The Battle of Portland Harbor
Near Portland, Maine
On the morning of June twenty-seventh, eighteen sixty-three, Portland woke to alarming news: Confederate raiders had crept into the harbor overnight and stolen a United States Revenue Cutter. The Civil War, which most Maine residents knew only through casualty lists and dispatches, had just arrived in Casco Bay.
The raiders were led by Confederate Navy Lieutenant Charles Read, a twenty-three-year-old Mississippian who had spent the previous three weeks capturing or burning more than twenty Union vessels up and down the Atlantic coast. Read's crew had seized a Maine fishing schooner called the Archer two days earlier, using it to blend in with harbor traffic. Disguised as fishermen, they slipped past Portland Head Light in the darkness and boarded the Caleb Cushing, a revenue cutter at anchor, overpowering her sleeping skeleton crew.
When Portland's citizens and soldiers realized what had happened at dawn, the response was swift and improvised. Two civilian steamers were commandeered and loaded with soldiers from Fort Preble and about a hundred volunteer civilians, essentially forming a posse to chase a Confederate naval officer twenty miles out to sea. The steamers were faster than the Caleb Cushing, which was making slow progress in light winds. When Read's men saw the steamers closing in and ran out of artillery ammunition, Read ordered his men into small boats, set a powder train to the Cushing's magazine, and watched the cutter explode.
Read was captured that afternoon and was held at Fort Warren and exchanged in eighteen sixty-four. The engagement was the northernmost naval action of the Civil War. No one was killed that day, which given the improvised nature of the pursuit was remarkable in itself.
