The two alleged spies collared by the New Orleans policemen were Erastus Hickok of Harrisonburg, Louisiana and Joseph R. Booth from Vicksburg.  Both men were reportedly carpenters but the story takes an unusual turn as they denied the charge of spying and announced to First District Recorder William Emerson that they had made the plans of an "infernal machine' to destroy the blockading Union warships.  Apparently Emerson believed the story as the clerk of the court did not enter their names into the docket book.  The phrase "infernal machine" was also used in reference to another New Orleans vessel, the first Civil War ironclad.  The turtle back iron plates which gave the ironclad her distinctive silhouette were laid over the sturdy hull of the former towboat ENOCH TRAIN to create the C.S.S. Manassas.  The carpenters claimed they had designed an infernal machine, not converted a steamer.  To have designed a seagoing special weapon meant that the two carpenters had knowledge above the average  cabinet maker or house builder.  These two men were likely pattern makers, a skill usually associated with those who worked in iron to create the finished project.

No information has been unearthed relating to the mysterious carpenter Hickok however, the 1860 directory of the City of Vicksburg holds intriguing circumstantial evidence regarding Mr. Booth.  In 1860, a John Booth was listed as an "engineer and machinist" and was employed at a Vicksburg foundry.  Ironically another gentleman named George Booth was employed in that city at the Southern Railroad machine shop. The story solidifies a bit more when compared to the 1860 Warren County, Mississippi census. 

Apparently John Booth ran a boarding house in Vicksburg and all 16 male occupants who were of working age were either blacksmiths or machinist. Most of the ironmongers (including Booth) came from the United Kingdom and a few from Canada.  Only one hailed from the United States and he called Louisiana home.  The Crescent City was the vital center of pre-war commerce for the South; James R. McClintock and Baxter Watson operated a steam gauge manufacturing shop at 31 Front Levee Street.  These forward thinking mechanical engineers built a submarine (1861-1862) known appropriately as the Pioneer with work conducted at the Leeds Foundry.

By 1861 Booth and perhaps his relatives could have moved to New Orleans to seek more lucrative employment upon the outbreak of the war.  One "J. Booth" was listed as a blacksmith, and lived at Constance and N. Seventh Streets.  A Carpenter named "T Booth" had his residence nearby at Constance and Eighth Streets.  Constance street was a focal point of machine work and metallurgy as one small firm at 32 Constance Street, Thomas H. Borden & Company, also manufactured Steam Gauges. 

Another point of geographic familiarity, the Leeds Foundry,  a  cradle of American submarine construction, had their office at the corner of DeLord and Constance Streets.  The 1861 New Orleans directory lists only one "Hickok," however this thread can not be easily dismissed as Mr. Daniel S. Hickok resided at Lake House on Shell Road.

The noted Crescent City naval enthusiast and inventor John Roy, had urged the officials of the embryonic Confederate Navy to build an already designed submarine that would be "equipped with a mechanism capable of raising and depressing the vessel at will, and a separate apparatus for turning the vessel,"  Again another hint as Roy stated the vessel was "an English invention."  As to construction of the mystery submarine, the 2004 broadcast of History Detectives  examined the vaporous history of the small Civil War era submersible formerly housed at the Cabildo.  The detectives claim that the mystery submarine was  'built entirely from scratch"  and states that late in the war the South ran low on resources and had to improvise with existing metal objects. 

When the Hunley was built in 1863, it was constructed from a converted boiler." Conservator Dave Johnson, working on the project to restore the New Orleans submarine, commented that the "hull plates are  formed in a strange pattern-this is not a converted boiler." During the episode it was reported that "each panel was rolled on the mystery submarine.  The iron panels were one-quarter inch thick iron sheets fastened with five/eights inch counter sunk rivets.

The claim that the South ran low on resources late in the war is untrue, the South and especially New Orleans, suffered from shortages at the onset of the blockade.  Some New Orleans ship builders snapped up available iron in September 1861, this firm had almost entirely exhausted its then available pig iron stocks.  In a desperate attempt to gather in enough iron to meet its contractual obligation, Tredegar sent agents to New Orleans and other cities to acquire dwindling supplies of scrap metals. As New Orleans firms were transitioning from civilian production to the manufacture of armaments, armor-clad and special weapons, iron and other vital metallurgical materials became scarce overnight.  New Orleans was forced to improvise and cobble together a military manufacturing base as the Union armies marched south and the blockade tightened from Hampton Roads to the Texas shores. 

