Love and War

Charles wasn't the only member of his family with a growing sense that the death of the Confederacy was inevitable. Cooper believed it, though he never said it aloud, not even to Judith.

Cooper and his family were in Charleston, sent there the preceding fall by Secretary Mallory. Lucius Chickering had accompanied his superior.

The city to which Cooper had come home was no longer the charming seaport of lamplight, good manners, and chiming church bells with which he had fallen in love after his father exiled him there. Charleston was still scarred from the great fire of '61, exhausted by blockade and siege, menaced by the enemy on water and on land. The graceful old town was hated throughout the North like no other. Above all, the Yankees wanted to recapture Fort Sumter or obliterate it, for purposes more symbolic than military.

Cooper found that the old waterfront complex of the Main family firm, the Carolina Shipping Company, no longer existed as such. The military had taken it over, enlarging the warehouses and permitting the piers to sag and rot because Charleston could not be supplied by sea. The cool, high house on Tradd Street had escaped the fire, although Cooper and Lucius were forced to arm themselves to drive out half a dozen white squatters. It then took brooms, paint, and fumigation to restore the house to something like its former condition. Not that the effort was really worth it, Judith thought scarcely a week after their arrival. Her husband spent every day and a good part of each night in his office or that of General Beauregard, in both places trying to lend needed direction and confidence to the testing and launching of the submersible boat Hunley.

A central fact of existence in Charleston was the federal blockade, which took the form of an inner ring of ironclad monitors, a chain barrier, and an outer perimeter of wooden ships. Here, as everywhere, the blockade was proving cruelly effective, and not merely because it continued to isolate the South from sources of essential goods. With the Yankees in virtual control of the Atlantic from the Chesapeake to Florida, it was deemed necessary to spread troops thinly along the entire coast, to cover all points that might be subject to attack. Scott's Anaconda was no longer a theory to be mocked. The coils were crushing the South to death.

A second nerve-wearing reality in the new Charleston was the continuing Yankee pressure to reduce or capture the city. Since coming home, Cooper had heard the terrible story again and again. The preceding spring, Du Pont had tried to take Charleston with a naval assault and failed. After that, the Union had adopted a mixed strategy. Early in July, Federals under Brigadier Quincy Gillmore had established beachheads on Morris Island and begun installation of their batteries among the dunes. Then, on July 18, some six thousand Union infantry had surged forward and surmounted the parapets of Battery Wagner, a Cummings Point fortification whose guns commanded the harbor entrance.

By evening the Yanks had been driven back to their lines, and with particular fury because Shaw's Fifty- fourth Massachusetts Colored Infantry had been in the van of the attack. Black faces swarming over bastions held by white soldiers made the whole town remember old names: Nat Turner; Denmark Vesey.

The failure to keep Battery Wagner galled the Yanks, but it had no significant effect on the siege campaign or the speed with which it took shape. Union artillerists kept working, in scorching sunlight all day and beneath calcium flares all night, to place siege mortars and great breeching guns in their sand batteries. Charleston lived in special dread of one eight-inch, two-hundred-pound Parrott nicknamed 'the Swamp Angel.' The great monster of a gun was intended to send incendiary shells on a low trajectory of eight thousand yards — right into the city. Cooper had read of the Swamp Angel in Richmond, thinking what an irony it would be if Hazard's had any part in its manufacture.

After days of practice firing, the massed guns opened the bombardment in mid-August. Since that time there had been three periods of heavy shelling, each lasting several days. Sumter now resembled a stone heap, though a garrison of five hundred, manning thirty-eight guns, still held on in the ruins. As for the Swamp Angel, it had done hardly any damage, had in fact blown up soon after discharging its first rounds.

The city withstood the bombardments and took relatively little damage. Sumter still flew the Confederate and state flags. Yet the enemy had neither given up nor gone away; the Yanks were out there in the haze beyond James Island, where Cooper had started his fledgling shipyard. To boost morale, President Davis had visited the city last November, on his way back to Richmond from the endangered West. Crowds gave Mr. Davis loud and friendly welcomes at each of his appearances. Cooper chose not to attend any of them. Only deeds, not patriotic homilies, could help now. His job was Hunley.

The fish-ship had been transported from Mobile last summer and since then had been plagued by misfortune. Docked with one hatch left open, she had been swamped when a much larger vessel passed nearby. All of her eight-man crew, including the skipper, Lieutenant Payne, were aboard. Only Payne escaped drowning.

During a test of the submersible with a replacement crew, five more men lost their lives. Old Bory gave up on Hunley, but changed his mind when Mallory reaffirmed his faith in the design, pleaded for patience, and promised that two of his trusted aides would be sent to supervise her testing and operation.

Meanwhile, on October 5, the torpedo boat David scored a hit on U.S.S. New Ironsides, a bark-rigged steamer with armor plating on her sides. David's spar torpedo successfully detonated six feet below the enemy's waterline, and although the sixty-pound charge was not enough to sink her, it did enough damage to force her to retire to Port Royal for repairs.

Cooper and Lucius arrived then. They pointed out to Beauregard that Hunley offered one advantage that David did not: silence. The official reports showed that David's engine had alerted New Ironsides to danger before the torpedo boat struck. Beauregard protested that he had had no time to scrutinize the reports, else he would have drawn the same conclusion. Cooper suspected the pompous little Creole was lying but settled for the general's promise of encouragement and cooperation. It was needed, he discovered. Hunley had already been nicknamed 'the Peripatetic Coffin.'

Hunley himself reached Charleston a few days later to take charge of the next test, on October 15. He and the entire replacement crew brought from Mobile lost their lives. 'She was buried bow first, nine fathoms down, at an angle of roughly thirty-five degrees,' Cooper said the night afterward. He hunched before a plate from which he had eaten nothing.

His daughter asked, 'How deep is nine fathoms, Papa?'

'Fifty-four feet.'

'Brrr. Nothing but sharks in the dark down there.'

And that Peripatetic Coffin.

'But you've already raised her —' Judith began.

'Raised her and opened her. The bodies were twisted into horrible postures.'

'Marie-Louise,' her mother said, 'you are excused.'

'But, Mama, I want to hear more about —'

'Go.'

After their daughter left the room, Judith briefly covered her mouth with her napkin. 'Really, Cooper, must you be so graphic in front of her?'

'Why should I sugar-coat the truth? She's practically a young woman. The disaster happened, and it needn't have.' He thumped the table. 'It needn't have! We studied the bodies carefully. Hunley's, now — his face was black and his right hand was over his head. Near the forward hatch, which he was clearly trying to open when he died. Two others had candles clasped in their hands. They were down by the bolts that secure the iron bars to the bottom of the hull. The bars are extra ballast, unfastened and dropped when the captain wants to come up. But not a single bolt had been removed, though the poor wretches had clearly been trying. It was all a puzzle till we made the important discovery: the seacock for the ballast tank at the bow was still open.'

'Telling you what?' Her tone and look said she wasn't sure she wanted to know.

'How she went down! Another crewman was manning the pump that empties the tanks. Panic must have ensured. Perhaps they used up the air, and the candles went out. In that confined space, that would do it. They were trying to bring her up, don't you see? But the seacock was open, and in the dark, with the panic, Hunley failed to order it closed. Or the man responsible was incapable of doing it. That's why they died. Operated properly, the vessel is seaworthy. She can kill plenty of Yankee sailors, and we're going to test her and train a crew until she's ready.'

Judith gave him a strange look: sad, yet not submissive. 'I'm frankly tired of hearing about your holy crusade to take human lives.'

He glared. 'Judah means nothing to you?'