Rubble was all that was left of the Charleston Lighthouse after Confederate forces blew it up in December 1861. This daguerreotype was made in the summer of 1863.
“EVERYTHING BEING RECKLESSLY BROKEN”
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Rubble was all that was left of the Charleston Lighthouse after Confederate forces blew it up in December 1861. This daguerreotype was made in the summer of 1863.
NO PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN AMERICAN HISTORY CAUSED more political reverberations than that of Abraham Lincoln, an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery, who was elected on November 6, 1860. The acrimony that characterized the campaign only intensified in the period immediately afterward, fanning the long-smoldering embers of secession into an outright conflagration. Nowhere was this felt more deeply or intensely than in South Carolina. When South Carolina’s secession convention met six weeks later on December 17, it was a foregone conclusion that the state would break from the Union, and that when it did, it would move to take control of all federal property within its borders. That is what greatly concerned naval commander T. T. Hunter, the lighthouse inspector in charge at Charleston. Accordingly, he wrote to the Lighthouse Board on December 18, asking what he should do when the state demanded that he turn over all the lighthouses.
The secretary of the Treasury responded on behalf of the board, curtly telling Hunter that although the department couldn’t give him any specific instructions, he was still accountable under the law for all the lighthouse property in his district. This “you’re on your own” response undoubtedly shocked Hunter, telling him that not only was he solely responsible for holding out against a state bitterly hostile to the federal government, but that if he capitulated in any way he would liable for the loss.
There was, however, one person at the board who knew exactly what Hunter should do—naval commander Raphael Semmes. Semmes had fought in the Mexican-American War, and just prior to being appointed secretary of the board in 1858 he served as a lighthouse inspector for the Caribbean and Gulf Coasts. He was the first to see Hunter’s letter, and it prompted him to write a note to the secretary of the Treasury, Philip F. Thomas, arguing that the lighthouses should be handed over to the state, adding that it would be a grave mistake to have “the coast of South Carolina be lighted by the Federal Government against her will.” Semmes’s perspective, amenable of course to South Carolina residents, made perfect sense given his loyalties, and his secret plans for the future.
Raphael Semmes, circa 1862.
Born in 1809 in Charles County, Maryland, along the banks of the Potomac, Semmes was a slightly built man, weighing around 130 pounds and standing about five feet seven, just below the average height for the time. He had piercing gray eyes, and in addition to a small goatee, he sported a conspicuously long mustache that flared out on both sides of his face, the ends of which he waxed into fine points and kept well trimmed and continually groomed to retain their proper shape. Semmes’s cool and forceful personality, as well as his keen intellect, commanded the respect of those around him.
Semmes with his family moved to Alabama in 1841, and it was in the Deep South that his allegiances lay. Lincoln’s election had convinced him that there was no hope for reconciliation between the North and the South, although he didn’t think that a war would have to be fought to effect the separation. When the split occurred, Semmes planned to resign from federal service and follow his conscience. A little more than a week before Hunter’s letter landed on his desk, Semmes had written to Alexander H. Stephens, the future vice president of the Confederate States of America, asking him to support his admission to the “Navy of the Southern Republic” when the time came. “I am still at my post at the Lighthouse Board,” Semmes told Stephens, “performing my routine duties, but listening with an aching ear, and a beating heart for the first sounds of the great disruption which is at hand.” That disruption was not long in coming.
SO VIRULENT WERE THE feelings toward Lincoln that on December 20 South Carolina became the first state to secede. The situation in Charleston’s harbor had become quite tense by the end of the month. Maj. Robert Anderson, who was in charge of federal troops in the area, gathered them together at the yet-to-be completed Fort Sumter, a three-tiered, pentagonal fortification located at the harbor’s mouth on an artificial island made of thousands of tons of granite. He chose that location believing that it would give his relatively small number of men the best chance of defending themselves against a possible attack by the South Carolina troops who were taking up positions along the shore.
Concerned that Washington might send reinforcements to Fort Sumter, South Carolina governor Francis Pickens, a wealthy landowner and former American ambassador to Russia, resolved to make their approach as difficult as possible. Thus he had all the buoys in the harbor removed, and he ordered his troops to take control of three of the lighthouses located in and around the harbor—at Castle Pinckney, Sullivan’s Island, and Morris Island—and extinguish their lights. Pickens also ordered Hunter to leave the state, which he did in early January. (He was not, however, ultimately held responsible by the board for the loss of the lighthouses.)
The federal reinforcements Pickens anticipated and feared arrived not long after midnight on January 9, 1861, aboard the Star of the West, a civilian steamer leased by the army, which had departed New York City four days earlier. The only lighthouse in the harbor still shining was the one at Fort Sumter with its fourth-order Fresnel lens, now operated by Major Anderson’s troops. That light alone, however, was not enough of a guide for the Star of the West to risk trying to get over the Charleston Bar, a series of submerged shoals about eight miles southeast of the city, forcing the Union men to wait until dawn to make their approach.
The Star of the West’s expedition was supposed to be secret, but word of its mission had leaked to the press, and the South Carolinians were ready. Pickens, worried that Morris Island might be taken over by Northern troops, and had already had the lighthouse’s first-order lens taken down and buried in the sand to keep it from being used by the enemy. As soon as the Star of the West approached the harbor, South Carolinian troops began firing cannons, hitting the ship twice but causing little damage. The Star of the West was not prepared for this assault and incapable of mounting a defense, so the captain put the ship about and returned to New York.
Over the next few months, as the standoff continued between Anderson’s troops at Fort Sumter and the growing number of Southern troops massing along the harbor’s edge, the Confederacy, as it would be known, came into being. By the beginning of February, six more states had seceded, including Alabama, and they had hammered out a provisional Confederate constitution that would be formally adopted a month later.
In the late afternoon of February 14, Semmes was at home with his family in Washington, DC, still biding his time, embedded within the bureaucracy of a federal government to which he felt no loyalty, when a messenger delivered a telegram that changed the trajectory of his life. The Committee on Naval Affairs of the Provisional Confederate States of America wanted Semmes to come to Montgomery as soon as possible. “Here was the sound for which I had been so anxiously listening,” Semmes later wrote. “Secession was now indeed a reality, and the time had come for me to arouse myself to action.” That evening he composed a letter to the committee, telling them that he would be there “immediately.”
