Unfortunately, the Confederates had very little at hand to use as a weapon against the Federal ships. At least the Union started out with some kind of a navy; the Confederates had none, except for a few small sloops and revenue cutters that they were able to seize at the time of secession. By February 1862 the Confederate navy still only amounted to thirty-three ships. Nor did the Confederates have much to build with. The South had little or nothing in the way of a shipbuilding industry: it possessed few of the raw materials or manufacturing facilities for fitting and arming warships, and lacked building and repair facilities. The only naval construction yard was in the Florida harbor of Pensacola, but the waters of the harbor were controlled by Fort Pickens, whose Union garrison had clung to control of the fort even after Fort Sumter had been bombarded into surrender. Of course, Virginia had occupied the navy yard at Norfolk in April 1861, but the Norfolk yard could easily be sealed off by Federal blockading ships in Hampton Roads and at the mouth of the Chesapeake. If the South had any hope of breaking the blockade, it was going to have to be by some unexpected and unconventional means.
However, the unexpected and unconventional seem to have come naturally to the Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Russell Mallory, whose technical ingenuity single-handedly created a Confederate navy, which in turn almost broke up the Union blockade. Very much like his opposite number, Gideon Welles, Mallory laid hands on any possible weapon, any proposed invention, no matter how unlikely—mines made from beer kegs, submarines made from boilerplate, gunboats laminated with railroad iron—and floated them out to do battle with the Federal steam frigates. It was in that last category, ironclads, that Mallory came the nearest to succeeding in his schemes. Mallory, a former U.S. senator from Florida and formerly the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, was fully abreast of the latest developments in building ironclad gunboats and warships. He was aware that, however imposing the Federal steam frigates and steam sloops might seem, not a single one of them was ironclad, and the Federal ironclad gunboats being built for use on the Mississippi were strictly for the river, too small to venture out on the ocean. Let the Confederacy manage, somehow, to construct even one ironclad warship capable of steaming on the high seas, then that one ship would be more than a match for each and every one of the Federal frigates. “I regard the possession of an iron-armored ship as a matter of the first necessity,” wrote Mallory. “Such a vessel at this time could traverse the entire coast of the United States, prevent all blockade, and encounter, with a fair prospect of success their entire navy. … Naval engagements between wooden frigates as they are now built and armed will prove to be the forlorn hopes of the sea—simply contests in which the question, not of victory, but who shall go to the bottom first is to be solved.”47
The difficulty, for Mallory, was that nowhere in the Confederacy was there the capability of building such a ship, even if he could find enough iron plate or iron rails to armor her. Then, on June 23, 1861, two of Mallory’s lieutenants at Norfolk reminded Mallory about the scuttled steam frigate Merrimack in the Norfolk Navy Yard. They pointed out that a salvage company had pumped out the half-sunken shell of the frigate and placed her in dry dock, and as it turned out, the hull and boilers of the Merrimack were still relatively intact. It would be possible to cut away her burned-over masts and useless upper decks, rebuild her upper works with an iron casemate like one of the Crimean “floating batteries,” and arm her with enough guns to sink anything the Federal navy could send against her. Mallory bought the idea at once: he had the sunken frigate inspected, and in July 1861 work began on reconstructing the Merrimack as a seagoing ironclad.
