This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

To search for The Our American Stories podcast, go to the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Up next a story from the South Carolina Military Museum in Columbia, the state capital.

The first successful submarine attack on February 17, 1864, was only a partial success.

When it was all said and done, the USS Hussetonic laid on the bottom of Charleston Harbor,

but so did the sub the CSS Hunley.

Here's John Freeman with the story.

The Hunley wasn't built here.

It wasn't even the first submersible type craft used by the Confederacy.

So they had something else called the David, which was called a semi-summersible. It was a boat that it rode really low in the water,

and because it thought, well, it would be difficult to detect, difficult to hit, but it would

call it a torpedo boat because it was supposed to be doing what the Hunny similar to it did,

which is take a torpedo, which torpedoes at that time were more mines and run it inside of enemy ships.

Well, the Hunley was built elsewhere and was brought to Charleston and it was brought here for testing, actually.

It was hopeful that after testing it could break the blockade that was going off the harbor by the Union Fleet.

And so when they initially built it, there was actually a rope and a floating mine behind them. And what they thought they would do is they would paddle a row, neither there was a property. So it was person powered. The honey was there was like a crankshaft. They were all sitting there hunched over in this little tin can and they're working with their arms, just getting this thing to go. So it was man-powered So what they're supposed to do is go out of the harbor,

head out towards the fleet, which wasn't in the harbor. It was actually outside the harbor. So the

fleet was, you wouldn't call it offshore, but it was a decent ways out. You had to get there by hand.

And then when they got close, they would actually submerge, and then they would drag this mine,

which was floating into the side of the ship to destroy the ship.

Well, during training they realized it wouldn't work.

...