Decision at Sea

by Symonds, Craig L.

  Buchanan wasted no time. The Virginia got under way for its first sea trial as an ironclad on the morning of March 8, 1862. Technically the ship was not yet finished; the shields for its broadside gunports had not been installed, and the engine had never been tested. But Buchanan was a man in a hurry. When the Virginia left its berth in the Gosport Navy Yard and eased slowly down the Elizabeth River escorted by a few small gunboats, only two men on board, besides Buchanan himself, knew that this was no trial run. Buchanan had decided that the run across the width of Hampton Roads was enough of a trial for the ship’s questionable engine plant. Assuming that the engines could get him there, he planned to steer his experimental craft directly at the enemy. As the Virginia left the river’s mouth and moved into Hampton Roads, Buchanan ordered the helm over, and slowly, ever so slowly, the prow of the great ironclad swung to port until it was aimed directly at the two Union warships anchored off Newport News Point.

  Buchanan and the Virginia were about to make history.

  If the appearance of the Virginia in Hampton Roads marked a milestone in naval warfare, the Civil War, in which it fought, was itself a milestone in defining the character of the nation. The country’s regional differences were already manifest when Perry won his signal victory on Lake Erie in 1813. The War Hawks of the South and West had looked disdainfully on those (mostly from New England) who had opposed the War of 1812, and many in New England suspected that the War Hawks had motives of their own for promoting an invasion of Canada. In the years since then, however, the issues had changed, and the balance of political power had shifted. The sectional squabble over the admission of Missouri proved to be only the first of a series of disputes over the rights of slaveholders in the West. After the American victory in the war with Mexico (1846–48), the nation almost broke apart over the question of whether slavery would be allowed in the territories annexed after the war. A few years later, the dispute over slavery in Kansas actually led to the spilling of blood.

  At the same time, continuing immigration and closer mercantile connections between the mid-Atlantic states and the Old Northwest had increased the relative strength of the northern states within the national government. Southerners, such as the former War Hawk John C. Calhoun, who had championed the consolidation of national power in the central government because they assumed that the southern states would always dominate that government, began to perceive as early as the 1830s that this was no longer likely. Threatened with the reality of the North’s new political influence, they constructed a dramatically different interpretation of republican government, asserting that national authority was subordinate to and dependent on the states, rather than the other way around. With Lincoln’s election in 1860, southern leaders realized that they had lost control, and they took the bold step of declaring themselves out of the Union.5

  Like the American declaration of war on England in 1812, the secession of the South was a bold, even reckless step, and like that earlier declaration, it was based on several false assumptions. The first of these was the South’s overestimation of its own economic leverage. Southerners believed (or at least they asserted) that the agricultural products of the southern states were so vital to the world’s economy that a cotton-hungry planet would side with the South in order to ensure continued access to its goods. When Lincoln declared a blockade of Confederate ports a week after Fort Sumter, the Richmond Examiner editorialized that such a declaration was fatuous because, according to the Examiner, the world needed the South more than the South needed the world. “If the world respects the blockade,” the Examiner declared, “all of mankind, civilized and savage, must suffer for the necessities of life; for all consume or use cotton, tobacco, rice and other of our agricultural products; and if those products be excluded from the markets of the world, the supply will be so deficient that universal want and privation will ensue, and starvation often occur throughout every State and country and continent of the world, and in every isle of the ocean.” Instead, of course, the nations of the world found other sources for their cotton, tobacco, and rice, and it was the Confederacy that suffered “want and privation,” if not actual “starvation,” for lack of access to the world’s markets.6