On February 17, 1862, the rebuilt Merrimack was launched and commissioned—and given a new name, CSS Virginia. The reborn steam frigate now looked nothing like its first form—or, for that matter, like anything else afloat. The Confederate engineers had cut the hull of the ship down to the waterline and then erected a thirteen-and-a-half-foot-high iron-plated casemate on top of the hull, using two layers of two-inch-thick wrought-iron plates, eight feet long by eight inches wide; the armored casemate would be rounded at each end and with sides sloping outwards at a 36-degree angle, and roofed over by an iron grille with three hatches. Four gunports with iron shutters gaped in each side, and at each rounded end of the casemate were three more gunports for a 7-inch rifled pivot gun. Just beneath the waterline at her bow was a 1,500-pound cast-iron ram, which the ironclad could use to smash the timber hulls of the Federal blockading fleet. On February 24 the Virginia was given a captain, Franklin Buchanan, and on March 8 Buchanan nosed the makeshift ironclad’s way out of Norfolk and down the ten-mile-long channel into Hampton Roads.48
Standing out in the Roads, sealing off Confederate access to Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic, were seven ships of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron—the prize steam frigates Minnesota and Roanoke, the twenty-four-gun sail-powered sloop Cumberland, an obsolete forty-four-gun sail frigate named Congress, and an assortment of supporting craft. Shortly after 1:00 PM, the Virginia bore down on them, selecting the Cumberland as its target as the most heavily armed ship in the line. As the startled Federal seamen beat to quarters, the Virginia cruised ominously past the antiquated frigate Congress, which unleashed a twenty-five-gun broadside at the passing monster. The broadside banged and rattled on the Virginia’s side, bouncing harmlessly off the iron plates and splashing hugely into the waters of the Roads. The Virginia then opened up on the Congress with a point-blank broadside of her own, dismounting an 8-inch gun and turning her “clean and handsome gundeck into a slaughter-pen, with lopped-off legs and arms and bleeding, blackened bodies scattered about by shells.” But the Virginia’s real object was the Cumberland. The Confederate behemoth bore down remorselessly on the Federal sloop as shot from the Cumberland’s 9-inch pivot gun made no more impression on the ironclad than the Congress’s guns had. The Virginia returned the fire, then drove directly at the Cumberland, crushing its ram into the Cumberland’s side. The stricken sloop sank bow first, its gun crews still trying to bang shot off the Virginia’s sides until the water closed over the ship’s unlowered flag. One hundred and twenty-one of her crew went down with her.49
The rest of the Federal squadron, having watched the easy destruction of the Cumberland, attempted to escape. But the Congress, Minnesota, and Roanoke all managed to run aground in the shallow waters of the Roads. The Virginia drew up behind its first antagonist, the old frigate Congress, and pounded it into a blazing shambles in half an hour; one of her few surviving officers struck her colors. The Virginia would probably have done the same to the rest of the Federal ships had not the tide started to ebb. Anxious not to be caught aground themselves, the Confederates turned their triumphant experiment around and the Virginia slowly steamed back up the Roads, intending to finish off the stranded Minnesota the next morning. Despite being hit ninety-eight times on her armor plate, she had suffered only two of her crew killed (by a Federal shell exploding near one of Virginia’s gun ports) and a handful (including Captain Buchanan) wounded.
With the Virginia’s capabilities proven, the Confederates had only to choose how to deploy the ship next. In his original orders to Captain Buchanan, and in a follow-up letter on March 7, Mallory grandly suggested that once the Virginia finished off the Federal ships in Hampton Roads, she should steam out into the Chesapeake and then up the Potomac to bombard Washington. “Could you… make a dashing cruise on the Potomac as far as Washington, its effect upon the public mind would be important to the cause.” The Virginia could then continue on to New York and “burn the city and the shipping.” With that, “peace would inevitably follow. Bankers would withdraw their capital from the city. The Brooklyn navy yard and its magazines and all the lower part of the city would be destroyed, and such an event, by a single ship, would do more to achieve our independence than would the results of many campaigns.” Whether the Virginia’s unwieldy bulk ever could have survived the first pitch and roll of the open ocean, much less naviga
te the shallow reaches of the Potomac River, is debatable. However, Mallory thought she could, and what was more, so did Lincoln’s cabinet.50
The next morning, the Virginia steamed back down to Hampton Roads to destroy the Minnesota and perhaps put an end to the war. As the Confederate ironclad bore down on the stranded Minnesota, the officers of the Virginia noticed that the Federal ship was not alone. At first they thought a raft had been brought alongside the Minnesota to take off the steam frigate’s crew. Then the raft began to move, and as it did, the Confederate sailors and gunners got their first good look at what they could only describe as “a tin can on a shingle.” It was, said one of the Virginia’s officers, “the queerest-looking craft afloat” and reminded him of “a cheese box on a raft.” It was in fact a Federal warship, an ironclad that floated almost flush on the surface of the water except for a single round gun turret in the middle. Its name was Monitor.51