The next morning Semmes severed all his ties with the North. First, he submitted his resignation as commander in the U.S. Navy. Next he resigned from the Lighthouse Board, having only two days earlier been promoted from secretary to one of the board’s two main naval positions after the death of one of the other members. His letter to the board was gracious, thanking the members for their courteous treatment of him over the years, but it was not acknowledged with so much as a receipt. Semmes attributed this slight to the fact that there were other Southerners on the board, including its chairman, Commodore Shubrick, a South Carolinian, who had also been wooed to join the Confederacy but had decided to stay put—a decision Semmes viewed with no small amount of disdain.
Semmes said his tearful good-byes to his Ohio-born wife and family—who would spend the next few years in Cincinnati—and headed for Montgomery, where Confederate president Jefferson Davis ordered him to travel to New York to buy arms for the South, this still being a time, before the actual outbreak of war, when Southerners and Northerners were relatively free to travel anywhere in the States and conduct business. Soon after returning to Montgomery on April 4, Semmes was appointed head of the Confederate Lighthouse Bureau, which had been created just a month earlier as a result of his own recommendation. He barely had time to settle in and appoint clerks before, as he later recalled, “Fort Sumter was fired upon, and the tocsin of war was sounded.”
IN HIS INAUGURAL ADDRESS on March 4, 1861,* Lincoln proclaimed that he would use his “power” to “hold, occupy, and possess, the property and places belonging to the Government.” One of those places, in his estimation, was Fort Sumter. This created an immediate problem, because Major Anderson and his men—having held out for months, besieged by Southern forces—were desperately low on food, and if they weren’t resupplied soon they would have to surrender. On April 4 Lincoln sent unarmed transports with provisions for Sumter, along with an armed escort of ships. Not wanting to provoke the South into starting a war, Lincoln told Jefferson Davis this was strictly a humanitarian mission, and that the armed ships were only to respond if the transports were fired upon. Davis’s government, however, had already decided that it couldn’t allow the North to retain control of Sumter because, as the historian James McPherson has pointed out, “The Confederacy could not be considered a viable nation so long as a foreign power held a fort in one of it principal harbors.” At 4:30 in the morning on April 12, Confederate batteries began shelling Fort Sumter, and thirty-four hours later, having withstood a thunderous barrage that gravely damaged much of the fort, Anderson raised the white flag and surrendered. With that, the bloodiest war in American history commenced.
Semmes knew what he had to do. He hated working behind a desk, and longed for military glory, especially now that his beloved South had struck the first salvo and he could devote his life to a cause he believed in. The “Light-House Bureau was no longer to be thought of,” Semmes wrote. “It had become necessary for every man, who could wield a sword, to draw it in defense of his country, thus threatened by the swarming hordes of the North, and to leave the things of peace to the future.” On April 18 he resigned his post at the newly formed bureau he created, and was given command of the CSS Sumter, one of the few ships in the nascent Confederate navy. Over the next few years, captaining both the Sumter and the CSS Alabama, Semmes terrorized Union merchant ships on the high seas, capturing or burning more than eighty-six vessels, in the process becoming a hero to the South and a villain to the North.
The day after Semmes resigned, Lincoln announced a blockade of most of the Southern coast from South Carolina to Texas. Eight days later he expanded the blockade to include the coasts of Virginia, which seceded on April 17, and North Carolina, which would do so on May 20. Rather than blanket the entire Southern coast, which stretched 3,500 miles, the blockade was intended to put a stranglehold on the major Southern ports, thereby keeping the South from importing the materials it needed to wage war, including arms, iron, machinery, medicine, and food, while at the same time cutting off exports of such Southern products as turpentine, tobacco, and, most important, cotton, the South’s number one source of revenue.
The South responded to the blockade by extinguishing its lighthouses, just as the United States had done during the War of 1812, and the colonies had done during the Revolutionary War. It is not clear from the records who issued the order to put out the lights, but it appears that it came from either the Lighthouse Bureau, local military officials, or possibly both. No matter who gave the order, it was strategically motivated. Confederate blockade-runners were very familiar with the coast and could dart in and out of harbors and bays, running along the shore in the dark of night without having to rely on lighthouse beams to show them the way and keep them from harm. Union ships didn’t share that familiarity, and the darkened coast put them at a grave disadvantage. With the lights out, Union ships would find it more difficult to navigate and would be placed in greater jeopardy of wrecking, making the extensive blockade that much harder to enforce. Despite this wartime logic, some keepers were conflicted about executing this order. The purpose of lighthouses was to aid mariners, and the keepers took that responsibility seriously. Dousing the lights went against their professional and, in some cases, moral sensibilities. Nevertheless most keepers promptly complied, and in a number of instances, military men took the lead in turning off the lights. As a result, by the end of April almost the entire Southern coast was dark.
Many in the North decried this purported dereliction of duty. The popular weekly Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper wrote, “After the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the Confederate Government, with that murderous indifference to human life which has distinguished them from the first, extinguished all the lights they could reach.” To the South, however, it wasn’t a case of “murderous indifference” but rather a sensible decision to make under the exigencies of war. And it was one that proved effective. As Theresa Levitt observes, “The blackened coast made life difficult for the Union, which lost more ships in grounding accidents than in all of the war’s naval battles.”
Not long after the lights went out, the Confederate Lighthouse Bureau ordered that lighthouse materials, including the lamps, the rotating machinery, and especially the valuable Fresnel lenses be removed for safekeeping. This, too, was a strategic decision. By eliminating these materials the Confederacy attempted to achieve two goals: the first being to keep them out of the hands of the Yankees, thereby making it more difficult for the Union to relight darkened towers if they recaptured Southern lighthouses. The second goal was to protect the lighthouse equipment so that if the Confederacy emerged victorious—as it fervently believed it would—it could quickly reestablish the lighthouses and welcome back the crucial trade and commerce they facilitated. At many lighthouses, keepers, customs collectors, and military personnel removed the materials and shipped them inland to warehouses or stored them near the lighthouses, sometimes burying them in the dirt or even in riverbeds.
