I have a feeling for those ships,
Each worn and ancient one,
With great bluff bows, and broad in the beam;
Ay, it was unkindly done.
But so they serve the Obsolete—
Even so, Stone Fleet!
So begins Herman Melville’s poem The Stone Fleet, which the author penned in December 1861 as ‘an old sailor’s lament’ for an incident that but for him may have been lost entirely to history; the scuttling of more than two dozen obsolete sailing ships outside Charleston Harbor during the early stages of the American Civil War. The port in South Carolina was regarded as the seat of Confederate rebellion, the state having been the first to secede from the Union at a special convention held in the city on 20th December 1860. Moreover, Charleston Harbor had seen the opening shots of the war fired on April 12th 1861, when Confederate shore batteries opened up on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, which stood in the middle of the harbor mouth, forcing its surrender after a day and a half of bombardment.
Charleston was just one of a dozen major ports, which also included Wilmington and Savannah, and over 150 other navigable points of entry along a 3,500 mile stretch of the Atlantic seaboard, through which the Confederate government could conduct the overseas trade vital to its survival. On 19th April 1861, Abraham Lincoln promulgated a ‘blockade’ of the entire coastline from Virginia to Texas, a strangulation strategy which was to become known as ‘Operation Anaconda’.
Such an ambitious undertaking required a massive expansion of the Union Navy, which at the beginning of hostilities comprised only about 90 vessels, the majority of them obsolete sailing warships unsuited to blockade duty, and few of them in active commission. Responsibility for this fell to Lincoln’s secretary to the navy, Gideon Welles. Welles delegated the task of procurement to his brother-in-law George D. Morgan, who set about purchasing and converting dozens of commercial vessels for naval purposes.[1] Morgan’s enterprise was controversial as he received a 2.5% commission on every ship he purchased for the navy. However, due to his efforts, around 90 ships were quickly added to the fleet. Together with a dozen hastily constructed ‘90-day gunboats’ of the Unadilla Class ordered by Welles, this brought the Union total to nearly 250 ships by the end of 1861. Welles also instigated a Blockade Strategy Board to make preliminary recommendations on its enforcement. The four-man board included two experienced navy officers, Samuel Francis du Pont and Charles Henry Davis.
The blockade of Charleston commenced on May 10th 1861 with the arrival off the port of USS Niagara, a powerful steam frigate. Only two days later, she had her first success in capturing the blockade runner General Parkhill. However, from the outset the Union blockade was extremely porous. This was not only due to a shortage of blockade ships. The runners, many of them nifty side-wheel steamers with experienced skippers, usually had the advantage of surprise, making their runs in and out of port at night when sea conditions were most favorable. On 28th June, for example, the Confederate privateer Jefferson Davis slipped unseen out of Charleston harbor and over a period of two months at sea went on to capture nine merchant ships. Charleston was especially hard to bottle up owing to the width of its harbor mouth and the existence of several channels; what the Northern press dubbed ‘rat-holes’; through which ships could pass.
In a bid to increase the efficacy of the blockade, the Blockade Strategy Board proposed the seizure of several ports along the North and South Carolina coastline, where blockade ships could be repaired and replenished. This was achieved with amphibious landings at Hatteras Inlet in August and Port Royal in November. In the meantime, a more expedient strategy for disrupting Confederate commerce was discussed. To Welles, the Board wrote on 16th July:
‘The most obvious method of accomplishing this object is by putting down material obstructions; and the most convenient form of obstruction, for transportation and use, is that of old vessels laden with ballast.’
It seems this idea was given further impetus by the newly-appointed Assistant Secretary to the Navy Gustavus Fox. Before taking up his post on 1st August, Fox had commanded a vessel attempting to resupply Fort Sumter just prior to its surrender. Initial plans for a ‘Stone Fleet’ centred on the waterways around Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, where Lieutenant Reigart B. Lowry had commanded the transportation force. On August 17th, Lowry had informed Fox of ‘nineteen schooners properly loaded with stone’ he had ready to ‘sink and obstruct’:
‘The obstructing party could place their vessels in position, secure them as we propose, by binding chains, spars on end in the sand to settle by action of the tide, anchors down, and finally sink them in such a way as to block the channel so effectually that there could be no navigation through them for several months to come, at least till by the aid of our new gunboats the outside blockade could be effectual.’
It’s not clear if this plan was ever fully realized, although several ships were evidently scuttled by Lowry off the entrance to Ocracoke Inlet in November. At the end of August, however, Confederate forces had also experimented with a similar strategy, albeit on a smaller scale; stone-filled barges being utilized to close off the Cumberland River to advancing Union gunboats near Fort Donelson in Tennessee.
Presumably through the urgings of Fox, the procurement of potential block-ships took on a more coordinated aspect towards the end of October, with Morgan being sent to New England to personally supervise the buying. To assist him, he called upon the services of a local businessman by the name of Richard. H. Chappell. Chappell’s commercial interests included seal hunting and guano collection as well as whaling. The New England states of Massachusetts and, to a lesser extent, Connecticut were the home of the Yankee whaling fleet. The industry had reached its peak in 1858, and was about to go into steady decline owing to the introduction of kerosene as an alternative lamp oil. The start of hostilities had only added to these economic woes, so Morgan had little difficulty finding owners ready to dispense with their less seaworthy ships.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 