On 12 August 1862, after removing “three sunken vessels filled with stone,” the U.S. schooner Corypheus, with Acting Volunteer Lieutenant John W. Kittredge on board, slipped into Texas’ Corpus Christi Bay. She was joined that night by several other Navy vessels that together made up Kittredge’s “mosquito fleet.”
The next day, the lieutenant set out in a launch under a white flag for the Corpus Christi wharf, where he was met by the local Confederate commander, Major Alfred Marmaduke Hobby of the 8th Texas Infantry Battalion. Hobby flatly denied Kittredge’s brazen requests that his forces abandon Corpus Christi and that the lieutenant be allowed to come ashore. After some haggling, Kittredge gave Hobby 48 hours to remove women and children from the town.1 The stage was set for the Battle of Corpus Christi.
A Two-Day Fight
During the eight months Kittredge had been operating off the coast of Texas, he had captured 14 sloops and schooners with their valuable cargoes, and the taking of Corpus Christi was to be his crowning achievement. Impressed by the lieutenant’s “energetic spirit and zeal,” Rear Admiral David Farragut, flag officer of the West Gulf Block-ading Squadron, had approved his bold plan and sent him the steamer Sachem and the Corypheus to help make it possible. The captured vessels Belle Italia, Breaker, and Reindeer, now armed with cannon, completed Kittredge’s “fleet.” With its 14-foot draft, Kittredge’s own ship, the bark Arthur, was unable to enter the bays and channels of the inner coastal waterway, so the lieutenant had transferred his flag to the Corypheus. The determined Kittredge had fewer than 100 men, but his vessels were well-armed and his sailors well-trained.
Corpus Christi’s Confederate defenders, armed with rifles and two smoothbore cannon—a 12-pounder and an 18-pounder—were positioned behind simple but effective earthworks that had been constructed on the beach by Brigadier General Zachary Taylor’s Army of Occupation in 1845 during the prologue to the war with Mexico.
Following the 48-hour truce for civilians to leave the town, Confederate soldiers quietly moved their two cannon to the beach fortifications during the night of 15–16 August. At dawn they began the engagement by firing a round directly into the Sachem’s hull above the waterline. For the remainder of the day and again when the battle resumed two days later, the opposing sides bombarded each other, the Federals firing some 400 shots and shells at the Confederate fortifications and houses believed to be sheltering enemy soldiers.
By now, the Confederates had added a second 18-pounder to the beachfront battery. Kittredge landed a party of 30 armed men with a 12-inch rifled howitzer, but their effort to outflank the Confederate fortification was foiled, and the sailors were forced to make a hasty withdrawal back to the Belle Italia. This brought an end to the Battle of Corpus Christi.
Jubilant over the Confederate success, the secessionist editor of the city’s newspaper, Henry Maltby, proudly proclaimed Corpus Christi as the “Vicksburg of Texas.”2 Remarkably, there was only one fatality, a Confederate soldier struck in the head by grapeshot, and only a few wounded, none with life-threatening injuries. Along with damaged buildings, scores of shell fragments and unexploded shells could be found throughout the town.
Lee Harby’s Tale
But were any of those shells filled with whiskey? In his official report, Major Hobby made no mention of any “whiskey bombs”—and it would be another 30 years before their existence became widely known. Prior to the battle, sailors on board the Sachem or the
Corypheus reportedly replaced the gunpowder from an unknown number of shells with stolen whiskey. Hiding a large amount of purloined whiskey on board ship would have been a challenge, but sailors are known to be ingenious. According to more than one source, during the heat of battle, these whiskey bombs were fired indiscriminately along with those filled with gunpowder.
The anecdote of the whiskey bombs gained widespread attention after it first appeared in the 13 February 1892 issue of Frank Leslie’s Weekly. Writer Leah “Lee” Cohen Harby made it the focal point of her article, “At Corpus Christi.” The incident, if true, makes the Battle of Corpus Christi unique in naval warfare history.
According to Harby’s account, numerous Union shells fired during the battle failed to explode. One landed on the property of an “old German,” who would have been 48-year-old Frederick Büsse. He decided to extract the powder from the shell, but fearing it was still “live,” he ordered a slave to do it for him. But instead of gunpowder, the shell was found to contain whiskey, sampled first by the slave and then by Büsse. After others learned of the remarkable discovery, “there was an immediate search for bombs; ten were opened, and the contents helped to make convivial the celebration of the [victory over] the fleet.”