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AS THE NORTH AND SOUTH squared off against each other, Southern lighthouses were drawn into the fight. Some were the focal point for battles, while others were ruinously set ablaze, blown up, or otherwise vandalized. On the east coast Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, North Carolina’s towering sentinel, was one of the first to be caught up in the action.
During the war Cape Hatteras retained its distinction as the most dangerous stretch of coast in the country. No fewer than forty Union navy ships grounded in the area, leading some to quip that “a few more shoals might have helped the South win the war.” It wasn’t only the navy that suffered, however. After the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse was darkened in April 1861, the Cape became especially perilous to Northern commercial vessels as well, which began foundering on the shoals in increasing numbers. The Linwood, bound from Rio de Janeiro to New York with six thousand bags of coffee on board, was one such casualty. Near midnight on July 17, while off Cape Hatteras, the captain of the Linwood posted a man to keep a lookout for the lighthouse’s beam to guide the ship past this treacherous spot. As the captain later testified, it was “in consequence of the absence of the light that the ship struck.”
Merchants and the companies that insured them complained bitterly to government officials about these accidents, demanding that the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse be relit as soon as possible. Sensitive to these pleas, and wanting to reestablish the lighthouse as well, Union officials also had other reasons for wanting to control Cape Hatteras, especially Cape Hatteras Inlet, the narrow passageway between Hatteras and the Ocracoke Islands, which connected the Atlantic Ocean to Pamlico Sound. For months Confederate vessels, part of the so-called Mosquito Fleet—named for the small size of the gunboats comprising it—had been launching raids from the inlet, attacking Northern merchantmen and taking them as prizes; this too raised howls of complaint from Northern shipping interests. Additionally, the inlet was an important supply route for the Confederacy, and cutting it off would be a boon to the Union. Thus, to eliminate the threat posed by what Union secretary of the navy Gideon Welles called “nests of pirates,” to capture and reestablish the lighthouse, and to cut off the supply route, the U.S. Navy sent seven warships south in August 1861 to take Cape Hatteras.
When the fleet arrived it attacked Forts Hatteras and Clark, both of which the Confederates had only recently finished building near Hatteras Inlet to protect the channel. Neither fort was awe-inspiring, their outer walls being made of mounded dirt and sand, covered by wooden planking and marsh-grass sod. Although the men in the forts did their best to defend their positions, they were severely overmatched. The fort’s relatively small cannons had a limited range, and their shells fell harmlessly in the water, far short of the Union ships. Those ships, by contrast, were armed with enormous cannons that unleashed a tremendous barrage, which, during a single three-hour stretch, pummeled Fort Hatteras with three thousand shells. On August 29, a day after the Union onslaught began, the battle was over, both forts having surrendered.
Though this was a fairly minor battle in the terrible scheme of the Civil War, since it was the Union’s first real victory it nonetheless had a huge impact on the North. Reportedly, when Lincoln was awakened and informed what had happened, he dashed into the Cabinet Room and danced a jig in his nightshirt. One of the Union officers, who had been providing reports to the New York Evening Post, added his own thoughts on the engagement’s significance. Cape Hatteras, he wrote, is “a place which is of such vast importance to us. It is the key of the State of North Carolina, and to the ports north and south of this. … With the possession of this port we can easily keep alight Hatteras lighthouse.”
This officer, however, spoke too soon: Cape Hatteras’s first-order Fresnel lens had been removed earlier that summer. Thus the hopes of the Union naval commander, S. C. Rowan, of quickly rekindling the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse were dashed. As he wrote to Welles, “I was desirous of lighting Hatteras light, but to my great regret I learn that the lens has been taken down and is now in Washington [NC] or Raleigh.” Before any attempt could be made to recover the lens, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse itself was threatened.
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AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER, Col. Rush C. Hawkins, who commanded the Union troops guarding Fort Hatteras, heard rumors that Confederate forces to the north on Roanoke Island were planning to retake Cape Hatteras. To foil such an attack, Hawkins led six hundred troops from the Twentieth Indiana Regiment north to the small town of Chicamacomico (modern-day Rodanthe) located about halfway between Hatteras Inlet and Roanoke Island. Soon thereafter the Union tug Fanny was dispatched to supply the men at Chicamacomico, but Confederate ships captured it. After interrogating Union troops on board the Fanny, the Confederate commander on Roanoke Island, Col. A. R. Wright, came to believe that the forces at Chicamacomico were planning to attack Roanoke Island. As it eventually turned out, neither the Union nor the Confederate forces had intended to attack the other, but as a result of the mistaken assumptions on both sides, a strange chase ensued.
Wright decided that the best defense was a good offense, so his plan was to land troops from the Third Georgia Regiment to the north of Chicamacomico, and to land additional troops from the North Carolina regiment below Chicamacomico, trapping the Twentieth Indiana. Once the Union troops were captured, Wright planned to march farther down the Cape, destroy the lighthouse, and then retake Forts Hatteras and Clark.
Things didn’t work out the way Wright had hoped. On the morning of October 5, Hawkins saw Confederate vessels approaching from the north, as well as ones heading farther to the south. Realizing they were trying to surround him, Hawkins ordered an immediate retreat back to Cape Hatteras. As soon as the Third Georgia Regiment landed, it set off in pursuit of the fleeing Twentieth Indiana.
Since the Union troops had expected to be resupplied by the tug Fanny, they only brought one day’s worth of supplies with them to Chicamacomico. As a result they had almost no food or water, and their retreat turned into a miserable slog over the sand under an unusually hot autumn sun. “The first ten miles were terrible,” recalled one of the Indiana soldiers. “No water, the men unused to long marches, the sand heavy, their feet sinking into it at every step. As the regiment pushed along, man after man would stagger from the ranks and fall upon the hot sand.”
Union soldiers of the Twentieth Indiana, encamped around the base of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.
