Richmond P. Hobson

Richmond Pearson Hobson tried to cork Santiago harbor with a collier and a volunteer crew. On the night of June 3, 1898, he took USS Merrimac in under the Spanish batteries to sink her across the channel that held Pascual Cervera's squadron. The steering gear was shot away. The charges did not put her where the plan wanted. The ship went down. The channel stayed open. Hobson and the seven men with him were taken off the wreck as prisoners.

The attempt failed as engineering and succeeded as news. The country needed a name between Dewey's morning and the army's landing. Hobson, an Alabama Naval Academy graduate (first in the class of 1889) and a constructor rather than a line captain, became that name. He was exchanged after Santiago fell. The seven enlisted men received the Medal of Honor in the years that followed. Hobson, as a commissioned officer, was not then eligible under the navy's rule. Congress corrected the paper in 1933. The citation is public. This page will not move the medal back to 1898 to make the night look finished.

He was born at Magnolia Grove in Greensboro, Alabama, on August 17, 1870. After the war he sat in the House from Alabama and spent a long public life on temperance and other causes that are not this register's subject. In 1934 a special act advanced him to rear admiral on the retired list. He died in New York on March 16, 1937, and is buried at Arlington.

The Merrimac did not bottle Cervera. Sampson's blockade and the July 3 sortie did the rest. This page will not turn a failed scuttle into a closed harbor. It will say a constructor took a collier into a channel that was shooting back, lost the ship in the wrong place, and came off it alive — and that the navy later wrote the night down as extraordinary heroism, not as a successful obstruction.