  The South’s second great error was to underestimate northern determination. Southerners could not believe that northern shopkeepers and tradesmen would willingly shed their blood to compel the southern states to remain in the Union against their will. The South’s image of the North, grounded in four decades of sectional feuding and stereotyping, was that of a money-grubbing secular society where notions of honor, self-sacrifice, and courage simply did not exist. The “fire-eaters” who pushed hardest for secession in the crisis winter of 1860–61 publicly offered to drink every drop of blood spilled in a southern war for independence.7 Such offers drew cheers and laughter from southern audiences, who understood clearly what was being implied: that northern men did not have the stomach for war, and when confronted by the united resolve of a defiant South, they would necessarily acquiesce in a peaceful, and bloodless, separation. That assumption, too, proved spectacularly misplaced. Over the next four years, northern shopkeepers and tradesmen as well as mechanics, clerks, teachers, farmers, lawyers, and others—350,000 in all—laid down their lives to preserve the Union.

  And finally, the South underestimated the vast potential of the North’s own economic powerhouse. In this case, southerners were misled not just by their conviction that agriculture trumped industry but by a historical phenomenon that caught almost everyone by surprise, for the Civil War turned out to be two things at the same time: both the world’s last old-fashioned war and the world’s first modern war. It was a war of galloping cavalry charges and open-field infantry attacks; a war in which regimental flags had a talismanic, almost religious, significance; a war where military orders were frequently subscribed (as Perry had ended his note to Harrison) “Yours with great respect and esteem.” But if such elements harkened back to the past, other aspects of the war foreshadowed the future, for the Civil War was also a conflict of mass conscript armies armed with rifled muskets; of rapid troop movements by railroad; of instantaneous communication by telegraph; and, in its final phase, of both trench warfare and the kind of violence against society best exemplified by Sherman’s famous march to the sea. It was, in short, a total war sustained by the mass production of standardized arms, uniforms, tents, and even rations.

  The war marked a revolution in naval warfare as well. That revolution was already evident even before the war began in April 1861, as the graceful frigates and sloops of the Age of Sail gave way during the 1840s and ’50s to coal-fired steamships. Many resisted the change. Coal was filthy; its ubiquitous dust permeated everything on board, making it impossible to maintain the kind of spit-and-polish cleanliness that had long defined successful command at sea. Moreover, while the wind was free, coal was expensive, and it was not available everywhere. A reliance on coal made warships operating thousands of miles from home dependent on foreign ports for fuel. In consequence, steam warships in the 1850s were often called “auxiliary steamers,” and they carried a complete set of masts and spars so that they could navigate from place to place under sail. Propellers were generally two-bladed rather than four-bladed so that when a ship was under sail, the propeller could be fixed in a vertical position to reduce its drag on the water. Many steamships had hinged crankshafts so that the propeller could be lifted out of the water altogether; others had hinged smokestacks that could be lowered to the deck. Practicality as well as tradition led naval architects to design steamships that still looked as much as possible like the ships that had fought on Lake Erie.

  Naval gunnery was changing, too. Naval guns still loaded from the muzzle, but by 1861 the guns had grown so large that their capacity was no longer measured by the weight of the shot (e.g., thirty-two-pounders) but by the diameter of the muzzle (e.g., seven inches). And once war began, the pace of change accelerated. Naval guns grew from seven inches to nine inches to e
leven inches and finally to fifteen inches—guns so large they dwarfed the human figures that served them. Before the war was over, the Union Navy forged a twenty-inch gun that weighed over ten tons, and though it was never deployed in battle, it was larger than the biggest naval guns of World War II. Moreover, not only were these guns bigger, but many of them were rifled—that is, they had grooves cut in a corkscrew pattern inside the barrel that put a spin on the projectile, enabling it to keep a true trajectory for a much longer distance. And the projectiles they fired were more often than not explosive shells rather than solid shot.8

  In addition to these bigger and more dangerous naval guns, there were entirely new devices, including what Federal sailors called “infernal machines,” by which they meant underwater torpedoes or mines, as well as the first submarine that successfully (albeit at the cost of its own destruction) sank an enemy warship.* Above all, the war at sea featured the emergence of armored warships, commonly called “ironclads,” vessels so different from Perry’s majestic brigs on Lake Erie as to be virtually unrecognizable as warships. In this contest, metal would count almost as much as mettle, and in a contest where the weapons of war required the application of industrial productivity, the Union states had an overwhelming advantage over their southern counterparts.

