Hunley Crewmen Found - December 1999 Civil War Times Feature

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Hunley Crewmen Found

BY SCHUYLER KROPF

Two of the South’s great loves–college football and the Confederacy–came together in July when archaeologists confirmed the discovery of four members of the submarine C.S.S. H.L. Hunley’s first crew buried beneath the Citadel’s football stadium in Charleston, South Carolina. The skeletal remains were found among two dozen other graves in a long-lost Confederate cemetery paved over and forgotten when 21,000-seat Johnson Hagood Stadium was built in 1948.

The disappearance of the cemetery was apparently the result of a clerical error. A 1947 vote by the city council gave Charleston’s stadium commission permission to move all the graves to nearby Magnolia Cemetery, where more than 1,100 soldiers from all over the Confederacy are buried. According to the note written by the city’s recording clerk, however, the council had approved the relocation of only the headstones. The four Hunley sailors were found in two unmarked pits–their coffins stacked on top of each other near the home bleachers’ C-gate entrance, parallel to the 20 yard-line.

Proof that the remains were of Hunley sailors came from the fact that all four bodies were dismembered, with rough chop and hack gashes on the leg and arm bones. “There are cut marks on the arms, like a saw or sharp object was used to cut the bone,” said volunteer digger Randy Burbage of the Confederate Heritage Trust, one of several reenactors who took part in the excavation.

“He’s a mess,” Jonathan Leader, spokesman for the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, said of the first skeleton found. “It seems he was very contorted, with parts of him dismembered and put back into place.”

The Hunley sank for the first time during a freak accident in Charleston Harbor on August 29, 1863. According to Lieutenant Charles H. Hasker, who survived the accident, Hunley commander Lieutenant John Payne “got fouled in the manhole by the hawser and in trying to clear himself got his foot on the lever which controlled the fins.” Payne had just given the order for the boat to move out, and the submarine dove while its hatches were still open. Four men escaped the sinking sub, but five others were trapped inside its iron hull and drowned. Ten days passed before the craft was recovered. By that time the bodies of the trapped crew were so badly bloated and contorted that salvagers were forced to cut off limbs so they could extricate the men through the sub’s tiny hatchways.

After their recovery the bodies were transported by horse cart to the city’s maritime graveyard where they were buried in unmarked graves among dozens of other dead Confederate sailors and marines. Four of the Hunley victims were found in the July dig; the whereabouts of the fifth is unknown.

Historians believe the men were buried with honors but that their role in the submarine’s development made for a hasty, low-profile ceremony. “It was probably a very quick event because they didn’t want any publicity,” said South Carolina Hunley Commission Chairman Glenn McConnell. “They knew the North would be monitoring anything that was in the newspapers. They didn’t want to put much attention on the fact the Hunley had suffered this fate.”

A Catholic priest may have been present for the interment, as the Hunley’s first crew was composed mainly of Irish immigrants who had arrived in New Orleans before the war. When the Civil War began in 1861, some of these men joined the Confederate Navy, eager for adventure and a steady paycheck. The dead men’s identities are Frank Doyle, John Kelly, Michael Cane, Nicholas Davis and Absolum Williams, but archaeologists are unsure which four they found.

The five men joined the Hunley project after Horace Hunley brought his experimental sub to Charleston from Mobile, Alabama, just weeks after the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1-3, 1863. Once in Charleston, Hunley made a personal plea for a volunteer crew by soliciting men from the Merrimac-style ironclads Chicora and Palmetto State, which were trapped inside Charleston Harbor by the Union blockade.

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