But how did whiskey get into these shells? Kittredge made a practice of obtaining buttermilk from John and Johanna Singer, Unionists who lived at Four Bluff, a dozen miles south of Corpus Christi, after Confederate military authorities expelled them from their Padre Island ranch. When, soon after the battle, Confederate officers at Corpus Christi learned that Kittredge planned to come ashore at Four Bluff, they set up an ambush and, on 14 September, captured the lieutenant and the seven sailors with him.
Brought to Corpus Christi, Kittredge was treated more like an honored guest than an enemy and was shown the fortifications and guns used in opposing him. Later, while dining with his prisoner, Major Hobby asked Kittredge about the whiskey in the unexploded shells, and, according to Harby, it all came to light in the lieutenant’s response:
Kittredge listened attentively and then laughed long and merrily. “I can recount,” said he, “for the milk in the coconut—or, rather, the whiskey in the shell. Some little time before the bombardment a barrel of my best Bourbon whiskey disappeared. I could find no trace of it, yet regularly after watch the men were found to be smelling of liquor. No one knew where it came from, how they got it, where they kept it, but liquor they had, that was sure. You have given me the explanation: they must have drawn the charges from the shells that were piled on deck and filled them with the stuff, drinking it when on watch. Evidently their store was not exhausted when I used the shells. I now comprehend why they would not explode—a fact which puzzled me at the time.”
Other Whiskey Bomb Sources
Lee Harby was a marvelous storyteller and accomplished writer, but she clearly took liberties in her account of the whiskey bombs, including the contrived dialogue.3 Despite her embellishments, however, it seems highly unlikely she invented the whiskey bombs story.
A likely consultant was James A. Ware, who, as captain of a company of partisan rangers, had led a cavalry charge against Kittredge’s men who had come ashore in the unsuccessful attempt to outflank the Confederate battery. He also played a role in the capture of Kittredge a month later. In 1892, Ware was a resident of the Confederate Soldiers’ Home in Austin.
Another possibility is that Harby’s source was John Ireland, who, as a captain in Hobby’s battalion, also had participated in the battle and played a key role in Kittredge’s capture. After serving as Texas governor from 1883 to 1887, Ireland retired to his home in Seguin, Texas.
Or Harby’s source could have been a member of the von Blücher family. A grandnephew of the field marshal of Waterloo fame, Felix von Blücher had received military training in his native Prussia and served as an interpreter during the war with Mexico. For his assistance in the defense of Corpus Christi during the battle, he was commissioned a major of engineers.4 Although Blücher surely would have known of any whiskey bombs, his wife, Maria, made no mention of them in a letter she sent to her parents in Prussia several weeks after the battle. Her husband would have provided her with the details included in her letter. In it, Maria contended that the unexploded shells were filled with gunpowder. She wrote:
A gunboat and 6 other boats fired on Corpus Christi with 32 and 24 pounders, using shells filled with sulfur and gunpowder and solid round balls or shrapnel shells with small balls (about the size of a Borsdorf apple). They flew merrily over our house, into our field, and through our fence but did not do any harm at all. In our yard the children found a shell 13” long, a similar one 10” long weighing 26 pounds, and one of 24 pounds, 9” long, all of them unexploded; careful opening showed them to be filled with sulfur and powder, and one had a full 32-pound round ball.5
In 1935, Felix’s son Charles von Blücher, who had been six years old when he discovered unexploded shells in his yard, made it known that he accepted the whiskey bombs story as factual. Whether this was based on what he had seen with his own eyes as a child or whether he had been influenced by Harby’s article in Frank Leslie’s Weekly is impossible to know. In an article he wrote about his father, Blücher noted:
Many of the cannon balls that fell in Corpus Christi did not explode, and the experts on the Confederate side were able to open them without exploding the caps. The powder inside was then used by the people in their firearms, as powder was scarce. Occasionally, a bombshell, upon being opened, was found to contain very fine whiskey, which was a pleasant surprise to many. After the war, it was explained that Captain Kittredge had on board some fine liquors, and that some of the marines conceived the idea of extracting the fuse cap and powder from some of the bombshells and replacing the same with liquor taken from Captain Kittredge’s barrels; the fuse cap was replaced to avoid detection. One of these liquor-filled shells was picked up by Frederick Büsse near the Blücher home, and opened.6
William Pettus Hobby Jr., who served as lieutenant governor of Texas from 1973 to 1991, first learned about the whiskey bombs from his father, former Texas governor William Pettus Hobby Sr. He, in turn, may have been told about them by his uncle, Colonel Alfred M. Hobby, who would have known for certain.7 Alfred Hobby died in 1881 and could not have been Harby’s source, but it is possible another family member was.
