CSS Neuse: The Ironclad That Never Fired a Shot in Anger

On the bank of the Neuse River near Kinston, the Confederate Navy attempted one of the war's most ambitious engineering projects, and produced one of its most dramatic failures.

The contract to build the CSS Neuse was signed in October eighteen sixty-two. She was to be an ironclad ram of the Albemarle class, a hundred and fifty-two feet long, her wooden hull sheathed in iron plate, armed with two six-point-four inch Brooke rifles, and capable of punching through a Union wooden fleet with her iron prow. The premise was audacious: ironclads had changed naval warfare at Hampton Roads earlier that year, and the Confederacy intended to reclaim control of North Carolina's coastal rivers.

But the Neuse was cursed from the beginning. In December eighteen sixty-two, a Union raid destroyed construction materials at the original build site at Whitehall. The half-finished hull was towed downstream to Kinston for machinery installation, and there she sat, repeatedly delayed, by material shortages, by the difficulty of getting engines inland, by the grinding attrition of a war the Confederacy was slowly losing.

She was finally launched in November eighteen sixty-three and commissioned in April eighteen sixty-four. Her one attempt at offensive action ended almost immediately when she ran aground in low water just two miles from her berth. Months of further delay followed. In March eighteen sixty-five, with Sherman's army sweeping through the Carolinas and Confederate forces in full retreat from Kinston, her crew set her on fire to prevent capture. She sank in the Neuse River where she had spent most of her life, going nowhere.

The river held her for nearly a century. In nineteen sixty-one, private salvagers began raising the hull. By nineteen sixty-three the lower section was recovered, yielding some fifteen thousand artifacts, the most extensive Confederate naval salvage ever conducted. Those artifacts and the vessel's remains are now on display at the CSS Neuse Civil War Museum in downtown Kinston, a strange memorial to Confederate ambition undone by logistics and the sheer weight of a war running the wrong direction.