The Federal navy had actually found out about the Confederate plans to rebuild the Merrimack as early as August 1861, and in February 1862 “a negro woman, who … had closely watched the work upon the ‘Merrimac’… passed through the lines at great risk to herself” and brought Navy Secretary Welles word “that the ship was nearly finished.” Although Welles himself was skeptical of the usefulness of ironclads on the high seas, the threat of what the Merrimack might be turned into forced him to ask Congress for an appropriation of $1.5 million to experiment with three ironclad prototypes. Two of the designs Welles commissioned were little more than conventional steam frigates with various kinds of iron plating; the third prototype came from a Swedish inventor named John Ericsson, and it was so bafflingly different that one officer advised taking the model of the ship home and worshipping it. “It will not be idolatry,” the officer quipped. “It is the image of nothing in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth.”52
Certainly it was peculiar. Ericsson’s plans called for an iron-plated raft 173 feet long and 41 feet 6 inches wide, with a small armored pilot house at the bow, two portable smokestacks that could be taken down for combat purposes, and, in the center, a revolving gun turret (with two 11-inch smoothbore guns) that could be turned to face in any direction. The 9-foot-high steam-powered turret, protected by eight layers of inch-thick iron plate, was the greatest marvel in this little ship of marvels (although in truth, the original plan for an armored cupola on a turntable belonged to the British gunnery expert Captain Cowper Coles, who had patented a design in 1859 and conducted trials on a prototype in September 1861), and it took the fancy of both Welles and Lincoln. On October 4, 1861, Welles and Ericsson signed the contract for the weird little ironclad, and less than four months later Ericsson launched the vessel from a private shipyard at Greenpoint, Brooklyn. At the invitation of assistant navy secretary Gustavus Fox, Ericsson named the ship USS Monitor. Formally commissioned on February 25, 1862, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Monitor steamed down the East River on March 4, bound for Hampton Roads to search out and destroy the rebuilt Merrimack before the Confederates could turn their ironclad loose.53
The Monitor arrived one day too late. But for the Minnesota, and the rest of the Federal blockade, her timing could not have been more exquisite. For the next three hours the two strangest ships in the world battered each other with their guns, each unable to hurt the other. The captain of the Minnesota watched in a mixture of delight and disbelief as the little Monitor, “completely covering my ship as far as was possible with her dimensions… laid herself right alongside of the Merrimack, and the contrast was that of a pigmy to a giant.”
Gun after gun was fired by the Monitor, which was returned with whole broadsides from the rebels with no more effect, apparently, than so many pebblestones thrown by a child. After a while they commenced maneuvering, and we could see the [Monitor] point her bow for the rebels, with the intention… of sending a shot through her bow porthole; then she would shoot by her and rake her through her stern. In the meantime the rebel was pouring broadside after broadside, but… when they struck the bombproof tower [the Monitor’s turret] the shot glanced off without producing any effect, clearly establishing the fact the wooden vessels can not contend successfully with ironclad ones; for never before was anything like it dreamed of by the greatest enthusiast in maritime warfare.
The Virginia tried to ram the Monitor, but the nimble little turret ship dodged aside. The Virginia’s replacement captain, Catesby Jones, assembled a boarding party and tried to lay his unwieldy ship alongside the Monitor to board her, throw a coat over the Monitor’s pilothouse to blind her, and then toss grenades down her vents, but the Monitor dodged away again. Then each ship, baffled at the other’s invincibility, drew off. The tide was running out, and the Virginia could not afford to be stranded on the shoals with this shallow-drafted terrier nipping at her. The Virginia’s plans to burn Washington and New York would have to be shelved. The Minnesota had been saved, and so had every other wooden warship in the Federal fleet.54
The two ironclads never fought again; in fact, neither of them survived the year. When McClellan began his movement up the James River peninsula later in April, the Confederates were forced to evacuate Norfolk. The Virginia, drawing too much water to retreat up the James River, was blown up on May 10 to keep it from capture. The Monitor remained on station in Hampton Roads until November 1862, when it was ordered to join the blockading squadron off North Carolina, where it was rumored that the Confederates were constructing another blockade-breaking ironclad. On December 30, in treacherous water off Cape Hatteras, the Monitor was caught in a severe storm and sank with the loss of four officers and twelve men.