Corpus Christi resident John Dunn collected every manner of item for his private museum, including bombs from the 1862 battle, several of which can now be viewed at the Corpus Christi Museum of Science and History. The sword taken from Kittredge at the time of his capture also is there. When interviewed in 1939, Dunn remarked, “You know, some of those shells had whiskey in them.”8
Complicated Lieutenant Kittredge
The connection between John W. Kittredge and whiskey bombs is ironic in that he had taken the required pledge of abstinence on becoming manager of a Christian-based Sailors’ Home in Oswego, New York, in his early 20s. Years later, while captain of the Arthur, he not only required all hands to attend Sunday divine services but also had Bible lessons held on deck each sabbath afternoon.
And yet there was a darker side to the New York–born ship captain. While first mate on board the passenger steamship St. Louis in 1855, he threatened a ship’s waiter with a loaded pistol and as a consequence served 60 days in prison at hard labor. His favored method of punishment while captain of the Arthur was “tricing”—despite Congress having put an end to all forms of corporal punishment of sailors. To be triced, a person would be tied by the wrists and left hanging for a specified length of time, which for Kittredge was between 20 and 30 minutes. One sailor was triced for lying down during a divine service and others for drunkenness, cursing, and defiance of authority.9
The lieutenant returned north following his release on parole. Early in 1863, he became captain of the steamer USS Wamsutta off the coast of Georgia but was court-martialed and dismissed from the Navy in October 1863 for having used his fist and the butt of a pistol to beat a sailor who refused to obey an order. The sailor was court-martialed as well and sentenced to a year in prison. Kittredge spent his later years as a ship broker and dealer in coal in Manhattan, where he died in 1889—three years before Harby’s article appeared.
Although Kittredge’s plan to capture Corpus Christi failed, he nevertheless was able to convince Admiral Farragut that he had succeeded. Farragut included Kittredge’s “success” in his report to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, who in turn included it in his annual report to Congress. To top it off, the New York Herald’s headline on 16 November 1862—“The Capture of Corpus Christi”—credited the victory to Captain Kittredge.
Today, Kittredge’s exploits along the Texas coast are largely forgotten, but the legendary “whiskey shells” endure as “kittredges.” Corpus Christi journalist-historian Murphy Givens observed: “If true, the Yankee commander unknowingly supplied the liquor for his own going away party. And, if true, it is one of the most amazing stories of the Civil War.”10
Billy Mann’s Key Role
Drawings of the second day’s battle made by two Confederate participants highlight a soldier exposed to enemy fire waving a Confederate flag to signal fellow soldiers of incoming shells. He was 22-year-old William “Billy” Mann, who had served as a private in a Tennessee heavy artillery battery in operations on the Mississippi before returning home in broken health after his discharge.
It was Mann who had persuaded Major Hobby to relocate the guns to the beach fortification. Hobby reported: “Mr. William Mann volunteered his services in the battery, and I placed him in charge of the guns. By his coolness, courage, and judgment he elicited the admiration of all.”
Confederate Brigadier General Hamilton P. Bee, who arrived at Corpus Christi on 20 August, was equally impressed by Mann’s performance. The general offered him a commission as captain of artillery, but Mann declined, “owing to the shattered state of his health from exposure at Island No. 10.”
1. Report of Acting Volunteer Lieutenant Kittredge, 12 August 1862, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of Rebellion, series 1, vol. 19, 151–52; Report of Maj. A. M. Hobby, C. S. Army, 16 August 1862, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies in the War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 9 (hereafter ORs), 621–22.
2. Ranchero Extra, 19 August 1862.
3. “Lee Cohen Harby,” The Handbook of Texas Online.
4. Anton Felix Hans Hellmuth von Blücher was educated in civil engineering, law, and languages at Berlin’s Friedrich-Wilhelm University and could speak six languages. He left Prussia for the United States in 1845 because of his involvement in antigovernment activities. In Corpus Christi, he served as county surveyor for many years. Reports of Brig. Gen. Hamilton P. Bee, C.S. Army, 21 August 1862, ORs, 619–20.
5. Bruce S. Cheeseman, ed., Maria von Blücher’s Corpus Christi: Letters from the South Texas Frontier, 1849–1879 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 130.
6. Mrs. Frank deGarmo, Pathfinders of Texas, 1836–1846 (Austin, TX: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1951), 150.
7. Lieutenant Governor William P. Hobby Jr. to author, 27 February 1975.
8. John Dunn interviews, 11, 29 May 1939 and 11 June 1940, LaRetama Central Library, Corpus Christi, TX.
9. Deck log of the USS Arthur, 11 December 1861 to 31 December 1862, Record Group 24, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.
10. Murphy Givens, “Did Union ships Fire Whisky Shells at City?” Corpus Christi Caller-Times, 17 September 2008.