Plymouth, North Carolina: The Battle and the Ironclad
North Carolina
Plymouth, on the Roanoke River in Washington County, was the scene of one of the most dramatic Confederate victories of the Civil War, and the story turns on an ironclad warship. On April seventeenth, eighteen sixty-four, Confederate General Robert Hoke attacked the Union-held town in a combined land and river operation. The secret weapon was the CSS Albemarle, a freshly commissioned ironclad ram that steamed up the river on April nineteenth, sinking the USS Southfield and driving off the Union gunboats supporting Plymouth's garrison.
Without naval cover, the Union troops surrendered on April twentieth. The Confederates held the town through the summer, until the night of October twenty-seventh, eighteen sixty-four, when Navy Lieutenant William Cushing led a daring nighttime raid up the river with a torpedo spar boat, blew a hole in the Albemarle's hull, and sank it. Within weeks, Plymouth fell back to Union hands.
Cushing survived by jumping into the river. He was twenty-one years old.
