West is a rare eyewitness account of that incident, one of the earliest submarine attacks in naval history. Hunley in February 1864, but few mention an earlier but unsuccessful attack by a cigar-shaped vessel, the CSS David, in October 1863. Most accounts of actual Civil War submarine combat focus on the sinking of the USS Housatonic by the CSS H. L. Following the war, the Pioneer was scrapped for metal. The Confederates were forced to abandon the Pioneer during testing for fear of capture but she eventually found her way into Union hands, where the submersible was examined and sketched by Ensign David Stauffer of the USS Alexandria.

An early example of this type of naval ingenuity was the CSS Pioneer developed by Horace Lawson Hunley, James McClintock, and Baxter Watson. However, one of the most celebrated tactical innovations of the war was the use of submarines by the Confederate Navy. Civil War combat foreshadowed modern warfare with the introduction of the machine gun, repeater rifles, and trench warfare, and the use of trains to quickly move troops.

Civil war union navy ship classes