LIEUTENANT CUSHING AND THE RAM "ALBEMARLE"

God give us peace! Not such as lulls to sleep,
But sword on thigh, and brow with purpose knit!
And let our Ship of State to harbor sweep,
Her ports all up, her battle-lanterns lit,
And her leashed thunders gathering for their leap!
--Lowell.


LIEUTENANT CUSHING AND THE RAM "ALBEMARLE"

The great Civil War was remarkable in many ways, but in no way
more remarkable than for the extraordinary mixture of inventive
mechanical genius and of resolute daring shown by the combatants.
After the first year, when the contestants had settled down to
real fighting, and the preliminary mob work was over, the battles
were marked by their extraordinary obstinacy and heavy loss. In
no European conflict since the close of the Napoleonic wars has
the fighting been anything like as obstinate and as bloody as was
the fighting in our own Civil War. In addition to this fierce and
dogged courage, this splendid fighting capacity, the contest also
brought out the skilled inventive power of engineer and
mechanician in a way that few other contests have ever done.

This was especially true of the navy. The fighting under and
against Farragut and his fellow-admirals revolutionized naval
warfare. The Civil War marks the break between the old style and
the new. Terrible encounters took place when the terrible new
engines of war were brought into action for the first time; and
one of these encounters has given an example which, for heroic
daring combined with cool intelligence, is unsurpassed in all time.

The Confederates showed the same skill and energy in building
their great ironclad rams as the men of the Union did in building
the monitors which were so often pitted against them. Both sides,
but especially the Confederates, also used stationary torpedoes,
and, on a number of occasions, torpedo-boats likewise. These
torpedoboats were sometimes built to go under the water. One
such, after repeated failures, was employed by the Confederates,
with equal gallantry and success, in sinking a Union sloop of war
off Charleston harbor, the torpedoboat itself going down to the
bottom with its victim, all on board being drowned. The other
type of torpedo-boat was simply a swift, ordinary steam-launch,
operated above water.

It was this last type of boat which Lieutenant W. B. Cushing
brought down to Albemarle Sound to use against the great
Confederate ram Albemarle. The ram had been built for the purpose
of destroying the Union blockading forces. Steaming down river,
she had twice attacked the Federal gunboats, and in each case had
sunk or disabled one or more of them, with little injury to
herself. She had retired up the river again to lie at her wharf
and refit. The gunboats had suffered so severely as to make it a
certainty that when she came out again, thoroughly fitted to
renew the attack, the wooden vessels would be destroyed; and
while she was in existence, the Union vessels could not reduce
the forts and coast towns. Just at this time Cushing came down
from the North with his swift little torpedo-boat, an open
launch, with a spar-rigged out in front, the torpedo being placed
at the end. The crew of the launch consisted of fifteen men,
Cushing being in command. He not only guided his craft, but
himself handled the torpedo by means of two small ropes, one of
which put it in place, while the other exploded it. The action of
the torpedo was complicated, and it could not have been operated
in a time of tremendous excitement save by a man of the utmost
nerve and self-command; but Cushing had both. He possessed
precisely that combination of reckless courage, presence of mind,
and high mental capacity necessary to the man who leads a forlorn
hope under peculiarly difficult circumstances.

On the night of October 27, 1864, Cushing slipped away from the
blockading fleet, and steamed up river toward the wharf, a dozen
miles distant, where the great ram lay. The Confederates were
watchful to guard against surprise, for they feared lest their
foes should try to destroy the ram before she got a chance to
come down and attack them again in the Sound. She lay under the
guns of a fort, with a regiment of troops ready at a moment's
notice to turn out and defend her. Her own guns were kept always
clear for action, and she was protected by a great boom of logs
thrown out roundabout; of which last defense the Northerners knew
nothing.

Cushing went up-stream with the utmost caution, and by good luck
passed, unnoticed, a Confederate lookout below the ram.

About midnight he made his assault. Steaming quietly on through
the black water, and feeling his way cautiously toward where he
knew the town to be, he finally made out the loom of the
Albemarle through the night, and at once drove at her. He was
almost upon her before he was discovered; then the crew and the
soldiers on the wharf opened fire, and, at the same moment, he
was brought-to by the boom, the existence of which he had not
known. The rifle balls were singing round him as he stood erect,
guiding his launch, and he heard the bustle of the men aboard the
ram, and the noise of the great guns as they were got ready.
Backing off, he again went all steam ahead, and actually surged
over the slippery logs of the boom. Meanwhile, on the Albemarle
the sailors were running to quarters, and the soldiers were
swarming down to aid in her defense; and the droning bullets came
always thicker through the dark night. Cushing still stood
upright in his little craft, guiding and controlling her by voice
and signal, while in his hands he kept the ropes which led to the
torpedo. As the boat slid forward over the boom, he brought the
torpedo full against the somber side of the huge ram, and
instantly exploded it, almost at the same time that the pivot-gun
of the ram, loaded with grape, was fired point-blank at him not
ten yards off.

At once the ram settled, the launch sinking at the same moment,
while Cushing and his men swam for their lives. Most of them sank
or were captured, but Cushing reached mid-stream. Hearing
something splashing in the darkness, he swam toward it, and found
that it was one of his crew. He went to his rescue, and they kept
together for some time, but the sailor's strength gave out, and
he finally sank. In the pitch darkness Cushing could form no idea
where he was; and when, chilled through, and too exhausted to
rise to his feet, he finally reached shore, shortly before dawn,
he found that he had swum back and landed but a few hundred feet
below the sunken ram. All that day he remained within easy
musket-shot of where his foes were swarming about the fort and
the great drowned ironclad. He hardly dared move, and until the
afternoon he lay without food, and without protection from the
heat or venomous insects. Then he managed to slip unobserved into
the dense swamp, and began to make his way to the fleet. Toward
evening he came out on a small stream, near a camp of Confederate
soldiers. They had moored to the bank a skiff, and, with equal
stealth and daring, he managed to steal this and to paddle
down-stream. Hour after hour he paddled on through the fading
light, and then through the darkness. At last, utterly worn out,
he found the squadron, and was picked up. At once the ships
weighed; and they speedily captured every coast town and fort,
for their dreaded enemy was no longer in the way. The fame of
Cushing's deed went all over the North, and his name will stand
forever among the brightest on the honor-roll of the American navy.

****

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