The H.L. Hunley: The Secret Hope of the Confederacy
By Tom Chaffin
(February/March 2009 Civil War News)

Illustrated, maps, notes, appendices, bibliography, index, 324 pp., 2008. Hill and Wang, 18 West 18th St., New York, NY 10011, $26 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Kenneth D. Williams
Kenneth D. Williams is writ­ing a book on the 11th Pennsylvania Volunteers and is doing doctoral level work in American history. He has worked as a park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park and Eisenhower National Historic Site.

Review:
The H.L. Hunley retells the story of the Confederate submarine that became the first submarine to sink a ship. In this case the USS Housatonic, a three-masted sloop-of-war, off Charleston Harbor on the evening of Feb. 17, 1864.
In this retelling the author goes into the background of the vessel’s namesake and one of its creators, the New Orleans lawyer, planter, Customs House worker and entrepreneur Horace L. Hunley.

Author Tom Chaffin discusses his early life and moderately successful career in the antebellum South, his early blockade running aboard the Adela, a former U.S. lighthouse tender, and his efforts to develop the vessel that would bear his name and be the cause of his death in Charleston Harbor in October 1863 during a training exercise.

Interestingly, while much of the training and preparation was being done on the Hunley in Charleston, the vessel’s namesake was off on an odyssey in the Deep South whose purpose can only be surmised.

Horace Hunley and several other individuals attempted to develop a submarine to break the blockade in New Orleans prior to the fall of that city. This predecessor to the Hunley, the Pioneer, a submarine vessel somewhat smaller than the Hunley, apparently had several successful trial runs prior to its scuttling in the New Basin Channel to prevent its capture.

Their efforts were moved to Mobile (although some of the creators would drop out and others take their places) where the H.L. Hunley assumed much of it final configuration. The relocation of the vessel to Charleston because of better harbor conditions for its use, its formal or informal change of name from Fish Boat to H L. Hunley, its subsequent two sinkings with loss of crew, and what is known of its final voyage and the final hours of the USS Housatonic are well told.

What sets this volume apart from previous books about the Hunley is the final portion that tells of the vessel’s finding and recovery near the spot where the Housatonic sank. In addition it recounts the early scientific research conducted by marine archeologists and other scientists at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center near Charleston where the vessel is being studied.

While the definitive volume about these findings is probably a decade in the future, early findings are fascinating. Consider that while Confederate shipbuilding is normally considered somewhat make-do and roughhewn (I note the description of the CSS Missouri as “made of green wood and caulked with cotton” and contemporary descriptions of the armor and appearance of the CSS Arkansas), the workmanship of the Hunley has been found to be of high quality and the vessel very streamlined.

Other mysteries, however, such as how the Hunley came to rest so near where its target (and perhaps slayer?) the Housatonic sank, and the famous flashing blue light signal to and from Confederate forces on Sullivan Island, may probably never be solved, but the author does have an excellent discussion of what is known or surmised to date.

This is a well-written and interesting volume and will be of interest to Civil War naval history buffs and those interested in the H. L. Hunley’s Civil War development and career, its recovery and the early scientific findings about the vessel.