Operational History
Soon after being launched, she was towed to the Philadelphia Navy Yard to be fitted out and manned. A fortnight later, she was placed under command of a civilian, Mr. Samuel Eakins. On 13 June, the Navy formally accepted this small, unique ship.
Next, the steam tug Fred Kopp was engaged to tow the submarine to Hampton Roads, Virginia. The two vessels got underway on 19 June and proceeded down the Delaware River to the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal through which they entered the Chesapeake Bay for the last leg of the voyage. At Norfolk, the submarine was moored alongside the sidewheel steamer Satellite which was to act as her tender during her service with the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron. A short while after reaching Hampton Roads on the 23rd, the submarine acquired the name Alligator, a moniker which soon appeared in official correspondence.
Several tasks were considered for the strange vessel: destroying a bridge across Swift Creek, a tributary of the Appomattox River; clearing away the obstructions in the James River at Fort Darling which had prevented Union gunboats from steaming upstream to support General McClellan's drive up the peninsula toward Richmond; and blowing up Virginia II if that ironclad were completed on time and sent downstream to attack Union forces. Consequently, the submarine was sent up the James to City Point where she arrived on the 25th. Commander John Rodgers, the senior naval officer in that area, examined Alligator and reported that neither the James off Fort Darling nor the Appomattox near the bridge was deep enough to permit the submarine to submerge completely. Moreover, he feared that while his theater of operation contained no targets accessible to the submarine, the Union gunboats under his command would be highly vulnerable to her attacks should Alligator fall into enemy hands. He therefore requested permission to send the submarine back to Hampton Roads.
The ship headed downriver on the 29th and then was ordered to proceed to the Washington Navy Yard for more experimentation and testing. In August, Lt. Thomas O. Selfridge, Jr. was given command of Alligator and she was assigned a naval crew. The tests proved unsatisfactory, and Selfridge pronounced "the enterprise… a failure."
The Navy Yard later replaced Alligator's oars with a screw propeller, thereby increasing her speed to about 4 knots (7.4 km/h). On 18 March 1863, President Lincoln observed the submarine in operation.
About this time, Rear Admiral Samuel Francis du Pont—who had become interested in the submarine while in command of the Philadelphia Navy Yard early in the war—decided that Alligator might be useful in carrying out his plans to take Charleston, South Carolina, the birthplace of secession. Acting Master John F. Winchester, who then commanded the Sumpter, was ordered to tow the submarine to Port Royal, South Carolina. The odd pair got underway on 31 March.
The next day, the two ships encountered bad weather which, on 2 April, forced Sumpter to cut Alligator adrift off Cape Hatteras. She either immediately sank or drifted for a while before sinking, ending the career of the United States Navy's first submarine.
Read more about this topic: American Submarine Alligator (1862)
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