  Yet the North did not immediately take advantage of its overwhelming industrial superiority. Part of the reason was that for once the U.S. Navy found itself in the unfamiliar position of being the dominant naval power and, consistent with the inherent conservatism of the superior power, its initial instinct was to rely on the time-tested weapons of naval warfare. Lincoln’s first order for the Navy was to announce a blockade of the southern coast. Blockade was a traditional wartime tool of maritime powers, though historically the great powers had used it not so much to stifle trade as to confine the enemy battle fleet in its own ports. Throughout the Napoleonic Wars, Britain had successfully maintained a blockade of the French Navy for most of two decades. In the Civil War, the U.S. Navy did not have to worry about keeping a Confederate battle fleet bottled up, because for all practical purposes the Confederacy had no navy. Instead, the goal of the Union blockade of the Confederacy was much more ambitious: to close all of the ports and harbors along the coast, literally stopping all trade. In Lincoln’s words, it was “to prevent entrance and exit of vessels from the ports aforesaid.”9

  Such a goal was easier to proclaim than to achieve. The Confederacy claimed a coastline of some thirty-five hundred miles, and the U.S. Navy had fewer than ninety warships. On the other hand, the North did not need cutting-edge technology or warships of innovative design to execute its blockade strategy. Indeed, almost any vessel—or at least any steam vessel (for sailing ships proved to be inefficient on blockade duty)—would suit. The Navy Department therefore went on a buying spree, purchasing steam merchant vessels, reinforcing their decks so that they could carry the weight of naval guns, and then sending them down to serve on the blockade. By 1864 the U.S. Navy boasted a ship’s list of over four hundred such vessels, and over six hundred ships altogether.

  The Confederacy could not hope to match these numbers, nor did it try. Just as the Union adopted the traditional strategy of superior naval powers, the Confederacy adopted the kind of naval strategy traditionally employed by weaker naval powers, a naval policy nearly identical to the one pursued by the United States in 1812 for its war against Britain: it would rely on its armies to master the war on land, conduct a war on commerce against Union merchant ships, and defend the coast by relying on shore fortifications supported by a few cutting-edge naval weapons.

  If southerners did not conceive of the land war as “a mere matter of marching,” as some of the War Hawks had proclaimed in 1812, they did harbor great confidence in the superiority of their land armies, a confidence that seemed to be well founded after several of the early land engagements resulted in Confederate victories before Union numerical and industrial superiority began to dominate. At sea, the idea of commerce raiding was particularly appealing because it would hit the Yankees where southerners believed it would hurt them most: in their pocketbooks. To execute such a policy, the Confederacy sent agents to Europe to purchase a handful of fast raiders. This eventually resulted in the acquisition of the Alabama, Florida, and Shenandoah, vessels that collectively destroyed more than 150 American merchant ships and provoked a near-panic among the bankers and businessmen of the North’s Atlantic seaboard.

  The protection of the southern coast proved more difficult. In those places where the Confederates were able to occupy existing forts built in the 1830s and ’40s by the Army Corps of Engineers, such as Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor or Fort Morgan at the entrance to Mobile Bay, they were able to fend off repeated naval assaults. But where they had to depend instead on fortifications thrown up since the onset of war, such as at Hatteras Inlet in North Carolina or Port Royal in South Carolina, the Union Navy generally had its way, blasting those dirt and log defenses into surrender within a matter of hours. To prevent Union domination of the coastline, Confederate navy secretary Stephen R. Mallory hoped to supplement the coastal forts by acquiring a few ships whose defensive characteristics were such that they could stand up to a whole squadron of conventional Union warships. “Knowing that the enemy could build one hundred ships to one of our own,” he wrote his wife, “my policy has been to make such ships so strong and invulnerable as would compensate for the inequality of numbers.” In a word, he wanted ironclads. As early as May 8, less than a month after Fort Sumter, Mallory urged the Confederate Congress (which had not yet moved from Montgomery to Richmond) to authorize the construction of an ironclad warship. “I regard the possession of an iron-armored ship, as a matter of the first necessity,” he wrote. “Such a vessel at this time could traverse the entire coast of the United States, prevent all blockades, and encounter, with a fair prospect of success, their entire Navy.”10

