This fear was the main factor in overcoming northern inertia on the ironclad question. With a conventional navy superior to anything the Confederates could construct, and preoccupied with the need to build up the blockade fleet, Secretary of the Navy Welles did not at first want to experiment with newfangled notions. But rumors of rebel activities caused Congress to force his hand with a law of August 3, 1861, directing the construction of three prototype ironclads. Welles set up a naval board to assess the dozens of proposals submitted by shipbuilders. The board accepted two, which resulted in the building of the Galena and the New Ironsides, ships of conventional design overlaid by iron plating.
No bid came from John Ericsson, the irascible genius of marine engineering who had contributed the screw propeller and several other innovations to ship design. Bitter about earlier feuds with the navy, Ericsson sulked in his New York office until a shipbuilder persuaded him to submit his radical design to the Navy Department. Ericsson's proposal incorporated several novel features. A wooden hull sheathed with thin iron plate would be overlaid by a flat deck 172 feet long with perpendicular sides extending below the waterline and protected by 4.5 inch armor plating. The propeller, anchor, and all vital machinery would be protected by this shell, which was designed to float with less than two feet of freeboard, giving the craft the appearance of a raft—and also presenting a small target to enemy fire. Sitting on the deck was Ericsson's most important innovation: a revolving turret encased in eight inches of armor and containing two eleven-inch guns. This turret, along with the shallow draft (11 feet), light displacement (1,200 tons, about one-fourth of the Virginia's displacement), and eight-knot speed would give Ericsson's ship maneuverability and versatility. She could almost literally dance around a heavier enemy and fire in any direction.
Lincoln and Welles were impressed by Ericsson's design. But would it float? More specifically, would it stay afloat in a heavy sea? Some members of the naval board were skeptical. They had never seen anything like this cheesebox on a raft. Ericsson appeared before the board and overcame their doubts with a bravura performance. They awarded him a contract, but ridicule of "Ericsson's folly" by senior navy officers caused Welles to hedge his bet: the ship must prove a "complete success" (whatever that meant) or its builders must refund every penny of the $275,000 the government agreed to pay for it. Ericsson was not concerned; he had confidence in his creation. He subcontracted the work to several firms to save time, and supervised almost every detail personally. Starting three months later than the South, northern industry launched Ericsson's ironclad on January 30, 1862, two weeks before the Confederates launched the Virginia. Doubters present at each launching predicted that these crazy craft would never float, but cheered the disproof of their predictions. Several more weeks were required to finish the fittings of both ships. Ericsson named his vessel Monitor (one who admonishes and corrects wrongdoers). There was no time for test runs to determine whether she fulfilled the terms of the contract; the Monitor's test would be trial by combat.
On March 8 the Virginia steamed out from Norfolk on what her crew assumed was a test run. But this too was to be the real thing. Five Union ships mounting a total of 219 guns guarded the mouth of the James River at Hampton Roads: the Minnesota, Roanoke, St. Lawrence, Congress, and Cumberland. The last three were sailing ships—pride of the navy in the 1840s but already made obsolescent by steam. The first two were steam frigates (the Roanoke was disabled by a broken shaft), pride of the navy in 1862. But the fighting this day would make them obsolescent as well. Rumors that the Merrimack (as the Federals continued to call the Virginia) was coming out had circulated for weeks. Today she came, heading first for the twenty-four-gun Cumberland, sending several shells into her side before ramming and tearing a seven-foot hole in her hull that sent her to the bottom. While this was happening, the Cumberland and Congress fired numerous broadsides at the Virginia, which "struck and glanced off," in the words of a northern observer, "having no more effect than peas from a pop-gun."3 This was not quite accurate; before the day was over two of the Virginia's guns were knocked out, every fitting on deck and part of her smokestack were shot away, her ram was wrenched off by the collision with the Cumberland, two of her crew were killed and several were wounded. But none of the ninety-eight shots that struck her penetrated the armor or did any disabling damage.
After sinking the Cumberland, the Virginia went after the fifty-gun Congress, raking the helpless vessel with broadsides which started fires that eventually reached the powder magazine and blew her up. The
3. William C. Davis, Duel between the First Ironclads (Garden City, N.Y., 1975), 89.
Minnesota having run aground in an effort to help her sister ships, the Virginia turned her attention to this flagship of the fleet that had captured Hatteras Inlet the previous August. But the Virginia's deep draft prevented her from closing with the Minnesota as night came on. The rebels left the Minnesota and the other ships for the morrow, and called it a day.
And what a day—the worst in the eighty-six-year history of the U. S. navy. The Virginia sank two proud ships within a few hours—a feat no other enemy would accomplish until 1941. At least 240 bluejackets had been killed, including the captain of the Congress—more than the navy suffered on any other day of the war. The whole Union fleet at Hampton Roads—still the main blockade base—was threatened with destruction. A taste of panic flavored the telegrams to Washington that night. The cabinet met in emergency session next morning. Secretary of the Navy Welles tried to calm Secretary of War Stanton's nerves with news that the Monitor was on its way from Brooklyn to Hampton Roads to confront the Virginia. But would she get there in time? And even if she did, was this two-gun "tin can on a shingle" any match for the rebel monster?