The Crescent City experienced a shipbuilding boom yet the government in Richmond was slow to pay its accounts. Partially as a result of unscrupulous ship owners dumping worn out steamers on the fledgling Confederate navy authorities and the penury of the Treasury  Department, Confederate government credit fell to a low level in New Orleans.  Mismanagement, supply shortages and steamships of insufficient quality caused the New Orleans Daily True Delta  to warn "It is clear that there is much dangerously wrong."

The Crescent City needed a new weapon to counter the Federal numerical and qualitative superiority afloat.  The greatest shortage the South experienced during the war was in skilled workers.  One New Orleans shipbuilder lamented "There was a great deficiency of mechanics of all kinds, especially in the machine shops.. There was a good deal of Government work on hand at all the shops in New Orleans, and they were all pressed for hands."

William Morrison Robinson, Jr. surveyed the mystery submarine at Camp Nicholls in the mid-1920's and pronounced it " the product of true craftsmanship."  Regarding the strange"  patterned well formed plates used in the construction, a wartime advertisement in a New Orleans newspaper offers a possible source for almost purpose made materials. George M. Longacre, a "Consulting and Mechanical Engineer" offered two steamboat chimneys for sale in the spring of 1862 .  The chimneys were second hand but in good condition and made of "number 10 iron" Accounting for gauges of sheet iron, No. 10 equals app. 1/8 inch thickness, offering a possible explanation if the sheets were folded over and laminated to create the strength of the quarter inch thick rolled plates on the mystery submarine from a steamboat funnel procured from Longacre or another merchant offering similar rolled iron rarities. 

By the late 1850's steamboat chimneys towered as high as 90 feet above the water. The tall smokestacks increased the forced draft in the  boilers and the sparks were usually extinguished by the great fall before they sprinkled the deck, thereby reducing the threat of fire.  Even light steamers of one hundred tons or smaller frequently carried 50 foot high chimneys.  With one iron funnel of average length, the clandestine shipwrights would have sufficient material with which to build their submarine.

The arrest of Booth and Hickok in the First ward places them across the river from Algiers, the dockyards where the other more conventional infernal machines, the Manassas, was converted into an ironclad by the workmen at John Hughes Shipyard. The proximity of the Leeds Works could point to the likelihood that a certain type of craftsmanship was required to manufacture experimental   submarine hulls.  Therefore, the same hands who built the Pioneer were possibly also engaged in building a similar sister, the mystery submarine,  Leeds would have had the necessary workforce, as it was the largest iron works in the city during the early years of the war.  Other nearby shops such as the John Clark foundry at Tchoupitoulas & North Orange Streets or the sheet iron works of Charles Byrne at 46 Tchoupitoulas or those of Wheeler  and Forstall at 185 Tchoupitoulas offer other intriguing possibilities for the likely birthplace of the mysterious submarine.

One report claims that the submersible was made by ""Captain Hunley and two Confederate soldiers during the last few months of 1861 and the early part of 1862." The facts related to this submarine and the Pioneer are interlaced with similar lineage in the secrecy of the times and with those dedicated to creating a unique war machine for  Dixie.  As the Pioneer was the prototype for the Hunley,  it is possible that the mystery submarine was a test bed for the Pioneer.  Indeed the two ironclads Louisiana and Mississippi  stand as wartime examples of naval experimentation in Confederate New Orleans.  Built side by side sometimes using the same workers, the two warships, built by two different teams, were radically different in design.  Clearly the Southerners were not willing to place their faith in only one untried blueprint for their ironclad steam batteries therefore it is possible that the same can be said for the crafting of Crescent City submarines.  The pedestrian proximity is a key feature relating to the two men reportedly engaged in designing the infernal  machine.;  With Farragut's fleet blockading the river delta and the spy scare deepening, anyone could be questioned or apprehended.  Provost Marshal Dufour even ordered Chief of Police McClellan arrested for interfering with a patrol  The Daily Picayune  assessed the climate by announcing "our provost marshals are in earnest."  With the onset of martial law, infernal machine builders, especially those of foreign birth, would have been less likely to travel too far from their homes or places of employment in order to avoid running afoul of the roving Provost guards.

