The cold rain drizzled down the tin roof of the union picket boat that unusually cold evening on the Roanoke River, turning the water into a shifting sheet of black ink.
Near midnight on October 27, 1864, Lieutenant William B. Cushing and the crew stood in the bow of a 30-foot picket boat, known as torpedoes, due to their iron-clad ramming rod on its bow.
His oilskin cap was slick with the rain as it began to turn to ice, eyes fixed on the faint glow of the town of Plymouth, just eight miles ahead.
You see, the confederate army was on the retreat, and the end of the war was now within ear shot. But the south’s last true bulwark of defense that held a chance? Was Its navy.
Behind him, thirteen volunteers crouched low, their breaths ghosting in the frigid air of the dark night sky. Among them was seamen Daniel George. An experienced sailor and a man, just risky enough to attempt a suicidal mission like this one.
serving under the borrowed name of William Smith, this seasoned sailor’s life had already swung between surviving 2 shipwrecks, 21 battlefields, and a previous prisoner of war camp.
“Keep her steady,” Cushing whispered. The boat’s small steam engine pulsed like a beating heart. On its bow jutted a twenty-foot spar, the deadly torpedo glimmering faintly beneath the rain.
George wiped water from his eyes and peered into the darkness. He could still scarcely believe he’d volunteered for this, a suicide mission, the men said. But George had escaped death too many times to be afraid of it now.
The mission, You see, was the CSS Albemarle. A floating fortress clad entirely in a thick layer of iron and cannons that had ruled these waters for almost a year. her iron hide shrugging off every cannonball the Union fleet had thrown against her, as it claimed the lives of every ship the union had thrown against her.
They slipped along the riverbank, past the black silhouettes of the cypress trees. Rebel pickets were posted all along the Roanoke, but the storm masked the hiss of their engine. A mile below Plymouth loomed the wreck of the USS Southfield, the ship the Albemarle herself had rammed and sunk that spring.
Confederate guards watched from her deck, lanterns glinting of muskets. “Silence,” Cushing mouthed. Every man froze. The launch drifted past, so near that George could hear a guard cough. No alarm. They had made it through.
Farther upstream sat the town of Plymouth. Moored to the town wharf, the CSS Albemarle loomed—a black, angular monster wrapped in a pen of floating logs thirty feet from her hull. Inside her iron shell, Lieutenant A. F. Warley, Confederate States Navy, paced the deck.
That night He had doubled the watch; the night was too dark, too wet, too still.
At three in the morning, a sentry peered into the rain and stiffened. “Steamer in the river!” he shouted. Warley snatched up his spyglass—barely a ghost of motion on the black water. “Hail her!”
“Boat ahoy!” came the challenge. An indistinct voice floated back, unintelligible over the wind. “Unsatisfactory!” Warley barked. “Sound the alarm! Open fire!”
A bell clanged. Rifles cracked. On the river, Cushing’s men heard the rattle of alarm. “They see us!” George hissed. “Then let’s give ’em something to see,” Cushing answered, voice calm as ever. “Full steam ahead!”
The little engine screamed. The picket boat surged forward, its bow throwing spray. Rebel bullets ripped the air like hissing bees; splinters flew as musket balls chewed through the thin hull.
“Canister!” Cushing ordered. From the small forward gun came a thunderous blast—grapeshot tearing into the wharf and scattering Confederate gunners about.
Through the rain and muzzle flashes, the Albemarle materialized: a hulking fortress of iron, her casemate rising above the logs like a cliff face. George gripped the torpedo lanyard. “Closer!” he shouted over the din.
The boat slammed against the log barrier. The men rocked violently as Cushing shouted, “Hold fast!” Steam roared, propeller churning. Slowly, impossibly, the launch clawed its way over the slippery logs, the spar dipping beneath the Albemarle’s overhang.
Inside the ironclad, Warley tried to bring his heavy Brooke gun to bear. “Fire the after gun!” he cried. The big cannon roared, but the muzzle could not depress low enough; the shot screamed just over the attackers’ heads and exploded on the far shore.
“Now, George—now!” Cushing yelled. George jammed the torpedo under the ironclad’s side. Then He yanked the lanyard, igniting the bomb.
A blinding flash—then the world convulsed.
The river erupted in fire and water. A column of spray and flame shot skyward, swallowing the picket boat whole. George felt himself lifted, weightless even, as the blast hurled him and his crewmates thirty feet through the air and into the frozen water.
When he struck the water, it was like hitting stone. The cold drove the breath from his lungs.
Under the Albemarle’s decks, the explosion ripped open her port bow. A gaping wound yawned beneath the waterline; the river poured in faster than men could stop it. Warley shouted for the pumps, for the donkey engine, for anything—but the water level rose too swiftly.
Within minutes the great ironclad lurched and settled, leaving only her casemate and smokestack above the surface. “Abandon ship!” someone cried.
Above, the Union picket boat was gone—shattered and sinking. The men thrashed in the water while Confederate rifles spat from the wharf. “Surrender!” a rebel voice shouted.
“Never!” Cushing barked back. “Every man for himself!”
George kicked hard, boots dragging him down. The weight of his pea coat and cartridges pulled at him like anchors. He shrugged free of the coat, clutching for air, for light, for anything. While Bullets plinked the water around him.
“Cushing!” he shouted, but the river swallowed his voice.
Somewhere in the chaos, Cushing swam toward the swampy bank, dodging fire, refusing capture. George’s arms burned, his side bleeding from shrapnel. He aimed for shore, strokes slowing, vision narrowing. At last his feet touched mud—and a rifle cocked above his head.
Confederate soldiers ringed him, shadows against the rising dawn. Exhausted and half-frozen, he lifted his hands. “All right, boys,” he rasped. “You’ve got me again.” They hauled him from the water. Behind him, through the mist, the Albemarle listed drunkenly, her iron hide vanishing beneath the river’s surface.
At sunrise, Lieutenant Warley surveyed the wreck from the fort. Only the ship’s armored roof and a wisp of smoke marked where the Confederacy’s pride had stood. “The pickets gave no warning,” he muttered bitterly. “The shore guns were silent.” He knew a court of inquiry would follow, but it would not raise his ship from the mud.
Downstream, half-buried in swamp grass, Cushing crawled from the water, shivering but alive. He listened as two Confederate officers passed along the path. “She’s gone,” one said. “The Albemarle’s at the bottom.”
Cushing smiled through cracked lips. “Then it was worth it,” he whispered
For Daniel G. George, capture by the confederates meant another long ordeal as a POW till the wars end in Salisbury Prison, starvation, disease, the endless waiting. Yet he survived again. When peace finally came, he returned to the Chicopee and served until his muster in 1866.
On December 31, 1864, the Navy issued General Orders No. 45. Among the names of those commended for “extraordinary heroism” was William Smith—the alias George had used to get aboard the Chicopee.
His true identity later revealed, Congress hailed him as a man whose “unconscious patriotism and sublime courage” rivaled any legend of war.
That rainy night on the Roanoke would live forever in naval history—a handful of men in a wooden boat striking down an armored titan. The Albemarle’s iron plates now slept beneath the mud, and the Roanoke ran free again to the sea.
And somewhere in the current, if one listens closely, the river still carries the echo of Cushing’s final command and the moment Daniel G. George pulled the lanyard that ended a giant.
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