Hunley Sesquicentennial Activities this Weekend
This weekend marks the 150th anniversary of the famous, fatal mission of the Confederate submersible H. L. Hunley at Charleston. Over at To the Sound of the Guns, Craig Swain has compiled an extensive list of commemoration activities going on there this weekend, including Monday, the sesquicentennial of the boat’s loss. Check it out.
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
We saw the Hunley replica when the missus and I visited the USS Alabama memorial in Mobile, several years ago. The very notion of setting out to attack a Union warship in that thing, hunched over a hand-operated crankshaft inside that cramped, ill-smelling, unlit space, in a contraption which had already sunk twice and taken with it first most then all of its crew … all I can say is, those guys had cojones.
They did. I don’t believe they thought they were on a suicide mission, but they certainly understood the risks were very high. The boat had sunk twice before, the second time in full view of everyone around the Cooper River waterfront.