The Battle of Portland Harbor
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Colby College Digital Commons @ Colby Honors Theses Student Research 2013 When the Confederates Terrorized Maine: The Battle of Portland Harbor Carter Stevens Colby College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses Part of the Military History Commons, and the United States History Commons Colby College theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed or downloaded from this site for the purposes of research and scholarship. Reproduction or distribution for commercial purposes is prohibited without written permission of the author. Recommended Citation Stevens, Carter, "When the Confederates Terrorized Maine: The Battle of Portland Harbor" (2013). Honors Theses. Paper 706. https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/706 This Honors Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Research at Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Colby. Stevens 1 When the Confederates Terrorized Maine: The Battle of Portland Harbor Carter Stevens April 26, 2013 Stevens 2 Acknowledgements This project has been a year-long undertaking and I am grateful to many people for their assistance through each, different stage of it. First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor Elizabeth Leonard, my adviser and first reader on this project. Her Civil War expertise, advice, and time were critical to my success, and I thank her for all this as well as for her willingness to answer any question I had, large or small. Secondly, I’d like to thank Professor Daniel Tortora, my second reader, and the rest of the Colby College History Department for all their assistance. I’d also like to thank the other thesis workers for this school year, and particularly my thesis office partner Lindsay Peterson, who worked long, often obscure hours in solidarity with me on this project and so many others this year, and for this I’m truly grateful. I’d like to thank the Maine Historical Society for allowing me to use all of the great resources stored there, and particularly Nicholas Noyes, Jamie Kingman Rice, and William David Barry, who identified key sources for me and continually pointed me in the right direction. I’d also like to thank the entire staffs of the Library of Congress, the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., and at the East Carolina University Special Collections Library for all their assistance in my research as well as physically guiding me through their buildings when necessary. Finally, I’d like to extend a huge thank-you to my amazing girlfriend, Emily Lorraine Shankle, who gave me an incredible amount of helpful advice and support for this project, and to my family for their love and the many summers on Peaks Island in Casco Bay which inspired my interest in this project. Stevens 3 Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 4 Section I: Background to the Battle ................................................................................................ 6 Section II: The “Battle” of Portland Harbor ................................................................................. 10 Section III: Lt. Charles W. Read and Northern Winds to Portland Harbor .................................. 33 Section IV: Newspapers and the Spreading Panic ........................................................................ 47 Section V: The Divide Between the Public and Private Spheres .................................................. 52 Section VI: Giving them the Slip – Confederates in Portland Harbor .......................................... 56 Section VII: The Aftermath – Portland Picking Up the Pieces .................................................... 72 Collaborators and Confusion .................................................................................................... 73 Fatality ...................................................................................................................................... 76 The Hunt is Off ......................................................................................................................... 78 Accolades and Trophies of War ................................................................................................ 80 Reactions in Maine ................................................................................................................... 83 Section VII: The Conflict Between Civilian and Military Jurisdiction ....................................... 85 POWs or Pirates? ...................................................................................................................... 85 Combating Commerce Raiding ................................................................................................. 90 Section IX: Newspapers and Reactions At Home and Nationwide .............................................. 93 The Great Criticism of Bureaucracy ......................................................................................... 93 The Celebrities .......................................................................................................................... 97 Fear and Rumors in New England .......................................................................................... 102 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 107 Epilogue: “To Sweep the Coast of Yankee Land” ...................................................................... 109 The Success of Commerce Raiding ........................................................................................ 109 Fates of the Confederates ........................................................................................................ 111 Fates of the Unionists .............................................................................................................. 118 Capitalizing on the Story ........................................................................................................ 120 Lasting Legacy ........................................................................................................................ 124 Appendix A: Images ................................................................................................................... 126 Appendix B: Battle of Portland Harbor Ships, Crew, and Volunteers ....................................... 129 Appendix C: Read’s Captures on Cruise of Clarence-Tacony-Archer ....................................... 131 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 136 Image Citations ........................................................................................................................... 140 Stevens 4 Introduction [This] is a story of audacity and adventure that is not surpassed in dramatic interest, I think, by any event which occurred outside the distinctive field of warfare, during the War of the Rebellion…My imagination was so impressed by the incident that it seems to me worthwhile to bring it before a new generation, forty years after it happened; especially as in that great year of battles it escaped the nation’s memory.1 –Clarence Hale, at the Maine Historical Society (MHS), 1901 Saturday, June 27, 1863, dawned brightly over Portland, Maine. As the city’s residents began to go about their weekend business, they suddenly realized that the Caleb Cushing, the United States Revenue Cutter (U.S.R.C.) which had been stationed in Portland Harbor on and off again since 1853, was missing. Rumors flew about a traitorous Southerner on board, the work of pirates on the coast, and more. Before the day was over, the revenue cutter would be destroyed and the Casco Bay area would be transformed forever, a victim of one of the northernmost events of the Civil War on the periphery.2 Although the “Battle of Portland Harbor” was a minor and peripheral event in the larger course of the war, for the New Englanders who experienced it, it represented a moment just as terrifying and important as any could imagine on the front lines. Other events on the Civil War’s periphery, including the Saint Alban’s Raid and bank robbery in Vermont, inspired similar feelings of fear and a sense of significance for the civilians and home guardsmen who participated in them. This battle represents an example of this war on the periphery, the power of newspapers to stir up panic and generate anxiety on the Union home front, and the tense divide which existed during the Civil War between private citizens and business on the one hand and the military and federal government on the other. 1 Clarence Hale, “The Capture of the Caleb Cushing,” in Collections of the MHS, Vol. 1, Ser. 3, (Portland, Maine: MHS, 1904), 191. 2 U.S. Department of the Treasury, Record of Movements: Vessels of the United State Coast Guard, 1790 – December 31, 1933, (Reprinted by Department of Transportation and United State Coast Guard, U.S.C.G. Headquarters, Washington, D.C., 1989), 389. Stevens 5 First and foremost, it is important to outline and detail the story of the battle, the circumstances leading to it, and its aftermath. This story that has been told slightly differently and in fragmented segments since the battle occurred, including as parts of