Meanwhile, others in New Orleans were continuing experiments with new engines of naval warfare. Arthur Barbarian demonstrated his newly fashioned torpedo on Lake Pontchartrain when he blew up a skiff in a shattering explosion.  Wives and daughters of sailors serving the Southland were given preferences for employment at the Naval Ordinance laboratory in New Orleans.  Among the delicate work performed by these women was the fitting of fuses and friction primers.  It is possible that they equipped the experimental torpedoes tested on Lake Pontchartrain with powder and detonation devises.  Torpedoes, later known to modern navies as mines, were confusingly also referred to during the war as "infernal machines."  Midshipman James Morgan, CSN, also referred to the LeMat handgun, a combination shotgun and revolver as an  "infernal machine" further complicating the reference to manned underwater vessels.

1895 Mystery Submarine

The mystery submarine apparently had a three-man crew and was powered by two men sitting on iron brackets ":fastened opposite, on each side of the vessel, immediately  under the hatchway" worked a crank shaft by hand to rotate the propeller.  The third member of the crew was the commander who stood forward of the hatch in order to navigate the vessel and to operate the diving planes.  One source claims that at the launch of the submarine in 1862, she slipped beneath the water and never surfaced.  Reportedly two slaves  suffocated on this trial dive.  Another source claims three sailors died within her hull on her only run.

William Robinson opined that at the bow of the submarine, the two inch wide circular tube " was used for forward observation rather that as a socket for a torpedo spar."  Another reason for the forward tube could be related to an intelligence report received from a pro-union Mobile, Alabama man.  In September 1861, the U.S. Consul in Hamburg, Germany received a report which featured a crude drawing of an ironclad "Turtle"
then building at a New Orleans dock.  The low lying vessel was capable of deflecting cannon balls with two inches of iron shielding rendering the cigar  shaped vessel virtually imperious to Federal guns.  This was obviously not the mystery submarine but was a somewhat speculative report on the outfitting of the Manassas.  However the report does mention that the "Hellish Engine" was equipped with "a steam borer or auger, about the size of a man's arm above the elbow, which in a moment , bores a hole into the vessel.  It is possible that this intelligence report confused the Manassas with another mysterious weapon.  Perhaps the little submarine was equipped with a hand powered auger with which to install an explosive in a hostile hull, in the same manner Bushnell's Revolutionary War Turtle planned to attack H.M.S. Eagle in 1776.  The French inventor Brutus de Villeroi, designed several improved submarines for the French Navy and included in his specification an auger to attack an unfortunate wooden hulled opponent.  Emperor Napoleon III did not support the idea and de Villeroi's undersea apparatus would have to wait until the next century before France christened a steel shark festooned with the tricolor.

The Hamburg dispatch was not the only report of a novel Rebel creation preparing to embark on a stealthy crusade against the blockading fleet below New Orleans.  In June 1861, a school teacher from New England had been teaching a little north of New Orleans and had heard of an "infernal submarine" being constructed in the Crescent City equipped with a sharp iron or steel pointed prow to perforate the bottom of the vessel." After she escaped to the North, the school mistress related this information to the Navy Department in Washington through a friend. The unnamed informant also stated that after the Union vessel was perforated, an explosive charge would detonate inside the stricken ship   Although she could have been describing a spar torpedo, it is interesting to note that the account references New Orleans newspapers as a source for supplemental  hints regarding  "infernal machines" constructed by competent engineers, etc." in the area.,  The school teacher's  report gives the impression that she had detailed information regarding the submarine as her sponsor put "implicit reliance in the correctness of this information."

One newspaper account of the era heralds celebrated New Orleans inventor John Roy as developing the plans for a "gun to load under water" which was to be fired from a submarine into a Yankee warship.  As fantastic as this may seem, before the war, Lodner Phillips had designed and built a submarine  to use as a salvage vessel on the Great Lakes,.  That vessel was successfully employed in that capacity from 1851-1855 and even utilized an underwater cannon with which the crew blew up subsurface obstructions.  The concept of underwater cannon as championed by Roy was also  claimed by an inventor in Europe.  During the war a Spanish inventor in Barcelona named Narciso Mouturiol built a submersible he called "Ictineo." This iron fish was reportedly armed with underwater cannon, a ram and torpedoes.  The tireless de Villeroi also designed a French submarine which was to have been armed with a 4-pounder underwater cannon.

Early test with Confederate torpedoes were utilized by the attacking vessels towing the torpedo behind in its wake as it approached a floating target.  The famous Hunley would successfully explode a towed torpedo against an anchored scow during trials near Mobile on July 30, 1863.  Robinson claims that over a year before the Hunley trials, the New Orleans mystery submarine was also armed with a "Magazine of Powder" attached to a tow line.  Like Roy's underwater cannon, the torpedo was not a new weapon.  The Russians had used torpedoes in the defense of Kronstadt, their Baltic naval base during the Crimean War of 1854-1856.

