Undoubtedly the concussion produced by the explosion of the torpedo destroyed instantly the lives of Dixon and his crew.
—Unnamed reporter, The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, 1877
The Hunley’s feat was not again repeated until World War I. By then, submarines had morphed into sleek, military-funded juggernauts, and torpedoes into vicious, self-propelled projectiles. Fifty years after the death of the USS Housatonic, a prowling German U-boat sent a British vessel to her grave, and this second victory further cemented the previously “infernal” submarine as a necessary and deadly new tool of combat.
Even though the Hunley victoriously sank her target, she failed in the grander scheme of her mission. Instead of running home in the hoped-for terror, the Union sailors remained undeterred, the fleet stayed put, and the blockade remained unbroken. The citizens of Charleston continued to starve. Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, fell precisely one year after the Hunley’s Pyrrhic victory, and the mayor of Charleston surrendered his city the day after that. The former Confederate officers, previously so loath to remain part of America, began one by one to pledge their loyalty to the US government so that they could regain their citizenship.
The Hunley was gone, but not forgotten. The mouth of Charleston’s harbor was replete with the ravaged, sunken hulks of dozens of combat-damaged ships. Even though they were the final homes of human remains, they were also riddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of metal and equipment, so salvage companies promptly got to work scrambling for the rights to the wrecks. By 1870 hard-hat divers touched their heavily weighted boots to the sands around the Housatonic. They sifted through the debris and muck, raising first the hefty propeller before moving on to other sundry chunks of metal and relics that could be sold at auction. An intact, corked bottle of wine, newly overgrown with seashells and subaquatic moss, made its way into the private collection of one of the divers.
With these dives came reports of the missing Hunley. The fish boat, apparently less financially valuable than the massive bulk quantities of scrap metal that could be recovered from the larger ship, was still a point of curiosity and fascination. Some accounts were clear fabrications, claiming that the little sub had been sucked into the hole her own torpedo blew in the side of the Housatonic, and that the two lay tangled together “in grim dead lock” on the ocean floor. Many more reports got the distance between the wrecks wrong, a potentially easy mistake to make in the turbid waters where visibility was only a few feet and in an area littered with unlabeled marker buoys, including one near the final location of the submarine and potentially even attached to it.
But some of these reports also contain eerily accurate details, details that we now know to be true. One diver provides a description that the sub seemed to be upside down because her propeller was “now uppermost,” which is actually how the unusually constructed vessel would have looked when right-side up, as she was found. One said that her bow was pointing back toward the wreck of the Housatonic. Some reported that even in death “all of her men were at their stations.”
After the divers left, she sat unperturbed for another hundred years. The turn of the century saw improvements in shipping, and with them the mouth of Charleston Harbor was opened and deepened. The construction of jetties shifted the sands of the area, and the rapid change in topography provides one theory for how the Hunley was buried quickly enough to keep her in such pristine condition.
But in the 1970s, archaeologist and diver E. Lee Spence kicked his way nearly 30 feet underwater to help pluck some snagged fishing equipment off an obstruction. Pulling marine growth from the hard surface, he noticed it had the sloping curve of a long, unusually smooth body that seemed atypical for a creation of nature. Spence knew the history of the area and of the Hunley, and he marked the location.
Since the site was over 3 nautical miles from land, not including the man-made jetties, it was in federal waters. Spence, who considered the submarine “part of our national heritage,” wanted it to be recovered, conserved, and publicly displayed for educational purposes. At the time, Sen. Strom Thurmond was heavily involved in the development and construction of the museum that would eventually become Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum in Charleston, and Spence thought this museum would be a suitable location for the artifact. He began to write letters, including to Thurmond, trying to advocate for the boat’s recovery and permanent location in Charleston.
He received enthusiastic permissions to perform the recovery from the state and local agencies and the museum personnel, as well as from the local branch of the US Army Corps of Engineers. He provided the army a map depicting the broad area he thought needed further archaeological investigation, but also containing a small, carefully drawn circle nearly centered over the location that would eventually be verified as the final resting place of the Hunley. The circle correctly indicated that the Hunley had drifted out to sea after her victory and was not located between the Housatonic and shore, as most other explorers mistakenly believed at the time. However, the General Services Administration (the GSA), which was most likely the legal owner of the federally located wreck, wrote back vaguely in April 1974 that before they could grant him contractual rights to recover the submarine, they needed to “complete certain internal requirements.”
