Coastal DefensesSTRATEGIES AND INNOVATION IN PEACE AND WAR by Dr. Louis Arthur Norton
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hroughout human history, people have selected sites for settlement near bodies of water, which provided them with a source of food and served as avenues for transportation and commerce. Whether along the coast or up rivers and bays, all had an overriding problem-security. Thieves, hostile neighbors, pirates, and ultimately hostile nations could raid these communities under cover of fog, storms, or darkness before an adequate defense could be mustered. In colonial North America, the early settlers built their homes away from the waterfront, where they had access to fresh water and where the natural geography offered a buffer from would-be raiders. Jamestown, Virginia, was situated well up the James River. The first settlements in Massachusetts, such as Gloucester, Salem, and Marblehead, were located more than am ile inland from the harbors where they made their livelihoods. Invaders might disrupt the settlers' boats, shacks, and fish stages, but their homes would have a buffer of land, the paths rigged with small bells on trip lines or bottles on strings to alert homeowners of unexpected visitors. The first stationary defenses were wooden, stone, or earthen forts strategically placed to protect harbors such as the Battery at the tip of Manhattan, Castle Island 's Fort Independence in Bosron Harbor, Fort McHenry off Baltimore, and Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island at the entrance to Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. Passive measures were set up in rivers or at shallow landing places that could impede invasion. The simplest were felled trees that could be positioned to form snags on river bottoms. These navigation hazards would prove a nuisance for many who plied rivers. Mark Twain commented about them during his piloting days on the Mississippi: "Snag-boats go patrolling up and down, in these matter-of-fact days, pulling the river's teeth; they have rooted out all the old clusters which made many localities so formidable; and they allow no new ones to collect. .. [with] the banishment of snags .. . and a chart and compass to fight the fog with, piloting, at a good stage of water, is now nearly as safe and simple as driving stage, and is hardly more than three times as romantic ... [but] the snags [could be] thicker than bristles on a hog's back." 1
Fort Independence on Castle Island guards Boston Harbor
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Mark Twain , Lift on the M ississippi (Boston , MA: James Osgood and Co, 1883).
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How do you defend (or attack) a 3,500-mile coastline? In the Civil Wtir, General Winfield Scott drew up a plan to cripple the Confederacy by blockading the eastern seaboard and the Gulf Coast. Nicknamed "Scott's Anaconda Plan, " it was not official!J accepted, but influenced Union strategy nonetheless. In other examples, boulders could be rolled over bluffs or down embankments into shallows, where currents could deposit silt or sand around them, creating artificial shoals and barriers to impede unsuspecting marauders. Volatile materials were sometimes stored at narrows, where they could be readily set afloat on rafts and ignited to provide either a wall of fire or a smoke screen. These later evolved into more sophisticated fireships used with terrifying effect in naval battles for centuries. As waterfront communities grew into port towns and cities, residents-and later local governments-would place channel markers or beacons in their waterways as guides to aid mariners navigating in harbors, up rivers, and close to shore. As much as these could be useful to help mariners, deliberate repositioning in the waterway could also be used to endanger unsuspecting intruders by pointing them towards unsafe waters. Beacons that guided enemy vessels to shoals and hazardous waters were a regular tactic used in the American Revolutionary War. Purposefully scuttling vessels near a harbor's channel was another tactic to impede a deep-draft ship's ability to attack a population center. The most famous employment of this strategy was the sinking of the "Great Stone Fleet" near the entrance to Charleston's harbor during the Civil War. The Union navy was struggling to shut down water access to Charleston because of the complex web of navigable channels connecting its harbor to the sea. Between December 1861 and January 1862, the navy purchased some thirty ships, mostly aging whalers, from New England shipowners, sailed them southwards loaded with stone, and scuttled them onto the sandy bottom of Charleston Harbor and its approaches. They hoped that sinking the "stone fleet" throughout these waterways would block ships from transiting in and out of the harbor, thus halting the importation of
SEA HISTORY 158, SPRJNG 2017