As New Orleans was readying her ironclads, fortifications and infernal machines to meet the Yankee invasion, another Confederate city was experimenting with submarines.  A former U.S. Navy officer, William G. Cheeney, had received a commission in the newborn Confederate Navy in 1861 and was busy in Richmond building a "submarine boat." Records reveal that Cheeney obtained crucial components such as boiler plate, castings, bolts, and an air pump from the Tredegar Iron works with which to build his undersea vessel.  A Union spy employed by the  grandstanding detective Allen Pinkerton, witnessed the trial of the submarine on the James in November 1861. The female informant known as "Mrs. Baker" witnessed the submerged submarine approach a scow anchored in the river, move off and then a "terrific explosion" rent the air and hurled the scow skyward.  The submarine reportedly had attached an explosive charge to the anchored target and after backing away to a safe distance, had detonated the magazine with a long wire trailing back to the submersible.  Mrs. Baker also noted that the submarine was equipped with an air hose which was buoyed by a float painted dark green to blend in with the color of the river waters.  This float device was the only method which permitted the observers to mark the presence of the stealthy subsurface craft..   Another tantalizing clue was included in her report as Mrs. Baker claimed that this submarine was a prototype for a larger submersible then building in Richmond.

Researcher Frank Furman is investigating the theory that Cheeney's submarine was transported from Richmond to New Orleans with the Tredegar crafted center propeller shaft for the C.S.S. Mississippi, then nearing completion at Jefferson City in April of 1862.  Cheeney had employed five men , one was a Richmond carpenter-probably a pattern maker, to work on "submarine batteries" in December of 1861. Mrs. Baker had referred to the James River submersible as a "submarine battery.  On May 13, 1862, the Tredegar Iron Works submitted an invoice for "alterations to Submarine boat." Included in the modifications were billing cost for Grinding Glass for sight" and "False Bows put on boat." Upon initial review,, the mention of the submarine as a singular entity could support the claim that the prototype was sent to New Orleans.  However no mention is made of a submarine arriving in New Orleans with the Mississippi's propeller shaft.  Indeed, the fifty foot long shaft was too large for any railroad car available in the South.  A  special car had to be fashioned for its transport to the Crescent City.  It is not likely that the Secretary Mallory, their friend and benefactor for months pressing for the rapid completion of the vital propeller shaft, it is also unlikely that they would have omitted any reference to a submarine when the shaft arrived in New Orleans on 'April 9, 1862.

Acting Master Cheney defected to the Federals in September, 1862 and reported on his work to his old compatriots.  It is certain that any reference to a submarine sent by special train to New Orleans would not have been overlooked by a two time turncoat eager to return to the graces of the Navy Department in Washington.  Further more, as John Roy had mentioned that a submarine diagram, presented to the Confederate Navy authorities in New Orleans was an English invention, Cheeney's creation must be discounted , as he was a native of New York.  The mystery submarine currently undergoing  preservation in Baton Rouge has no "False Bows" therefore discounting yet another connection to a submarine Tredegar billed for in May of 1862.  Another reference to Richmond infernal machines also serves to remove the Louisiana mystery submarine from a James River conception.  As stated previously, many industrial materials were already at a premium in the South as early as 1861.  The James River submarine was possibly built with boiler plate however one Richmond area manufacturer had constructed torpedoes from boiler plate as well.  These "torpedo-tanks" were crafted from boiler plate 1/2 inch in thickness.  The New Orleans mystery submarine was constructed of sheet iron 1/4 in thickness; it is unlikely that boiler plate sheet iron supplies available to manufacture torpedoes in the Richmond area would have been very different from those used to manufacture Cheeney's submarines).