The planned landing of the North Carolinians never happened because their transports grounded far offshore, and this allowed the Twentieth Indiana to make it to the lighthouse at midnight, having covered twenty-eight miles in fifteen hours. “Here we found water,” one of the soldiers said, “and using the lighthouse as a fort, we encamped for the night.” At the same time the Georgian troops, also exhausted, set up camp about six miles north of the lighthouse.
The next morning the tables were turned as the Ninth New York Regiment arrived at the lighthouse. With their force added to the Indiana’s, the Union troops took off after the Georgians, who were now forced to retreat to Chicamacomico, whereupon the Union forces called off the chase, and headed back to Fort Hatteras. This two-day affair, full of energy and effort but of no real military consequence, was later dubbed by historians the “Chicamacomico Races.” The Confederates finally made it back to Roanoke Island, and the lighthouse remained under Union control for the duration of the war.
BUT THE LIGHTHOUSE WAS still dark, much to the consternation of a group of Northern insurance company presidents, who wrote to the Lighthouse Board in early October 1861, pointing out that Hatteras was “a very important point on our coast and it is desirable the light be re-established as speedily as possible.” Such pleas notwithstanding, it would be many months before the lighthouse shone again, in large part because the military situation remained unsettled, and Union officials, including the board, feared that if the lighthouse were relit, it might be attacked and destroyed by Confederate forces.
By the middle of March 1862, however, as more of the coast of North Carolina came under Union control, the board decided to relight Cape Hatteras. The lighthouse engineer W. J. Newman was dispatched to the Cape to evaluate the situation, and he found that the only machinery missing was the first-order lens and the lamps—the lens pedestal, baseplate, and revolving mechanism were all still intact. Although the board wanted to supply Newman with a first-order lens, the best it could do was scrounge up a second-order lens, which finally arrived at the Cape in early May. By the end of the month Newman’s crew had the lens installed and operational, much to the delight of insurance companies, shipowners, and the Union navy. A year later the illumination improved when the second-order lens was replaced with one of the first order that had been purchased from France.
At the same time that the board decided to relight Cape Hatteras, the Union navy began searching for the missing lens. Informants told Union forces that the lens was in Washington, North Carolina, a small town located about twenty-five miles up the Pamlico River, whose mouth lies due east of Cape Hatteras. But when a naval expedition arrived in the town of Washington on March 21, the purloined lens was no longer there.
When the lens had first been removed from the lighthouse in the summer of 1861, it had indeed been transported to Washington and placed in the warehouse of John Myers, a merchant and shipbuilder. Washington was also the home of H. F. Hancock, the local lighthouse superintendent as well as the town druggist, who was supposed to take care of the lens. However, as Union forces advanced on Washington, the Confederate troops there fled, as did many of the town’s residents, including Hancock.
This left Myers with a problem. If he left the lens in his warehouse, Union forces would surely find it, and as a loyal Southerner, this was an outcome he wanted to avoid at all costs. So, just hours before the Union expedition arrived, Myers had the boxes containing the lens and all its parts loaded onto the deck of the sternwheeler Governor Morehead, and accompanied them nearly fifty miles upriver to Tarboro.
When Rowan learned that the lens had been shipped to Tarboro, he demanded that it be given back, vowing to “hold the authorities responsible for the return of the lens before I promise protection to the inhabitants” of Washington. Rowan also wrote to his superior officer that he would consider taking armed boats to Tarboro and “frighten[ing] the people out of their boots unless the lens was returned.” These threats notwithstanding, Rowan didn’t follow through, and the lens continued its dramatic inland odyssey.
Upon arriving in Tarboro, Myers handed the lens over to Confederate army quartermaster George H. Brown, who immediately fired off a letter to the Confederate Lighthouse Bureau in Richmond urging it to send someone to take possession of the lens. Brown noted that he had been told that force would be used to get the lens back, and that Union officers had even threatened “the destruction of the town of Washington if the apparatus was not forthcoming.” If the lens was not removed to a safer location, Brown feared that Tarboro might be the next target in the Union’s campaign to recaquire it.
The Confederate Lighthouse Bureau sent J. B. Davidge—apparently a scoundrel more interested in drinking at the local bars than doing his duty—who soon left town, making off with the money to cover the costs of moving the lens. Fortunately for Brown he soon made the acquaintance of a “very responsible gentleman,” Dr. David T. Tayloe, a physician from Washington who had escaped the city and was on his way to join his family at Hibernia Plantation on the outskirts of Townsville, North Carolina, near the Virginia border. Tayloe agreed to take the lens with him, free of charge, as long as he was furnished with a means of transporting it. A railroad car was quickly requisitioned, and loaded with forty-four boxes and two cases containing the lens’s prisms, along with sixty-four castings, fourteen fixtures, and two sheets of copper, all of which were also part of the lens apparatus.
Departing on April 14, 1862, Tayloe and his valuable cargo began an arduous five-day journey to Townsville, the trip taking far longer than expected on account of the decrepit condition of the train tracks, and the need to switch cars at one point. Soon after arriving and reuniting with his family, Tayloe wrote to the Lighthouse Bureau, proving his credentials as a trustworthy and responsible man, “I have had the apparatus removed to a good store house in the country and safely stored.” And it remained hidden for the remainder of the war.
SHORTLY BEFORE UNION FORCES attacked the forts on Cape Hatteras in August 1861, another lighthouse drama played out in Florida, where “a band of lawless persons,” as the Union’s Lighthouse Board called them, took matters into their own hands. The problems began at the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse, located on a small hill on the northern bank of the Loxahatchee River, as a result of a strong difference of opinion between the head keeper, Joseph Papy, and one of his assistants, Augustus Oswald Lang. Lang, an ardent Confederate, aware that lighthouses throughout the South had been extinguished as part of the war effort, repeatedly demanded that Papy pitch in and do the same. Papy refused, claiming that he would not do so until he received orders from the board. Some of his contemporaries argued that Papy’s intransigence had more to do with his desire to continue receiving pay and provisions from the Union government than with any concern about protocol. Yet whatever the reason, Papy’s stance infuriated the devoted partisan Lang, who quit his position on August 9, and headed forty miles north to discuss the matter with James E. Paine, another loyal Southerner. The two of them quickly decided to preempt matters and do what Papy would not.