After months of deliberation, the GSA finally responded. They said they still had unresolved questions about the legal requirements of the Antiquities Act and therefore were “holding in abeyance the issuance of any contracts covering the raising of sunken vessels.” They did not specify what those questions were.
Spence’s claim may have been the accidental victim of an unrelated discovery: He began writing to the GSA in January 1974 and at first they seemed receptive, keeping the personal check he wrote for them to process the claim paperwork. However, by September they had changed their minds. In between, in March 1974, another private team announced that they had found the wreck of the famous ironclad USS Monitor. It was also located in federal waters. Any method for granting salvage rights that the GSA applied to the Hunley would likely set a precedent for how rights should be granted to the USS Monitor.
The government would eventually decide to keep the Monitor. Her site would be declared a National Marine Sanctuary, and portions of her wreck would be salvaged by US Navy divers for preservation and display in a museum. The GSA returned Spence’s check but made no moves to salvage the Hunley themselves as they had the Monitor, and the news of the discovery fizzled.
In 1995, Clive Cussler’s announcement to the media revived the name of the Hunley in spectacular fashion, causing immediate sensational news coverage around the world. The famous author had used his personal funds to partially sponsor the search, and this time the divers brought back video footage as proof. The GSA did not seem interested in being involved, and quickly passed control of the relic to the Department of the Navy.
Following this announcement, the government of South Carolina was more coordinated in its approach than it had been the first time. State senator Glenn McConnell was a prominent member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the co-owner of a store dedicated to the sale of Confederate memorabilia, so he immediately designated himself the submarine’s fiercest advocate. He assembled the Hunley Commission, a group of state senators, representatives, gubernatorial appointees from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and a retired rear admiral. Together, the group decided to “be as aggressive as possible” in obtaining “control of this piece of southern history.”
Senator Thurmond leapt into action, quickly quashing language in a federal bill that would send the Hunley to Alabama, her place of construction. Then on October 24, 1995, the members of the Hunley Commission assembled in DC. With them in the meeting was Strom Thurmond, and across the table were the representatives of the Naval History and Heritage Command, the NHHC, which was called the NHC at that time. Prior to this meeting, the navy had been largely unresponsive to the demands of the Hunley Commission, seeming to push them off with polite but noncommittal language. After this meeting, all parties agreed unanimously that South Carolina would have full control of the Hunley in perpetuity.
Interestingly, nobody from South Carolina or the Hunley Commission seems to have any record of exactly what took place in that meeting on October 24, 1995. Thurmond’s schedule shows an hour and a half budgeted for the conversation, a lengthy period of time for a man who provided the Dalai Lama with only minutes. Documents obtained from the Hunley Commission via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request explicitly state that Thurmond had at least one aide in the meeting taking notes for the group, but FOIA requests and research in Strom Thurmond’s archived documents failed to turn up any record of the notes themselves. Whatever it was that did happen, it got South Carolina the boat. Later, Friends of the Hunley–affiliated writer Brian Hicks referred to it as “blackmail.”
In the fall of 1995, Strom Thurmond was the newly minted chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The US military had an overseas presence in the still-tense situation in Bosnia, but the procurement budget for the Department of Defense was at its lowest point since 1950. Many weeks that fall, Thurmond had taken to the Senate floor to argue against bills that would further cut the military’s funds. It seems plausible that, to win for his state the submarine that they craved, Thurmond might have threatened to simply switch sides in the budget argument.
Before the navy acquiesced in late October, the Hunley Commission had hatched a plan to use E. Lee Spence’s information and guidance to go find the boat for themselves. However, they also seemed to want legal assurances from Spence that he did not want to keep the submarine for himself. According to the Hunley Commission meeting minutes, based on what read like thin verbal promises of involvement in the project, with little debate and no lawyer present, Spence signed over all of his rights to the claim. After reaching the agreement of possession with the navy, the Hunley Commission decided that Spence was no longer needed, and that he should be excluded.
