Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (57 page)

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 struts 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

Over the next two years, Semmes sailed his beautiful ship, with her 144-man crew, two big pivot guns, and eight 32-pounders, across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, never calling at a Confederate port, always replenishing her supplies from captured Yankee ships or from stores purchased by Confederate agents in Cape Town, Singapore, and the French port of Cherbourg. “She was built for speed rather than for battle,” wrote her executive officer. “Her lines were symmetrical and fine; her material of the best.” By the time Semmes brought the
Alabama
into Cherbourg for a badly needed refitting in June of 1864, he had sunk or captured 64 Union merchantmen worth more than $6.5 million, and had even sunk a Federal blockade ship, the
Hatteras
—all this at an original building cost of £47,500. While anchored in Cherbourg harbor, however, the
Alabama
was trapped by the Federal steam sloop
Kearsarge
, and when Semmes and the
Alabama
attempted to fight
their way free, the
Kearsarge
’s two 11-inch pivot guns sent the
Alabama
to the bottom. “The
Alabama
settled stern foremost, launching her bows high in the air” and staying “graceful even in her death-struggle.” Semmes was rescued by an English yacht and managed to make his way back to the Confederacy in October, 1864, where he was promoted to rear admiral in 1865 and, ironically, given river-defense duty below Richmond.
⁵⁹

The
Alabama
and
Florida
were only the most successful of the Southern commerce raiders. Together with some twenty smaller cruisers, the Confederate commerce raiders accounted for the destruction of at least 261 U.S.-registered ships. After the war, the United States demanded that the British government pay reparations as a way of taking responsibility for the raiders its shipyards had built, and in 1872 the British settled the so-called
Alabama
Claims for $15.5 million. But that figure cannot begin to account for the millions expended in chasing the raiders down (Welles had to devote the attentions of seventy-seven warships and twenty-three other chartered vessels to chasing the raiders), for the trade that was frightened off the seas by the Confederate raiders, or for the 715 other American vessels that were transferred (either for safety or for the opportunity to evade Federal prohibitions on trade with the Confederacy) to other flags. The American merchant marine, which before 1861 held first place in the Atlantic carrying trade with 2.4 million tons of shipping under the Stars and Stripes, was toppled from its preeminence, falling to 1.3 million tons by 1870, and to this day it has never recovered from the blows dealt it by the
Alabama
and the Civil War.
⁶⁰