As the Southerners were busy under the waves, in the North an intrepid inventor was demonstrating his undersea boat.  The ever present de Villeroi, had built a salvage submarine in 1859 reportedly to recover items from wrecked ships and to scour the bottom of the behemoth transatlantic wonder. the Great Easter.  The Frenchman was about the business of preparing to demonstrate the abilities of his submarine near the Philadelphia Navy Yard when the harbor police seized the vessel on May 17, 1862.  The patriotic constables of Philadelphia feared that "it was designed to aid and assist Jefferson Davis in the benevolent occupation of transferring Federal vessels of war into fly morsel of wood and iron  "therefore the "whale" like craft was seized for the Union.  The Federal Navy then rewarded de Villeroi with a contract for a submersible larger that the prototype salvage boat.  The New submarine was appropriately dubbed the Alligator.  Just as de Villeroi built a smaller submarine to demonstrate his mechanical ability, and Cheeney planned to build larger boats from expertise gained from his unnamed prototype, the evidence of practical 19th century mechanical aptitude suggests that the New Orleans mystery submarine was also likely a test bed for a larger submarine.  Again circumstantial evidence points to the Horace Hunley sponsored team of McClintock and Watson as the likely candidates and the Leeds Iron Works as the facility of choice.

Another defector provides a tenuous clue to Confederate submarine construction along the Gulf Coast.  On February 24, 1863, a dispatch was sent to Union naval officials from the stem sloop U.S.S. Susquehanna then on blockade duty off Mobile bay.  The subject of the report was a deserter from the gunboat C.S.S. Selma, a wooden steamer on station with the Confederate squadron with the bay.  James Carr, a native of Brooklyn, New York, had been a Mississippi River steamboat hand when the war broke out.  He was soon thereafter deposited in the New Orleans Parish prison as a suspected Union spy. He was released when he promised to enlist in the service of the Southern navy then building up in the Crescent City.  While serving aboard the Confederate gunboat McRae, he  was wounded in the uneven contest with Admiral Farragut's juggernaut and eventually reported to Motile and his new ship the Selma.  Carr told his colleagues in the Federal Navy that a submarine ""propelled by a screw which is turned by hand capable of holding 5 persons and having a torpedo" was ready for service at Mobile.  The submarine ventured out to attack the Union fleet near Fort  Morgan on or about February 14, 1863, and the submersible was "in charge of the Frenchman who invented it." The vessel steered toward the enemy warships but had to cut the torpedo adrift, when the current pulled the tiny vessel off course and out to seal  Carr also reported that "three or four other" submarines were being built in Mobile at the time.  One such craft was the Hunley which was shipped by rail to Charleston In August of 1863.  The boat built by the unknown Frenchman was not the Hunley, as the famous refashioned boiler had a nine man crew.  Perhaps the Frenchman was a New Orleans citizen who, like Watson, McClintock, Horace Hunley and others (maybe including torpedo maker Arthur Barbarin ) fled before Union invader Ben Butler's army arrived, and removed to Alabama's port city to start anew.

Reasons for the dearth of information regarding the mystery submarine were undoubtedly the result of security measures prior to the Union naval attack in April of 1862.  Another reason why so little is known of her early history is due in part to the rapacious needs of the Confederates Navy.  In the fall of 1861, Commodore Hollins was determined to acquire the Manassas in order to attack the Federal ships anchored at the Head of Passes.,  The privateer crew of the Manassas, defied the  requisition order by claiming the Confederates "did not have men enough to take her."  The gunboat McRae steamed up alongside and lowered a boat.  The men on  the armor-clad shouted that they would kill any navy seamen who boarded their privateer.  Undeterred, Lieutenant Alexander F. Worley, CSN, stormed up the deck plates with revolver drawn and the civilian crew submitted without bloodshed.  The ironclad was at a stroke, the property of the Confederate States Navy.  Private capital, toil and the hope of prize money were trampled by the necessities of war.  Captain John A. Stevenson left his privateer dream and went ashore with tears in his eyes.   Any builder of another infernal machine privateer in New Orleans would have been very aware of the Confederate Navy's glory robbing exploits regarding Captain Stevenson and the Manassas and would likely have been more determined to maintain some level of secrecy until their submersible was fully tested.

The mystery submarine was launched and lost under the uncertainties of war and remained forgotten until 1878 when a dredge clearing a channel in Bayou St. John happened upon her iron skinned carcass buried in the muck.  When subsequently pulled to the surface and dumped ashore that year, this relic became an enigmatic reminder of the genius and desperation that was war time New Orleans.  Over the decades, this pathfinder of subsurface warfare has only sparingly oozed hints of her past.  With the restoration complete she will serve as a fitting triumph to the overlooked hands that formed the streamline shape and those who sank to their graves within her.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew R. English received a Bachelors degree in History from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1984 and a Masters degree in History from the same institution in 1987.  He is currently a Major in the United States Air Force. Having published a history of Hattiesburg, Mississippi entitled: All Off for Gordon's Station  in 2000, this is his second book.