Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 03.djvu/266

 incompressibility of water and the developed gasses of the fired gunpowder of the torpedo under the vessel's bottom passing through it, as the direction of least resistance.

While other nations are pursuing the science of assault and defence theoretically and experimentally, the United States has had more practical experience with the torpedo, and better understands its capabilities, wisely discarding the iron and steel leviathians of the deep for models, as the Dreadnaught, Inflexible, Devastation, Alexandria, Iron Duke, Duillio, &c.

During the war with the Confederacy, there were 123 torpedoes planted in Charleston harbor and Stono river, which prevented the capture of that city and its conflagration. There were 101 torpedoes planted in Roanoke river, North Carolina, by which, of twelve vessels sent with troops and means to capture Fort Branch, but five returned. One was sunk by the fire from the fort, and the rest by torpedoes. Of the five iron-clads sent with other vessels to take Mobile, Alabama (one was tin-clad), three were destroyed by torpedoes. There were fifty-eight vessels sunk by torpedoes in the war, and some of them of no small celebrity, as Admiral Farragut's flag-ship the Harvest Moon, the Thorn, the Commodore Jones, the Monitor Patapsco, Ram Osage, Monitor Milwaukee, Housatonic and others. (Cairo in Yazoo river). Peace societies we must acknowledge a failure in settling national differences by arbitration, since enlightened nations go to war for a mere political abstraction, and vast armies in Europe are kept ready for action, to be frustrated, however, by this torpedo system of mining, carried out according to views.

For three years the Confederate Congress legislated on this subject, passing each house alternately for an organized torpedo corps until the third year, when it passed both houses with acclamation, and $6,000,000 appropriated, but too late, and the delay was not shortened by this enormous appropriation.

Could a piece of ordnance be made to sweep a battle field in a moment of time, there soon would be no battle field, or could a blast of wind loaded with deadly mephitic malaria in one night, sent like the destroying angel in Sanacherib's army, or the earth be made to open in a thousand places with the fire of death for destruction, as in the days of Korah, Dothan and Abiram, to which this system tends, then and then only may we beat the sword into the ploughshare, the spear into the pruning-hook, and nations learn wars no more.