She did, and she was. The Monitor had arrived alongside the Minnesota the night before, her crew exhausted from fighting a storm that had almost sunk them on the way from Brooklyn. The prospect of fighting the Virginia, however, started their adrenalin pulsing again. When the Confederate ship steamed out on the morning of March 9 to finish off the Federal fleet, her crew spied a strange craft next to the Minnesota. "We thought at first it was a raft on which one of the Minnesota's boilers was being taken to shore for repairs," said a Virginia midshipman. But the boiler ran out a gun and fired. A Monitor crewman described the Virginia's response: "You can see surprise in a ship just as you can see it in a man, and there was surprise all over the Merrimac." The rebels turned their attention from the stranded Minnesota to this strange vessel that began circling the sluggish Virginia "like a fice dog" and hurling 175-pound shot from her eleven-inch guns. For two hours the ironclads slugged it out. Neither could punch through the other's armor, though the Monitor's heavy shot cracked the Virginia's outside plate at several places. At one point the southern ship grounded. As the shallower-draft Monitor closed in, many aboard the Virginia thought they were finished. But she broke loose and continued the fight, trying without success to ram the Monitor. By this time the Virginia's wheezy engines were barely functioning, and one of her lieutenants found her "as unwieldly as Noah's Ark." The Monitor in turn tried to ram the Virginia's stern to disable her rudder or propeller, but just missed. Soon after this a shell from the Virginia struck the Monitor's pilot house, wounding her captain. The Union ship stopped fighting briefly; the Virginia, in danger of running aground again, steamed back toward Norfolk. Each crew thought they had won the battle, but in truth it was a draw. The exhausted men on both sides ceased fighting—almost, it seemed, by mutual consent.4
This day saw the completion of a revolution in naval warfare begun a generation earlier by the application of steam power to warships. Doomed were the graceful frigates and powerful line-of-battle ships with their towering masts and sturdy oak timbers. When the news of the Monitor-Virginia duel reached England, the London Times commented: "Whereas we had available for immediate purposes one hundred and forty-nine first-class warships, we have now two, these two being the Warrior and her sister Ironside
[Britain's experimental ironclads]. There is not now a ship in the English navy apart from these two that it would not be madness to trust to an engagement with that little Monitor."5
Of more immediate interest in Washington, the Union fleet at Hampton Roads was saved. For the next two months the Monitor and Virginia eyed each other warily but did not fight. With no ironclads in reserve, neither side could risk losing its indispensable weapon. When McClellan's army invaded the Virginia peninsula and forced the Confederates back toward Richmond in May 1862, Norfolk fell to the Federals and the Virginia was stranded. Too unseaworthy to fight her way into open water and too deep-drafted to retreat up the James River, the plucky ironclad was blown up by her crew on May 11, less than three months after she had been launched. The Monitor also failed to live until her first birthday. On the last day of 1862 she sank in a gale off Cape Hatteras while being towed south for a blockade assignment.
Despite their defects, the Virginia and Monitor were prototypes for the subsequent ironclads built or begun by both sides during the war: 21 by the Confederacy and 58 by the Union. Many of these never saw action; all were designed for bay and river fighting; none achieved the fame of their progenitors. The existence of rebel ironclads lurking in
4. Foote, The Civil War, I, 260; Davis, Duel between the First Ironclads, 120–21, 127.
5. Quoted in John Taylor Wood, "The First Fight of Iron-Clads," Battles and Leaders, I, 692.
southern rivers provoked a state of anxiety in the Union navy known as "ram fever," but had little effect on the course of the war. Steam/sail warships built of wood remained the mainstay of the Union's deep-water navy. But in the last third of the nineteenth century the world's navies converted to iron and steel, incorporating the principal features of Ericsson's folly: low profiles, speed and maneuverability, revolving gun turrets, and a few guns of heavy caliber rather than multiple-gun broadsides.
II
Blockade duty in the Union navy offered few opportunities for glory. The main enemy was boredom. About 500 ships took part in the blockade during the war, with perhaps an average of 150 on patrol at a given time over the four years of fighting. These ships captured or destroyed about 1,500 blockade runners. Assuming that for every runner captured, a blockade ship sighted or chased a dozen, this meant that the average blockader sighted a runner once every three or four weeks and participated in one or two captures a year. "Day after day, day after day, we lay inactive, roll, roll," was the description of blockade service by one officer. Another wrote to his mother that she could get an idea of what blockade duty was like if she were to "go to the roof on a hot summer day, talk to a half-dozen degenerates, descend to the basement, drink tepid water full of iron rust, climb to the roof again, and repeat the process at intervals until [you are] fagged out, then go to bed with everything shut tight."6
Only the chance to strike it rich kept blockade sailors sane and alert. The crew shared half and half with the government the proceeds from every prize they captured. This amounted to about 7 percent of the prize's value for the captain, a lesser portion for each officer, and 16 percent shared among the seamen. The dream of hitting the jackpot in this system sometimes came true: within nine days in the fall of 1864 the little gunboat Aeolus captured two runners unassisted, earning $40,000 for her captain, $8,000 to $20,000 for each of her officers, and $3,000 for each seaman.