On August 15 Lang and Paine, along with one James Whitton, arrived at the Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse. Papy demanded to know their intentions, and upon being told, he asked under what authority they were acting. As Paine later wrote to the Confederate Secretary of the Treasury, “I informed him that we came as citizens of the Confederate States, to discharge a duty to our country … and that our acts would meet the approbation of our government.” Papy, outnumbered and outgunned, stepped aside, and the raiding party went to work disabling the light. In keeping with the strategic goal of putting out the light, while maintaining its readiness should the South prevail, they later recalled, “we destroyed no property whatsoever, the light being a revolving one and of very costly make, we took away only enough of the machinery to make it unserviceable,” and then locked the parts, as well as various tools and oil, in a shed near the lighthouse.
The group now set its sights on raiding the Cape Florida Lighthouse farther to the south, at the tip of Key Biscayne. And they had a new recruit, Papy’s second assistant, Francis A. Ivey. Although Paine remained behind, Lang, Whitton, Ivey, and another man traveled on foot and by boat roughly ninety miles to the lighthouse, a grueling trip that tested their allegiance to the Confederate cause since they had very little food and were alternately pelted by torrential rains and baked by a scorching sun.
Lang and his associates had heard that the keepers at the Cape Florida Lighthouse were heavily armed, under instructions by Union officials not to surrender the facility, and had in fact “repeatedly boasted that they would defend the light to the last.” These rumors were confirmed when the raiding party arrived near midnight on August 21, and discovered the two keepers holed up in the tower, barricaded behind its iron door, which they had bolted shut. Despite this fortification, a clever deception got the keepers to open the door. Lang knew the head keeper, Simeon Frow, and he also knew he was expecting supplies to be delivered from Key West. So the enterprising Lang shouted to Frow, telling him he had news from Key West. This brought both keepers down, and when they opened the door and saw four guns pointed at them, they gave up without a fight.
The raiding party decided that merely disabling the light would not do. As they later wrote in a letter to the governor of Florida, “The light being within the immediate protection of Key West and almost indispensible at this time to the enemy’s fleet, as well as knowing it to be useless for us to try and hold it, we determined to damage it so that it will be of no possible use to our enemies.” They smashed the lens and loaded the lighthouse boat with lamps, burners, and the keepers’ guns before sailing back to the Jupiter Point Lighthouse, where they stored the materials.
These raids notwithstanding, Florida provided one of the few bright spots for the Lighthouse Board during the war. In mid-December 1860, when it was already quite clear that Florida would soon secede, forty-one-year-old Capt. James M. Brannan, who led the First Artillery stationed at Key West, sent a message to Washington asking if he should “endeavor at all hazards to prevent Fort [Zachary] Taylor [located on Key West] from being taken or allow the State authorities to have possession without any resistance on the part of his command.” When Florida seceded on January 10, 1861, Brannan still had received no instructions. Three days later, unwilling to wait any longer, he made a crucial decision. In the dead of night as the city’s residents were sleeping, Brannan marched his small force of forty-four men the four miles from their barracks to the still-unfinished fort. Brannan’s quick action secured Key West for the Union, and with the fort as a base of operations, the Union navy was able to launch attacks, support its blockade of Southern and Gulf Coast ports, and also maintain control of most of the Florida Keys. This was not only a strategic windfall for Union forces, without which the outcome of the war might well have been different, but it also meant that the Keys’ lighthouses, minus the severely damaged one at Cape Florida, could be protected. In fact the lighthouses at the Dry Tortugas, Key West, Sand Key, Sombrero Key, and Carysfort Reef were the only ones in the South that remained lit throughout the entire war, providing Union naval forces with much needed guiding lights as they traversed the treacherous waters off the south Florida coast. When Union Cdr. John R. Goldsborough visited Key West in January 1862, he noted with satisfaction that these lighthouses were “shining as the safeguards and symbols of fraternal commerce and peaceful civilization.”
BEYOND CAPE HATTERAS AND FLORIDA, lighthouses at many other locations up and down the east coast found themselves caught in the crosshairs of war. In late March 1862, Samuel Francis Du Pont, the brave and highly competent commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, which patrolled the coast from South Carolina to Key West, visited some lighthouses in his area of jurisdiction and shared his findings with the Lighthouse Board (his interest in this activity, of course, was amplified by virtue of his having served on the board in the 1850s). What he found was a trail of destruction. While the tower at Cape Romain, South Carolina, remained still standing, the iron railing at the top was broken, and the lens “ruthlessly destroyed.” The Bull’s Bay Lighthouse, also in South Carolina, had been subjected to similar treatment, “everything being recklessly broken, down to the oil cans.” Charleston’s venerable lighthouse on Morris Island had been blown up the previous December because the Confederates feared that Union forces might capture the island and use the tower as a lookout in the event of an attack on the city. The Charleston Mercury’s report of the explosion observed that “nothing save a heap of ruins now marks the spot where” the lighthouse stood. And at Georgia’s Tybee Island Lighthouse, when Confederate troops abandoned the island in November 1861 to consolidate their forces at nearby Fort Pulaski, they torched the interior of the lighthouse, leaving the lantern, according to Du Pont, “much injured” (the lighthouse’s second-order Fresnel lens had already been removed and sent to Savannah).
Many other lighthouses could be added to Du Pont’s list, among them the Cape Charles Lighthouse, located in Virginia near the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. Originally built on Smith Island in 1828, the lighthouse was just 55 feet tall, and in the mid-1850s the board decided that this critically important spot needed a 150-foot tower with a powerful first-order lens. The new tower had progressed to a height of 83 feet by the outbreak of the war, but in 1863, a party of Confederates, or “guerillas,” as the board called them, destroyed the old tower, and “subjected” the construction materials stored on the ground to “indiscriminate pilfering and spoliation.”
Burning of the Tybee Island Lighthouse by Confederate forces in November 1861. Note the soldiers’ barracks to the left of the tower.
