The UNION had a sub too!
Using high-tech underwater search and survey tools, the US Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the US Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR), plan to search for the Alligator - the US Navy's first submarine.
The original design of the 47-foot-long submarine was painted green and had paddles protruding from the sides which caused it to be nicknamed the Alligator. It disappeared during a fierce storm off Cape Hatteras, NC in 1863 as it was being towed to Charleston, SC to test against the harbor defenses.
Launched in 1862, the Alligator represented a significant leap forward in naval engineering. Among the sub's most notable features was an airlock designed to allow a diver to exit the vessel while submerged and place an explosive charge on an enemy ship. The Alligator's design also included an air purification system.
Unlike the Confederate H.L. Hunley, the Alligator slipped into the ocean and obscurity. Little if anything was ever written about it in history books.
Finding the sub could benefit national security. "If we can find the Alligator, we can find anything, and that is always of critical importance for our great Navy." said Rear Admiral Jay M. Cohen, chief of naval research.
A symposium on the Alligator will be held at Nauticus in October.
(Submitted by Unionblue from an article from the Camp Chase Gazette, September 2004, Volume XXXI - Number 10.)
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"The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana | 
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