Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

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The moonlit sea was unusually calm on the bitterly cold night of Feb. 17, 1864, when a watchman spotted a strange, partially submerged shape gliding steadily toward the side of the Union sloop-of-war Housatonic. The steam-powered warship was serving blockade duty outside Charleston Harbor, and was one of the Union’s biggest, best-armed vessels. Its men had heard reports of a new Confederate weapon, a “sub-torpedo”; still, it took a few minutes for the officer of the deck, John Crosby, to comprehend what he was seeing. By the time he did, it was too late.

The swiftly moving craft had passed under the Housatonic’s guns, and the small-arms fire now directed at it by the men on deck bounced harmlessly off its iron hull. The men onboard heard a muffled thud as the vessel planted an explosive charge in the Housatonic’s wooden side, below the waterline. Moments later, the charge detonated, lighting up the sky and sending the Yankee warship to the bottom, along with five of its sailors. The Housatonic had achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the first ship to be sunk by a submarine in combat – and the only vessel destined to be destroyed by the H.L. Hunley.

In the wake of the explosion, the Hunley’s commander signaled to the rebel lookouts on shore with a blue magnesium light, indicating that the mission had succeeded. The shore party obligingly built huge signal fires, to guide the Hunley home. But as the submarine’s crew back-powered furiously, something went terribly wrong. Perhaps the concussion from the blast compromised one or more of the seals that kept the ocean out. But shortly after the Housatonic went down, the Hunley and its eight-man crew joined her on the ocean floor.

Men had dreamed of building submarines for centuries. As far back as 1580, a British innkeeper and would-be scientist named William Bourne hatched a design to “make a boate go under the water unto the bottome, and so to come up again at your pleasure.” During the American Revolution, the American inventor David Bushnell built an ovoid contraption, appropriately called the Turtle, that actually staged an attack – albeit unsuccessfully – on a British warship in New York Harbor. In 1862, the Union Navy had, in fact, commissioned an oar-powered submarine – the “Alligator” – from its French designer, but it proved too awkward for river campaigns, and in 1863, before it could be employed in coastal warfare, it sank in a storm off South Carolina. That same year, a group of Northern speculators formed the American Submarine Company, and built an ungainly craft called the Intelligent Whale. But it failed during review by a Navy board.

By 1863, there were several enterprising men around the world who were experimenting in the construction of undersea vehicles. But it took a Louisiana planter, lawyer and financier named Horace Lawson Hunley, along with two colleagues, to build one that worked. It was a combination of clever innovation and surprisingly primitive mechanisms. The ship was about 40 feet long and was dominated by a cylindrical iron boiler, secured by iron bands and rivets, which took up its entire midsection. The jet-black vessel tapered sharply at the bow and stern, with a water ballast tank at each end. The Hunley submerged and surfaced by means of controlling the amount of sea water taken in and pumped out by hand. It ran upright by means of a 4,000-pound keel, and was powered by an offset crankshaft that ran the length of the interior, with a bench and seven hand cranks on one side to power the propeller. Depth was indicated by a mercury gauge, lit by a single candle. Two conning towers, some 16 feet apart, were ringed by a number of small viewing ports. Each tower was capped by a small hatchway, sealed with rubber gaskets. Entry into the vessel was tight at best, and inside there was very little room for movement. The Hunley could remain submerged for two excruciating hours before having to surface for fresh air.

Observing the Hunley’s construction in Mobile, Ala., was a dashing young lieutenant of the 21st Alabama Volunteers named George E. Dixon, who was staying in Mobile while recovering from a combat wound, and he apparently spent considerable time with William Alexander, a member of Dixon’s regiment, and one of the builders of the Hunley. Having worked on the Mississippi as a steamboat engineer in civilian life, Dixon was fascinated with the prototypical vessel. He immediately shifted his focus from the infantry to the nascent field of submarine warfare. A professional boatman by training, he volunteered for service with the revolutionary “sub-torpedo.” In August 1863, he and the submarine rode the train to Charleston, where it was hoped it could aid in relieving the heavily fortified Union blockade.

The Hunley’s first two outings proved disastrous. The same month the vessel arrived in Charleston, its crew prepared to set out at night, to attack a Union ship. Unfortunately, the volunteer captain inadvertently stepped on the diving controls while the hatches were open, and five crewmen drowned. “Poor fellows,” wrote a rebel soldier to his wife, “they were five in one coffin.”

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After the boat – and the bodies within – were retrieved, the Hunley was prepared for another mission. This time Horace Hunley insisted on helming. During a routine diving exercise, the Hunley plummeted bow-first to the ocean floor, where it stuck in the black mud at a 30-degree angle. All eight men, Hunley included, perished. Recalled Conrad Wise Chapman, the Southern artist best known for his 1863 painting of the Hunley, “After this had happened the second time, someone painted on it the word ‘coffin.’”

