re: 150 years ago this day...

Tuesday, 19 January 1864

Much is often made of the disadvantages the “agricultural, pastoral” South faced in fighting the “industrialized, technological” North during the Civil War. This should not be taken to extremes, however. The Confederacy certainly had manufacturing capabilities, and moreover had some very ingenious persons employed in the war effort to use creativity in weapons design. One such was a nasty, little item devised around this time: the “coal torpedo.” It was a hollow lump of cast iron, the hollow part of which was packed with gunpowder and sealed. This was then milled, ground and painted until it looked like a perfectly ordinary lump of coal. All that was required was for a passerby at a Union naval fueling station to drop this into a coal pile about to be loaded onto a ship. When the bomb was shoveled into the ship’s boiler it didn’t even need a fuse to turn it into a devastating explosive. Not enough were made to have much of an effect, although one would come close next year in City Point, Virginia.

Thomas E. Courtenay, engaged in secret service for the Confederacy, informed Colonel Henry E. Clark, that manufacture of "coal torpedoes" was nearing completion, and stated: "The castings have all been completed some time and the coal is so perfect that the most critical eye could not detect it." These devices, really powder filled cast iron bombs, shaped and painted to resemble pieces of coal, were to be deposited in Federal naval coal depots, from where they would eventually reach and explode ships' boilers. During the next few months Rear Admiral David D. Porter, commanding the Mississippi Squadron, became greatly concerned over Confederate agents assigned to distribute the coal torpedoes, and wrote Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles that he had "given orders to commanders of vessels not to be very particular about the treatment of any of these desperadoes if caught- only summary punishment will be effective."

Boats from the USS Roebuck, under Acting Master Sherrill, seized the British schooner Eliza and sloop Mary inside Jupiter Inlet, Florida. Both blockade runners carried cargoes of cotton. Three days later the Mary, en route to Key West, Florida, commenced leaking, ran aground, and was wrecked. The prize, crew and most of the cotton were saved. In ten days, Sherrill's vigilance and initiative had enabled him to take six prizes.

This evening a party scouting for Colonel Williams, in command of the military post at Rossville, Arkansas, returned to camp, having captured in the Magazine Mountains, some fifteen miles east of the post, the county records of Vernon and Cedar Counties, Missouri. The books and papers so captured and retained were worth one million dollars to those counties.

Colonel Powell Clayton attacked Brigadier General Joseph Orville Shelby's smaller Southern force, twenty miles below Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on the Monticello Railroad. The fight lasted half an hour, when the enemy fled, pursued by Clayton with his command, for two hours and a half. The Confederates were driven seven miles. Shelby's force was estimated at almost eight hundred. Colonel Clayton marched sixty miles in twenty-four hours, and made fight and gained a victory.

An unsuccessful attempt was made to burn the residence of President Jefferson Davis, at Richmond, Virginia.

A sale of confiscated estates took place at Beaufort, South Carolina.