The following letter was written by Henry Baird (1824-1863), the son of William Baird (1765-1863) and Nancy Harbison (1787-1855). Henry’s father emigrated from Northern Ireland and settled in Pennsylvania where most of Henry’s numerous siblings remained and raised families of their own. However, Henry—born in 1824 in Pleasant Gap, Centre county, Pennsylvania—settled in the South prior to 1850. In the US Census of 1850, he was enumerated in Mobile, Alabama, with his wife, Lecetta McKibben (1828-1892) and their infant child, James. The child would die four years later but they had two more boys, Edgar (b. 1854) and Robert (b. 1856) by the time this letter was penned in May 1861.
Henry does not say anything about his employment but the 1859 Mobile City Directory identifies his as a steamboat carpenter with a residence at 77 South Scott Street. By the spring of 1862, Henry appears to have been employed by the Park and Lyons Machine Shop in Mobile. It was at that time that riverboat captain James McClintock, engineer Baxter Watson, and lawyer Horace Lawson Hunley scrapped their initial attempts in New Orleans to develop a submarine for the Confederacy and moved its operations to Mobile where they began the construction of a second submarine in the Park & Lyons Machine Shop. This submerged vessel propelled by a hand crank came to be called the American Diver. After this vessel sunk in Mobile Bay, the machine shop began work on a third submarine they dubbed the Hunley. When it was finished, they transported it by train to Charleston, South Carolina, with the hope that they might be able to sink ships of the Federal blockade by detonating a torpedo attached to a long spar on the front of the submarine.
During a trial run of this vessel, manned by volunteers from crews of Confederate ships, the Hunley sank when it began to dive before the hatch was closed, killing five of the eight on board. A few weeks later, after the submarine had been raised, she was outfitted with a new crew that included Hunley (the designer himself) and members of the machine shop that built it—including Henry Baird. Unfortunately the submarine sank again, killing all eight crew members. The monument erected to the memory of Hunley’s second crew includes Henry but his name was incorrectly spelled “Beard.”…