library of congress
Drawing of the capture of the forts at Cape Hatteras in the Civil War, 1861, by Alfred R. Waud. Harriet Lane is at left, between the beach and the steam frigates Minnesota, Wabash, and Susquehannah, and the sailing frigate USS Cumberland. Several projectiles going into the [Confederate] battery and one going directly through the ramparts. The fire was so hot that the enemy went into a bombproof… and soon the white flag rose.” With the fall of Forts Hatteras and Clark on either side of Hatteras Inlet, Union forces captured 25 heavy cannon and 1,000 Confederate troops. The cutter’s fusillade had such a demoralizing effect on the troops at Fort Clark that Confederate forces later coined the term to be “Harriet Lane’d,” meaning to suffer or be demoralized. The Lane had proven so useful to the war effort that the US Navy assumed official control over her by the end of that first summer. In September 1861, Navy commander Richard Wainwright relieved Captain Faunce of command, and the Harriet Lane was turned over to the US Navy. USS Harriet Lane served in a number of notable assignments as flagship of the Potomac River Flotilla and later as flagship for Admiral David Porter. She participated in the captures of New Orleans and Pensacola; initial attacks on Confederate stronghold Vicksburg, Mississippi; and the first Union capture of Galveston, Texas. In January 1863, the Confederates launched a surprise attack on Union forces in Galveston, retaking the town and capturing USS Harriet Lane. During the attack, Captain Wainwright died in hand-to-hand combat, and, in a unique and tragic twist of fate, Harriet Lane’s executive officer, Lieutenant
Commander Edward Lea, died in the arms of his father, Major Albert Lea, a Confederate officer engaged in the attack. Under the Confederate flag, the former US Revenue cutter became a blockade runner and slipped through the Union blockade of Galveston, only to sit out the war’s final days in Havana, Cuba. There she remained until 1867, when Captain Faunce and a crew traveled to Cuba and returned Harriet Lane to New York. The Federal Government later sold the Lane to the merchant Elliott Ritchie, who renamed the former cutter for himself. Ritchie removed her engines and re-rigged her as a barque for the lumber trade to South America. In May of 1884, the Elliott Ritchie set sail from Georgia with a load of lumber destined for Buenos Aires. She would never return. Hit by a series of storms on her southbound voyage, the old cutter’s seams opened up and she began taking on water. Her crew abandoned ship as she foundered off the coast of South America. In 1860, before the Civil War had erupted, President Buchanan had declined to run for a second term. After Abraham Lincoln assumed the presidency, Buchanan and his niece moved to Wheatland, the outgoing president’s country estate near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Free from the pressures of the White House, Harriet Lane began a long-term relationship with wealthy Baltimore banker Henry Johnston; they
married in 1865. The couple had two children, boys separated in age by two years. A happy ending would elude her still. In the years following the war, she suffered the loss of everyone that she held dear. In 1868, her beloved Uncle Nunc passed away at the age of 77. Within a few years, misfortune struck again with the loss of both her young boys to rheumatic fever. Not long after her sons died, her husband Henry passed away as well. She never remarried. After these personal blows, Lane returned to Washington, DC, and transformed her adversity into a life of service and philanthropy. In memory of her children, she used her inherited fortune to endow a home for invalid children at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, with the stipulation that the facility treat patients of all races, creeds, and nationalities. The facility evolved into a pediatric medical center with a national reputation, and it continues to serve thousands of children and their families each year. Lane also left a bequest for the establishment of St. Albans School in Washington, DC, which will soon celebrate its 110th anniversary. In addition, her interest in art resulted in an endowment to the Smithsonian Institution with the donation of her personal art collection, forming some of the original artwork held by the National Art Gallery. A second cutter named for Lane was built in 1926, more than twenty years after the death of her namesake. Harriet Lane II
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