America’s First Submarine Was Built by a Black Engineer — Here’s the Hidden Truth | HO!!!!

The story of America’s first submarine, the H.L. Hunley, is a staple of Civil War history. For generations, textbooks and documentaries have credited Horace Lawson Hunley, a Confederate lawyer and planter, with the creation of the underwater vessel that changed naval warfare forever. But beneath this familiar narrative lies a hidden truth—one shaped by racism, erasure, and the deliberate neglect of black genius.

New research and oral histories reveal that the technical mastermind behind the Hunley was not Hunley himself, nor his white associates, but an enslaved black engineer whose name was never recorded in official histories. This is the story of the man known only as Benjamin—an unsung craftsman whose ingenuity and skill helped build the submarine that stunned the world.

A Nation at War and the Birth of Innovation

To understand how this erasure unfolded, we must step back into the 1860s, when the Civil War tore America apart. The Union’s naval blockade strangled southern ports, leaving the Confederacy desperate for new technologies to break the North’s grip on its waterways. The answer they pursued was radical: an underwater vessel capable of sneaking beneath enemy ships and sinking them from below.

The Hunley project, based in Mobile, Alabama and New Orleans, was not the work of a lone inventor. While Horace Hunley provided funding and inspiration, he was no engineer.

The actual construction—blacksmithing, carpentry, ironwork, and mechanical design—fell to the skilled hands of enslaved and free black craftsmen. These men, forced to labor in southern shipyards and foundries, carried centuries of African metallurgical knowledge into their work.

Black Labor: The Engine of Southern Industry

Contrary to the myth of a white-only industrial South, enslaved men worked in foundries, shipyards, and carpentry shops across the region. They became mechanics, machinists, and builders, shaping iron and timber into the backbone of Confederate infrastructure.

This labor force was not just muscle—it was mind. Black artisans brought expertise in pressure mechanics, metallurgy, and engineering, often surpassing the knowledge of their white overseers.

Records from the time describe enslaved men laboring under Confederate officers to shape the iron plates and rivets of the Hunley. Contemporary witnesses admitted, sometimes grudgingly, that the submarine’s construction would have been impossible without black expertise.

Yet, these men were denied credit. Their names were omitted from Confederate histories, and later southern apologists deliberately avoided mentioning their role in one of the South’s greatest technological achievements.

The Shadow Engineer: Benjamin’s Forgotten Genius

Among these unnamed craftsmen was Benjamin, whose story survives only in fragments passed down through African-American families in Louisiana. Trained as a blacksmith and iron worker, Benjamin understood pressure mechanics in ways that astonished even the white supervisors.

His descendants claim he sketched designs for underwater vessels years before the Hunley was ever built, inspired by African traditions of river warfare and the manipulation of air and water pressure.

In West Africa, knowledge of watercraft and fishing technologies often included ways of storing and managing air while diving. Benjamin adapted these principles to the Confederate submarine project, devising solutions for the vessel’s air intake system and hand-crank propulsion.

White officers dismissed his genius publicly, but privately relied on his designs. The submarine that would become the H.L. Hunley bore his mind as much as the name of his enslaver.

A Vessel Built in Secrecy and Suffering

The Hunley was as much a coffin as it was a warship. The submarine sank multiple times during testing, killing its crew again and again. Each time it was raised, repaired, and reconstructed, and each time, black craftsmen—enslaved workers forced into secrecy—rebuilt it.

The most famous voyage came on February 17, 1864, when the Hunley successfully attacked the USS Housatonic, making history as the first submarine to sink an enemy ship in combat. But the victory was pyrrhic. The Hunley itself never resurfaced, drowning its crew in the cold waters of Charleston Harbor.

For decades, southern writers hailed Hunley as a hero, painting the submarine as a white man’s triumph of innovation. The truth—that without the forced genius of black labor, the machine would never have existed—was deliberately omitted.

Erased by Law and Custom

Benjamin’s story is not unique. The history of American invention is filled with black engineers whose names were erased. Thomas Jennings, the inventor of dry cleaning, was exceptional in being free and able to patent his design.

Benjamin Montgomery, an enslaved mechanic, designed a revolutionary steamboat propeller but could not legally hold a patent. The submarine project fits this same pattern. Black inventors created breakthroughs under bondage, but their white counterparts received the fame and the credit.

Hunley himself died in the submarine during a test dive in 1863, yet his name endures while the enslaved engineer’s is absent from textbooks. When the wreck of the Hunley was finally discovered and raised in 2000, archaeologists marveled at its sophisticated design—the iron rivets, air circulation systems, ballast tanks, and hand-crank propulsion were ahead of their time.

But historians largely repeated the old story, crediting Hunley and a handful of white Confederate officers, leaving the silence surrounding the black engineer undisturbed.

Why Was This Story Buried?

Part of the answer lies in the deliberate rewriting of history after the Civil War. The Confederacy and later the mythmakers of the Lost Cause sought to portray slavery as backward and paternalistic, not as a system that relied on advanced black labor and knowledge.

To admit that enslaved men helped invent one of the era’s most important war machines would mean acknowledging that African-Americans possessed intellectual genius equal to or greater than their enslavers. That truth threatened the racial order. So it was buried.

By silencing these contributions, white historians crafted a version of the Civil War that kept black people invisible, reduced to passive victims rather than active participants in shaping technology and history. Recovering this history today means piecing together fragments from oral traditions, naval records, Confederate correspondence, and the broader patterns of enslaved black invention.

It also means listening to the descendants of those who labored in secrecy. Families in New Orleans, Charleston, and Mobile have long whispered of ancestors who built the “iron fish” that swam underwater. Their names may never be fully known, but their legacy is undeniable.

A Legacy Written in Iron

Every rivet of the Hunley bore the mark of black hands. Every weld carried the imprint of black skill. The very survival of the vessel after repeated sinkings was due to the labor of those who were not free. The narrative of Horace Hunley as the sole creator of America’s first submarine is a myth constructed by racism. The true story is far richer—and far more tragic.

It is the story of a black man whose mind built a vessel that stunned the world, even as his name was struck from the record. It is the story of how America’s greatest achievements were often built on the backs of the enslaved, not just in labor, but in genius. And it is a reminder that history is not simply what is written in books, but what survives in the whispers of families, in the iron rivets of sunken ships, and in the struggle to tell the truth.

Uncovering the Truth, Honoring the Genius

America’s first submarine, the H.L. Hunley, was forged in black hands—a testament to engineering brilliance under slavery. The vessel’s voyage into history is also the voyage of Benjamin and the countless unnamed black craftsmen whose skills shaped the future of naval warfare. Their story, long buried, is finally coming to light.

As we continue to uncover history’s untold stories, it is our responsibility to honor the genius that was denied recognition and to challenge the myths that have shaped our understanding of the past. The submarine that bore Hunley’s name is, in reality, a monument to the brilliance of black engineering. They hid his story, but they cannot erase the fact that America’s first submarine was built by a black engineer.