The title for the Hunley never officially transferred to South Carolina, and it still resides with the US Navy. The important thing, the primary thing that the members of the commission wanted, was control over the display. They wanted to ensure “proper exhibition” “and interpretation” of the submarine, with legal ownership a secondary issue. They seemed especially worried about the changing currents of American political correctness—by then people were already protesting the Confederate battle flag flying over the South Carolina Statehouse. One member of the commission “expressed his concern that 10 or 15 years from now, there might be certain provisions on how the Hunley should be displayed.” The commission members made a repeated habit of referring to the Civil War as “the War Between the States.”
The Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was at that time proverbially buried by controversy because of its planned display in the Smithsonian Institution. Some protesters thought the airplane’s display needed more focus on the atrocities of nuclear warfare, while other protesters countered that the display should downplay that subject and focus instead on the suffering of American military personnel in the Pacific. Glenn McConnell, during a meeting of the Hunley Commission, “expressed his strong feelings about the presentation of the [Hunley’s] exhibit—in not wanting to see the Hunley become the new Enola Gay.” Before the agreement of October 24, the Smithsonian was a leading candidate for the permanent placement of the sub.
The Hunley’s advocates often wrote to one another, and these documents shed further light on the motivation behind their concerns over the display of the Confederate relic. In one letter, Glenn McConnell had the Hunley Commission’s attorney send a newspaper clipping to Strom Thurmond along with a letter on McConnell’s behalf. The clipping was about a “minority employee [who] ‘angrily protested’ the use of the Confederate battle flag.” The state flag of Georgia, which at that time heavily featured the image of the Confederate battle flag, was removed from a display as a result of that protest. “According to Senator McConnell,” the attorney wrote, “this is the type of action which necessitates that the State insist on control over the presentation of the Hunley.”
The commission members got their way. While early drafts of the agreement between the Hunley Commission and the US Navy included provisions for neutral third-party arbitration in the event of any disagreement over the display, the commission resisted these arrangements vehemently. The final contract provides for some preliminary arbitration over display conflicts, but ultimately the Hunley Commission has full control. However, they do pledge to think carefully about the opinions of all people concerned when making their final decision. In July 2000, South Carolina lowered the Confederate battle flag from the top of the Statehouse Building. In August 2000, the Hunley was raised from the ocean floor and carried to North Charleston.
The Hunley is on display at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, a facility owned by Clemson University. The Friends of the Hunley, the nonprofit organization charged with fund-raising efforts for the Hunley project group, was heavily involved in the museum’s curation and is considered legally separate from the university but is based out of the same building. When I last toured the museum I was unable to find, even in the sections dedicated to general Civil War history, a single mention of slavery.
As for me, I tried to move on to other scientific pursuits after the Hunley research and my defense, but like the U-Haul emblazoned with the image of the Hunley that kept showing up in my apartment complex parking lot, the story of the submarine kept following me around. I was surprised and humbled by the amount of press attention surrounding the paper, especially because I never thought my theory was anything revolutionary. It was one seriously massive bomb, but other people had published the same idea before; I had simply been the first to provide data. The earliest reference I could find was written by a newspaper reporter in 1877, even though he used the now-obsolete terminology of referring to a blast waveform as a “concussion,” a term edged out of use because it was too easily confused with the head injury called concussion, which is instead caused by blunt force trauma.
Nick and I were married in April 2017 at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, wearing Converse sneakers instead of dress shoes. I left my job with the US Navy a few weeks before the release of the final paper in August 2017, but for unrelated reasons. The small project I was pursuing out of Duke Hyperbarics on the side of my doctoral work had blossomed, developing into a feasible safety device that could save the lives of rebreather divers. I already had funding in hand to continue the research when logistical issues on base meant I was asked to abandon the project and return to Florida. I baked and ate an entire small cake while thinking about it, and by the time I queasily scraped the last melted chocolate chip off the plate, I had decided to save the project at the expense of my job.
Leaving the navy meant I had pledged some of my workweek to completing my project as an employee of Duke, which thankfully provided me a scientific home, but that my time was otherwise uncommitted. I realized . . . blast trauma might make a good book subject. And the story of the Hunley might provide the perfect way to explain all that science.