USS Sachem (1861)
| History | |
|---|---|
 
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| Name: | USS Sachem |
| Launched: | 1844 |
| Acquired: | by purchase, 20 September 1861 |
| Fate: | Captured, 8 September 1863 |
| General characteristics | |
| Type: | Steam gunboat |
| Displacement: | 197 long tons (200 t) |
| Length: | 121 ft (37 m) |
| Beam: | 23 ft 6 in (7.16 m) |
| Depth of hold: | 7 ft 6 in (2.29 m) |
| Propulsion: | Steam engine |
| Complement: | 52 |
| Armament: |
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The second Navy vessel to bear the name Sachem, this screw steamer was built in 1844 at New York City, where it was purchased by the Navy on 20 September 1861.
After towing service in New York Harbor where the Navy was buying vessels to blockade the Confederate coast, USS Sachem, commanded by "Acting Master" Lemuel G. Crane, got underway on March 6, 1862, and with USS Currituck escorted the just built ironclad USS Monitor to Hampton Roads. The three ships reached nearby Fort Monroe on the night of March 8, the first day of the Battle of Hampton Roads. Sachem was present the next day during Monitor's historic engagement with Confederate ironclad ram, CSS Virginia. The Confederates built the Virginia by using the raised hull and engines of the former USS Merrimack—which had been burned and scuttled by U.S. Navy forces as they retreated from nearby Norfolk Navy Yard when that facility was seized by the Confederacy early in the Civil War.
On the 17th, Sachem was assigned to the Coast Survey and, with the assistant in charge, soon sailed for the Gulf of Mexico where Flag Officer Farragut was preparing to attack New Orleans. Sachem entered the Mississippi on 12 April; and, "...while exposed to fire from shot and shell, and from sharpshooters in the bushes," her boats surveyed the river from the passes to positions just below forts St. Philip and Jackson. They marked off the channel for Farragut's deep draft men-of-war and located firing positions for Comdr. David D. Porter's mortar schooners. Whenever riflemen in the underbrush along the river's marshy shores fired upon the surveying parties, a few rounds of canister from the Union warships would silence the musketry. However, at night, Confederates managed to undo much of the work of these brave engineers by moving their carefully located stakes and flags. But the triangulation continued; and, when Farragut moved his fleet up the river on the 15th, charts prepared by the Coast Survey guided each of Porter's vessels to a position from which it could fire accurately at one of the forts while suffering minimum exposure to enemy guns. On the morning of the 18th, when the schooners began bombarding the forts, each gunner knew to the yard the distance from his mortar to the target. In the days that followed, whenever a vessel changed its position, an officer of the Coast Survey would immediately calculate the new distance for her gunners, enabling them to resume their extremely accurate fire.
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