By this time, Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, who commanded the Southern defenses at Charleston, had lost faith in the vessel, and with good reason. As Beauregard later recalled after the second disaster:

When the boat was discovered, raised, and opened, the spectacle was indescribably ghastly, the unfortunate men were contorted into all kinds of horrible attitudes, some clutching candles, evidently endeavoring to force open the man-holes, others lying in the bottom tightly grappled together, and the blackened faces of all presented the expression of their despair and agony. After this tragedy, I refused to permit the boat to be used again.

However, with Charleston Harbor tightly blockaded, desperate measures were called for. George Dixon had recently been given command of the Hunley – and he was a convincing advocate. He persuaded Beauregard to let him take on the Housatonic, which dominated the blockade fleet. Dixon’s plan was to approach the warship half-submerged and plant the charge in its wooden hull. A “spar torpedo” – a copper cylinder containing some 135 pounds of explosives – extended 17 feet beyond the sub’s bow, where it was affixed to the detachable barbed end of a hollow metal spar. Once the Hunley rammed the barb holding the torpedo into the Housatonic’s side, Dixon’s crew would reverse-power far and fast enough to escape the effects of the blast. The detonator, which was rigged at the end of 150 feet of coiled rope, would not be triggered until the Hunley had removed itself to the rope’s full length.

By early 1864, however the Yankees had acquired intelligence of the Hunley, and Dixon knew it. “The Fleet offshore,” he wrote, “have drawings of the sub-marine and of course they have taken all precautions that it is possible for Yankee ingenuity to invent, but I hope to Flank them yet.” Finally, the night of February 17 gave him the calm seas for which he had waited, and Dixon and his crew propelled the Hunley toward the Housatonic, and into naval history.

Epilogue

For decades, salvagers, Civil War buffs, and naval historians searched fruitlessly for the resting place of H.L. Hunley and its crew. Finally, in May 1995, the submarine was found by the National Underwater Marine Agency, the nonprofit brainchild of the best-selling author Clive Cussler. It took another five years of planning and preparation before the vessel could be raised and stabilized, and months more before investigators could begin their research.

Upon first excavating the sub, the archaeologists and forensic specialists were astonished. Incredibly, the skeletal remains of all eight crew members were remarkably well preserved. A number of artifacts belonging to the men – naval buttons, shoes, smoking pipes – were also found.

On a warm April morning in 2004, tens of thousands from around the country and the world stood solemnly, as horse-drawn caissons carried the remains of the Hunley’s eight crew members to Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery, where they were buried near the graves of the other brave men who had died aboard the submarine.

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Over the years, the lost Hunley and its crew had become the subject of numerous stories, not the least of which was the tale of its commander and the gold coin –reportedly given him as a keepsake by a lady friend – that had saved his life during the April 1862 Battle of Shiloh. According to legend, Dixon was carrying the gold piece in his pocket when he was hit in his upper thigh. But this was George Dixon’s lucky day. Had the bullet run its course and damaged a femoral artery, he would have died; at the least, the wound would have cost him a limb. Remarkably, the gold coin absorbed the brunt of the bullet’s force, and saved his leg – and quite possibly, his life. At least, so went the legend.

In May 2001, after months of painstakingly excavating objects and human remains from the dense mud that filled the Hunley, the senior archaeologist Maria Jacobsen made a stunning discovery. Alongside Dixon’s remains at the command station beneath the forward conning tower, she found an 1860 $20 gold piece, badly indented. “I was very blasé about the coin – until I found it,” Jacobsen said. “Dixon carried it in exactly the same location as he had when he was wounded. Once I removed the mud, my eyes caught the faint inscription, ‘Shiloh.’ I was dazed; it had quite an emotional impact on me.”

The coin was cleaned, and on one side shone the image of Lady Liberty; on the other, hand-etched in cursive script, was an inscription that no one had known existed:

“Shiloh

April 6, 1862

My life Preserver

G.E.D.”

Subsequent examination bore out the coin’s inscription. “We found a healed gunshot wound in Dixon’s left upper thigh, with minute lead fragments embedded in the bone,” Jacobsen said. These lead particles were also present in the indented portion of the coin. All the pieces of the puzzle fit; the coin had indeed deflected a bullet, and in all likelihood, saved its owner’s life. Remarkably, after nearly a century and a half, the legend of Lieutenant Dixon’s coin was proved true.

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Ron Soodalter is the author of “Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader” and a co-author of “The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today.” He is a frequent contributor to America’s Civil War magazine, and has written several features for Civil War Times and Military History.