Hello and thanks for the great thread about the CSS/USS Cornubia

Otis J White

Cadet
Joined
Feb 16, 2016
Location
Wilmington NC
I am moving to a new neighborhood in Wilmington on to Cornubia Drive ... the builder named all of the streets for blockade runners. Love it! So I am researching the ship and hoping to find a picture. The thread on the ship was fantastic with the drawings and designs ... thanks guys! Glad to join the group ...

I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
Otis J White
Cadet
 
I wanted to thank everyone for the wonderful book on the Cornubia ... we have been passing it around and find the details fascinating. It is a very well done piece of research ... since our streets are named after some blockade runners and iron sides of the Confederacy it has been a great deal of fun for us. My street is Cornubia Drive. All the best mates ...

I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
Otis J White
Still a Cadet
 
Welcome to CivilWarTalk from Galveston, where Cornubia played a role in "the closing act of the great rebellion.”

On May 24 [1865], the same day that looters tore apart Lark in Galveston, General Magruder had sent a note out to the Federal squadron anchored off the port, asking the navy to transport representatives to New Orleans to negotiate an armistice in Texas. Texas Governor Pendleton Murrah endorsed this plan, but things were moving quickly at this point. By the end of May, Kirby Smith himself publicly acknowledged the collapse of the Trans-Mississippi, issuing an angry and bitter farewell message to his troops, writing, “you have made yr. choice. It was unwise and unpatriotic…. I pray you may not live to regret it.” On May 31, at Houston, Kirby Smith distributed $1,700 of his command’s last remaining specie to his senior officers as back pay; the rest, he instructed, should be turned over to Union forces.

Two days later, at Galveston, Generals Kirby Smith and Magruder boarded a flag-of-truce boat and went aboard the Union blockaders’ flagship, anchored offshore. There, late in the afternoon, in the captain’s cabin of USS Fort Jackson, Kirby Smith formally surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederacy—the last major Confederate command to capitulate.

Three days later the commander of the Federal squadron, Captain Benjamin F. Sands, steamed into the harbor in the side-wheel steamer Cornubia, with the gunboat Preston following behind. Cornubia had itself been a successful blockade runner before being captured in 1864, condemned by a prize court, and bought by the U.S. Navy. Cornubia tied up at Central Wharf, near where Lark had been scavenged two weeks before. Captain Sands and a handful of other officers crossed the gangplank to the wharf, where they were met by a Confederate officer who led them a few blocks to the city hall. Sands and his officers did not take an armed escort with them. On their way they must have passed Hendley’s Row; undoubtedly someone made a clumsy joke about the rooftop lookout station that had been the bane of the blockaders over the previous four years.

At city hall, both the mayor and Sands briefly addressed the crowd that had gathered. Both men made assurances of their mutual goodwill, and urged the population to go about their business. Sands told the crowd that he wore a sidearm that day as a sign of respect for the mayor and local officials, rather than out of any fear for his own safety. Then, along with the mayor, Sands continued on to the old U.S. Customs House, where he “hoisted our flag, which now, at last, was flying over every foot of our territory, this being the closing act of the great rebellion.”
 
Back
Top