Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

Wednesday, January 19, 2000

Yankee fleet bombards Corpus Christi

After New Orleans was captured in April, 1862, during the Civil War, the Cotton Road to Matamoros - the back door of the Confederacy - became vastly more important. Union warships tightened the blockade on the coast and one active Yankee commander proceeded to attack Corpus Christi.
   The motive for this attack has never been clear. Corpus Christi was a small village of 1,300 with no strategic importance and the Union commander didn't have enough men to hold the place even if he could capture it. The battle that resulted was real enough, in a bitter and tragic war, but it had its comic aspects.
   It was in August, 1862, when four shallow-draft vessels under the command of Lt. J.W. Kittredge sailed into Corpus Christi Bay. The Union flotilla arrived on the Wednesday morning of Aug. 13 and took up a position offshore, near where the approach to the Harbor Bridge is today.
   Lt. Kittredge landed under a white flag to confer with Maj. Alfred M. Hobby, who had been put in charge of Corpus Christi's defense. The lieutenant demanded the right to inspect U.S. government buildings in Corpus Christi. Hobby said the United States owned no buildings here. Kittredge said he would attack the town and gave Hobby 48 hours to evacuate civilians. The truce would last through Aug. 15.
   The population scattered inland. They used anything on wheels to escape. Many camped west of the town in the area where Tinseltown is today. Some spent five days or more out on the prairie, under a broiling August sun, seeking shade under wagons and singing hymns like "What a Friend We Have in Jesus'' and "Nearer My God to Thee.''
   Some refused to leave. A stubborn old man in a house on Chaparral, confined to bed with rheumatism, said he would rather die than suffer the pain of being moved. Just about then, the Union fleet opened fire and a cannonball crashed through the walls of his house, a few feet over his head, and he scrambled out of bed, ran up the hill, and never suffered from rheumatism again.
   The Confederate battery consisted of two guns behind old breastworks built by Zachary Taylor's army. This was on the waterfront, east of Giles Hotel, near the ship channel on the North Beach side. The old smooth-bore cannons may have once been used by H.L. Kinney to guard his store on the bluff. Hobby's report says he had two guns - a 12-pounder and an 18-pounder.
   At one point, Kittredge sent a landing party of 30 men with a 12-pounder, a rifled gun, to try to flank the battery, but it was beaten back by a cavalry charge of 25 men led by Hobby. (In his report, Kittredge said his men were attacked by a cavalry force of 300 men with 250 infantry supporting it.)
   The U.S. gunships moved out of range of Hobby's old smooth-bores and fired at the city with their more accurate, long-range, rifled guns.
   One shot hit a warehouse on Water Street that stored hides. With fragments of hides filling the air, a man running from the explosion yelled, "My God! They're shooting goat skins at us!''
   On Monday, the Union fleet moved south along the shoreline, firing desultory shots at the city as the ships departed - good target practice for the men.
   Kittredge had arrived on Wednesday and sailed away on Monday. The battle had lasted off and on for three days; most of the action happened on Saturday, Aug. 16 and two days later on Aug. 18. One of Kittredge's men was wounded by a wooden splinter and a Confederate private named Henry Mote was killed.
   T
   he people straggled back to find the town shot up. The Corpus Christi Lighthouse on the bluff was demolished. Cornices were knocked off buildings. Exploding shells killed a cow, a Newfoundland dog and a mule named Sweetheart. One resident found his old gray tomcat with his head swollen to twice its natural size and one side of it skinned like he had rubbed up against a buzz saw. A cuckoo clock from Germany owned by the Petzels was ruined and a cannon ball had whizzed along the shelf of a saloon, breaking its whisky bottles.
   People found unexploded cannon- balls all over the city. They called them Kittredges. The Yankee ships had fired between 400 and 500 rounds of solid and exploding shells.
   Since the Confederacy was desperately short of gunpowder, people tried to salvage the powder inside the unexploded cannonballs. But to their surprise they found what smelled like bourbon in some of the shells. They thought it was a trick; perhaps the diabolical Yankees had poisoned the whisky. But after a few cautious sips, they began to drain all the cannonballs that had liquid contents.
   Some weeks later, on Sept. 12, Kittredge was captured at Flour Bluff. He made the mistake of going ashore to trade coffee and sugar for buttermilk. When he was brought to Corpus Christi, the town he had so recently shot up, he met Maj. Hobby and was told about the whisky-filled shells.
   Kittredge, it was said, told Hobby that a barrel of bourbon kept for the captain's mess had been stolen; he had been unable to find where it was hidden, but men coming off the dogwatch sometimes smelled like they were returning from a tavern. The sailors, he said, must have emptied some of the cannonballs of gunpowder and refilled them with whisky, to await their turn at night duty. When the bombardment started, they had been sadly forced to fire their whisky-filled shells at the Confederates.
   Did some of them really contain whisky? The official reports filed by Hobby and Kittredge do not mention it, but then, that's not the kind of thing that would be put in an official report; it would have been too hard to explain in officialese. It hardly matters whether it happened or not. The legend of the whisky-filled cannonballs has been told for more than a century, and it makes a good story. If it's true, then the Yankee commander unintentionally delivered the spirits for his own going away party.
  (Sources: Archival Caller-Times articles by Ernest Morgan, E.T. Merriman, and Dee Woods. Official reports by Lt. Kittredge and Maj. Hobby; "Corpus Christi, the History of a Texas Seaport'' by Bill Walraven; magazine articles in Texas Parade by David Allred, the Houston Chronicle Magazine by Dick King, and Civil War Times by Del Mar professor Norman C. Delaney.)
  

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