While virtually all the lighthouses damaged during the war were in Confederate states, there was at least one exception to this rule. In May 1864, twelve Confederates led by Capt. John M. Goldsmith landed on Blackistone Island (now St. Clement’s Island), in Maryland, intent on destroying the lighthouse, which consisted of the keeper’s house with a tower and lantern room rising from its center. The keeper, Jerome McWilliams, begged the attackers to spare the building: His wife was close to giving birth. If he were forced to take her to the mainland, he feared, both her life and the life of their unborn child would be jeopardized. Goldsmith, who had grown up on the Maryland mainland not far from the lighthouse and had joined the Confederacy at the start of the war, was swayed by McWilliams’s earnest pleas, but true to his mission, he made sure the lighthouse itself was disabled, smashing its lens and lamp, and confiscating fifteen gallons of sperm oil. However, this proved a short-lived victory, as the light was quickly reestablished, and a Union gunboat was stationed nearby to protect it from further raids.
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THE TIDE OF DESTRUCTION visited upon lighthouses by the war extended well beyond just the east coast; those on the Gulf of Mexico, where the blockade was also enforced, suffered just as much. In September 1861, before abandoning Ship Island off the coast of Mississippi in the face of advancing Union naval ships, Confederate forces tossed wood into the base of the island’s lighthouse and set it on fire, destroying the stairs and damaging the lantern. And true to form, upon departing, the Confederates took the lighthouse’s Fresnel lens with them.
Sand Island Lighthouse was another target for the Confederates. Located near the entrance of Mobile Bay, a key port for blockade-runners attemping to supply the besieged Confederacy, this magnificent two-hundred-foot-tall conical brick lighthouse was the tallest on the Gulf Coast, and had been completed only in 1858 under the direction of the army engineer Danville Leadbetter, a native of Leeds, Maine, who had graduated third in his class from West Point in 1836. Ever since Union ships began blockading Mobile Bay in 1861, Northern forces used the darkened tower as an observation post to track the movements of blockade-runners, and also to spy on Confederate forts in the area. And in December 1862, under the protection of Union gunboats, a lighthouse engineer was able to install a fourth-order lens in the lighthouse so as to provide Union forces with a guiding beam that could be relied on during the planned invasion of Mobile, Louisiana.
This relighting obviously didn’t sit well with Confederate troops, and in late January 1863, Lt. John W. Glenn led a small number of men to the island to destroy the lighthouse. All they were able to do, however, was set fire to a number of buildings before being chased off by gunfire from the USS Pembina. Not a man to be easily deterred, Glenn promised to return and “tumble the lighthouse down in their teeth.” True to his word, less than a month later he landed on the island again, buried seventy pounds of gunpowder at the base of the tower, and lit the fuse. But Glenn had miscalculated the burn rate and had run only a short distance when the explosion knocked him to the ground and showered him with huge chunks of the lighthouse’s walls, including one that was several tons and fell mere inches from his body. All that remained of the lighthouse was a fifty-foot-high sliver about one to five feet wide, which Glenn claimed would be toppled by the next storm. Proud of his achievement, despite nearly being crushed to death, Glenn sent a report of his activities to the commanding Confederate officer in the region, who was none other than Brig. Gen. Danville Leadbetter. Although Leadbetter didn’t record his feelings at the time, it is not hard to imagine him feeling a twinge of sadness or regret upon learning that perhaps his greatest engineering accomplishment lay in ruins, a victim of the very cause for which he was so fervently fighting.
According to the lighthouse historian David L. Cipra, “There was only one documented instance on the Gulf Coast where mass destruction of lighthouses was deliberate and coordinated.” This was during 1862–63, when the Confederate general John Bankhead Magruder ordered six lighthouses along the gently curving and barrier-island-strewn Texas coast to be burned or blown up so that the Union’s Southern Blockading Squadron would not be able to use them as lookouts. Magruder’s orders were carried out, and most of the lighthouses were severely damaged. At the Aransas Pass Lighthouse, for example, two kegs of gunpowder blew apart much of the top of the brick tower, and some reports said that the force of the explosion sent the lighthouse’s spiral staircase shooting skyward. At the Matagorda Lighthouse, a brick-lined tower with a cast-iron-plate skin, a similar explosion damaged much of the foundation, but only a few of the heavy metal plates.
Using lighthouses as lookouts was ubiquitous during the war, as lighthouses were by design placed at critical points and provided a wide panoramic view of the surrounding terrain, and in the case of the Sabine Pass Lighthouse, a heavily buttressed eighty-foot-tall brick tower located at the mouth of the Sabine River in Louisiana, this not unnaturally led to a series of skirmishes when both sides had the same idea. While blockading Sabine Pass, the Union lieutenant commander Abner Read would frequently send small parties to the lighthouse to monitor enemy movements. The Confederates often did this as well, but for some time the two sides did not cross paths. That changed on April 10, 1863, when one of Read’s parties, led by Lt. Benjamin Day, was at the lighthouse on reconnaissance. While at the top of the tower, Union observers saw a small enemy sloop approaching. Day immediately ordered his men to hide in tall grass near the lighthouse. Once the sloop came within a few feet of the shore, Day’s men stood up with guns trained on the four Confederates in the boat, who, caught completely off guard, promptly surrendered and were taken prisoner. One of captured men, Capt. Charles Fowler, was a great prize, given his role as commander of the confederate fleet in the area.
But the Confederates would have their revenge. On April 18, only a few weeks before Gen. Robert E. Lee would achieve his greatest victory, routing Union forces during the Battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia, Read led thirteen men to the lighthouse to make more observations of Confederate activities. Although Read was wary, given the earlier confrontation, he saw no movement on the shore and decided to land, feeling somewhat reassured since he had brought along a well-armed party. The boats were pulled up on the shore, and the men approached the lighthouse. They did not get far before a band of thirty Confederates, who had concealed themselves behind the keeper’s cottage, rushed forward, guns blazing. In the brief battle that ensued, most of the Union soldiers were killed, captured, or injured. Read, who lost an eye, made it back to his ship with a couple of his men. From that point forward, Union forces, at least, never again used the Sabine Pass Lighthouse as a lookout.
