Singer’s Secret Service Corps: Causing Chaos During the Civil War
By Mark K. Ragan

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Along the remote windswept coast of southern Texas, two days’ sail from Galveston, lay a backwater, mosquito-infested village called La Vaca. About as far removed from Richmond and the war in the East as one could get and still be within the borders of the Confederacy, La Vaca—later known as Port Lavaca—hardly seemed worth military protection. Still, Captain Daniel Shea’s company of Texas Light Artillery, a small poorly equipped home guard unit consisting mainly of middle-aged men unfit for active field service, kept a determined vigil on Matagorda Bay.

All remained quiet on this western front until one day in the fall of 1862, when a small Union armada brazenly steamed into the bay and fired more than 250 rounds onto La Vaca’s streets and into the homes of the soldiers manning the port’s guns. One of those men, a 6-foot-3 gunsmith originally from Ohio, swore that would be the last time a Northern fleet slipped into a Southern harbor without a fight.

The gunsmith, Private Edgar C. Singer, was no stranger to new contraptions and risky ventures. A nephew of Isaac Merritt Singer, the inventor of the first commercially successful sewing machine, Edgar also had worked on his uncle’s sewing machine design and had been awarded a patent for “Improvements.” It was hardly surprising, then, that within days of the La Vaca attack Private Singer began experimenting with small charges of gunpowder in a water-filled barrel behind his house. He quickly became convinced that the destructive power of gunpowder could be unleashed from an underwater mine. But he needed both men and money.

For men, Singer turned to the local Masonic lodge, which he had joined upon arriving in Texas in 1840. His first recruit and partner in experiments was lodge leader and friend Dr. John Fretwell, a 47-year-old private in Shea’s artillery company. To demonstrate their new nautical weapon in La Vaca, Singer and Fretwell chose an old partially beached hulk as the target.

As one postwar report noted: “The mine was placed alongside and set off, and the vessel was blown to atoms. Commander Shea was astounded and immediately ordered Singer to report to General [John] Magruder at Houston.”

By the time Singer and Fretwell arrived in Houston to meet with Magruder, the general was mobilizing forces for the recapture of Galveston, which had fallen to a Union flotilla in early October. Magruder launched a joint land and sea attack on the port on December 31, 1863, capturing Gal-veston the following day—the first and only time that the Confederates reclaimed a major port city from the Union.

Magruder was skeptical of Singer’s mine contraption, but he eventually gave the inventors 25 pounds of gunpowder and instructed them to demonstrate their device in Buffalo Bayou, the waterway running through Houston. Singer and Fretwell submerged their mine, then floated an old scow above it. A report noted that when the boat struck the mine, “she was blown into kindling wood….”

A highly pleased Magruder ordered Singer to report to Maj. Gen. Dabney H. Maury, commanding the District of the Gulf, with headquarters at Mobile, Ala. Engineers who subsequently evalu­­­ated the merits of Singer’s device for the War Department in Richmond urged its adoption “as a powerful accessory to our limited means.”

Singer went to work fabricating the explosive devices in his small workshop. The torpedo he created consisted of little more than a cylinder-shaped, watertight metal canister of gunpowder with a spring-loaded detonating rod. When a passing vessel triggered the mine, a spring-driven rod slammed into the end of the metal canister and detonated two internal percussion caps. The entire device was chained to a small anchor and submerged about 3 feet beneath the water, with its four-pronged detonating trigger in an upright position.

Although he had limited means, Singer managed to recruit more volunteers to help with torpedo production from his Masonic lodge. The Masons who made up the core of his operation included jeweler James Jones; William Longnecker, the 51-year-old owner of a livery stable; merchants John D. Braman and Robert W. Dunn; C.E. Frary, a Canadian-born carpenter and Singer’s brother-in-law; David Bradbury, a 51-year-old contractor who would be placed in charge of Singer’s torpedo facility at La Vaca and later of all torpedo operations west of the Mississippi; and 37-year-old store owner and father of five B.A. “Gus” Whitney.

Tags: Civil War, Civil War Times, Military Technology, Naval Battles, Weaponry

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