Southern rebellion and a major blockade running port, then under Union siege.  Like most goods bound for the South, the shipment was sent first to Bermuda, where it would be re-loaded onto a sleek blockade runner to brave the Union line.  Should these guns reach Charleston, they might easily shift the balance of power.  They had to be intercepted!

So on August 22^nd Navy Secretary Gideon Welles contacted RADM John A. Dahlgren, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Charleston, enclosing a message from War Secretary William H. Seward that the massive guns had safely reached Bermuda ten days earlier.  At that moment a wooden sidewheel steamer just purchased from her civilian operators and commissioned USS FORT JACKSON was fitting out in New York City.  Welles seized the opportunity this day to divert the one-year-old steamer to a SecNav-directed mission–to cruise back and forth along the Bermuda Line commonly used by blockade runners approaching the Carolina coast.  FORT JACKSON did so, at least until her boiler burned out on 16 September, but did not encounter an incoming runner.

Despite Union vigilance the guns did reach Wilmington, NC, in November.  Gibraltar herself made the run.  One of the guns was emplaced in the shore defenses at White Point on the Cape Fear River, however on the first test firing, the breech plug failed and the barrel cracked in eight places.

Watch for more “Today in Naval History”  30 AUG 23

CAPT James Bloom, Ret.

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Civil War Naval Chronology 1861-1865.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1961, p. III-133.

Department of the Navy, Naval History Division.  Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Vol 2 “C-F”. Washington, DC: GPO, 1977, p. 433.

“Letter of the Secretary of the Navy to Acting Rear Admiral Lee, U.S. Navy, transmitting extracts from consular reports.”  IN: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Vol 9, North Atlantic Blockading Squadron from May 5, 1863, to May 5, 1864.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1899, pp. 127-29.

“Report of Rear-Admiral Dahlgren, U.S. Navy, regarding the landing of Blakeley guns by the steamer SUMTER, at Wilmington, N.C.”  IN:  Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Volume 15, South Atlantic Blockading Squadron from October 1, 1863, to September 30, 1864.  Washington, DC: GPO, 1902, p. 109-10.

Tucker, Spencer.  Arming the Fleet:  U.S. Navy Ordnance in the Muzzle-Loading Era.  Annapolis, MD: USNI Press, 1989, pp. 226-28.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  Gibraltar met a no less inglorious fate herself. On a subsequent blockade run she was sunk by friendly Confederate shore batteries off Charleston when she was mistaken for a Union blockader on a foggy morning.

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