Hunter Davidson (1826-1913) may be the most accomplished Civil War naval officer of whom you’ve never heard. He entered the U.S. Navy in 1841 and enjoyed a distinguished 20-year career in blue before resigning in 1861 to join the Virginia State Navy. Commander of a gun section on the CSS Virginia (Merrimac) at the Battle of Hampton Roads, Davidson succeeded Spotsylvania’s own Cdr. Matthew Fontaine Maury in charge of the Confederacy’s Submarine Battery Service. After the war, he served with the Chilean Navy, was captain of the Maryland State Oyster Police, and commanded the Argentine Navy’s torpedo and hydrographic department before retiring to Paraguay. Davidson’s historical reputation rests primarily on his role as a pioneer of electrical “torpedoes” (mines).  

How did a promising and intelligent young naval officer hailed as “a mechanical genius” for his invention of a life-saving apparatus in the spring of 1861 become “notorious” to his old service by 1864?  Why did Davidson spend the last 45 years of his life as a self-described “hard up Confed” who marketed his talents to foreign governments and abandoned both his family and his country? And what can we learn from his self-described “hard messy uneasy life” about the careers of other former Confederate naval officers?