There was at least one case in the Gulf in which Union and Confederate forces damaged the same lighthouse. On July 12, 1863, a little more than a week after the momentous Battle of Gettysburg, a critical victory for the North that resulted in a staggering toll of more than fifty thousand casualties, Union forces visited the St. Marks Lighthouse in Florida, a brick tower near the edge of Apalachee Bay, and burned the interior so that it could not be used as a Confederate lookout. Two years later, when Union forces landed at the lighthouse to launch an attack further inland, they discovered that retreating Confederates had set off multiple explosions that blew out one third of the circumference of the lower tower to a height of eight feet, cracked other parts of lighthouse’s walls, and shattered the lantern’s glass panes.
The Mobile Point Lighthouse was not damaged due to mutual sabotage, but because it got in the way during the Battle of Mobile Bay. In the summer of 1864, the Union fleet, commanded by Rear Adm. David G. Farragut, came under heavy shelling from Fort Morgan as it passed by Mobile Point. Next to the lighthouse the Confederates had built a furnace that turned cannonballs into glowing projectiles that could ignite enemy ships—illustrating the fact that despite technological advances over the centuries, in some cases the state of warfare resembled nothing so much as a medieval siege. When Farragut’s fleet fired on the furnace and the guns surrounding it, the lighthouse, although not the intended target, was shelled nonetheless. Subsequent firefights further damaged the structure, blasting away the outer layers of bricks on one side of the tower, and leaving a few gaping holes. Farragut, who purportedly spurred on his men—fearful of torpedoes, the term then used for naval mines— with the infamous cry, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” went on to win the battle, handing the Confederacy one of its worst defeats and giving the Southern Blockading Squadron control over the Gulf east of the Mississippi River.
Damage inflicted on the Mobile Point Lighthouse during the bombardment of Fort Morgan by the Union fleet in 1864.
One of the strangest instances of the war’s impact on a Gulf Coast lighthouse occurred at Bolivar Point Lighthouse at the mouth of Galveston Bay. Sometime after the Confederates put out the light and packed up the lens, the entire tower vanished, leaving behind only its concrete base. Apparently someone had decided that the lighthouse’s iron plates were too valuable to the war effort to be left in place. Whether they were melted down to make arms and munitions, or used to plate ships is unknown.
BY THE END OF the war the Confederacy had darkened, damaged, or destroyed some 164 lighthouses. Neither the Union Blockading Squadrons nor the board sat idly by while this was happening. Whenever possible the squadrons tried to track down missing lenses and other valuable lighthouse supplies. This is what developed in St. Augustine, Florida, in March 1862, when the city surrendered to Samuel F. Du Pont. The previous August, the St. Augustine customs collector Paul Arnau led a group of men to the St. Augustine Lighthouse, where they removed the lens, which Arnau hid in an undisclosed location. Next he ordered a few of his men to venture south to the Cape Canaveral Lighthouse, the only one in the country that did not have a Fresnel lens but still used reflectors and lamps based on Winslow Lewis’s design. The keeper, Mills O. Burnham, obligingly helped the men dismantle the reflectors, the lamps, and the clockwork for the revolving mechanism. While the lamps and clockwork were delivered to Arnau in St. Augustine, Burnham buried the rest of the materials, along with more than two hundred gallons of sperm oil, in his orange grove.
Soon after arriving in St. Augustine, Du Pont had Arnau—who had resigned as mayor rather than surrender the city to Union forces—arrested and placed aboard the steamer Isaac Smith to be interrogated by the ship’s commander, J. W. Nicholson. When Arnau pleaded ignorance as to the whereabouts of the lighthouse materials, Nicholson threatened to imprison him on the ship, holding him hostage until they were produced. This none-too-gentle form of persuasion brought Arnau around, and he promptly sent men to recover the hidden items, at which point he was released from custody.
Another case of retrieval took place on May 12, 1862, when the Union lieutenant C. W. Flusser obtained information on the whereabouts of the fifth-order Fresnel lens taken from the Wade’s Point Lighthouse, a screw-pile structure in the shallow, frequently windswept waters of Albemarle Sound near the mouth of North Carolina’s Pasquotank River. That same night Flusser led seventy-six seamen and thirty-eight soldiers on a three-mile march into the countryside on the outskirts of Elizabeth City, North Carolina—which had only recently been captured by Union forces—where they found the lens and other lighthouse machinery in a barn. Flusser then forced the barn’s owner and other local residents to transport the materials back to the waiting ships.
For its part, the board did its best to reestablish lighthouses as soon as areas came under Union control, so that the blockading squadrons could benefit from the resumed navigational assistance. Cape Hatteras provides one of the best examples of this, but there were many others. In its annual report for the year ending on June 30, 1862, the board proudly reported, “Immediately upon the restoration of the eastern shore of Virginia to governmental control by the military operations in that quarter, the lights at … Cherrystone, and Hog island were re-established, and have rendered assistance of no small importance to the immensely increased navigation of Chesapeake bay and tributaries.”
After the South’s largest city, New Orleans, fell in the spring of 1862, delivering a terrific blow to the Confederacy, the board sent an engineer, Capt. William A. Goodwin, there to assess the situation and begin relighting the area. Upon arriving in early August, Goodwin found the German-born Treasury special agent Maximilian F. Bonzano, who counted among his other skills being a physician and a printer, feverishly at work, recovering and repairing fifty thousand dollars’ worth of lenses and other lighthouse apparatus that had been stored at the New Orleans Mint. Within a mere four months Bonzano, whom Goodwin appointed acting engineer and lighthouse superintendent for the region, had orchestrated the relighting of eleven lighthouses from New Orleans down to the Gulf.
