More than half a century before Marines started firing rounds aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico, Confederate troops spent four and a half months lobbing artillery at Union ships and batteries from what is now the shoreline of the base.

During the winter of 1861 and ’62, the Confederacy managed to blockade the Potomac River to Union ships traveling to and from Washington, D.C., with a series of about 15 batteries up and down the river. The largest two were at what was then called Shipping Point, now Hospital Point and home of Marine Corps Systems Command, next to the town of Quantico. The town was then called Evansport.

“It was quite an embarrassment for the Union, which had just instituted a policy of blockading and strangling the South,” said John Haynes, former Quantico base archaeologist, who has published two articles on the campaign. Now, the South was strangling the main waterway to D.C.

Haynes also prepared the nominations that got the sites of three Confederate winter camps, which supported the batteries and were on what is now the eastern side of the base, onto the National Register of Historic Places.

In mid-October, 1861, Confederate forces at Shipping Point started blasting at Union vessels, including a ship full of Marines bound for South Carolina. Though that ship, the USS Pawnee, sustained at least six hits, the decision not to return fire spared its passengers and crew from any injury. The guns were hit, but they were unmanned at the time.

The batteries, including one at what is now the Officer Candidates School and another at modern-day Waller Hill, as well as others, allowed the Confederacy free reign over a stretch of the river, where its CSS George Page conducted sorties and captured the occasional schooner.

The Union’s Potomac Flotilla found itself trapped between batteries, and its guns were eventually removed and placed across the river from Shipping Point, at Budd’s Ferry in Maryland. There, Union Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker showed up with 8,000 troops and field artillery, and the two sides began shelling each other.

“That went on virtually every day for four and a half months,” Haynes said. “There would sometimes be hundreds of [shots fired] per day, according to some accounts.”

Excavations have unearthed some of those projectiles, as well as other remains. At the largest battery site, which Haynes said covered about 160 acres and camped four regiments, an unexploded 10-pound Parrott gun shell and most of the pieces of an exploded, 9-inch Dahlgren gun shell were found, both probably fired by Union forces. He also said he found a 42-pound, solid cannonball off the shore from the site of the smaller Shipping Point battery, possibly from a Confederate gun that exploded.

Other remains include bottle glass, ink wells, ceramic pieces, three-legged “spider” frying pans and surface depressions left from the dugout huts where Confederates housed themselves for the winter, Haynes said. “They’d dig a hole in the ground and build a little hut over it with whatever they could scrounge up.”

Near the largest of the camps, a concentration of horseshoes and blacksmith’s tools were found.

“We didn’t find a whole lot of bullets, and pretty much all the bullets we found in Confederate camps were round shot,” Haynes said, noting that the South appeared to be outgunned in terms of both numbers and technology.

In February of 1862, Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnston, fearing an attack on Richmond, ordered his men to withdraw from their Potomac River batteries, ending the blockade.

“He probably would have been much better off retaining those strong positions,” Haynes said.

He said the blockade demonstrated that not all important battles are bloodbaths, as the mere threat of the cannons along the main waterway into Washington, D.C., gave the Confederacy a strategic advantage without inflicting a lot of damage.

“There was an incredible amount of firing and ordnance but very few casualties on either side,” Haynes said.

— Writer: mdicicco@quanticosentryonline.com