Confederate troops captured the navy yard at Gosport, Virginia. The Union made an attempt to destroy everything of value before they evacuated the yard, but the Confederates managed to raise the sunken U.S.S. Merrimack, a 40-gun steam frigate. Confederate naval architects changed the former Union warship into something entirely new. They gave the frigate a sloping super-structure composed of two 2-inch-thick layers of wrought iron. The weight of all that iron pushed the ship low in the water, but the Confederates added still more iron — a 1-inch belt of iron around the hull that extended 3 feet below the waterline. The completed vessel, rechristened the C.S.S. Virginia, had a draft of 22 feet. There was no way it could take the weight of the old Merrimack’s 40 guns. It had four smoothbore cannons on each side and one 7-inch rifled gun at the bow and another at the stern. Even with the reduced armament, Virginia’s draft was too deep to allow movement in shallow water, and its deck was so close to the waterline that steaming on the open ocean would be extremely hazardous.
The prime Confederate objective, though, was not to create an ocean-going warship. It was to get rid of the Yankee ships blockading Virginia. For that, this new class of ship, called a ram (because its bow carried that ancient weapon of the classical galleys), seemed ideal. On March 8, 1862, the C.S.S. Virginia, chugged into Hampton Roads and confronted five Union warships, the United States Ships Minnesota, Roanoke, St. Lawrence, Cumberland, and Congress. The clumsy, underpowered ram chugged toward Cumberland, firing as she advanced.
Cumberland fired back at what one witness said looked like “a barn roof floating on the water.” The Union ship’s iron cannonballs merely bounced off the monster, and its shells exploded harmlessly on the armor. The Virginia drove its ram into Cumberland’s hull. When it backed away, the ram was wrenched off, but there was a 7-foot hole in the Union ship. Cumberland went to the bottom, some of its guns still firing as the water closed over them.
Virginia next engaged the U.S.S. Congress. Its guns proved as potent as its ram. One shot hit Congress’s powder magazine and blew the blockader up. News of the Confederate ironclad’s victories caused a near panic in Washington.
Ironclads were not unknown to the U.S. Navy. They had already been tried in Europe.
Until the mid-19th century, all warships were protected by enormously thick hulls of seasoned oak. To make any impression at all on these masses of hard-wood, ships closed to pistol range before firing their cannons. The missiles fired were exclusively solid shot — cast iron cannonballs, sometimes two cannonballs connected with a chain (“chain shot”) or an iron bar (“bar shot”) to take down masts and rip up rigging. In 1822, Colonel Henri Joseph Paixhans, a French army officer, proposed firing shells in naval warfare. Shells, being much lighter for their size than cannonballs, had no chance of penetrating those massive oak hulls, so they had never been used. But Paixhans, being a soldier, was not inhibited by naval tradition. He pointed out that even if a shell did not penetrate one of those wooden walls (if it lodged in a hull and exploded), it would do a lot of damage. It would also throw hot metal fragments and bits of blazing wood far and wide. Sails, tarred rope, and wood all burn readily.
In 1853, the Russian Navy tested Paixhans’ theory. At the Battle of Sinope, a Russian squadron firing shells burned a 12-ship Turkish squadron. France and Britain, fearing the Russian capture of Constantinople and the entrance to the Black Sea, went to war with Russia. To counter the scary new “shell gun,”
they turned to iron. In the ensuing Crimean War, the French used three armored floating batteries to demolish Russian forts. They followed that by launching, in 1859, La Gloire, the first armored, steam-powered battleship.
Word that the Confederates were building an ironclad woke up authorities in Washington. Congress appropriated money for three armored ships, Galena, New Ironsides, and Monitor. The first two looked like conventional ships, but Monitor, the smallest, was revolutionary. Its deck was barely above the water. It had a 4-inch-thick belt of homogeneous armor and a revolving turret — the word’s first — made of 4-inch-thick iron. The two ironclads slugged it out for two hours.
At one point, Virginia ran aground, but she backed into deeper water before Monitor could make a kill. Later, a shell from Virginia exploded on Monitor’s pilot house — a tiny, boxlike structure on her deck — wounding the captain.
Monitor temporarily stopped firing, and Virginia took advantage of the pause to steam back to Norfolk and the protection of the Confederate forts. Because Monitor stopped firing, the Confederates claimed a victory, and, because Virginia ran away, the Yankees claimed a victory. Actually, it was a draw, tactically. Strategically, the Confederates had been defeated. Virginia never again threatened a Union ship and the Confederates scuttled her when they had to abandon Norfolk.
The affair at Hampton Roads was the first battle between ironclads, but it was hardly the only use of iron ships during the Civil War. The Union built a number of sea-going ironclads, including New Ironsides, which mounted the heaviest gun yet put on a ship and which won renown as a fort-destroyer, a whole fleet of monitors with one or two revolving turrets, and a swarm of ironclad river boats, which were instrumental in the Union’s victorious campaigns in the West. The Confederacy, too, built a number of ironclads, although its industrial capacity was limited. The biggest was the C.S.S. Tennessee, which was defeated and captured at the Battle of Mobile Bay. Tennessee, like Virginia, was a ram, a class of warship invented by the Confederates and used only in the Confederate Navy. The U.S.S. Monitor was also the original of a class of ships called monitors — small, low-lying ships with extremely heavy guns in revolving turrets. Monitors were used in many navies: the British and Austrians were using them in World War I. Neither the rams nor the monitors were good for ocean travel because their decks were so low, so neither type was the wave of the future.
Armored ships with high freeboards were, however. Unlike the original ironclads — wooden ships covered with iron armor — the new warships were built entirely of iron and, later, steel. All steel construction made it possible to build them bigger and drive them with more powerful engines.
The victories of Yi Sun Shin in the 16th century were spectacular, but they led to no permanent change in naval warfare. The indecisive fight between Virginia and Monitor, however, changed warfare permanently.
Chapter 23
“Damn the Torpedoes!”: Naval Mines
It was 1864, and only one port in the Confederate States — Mobile, Alabama — remained open. Now David Glasgow Farragut, commanding a fleet of four ironclad monitors and fourteen wooden ships, was attempting to close it. Mobile was heavily fortified, and in its harbor was the C.S.S. Tennessee, a huge armored ram, a larger version of the famed C.S.S. Virginia (nee Merrimack).
Farragut was on the wooden frigate Hartford. When the battle began, Farragut wanted to be able to see what was happening, and he could get a better view from the tall Hartford than from one of the low-lying monitors. The old sea dog climbed a mast so his view wouldn’t be obscured by the smoke of Hartford’s guns. Farragut was not a young man: he was a veteran of the War of 1812. So a quartermaster tied him to the mast for safety. His age and long service in the navy had not made Farragut a tactical conservative. He sensibly positioned the monitors between the Confederate Fort Morgan and the more vulnerable wooden ships.