Given that the war was still raging, and passions were running high, reestablishing lighthouses in the heart of the Confederacy could be dangerous work. Such was the case for Thomas Harrison, who was shot just two days after he became keeper at the recently relit West Rigolets Lighthouse, near the eastern end of Lousiana’s Lake Pontchartrain, murdered within a few steps of the lighthouse. His killer was never found, but one theory was that it was a Confederate who was angry to see Harrison working for the enemy. Whatever the cause, Harrison became the only known lighthouse keeper to die on duty during the war.
On some occasions the board acted prematurely. With the Wade’s Point Lighthouse lens back under its control, the board repaired and relit the damaged lighthouse early in 1863 on the assurance that it would be adequately protected by the military. But in May of that year “it was visited by a guerilla force from the mainland and again destroyed.”
Sometimes the board’s efforts were imperiled by the very troops sent to protect the restored lighthouses. Not long after Confederates destroyed the old Cape Charles Lighthouse and stole construction materials intended for the new tower, the board resumed work. To ensure there would be no more trouble from the Confederates, Union soldiers were stationed at the site. But according to the district engineer, the soldiers were anything but helpful. “They are amenable to no discipline,” wrote the engineer. “Their dilapidations and injury to government property exceed all that has been done by the rebels.” Notwithstanding the soldiers’ unruly behavior, however, the new lighthouse began shining on May 7, 1864, and it suffered no more at the hands of either Union or Confederate forces.
WHILE THE LIGHTHOUSE BOARD was moving ahead with substantial success, the Confederate Lighthouse Bureau had virtually disappeared. Not long after the orders to darken the lights and pack up lighthouse materials had gone out, almost all the Southern lighthouse keepers were relieved of their duties, and bureau headquarters was left with a lone employee, the interim chief, Thomas Martin. In his final annual report, penned in January 1864, just a few months before Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant assumed command of all Union armies, Martin wrote, “The operations of the Lighthouse Establishment during the past year have been very limited in extent, being confined almost exclusively to the care and preservation of the Light House property which has been taken down and removed to places of safety.” Martin was still sanguine that the South would win, and that the bureau would spring back to life, but his hopes were not to be realized.
Rather than create new stationery, the Confederate Lighthouse Bureau simply modified the lighthouse stationery it had on hand.
THE CIVIL WAR OFFICIALLY ended on April 9, 1865, when General Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Upon hearing the news, the Union troops began firing their rifles and cheering, but Grant put a halt to the celebrations, telling his men, “The war is over, the rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sign of rejoicing after victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations.” Less than a week later, the North’s joy and relief at having won the war were replaced with overwhelming sorrow when the Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln, shooting him in the head while he was attending a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC, adding yet another horrific casualty to the war’s grisly tally.
By the time of the surrender dozens of Southern lighthouses had already been relit, but the job still facing the board in the South was monumental, and they attacked it with zeal. Board engineers fanned out to assess damage and begin repairs, while board and military personnel scoured the countryside and questioned former keepers or anyone else who might have relevant information, in order to recover lighthouse materials hidden during the war.
One of the most spectacular finds took place in Raleigh, North Carolina. Soon after Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman entered the city in mid-April 1865, he had some of his men do a sweep of the Capitol Building, during which they came upon a most unusual sight. As a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, “In the rotunda, between the two chambers, is stored a vast pile of lighthouse apparatus: costly lamps and reflectors of Fresnel and Argand. … The glass concentric reflectors of Fresnel are viewed with novel curiosity by the Western men [soldiers from inland states], to whom lighthouse paraphernalia is something new.”
Local workers were hired to pack the lighthouse apparatus in crates, and the quartermaster general of the Union army, Montgomery C. Meigs, was tasked with having the crates shipped to the board. In a letter to the board chairman, Adm. Shubrick, Meigs noted, “Some broken prisms or portion[s] of lenses have been seen in possession of boys in the street, but the greater part of the lens apparatus will, I think, reach Washington in good order.” Meigs also shared with Shubrick a startling discovery: The workers had used the most readily available packing material—papers that were strewn about the Capitol. When Meigs took a closer look, he found that the papers were quite old, many reaching back before the Revolution, some signed by eminent statesmen including Thomas Jefferson and Charles Thompson, the secretary general of the Continental Congress. In other words the lighthouse materials had been packed in North Carolina’s irreplaceable historical archive. After the crates arrived in Washington, the papers were salvaged, stored at the Treasury Department, and promptly forgotten. It was forty years before a shocked Treasury employee accidentally rediscovered them, and a large chunk of North Carolina’s historical heritage was returned to the state.
Although hopes were raised when the stash of lenses was discovered in Raleigh that the missing first-order lens from Cape Hatteras Lighthouse would be among them, it was not. Four months later, however, in August, the storied lens, which the board wanted to recover more than any other, was found by Union soldiers on patrol in Henderson, North Carolina, not far from Townsville, where the dependable Dr. Tayloe had originally hidden it during the early days of the war. The discovery revealed a problem: Sometime after the war ended, local residents had helped themselves to pieces of the precious apparatus, hoping to get a reward for their return. The board, however, was in no mood to barter, and it got the Union forces on site to pressure the locals to return the stolen pieces. Within a few weeks they were recovered, and the lens was on its way to New York.
THE FLOOD OF DAMAGED lenses coming from the South, many with chipped or missing prisms, was overwhelming. The repair shop at the board’s Staten Island depot, where most of the lenses ended up, did not have the capacity or skill to fix them all, so the board sent many of them back to the French manufacturers. At one point Shubrick urged the manufacturers to make repairs “as soon as possible in order that the apparatus may be re-established upon our Southern coast and the commerce of the world be benefited thereby.” The board also ordered new lenses to replace those that were too damaged to repair or couldn’t be found.
The pace of restoration overseen by the board was impressive—much faster than that of the South itself. By the end of 1866 it had rebuilt or repaired ninety-four Southern lighthouses. But still, with so much work yet to be done, and so many lenses to be fixed or replaced, many of the Southern lighthouses that were darkened or damaged during the war would not be relit until the early 1870s, while many others were deemed no longer necessary for navigational purposes. Thus they remained among the permanent casualties of a war that had taken an immeasurable toll on the nation.
* Not until the Twentieth Amendment was ratified in 1933 was Inauguration Day moved to January 20.