Despite their short lives, the Monitor and the Virginia had written their own chapter in naval history: their combat was the first occasion in which ironclad warships fought each other. Both ships also became the model for further experiments in building ironclads. The success of the Monitor’s design induced the U.S. Navy to build sixty Monitor-type vessels, some of them big enough to carry two turrets, and even one, the Roanoke, with three, and from that point until after World War II, the turret design dominated naval ship building. The Confederates clung to the casemate design of the Virginia, and with its limited resources, the Confederate navy scraped together enough men and material during 1862 to have four large ironclads built by private firms on the Mississippi River: the Arkansas, the Tennessee, the Mississippi, and the Louisiana. None of them, however, was used well or wisely by the Confederate navy, and all of them were eventually destroyed by the Confederates to avoid Federal capture.55
Undaunted, the Confederate navy laid down twenty more casemate-style ironclads, and three new facilities for rolling iron plate were developed in Richmond, Atlanta, and northern Alabama. The overall scarcity of materials in the Confederacy, and the inadequacy of even three new mills to roll enough iron, doomed most of these ships to rot on the stocks. One of the most fearsome of them, the Albemarle, was sunk at her moorings in the North Carolina sounds by a daring nighttime Federal raid, while the 216-foot Tennessee (the second rebel ironclad to bear that name) was pounded into surrender by the combined gunnery of Farragut’s fleet at Mobile Bay in 1864.
The Confederates continued to experiment with a variety of exotic naval weapons. Commander Matthew F. Maury developed the first electrically detonated harbor mines, and between these mines and other improvised naval explosives, the Confederates sank thirty-seven Federal ships, including nine ironclads, on the waters of the Confederacy’s rivers and harbors. A four-man “torpedo-boat,” appropriately named the David and closely resembling a floating tin cigar, puttered out of Charleston on the night of October 5, 1863, with 100 pounds of high explosive rigged on a ten-foot spar that jutted out from the little metal boat’s bow. Lieutenant William T. Glassell maneuvered the David up to the side of one of the Federal blockade ships—which just happened to be one of the other Federal ironclad prototypes, the New Ironsides—and detonated the spar “torpedo.” The explosion cracked iron plates and st
ruts in the New Ironsides’s hull, while the wash from the detonation swamped the David and drowned its small boiler fire. Glassell ordered his men to abandon ship and swim for their lives (Glassell himself was fished out of the water by a Federal schooner and made a prisoner). But his quickthinking engineer relit the boiler and navigated the unlikely little vessel back into Charleston harbor.
Far stranger than the David were the projects submitted for building submarines. The most famous of these submersibles was the H. L. Hunley, the eponymous brainchild of a civilian, Horace Lawson Hunley. Hunley’s primitive submarine successfully destroyed the Federal sloop Housatonic outside Charleston on February 17, 1864. Unhappily, the Hunley never made it back to port (her resting place on the ocean bottom, four miles off shore, would not be found until 1995), and any serious further Confederate interest in submarines went down with her.56
Even with all the inventiveness in the world at its disposal, it was apparent after the failure of the Virginia to disrupt the blockade that the Confederacy could not wait for the development of some other secret weapon to pry the blockade ships loose. So, unable to break the Federal navy’s hold on the Confederate throat, they responded by trying to get their own grip around the Federal throat by sending out commerce raiders to prey on Northern shipping.
The first great success in commerce raiding was scored by John Newland Maffitt in the Florida.57 But by far the most daring of the Confederate raider captains was Raphael Semmes, a fifty-two-year-old lawyer and former naval officer. Semmes was a strong advocate of the use of commerce raiders, and even took it upon himself in 1861 to convert an old New Orleans steamer into the raider Sumter. He made his first capture, the Golden Rocket, as early as July 3, 1861, and over the next six months he captured eighteen U.S. merchant ships, burning one and either sending the others off as prizes or releasing them on the payment of a bond. Cornered by three Federal warships in the British outpost of Gibraltar in January 1862, Semmes simply sold the Sumter, paid off his crew, and disappeared. Six months later Semmes turned up in the Azores, where he took command of James Bulloch’s newest purchase from British shipbuilders, a sleek, deadly 1,040-ton cruiser that Semmes named the Alabama.58
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