  The concept of iron-armored warships was not a new one. Robert Fulton had designed and built a self-powered floating battery (which he called Demologos) for the defense of New York Harbor at the end of the War of 1812, though it never saw action. In 1854 the United States had experimented with a similar craft, the Stevens Battery, but it was still unfinished in 1861 and had design flaws that made it unlikely that it would ever be completed. In 1857 the French had initiated a program to build ten ironclad warships, thus stealing a nautical march (to use a mixed metaphor) on their British rivals, and the first of them, called Gloire, had been launched in 1859. Inspired (or, rather, provoked) by the French to reciprocate, the British had also begun construction of an armored warship.* Mallory’s first thought was to try to buy the Gloire from the French outright. The French refused, however, not only because they were unwilling to relinquish the jewel of their fleet but also because it would be an obvious violation of neutrality. If Mallory wanted armored warships for his new navy, he would have to find a way to build them at home.

  His problem was that the Confederacy lacked the facilities (what today would be called the industrial infrastructure) necessary to build such a vessel from scratch quickly. The design, fabrication, and construction of the engine plant alone was likely to take a year or more. Mallory therefore sought a shortcut, and he found one thanks mainly to the Federal commander of the Gosport Navy Yard near Norfolk, Virginia, Commodore Charles McCauley. Only days after Confederates fired the first shot of the war at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and Virginia seceded from the Union, McCauley feared that a noisy mob of citizens outside the Navy Yard gate might try to storm the place. On April 20, 1861, he ordered that the yard be evacuated. Not only was his decision premature, but the evacuation was poorly coordinated and incompletely performed. Though McCauley ordered his men to destroy whatever could not be carried away, much of value was left behind, including repair facilities, machine shops, a huge granite dry dock, and the partially burned hull of the steam frigate Merrimack.

  Months later, long after the Merrimack had been transformed into
the ironclad Virginia and won its first dramatic victory, an argument emerged over who deserved the credit for planning and building the South’s first ironclad. One candidate was a lieutenant in the Confederate Navy named John Mercer Brooke. On June 3, 1861, Brooke met with Mallory in Richmond to urge the construction of an iron-plated warship, and a week later he submitted a sketch of a casemate ironclad. For technical advice about the feasibility of the concept, Mallory sent for Chief Engineer William P. Williamson and Naval Constructor John L. Porter. Porter is the other contender for credit as the designer of the CSS Virginia. He had no idea why Mallory had summoned him, but he had been thinking about an ironclad warship independently, and when he traveled to Richmond he brought with him a design of his own for an ironclad warship. When he arrived there on June 23, he was surprised and pleased to discover that building an armored warship was the very project Mallory had in mind. In fact, Brooke’s drawing and Porter’s model were strikingly similar. They both featured an iron fort or casemate with angled walls (Brooke’s at a forty-five-degree angle, Porter’s at forty degrees), built atop a flat-bottomed hull. (After tests ashore, the walls of the casemate were eventually constructed at a thirty-six-degree angle.) The principal difference was that in Porter’s model the casemate covered the entire hull, whereas in Brooke’s plan both the ship’s pointed prow and its rounded stern extended beyond the casemate, partly to prevent the bow wave from washing up on the armored shield and partly to increase buoyancy. Porter agreed that this was a desirable feature, and he volunteered to turn the rough sketch into a finished design.11*