The first submarine to successfully sink an enemy ship accomplished her mission on the night of February 17, 1864. She was an experimental Confederate vessel engaging the Union sloop-of-war USS Housatonic, and neither ship survived the night. You can read more about her here:
H. L. Hunley
The Civil War occurred long before the advent of maritime nuclear propulsion and even practical internal combustion engines. With no viable alternatives, Hunley opted for human power in his machine, and the role of eight of the crew of 9 was simply to hunch over a giant crankshaft, turning it for hours to move the vessel just below the waves of the Atlantic. Clearly this is a marginal solution, but since the Hunley had no competition in the field of underwater warfare, it was groundbreaking nonetheless.
The Hunley's sinking of the Housatonic was a historic event, a harbinger of things to come in naval warfare, but to call the Hunley's operational experience problematic would be excessively charitable. She sank three times during her brief career, twice with all hands, doing more damage to the south than the north in the process. It's likely that the explosive charge planted on the Housatonic disabled the Hunley as well, sending her to the bottom before the crew could escape. Really, the technology just wasn't there in 1864 to make submarines truly viable for warfare, but the idea would never go away after this tenuous proof of concept.
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