Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
In late November 1864, the Union troop transport Greyhound was steaming down the James River in Virginia from the Bermuda Hundred Plantation, where the army of Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler had been bottled up for weeks. Butler’s superior, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, had planned to send Butler due south toward Richmond, thereby trapping Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia between two large concentrations of Union troops. But Butler soon found himself in a stalemate against entrenched Confederate forces, far outside Richmond.
On Nov. 27, Butler and his guests, Rear Adm. David Dixon Porter, commanding the North Blockading Squadron, and Congressman Robert C. Schenck of Ohio, now back in political office after being seriously wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run, boarded the Greyhound, which served as Butler’s floating command post, complete with a gilded saloon and a crew he had outfitted himself. Notably, the ship was unarmed, as was the crew, without “a pop-gun among them,” one observer recalled.
The three were discussing how best to close the port of Wilmington, N.C., the last important refuge of the blockade-runners in the Confederacy. Wilmington sat a few miles inland, reached by the Cape Fear River, whose mouth was defended by the formidable Fort Fisher.
Meeting in a lower deck salon, most likely sitting around a large table studying detailed maps of the Fort Fisher area, Butler kept quiet for the moment about his idea of sending a “bomb ship” (sometimes called a “powder boat” or “grand torpedo”) through the obstructions and minefields toward the fort.
The general planned to explode it so close to Fisher’s powder stores that the soldiers inside would be stunned, incapable of repelling any invaders, or dead. At the time, Butler “was in the zenith of his power and seemed to do pretty much as he pleased,” in Porter’s words; but it was a power that was slowly evaporating. While not known for expertise in battle, Butler was famous for supporting innovative if far-fetched ideas, such as his experiments with “Greek fire” (phosphorous) to incinerate artillery batteries, attacking infantry or gunboats.
From their time together in Louisiana two years before, Porter and Butler had been at personal and professional odds; but now, at least on the surface on this November day, relations were respectful.
From the start Porter had been uneasy about the discussion’s setting. Starting with the men loading coal aboard the transport, the admiral, who well knew the ways of Confederate sympathizers on the St. Louis Mississippi riverfront was on edge, looking for anything out of the ordinary in the undefended, unnecessarily tight space of the ship.
Porter had every reason to be concerned. The Greyhound was extremely vulnerable to stealth attack, an area of Confederate expertise. Confederate inventors in and out of uniform viewed the Union Navy’s shift to coal as a godsend for even deadlier attacks. They were spurred on by a new law, passed in a secret session of the Confederate Congress, authorizing bounties for inventors of devices from mines to submersibles to submarines that sank warships. Now in the Confederate arsenal was the “coal torpedo.”
When Schenck and Butler began talking politics, Porter excused himself and headed to the upper salon. Once inside he found a half-dozen or so “cut-throat-looking-fellows.” He challenged them by asking whether the Greyhound carried first-class passengers. One of the men shot back, “We are just lookin’ around to see how you fellows live; we ain’t doing no harm.”
While the admiral didn’t directly pursue the matter with the men, he stayed in the salon until slowly, one by one, the group headed below. After the last man left, Porter hunted down Butler, saying that he believed neither of them wanted to be captured by “a cargo of the worst-looking wretches on board.”
That was enough for Butler, whose ceremonial sword was the only weapon in Union hands then. He headed to the wheelhouse and ordered the captain back to Bermuda Hundred. Once there, the suspected Confederate spies or guerrillas were turned over to the provost marshal; and before getting under way again, the Greyhound was scoured for any stowaways. It soon appeared that Butler and Porter had overreacted. The whole matter was now being dismissed jocularly as just a bunch of “loafers trying to get to Hampton Roads free of expense.” Then the ship left again.
The coal, apparently, was never inspected.
About five or six miles from Bermuda Hundred, the Greyhound howled from a blast in the engine room. “A large volume of smoke poured out” from there, but the engineer kept his cool, closing the throttle valve and opening the safety valve, letting steam rush out as the vessel came to a noisy, shuddering stop. Some of the gaudily dressed crew members grabbed planks and jumped overboard.
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An excited Butler asked Porter if he knew what happened. “Torpedo! I know the sound.” They could see the flames amidships, and the smoke that was rising dangerously into the salon.
Porter and a steward wrestled the general’s gig (a small boat) from the port quarter; once it was clear of the wheelhouse, Porter lowered it until it was about two feet from the water. He next turned his attention to getting a smaller boat on the other side of the burning ship into the water so a steward and stewardess could make their escape.
By then, some crew members who had jumped overboard in the wake of the explosion had paddled around to the gig. “We all got into the boat and shoved off,” one recalled. “Of the crew only the captain was still aboard, who lowered the colors and climbed down to the rudder where he was picked up by the gig.”
Butler’s aide, determined to do his duty, grabbed all the papers he could, leaving only when his hand was burned. It was now less than five minutes after the explosion, in Porter’s estimation, and the ship was fully engulfed in flames, doomed. Several of Butler’s prized horses were still aboard, whinnying in terror until the roar of the blaze, the crashing of timbers and the blasting of steam drowned out their suffering.
From the gig, the crew, with Porter, Butler and Schenck safely in place, rowed back and forth on the river to make sure that all those who jumped overboard were accounted for.
“I think I saved General Butler a ducking on that occasion, if not his life; but I am afraid he forgot the service, although I would have worked as hard to get him out of that vessel, even had I known beforehand he would try to injure me,” Porter wrote. All those rescued from the Greyhound were taken aboard an Army transport (though Porter decided he had had enough of Army vessels that day, and for many to come, and soon found passage back aboard a Navy tug).
The true cause of the explosion was never determined; there was no formal inquiry into what happened aboard the Greyhound or the circumstances surrounding the explosion and fire. But Porter was convinced the explosion wasn’t an accident.
In the admiral’s eyes, the men ordered off at Bermuda Hundred had planned to capture Butler and any other dignitaries aboard, then set off explosives hidden “among the coal, which they could easily do when the firemen’s backs were turned,” to destroy the ship. The first part of their plot was foiled, but not the second. He added that the saboteurs most likely saturated the woodwork near the engine and firerooms with fuel, so that it quickly ignited when the “coal torpedo” exploded. “In devices for blowing up vessels the Confederates were far ahead of us,” he concluded, “putting Yankee ingenuity to shame.”
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Sources: Official Records of the Union and the Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, Ser. 1, Vol. 12; Robert Browning, “From Cape Charles to Cape Fear: The North Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the Civil War”; Linda Lasswell Crist, ed., “Papers of Jefferson Davis: June 1865-December 1870”; Milton Perry, “Infernal Machines: The Story of Confederate Submarine and Mine Warfare”; David Dixon Porter, “Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War”; J. Thomas Scharf, “History of the Confederate States Navy From Its Organization to the Surrender of its Last Vessel”; James A. Shutt and Joseph Thatcher, “The Courtenay Coal Torpedo,” Military Collector and Historian, Vol. 11; New York Times, May 18, 1865.
John Grady is a former editor of Navy Times and a retired director of communications at the Association of the United States Army. His biography of Matthew Fontaine Maury, Father of Oceanography will be published by McFarland in 2015. He is also a contributor to the Navy’s Civil War Sesquicentennial blog.