Potential profits as well as actual excitement were greater for the crews of blockade runners. "Nothing I have ever experienced can compare
6. Richard S. West, Jr., Mr. Lincoln's Navy (New York, 1957), 60; Merrill, Rebel Shore, 69.
with it," wrote a British officer on a runner. "Hunting, pig-sticking, steeple-chasing, big-game hunting, polo—I have done a little of each—all have their thrilling moments, but none can approach running a blockade."7 But such a comment did not apply to the first year of the war. The blockade then resembled a sieve more than a cordon; the small risk of running it raised cargo prices and insurance rates but offered few thrills. By the summer of 1862, though, things were different. With most of the South's ports sealed off or occupied, the blockade fleet could concentrate on the few ports remaining open. Experience had taught northern captains to station smaller ships inshore as picket boats to send up rocket signals when a runner approached the harbor entrance attempting to enter or leave. All warships within sight would then converge on the runner. Several miles out a second cordon of Union ships patrolled a wider area, giving chase to outward-bound runners spotted by the picket boats or inward-bound ships spotted by themselves.
This system worked reasonably well against slow or large blockade runners in conditions of good visibility. But such craft trying to run the blockade in these conditions soon disappeared from southern shores. In their place came sleek, fast, shallow-drafted vessels built (mostly in Britain) for the purpose, painted gray for low visibility, burning smokeless anthracite, with low freeboard, telescoping smokestacks, and underwater steam-escape valves. With pilots on board who knew every inch of the coast, these ships chose moonless, foggy, or stormy nights to make their dash into or out of a channel from which all navigation markers had been removed except coded shore lights to guide the pilots. Under such circumstances, a runner might pass within 200 yards of a warship without being detected. Some runners carried signal rockets identical to those used by the Union navy, which they fired in a wrong direction to confuse pursuit.
Nassau, Bermuda, and Havana became the principal bases for blockade runners. There they took on cargoes of guns, ammunition, shoes, army blankets, medicines, salt, tea, liquor, hoop skirts, and corset stays. When the Union navy acquired enough ships it established a third cordon of blockaders patrolling these ports (despite British and Spanish protests) to intercept runners hundreds of miles from southern shores. The blockade runners usually escaped these patrols, however, and made the run to Wilmington, Charleston, Mobile, or some other port where they picked up cotton for the return run.
7. Robert Carse, Blockade: The Civil War at Sea (New York, 1958), 41.
Wilmington and Nassau became wartime boom towns—rowdy, violent, bawdy, awash with wealth and greed.8 The chance of profits from a successful voyage outweighed the one chance in three (by 1864) of capture. Owners could make back their investment in one or two round trips, clearing pure profit with every subsequent voyage. Cotton prices in European markets soared to six, eight, ten times their prewar levels, enabling speculators who bought cotton in the South and shipped it out to earn a return of several hundred percent. By 1864 captains of blockade runners received $5,000 or more in gold for a round trip, other officers from $750 to $3,500, and common seamen $250. In addition, captains reserved part of the cargo space for their own cotton (outgoing) or high-value goods (incoming) which they sold at auction. Many of the owners, captains, and crews were British, including some former royal navy officers who had resigned to pursue this more lucrative career. Although patriotism actuated the numerous southerners who also owned and operated blockade runners, the profit motive was not entirely absent. The North treated captured southern crews as prisoners of war but could not risk the diplomatic consequences of imprisoning foreign crew members, so let them go. The crowding out of war matériel by high-value consumer goods on incoming runners became so notorious that in early 1864 the Confederate government enacted (much evaded) regulations banning luxury goods and requiring all runners to allot at least half their space to the government at fixed rates. The government (especially Josiah Gorgas's Ordnance Bureau) and some southern states also bought their own blockade runners.
How effective was the blockade? There are two ways of answering this question. One way is to point out that during the war an estimated five out of six blockade runners got through (nine out often in 1861 scaling down to one out of two by 1865). They shipped out half a million bales of cotton and brought in a million pairs of shoes, half a million rifles, a thousand tons of gunpowder, several hundred cannon, and so on. The dollar value of Charleston's foreign trade
was greater in 1863 than in the last year of peace. Confederate envoys to Britain compiled long lists of ships that had run the blockade to prove that it was a "paper blockade" entitled to no recognition by international law. In January 1863,
8. Wilmington became the principal Confederate port for blockade runners because of the tricky inlets and shoals at the mouth of the Cape Fear River guarded by Fort Fisher, whose big guns kept the blockade fleet from interfering when a runner came within their protecting range.
Jefferson Davis pronounced the "so-called blockade" a "monstrous pretension." A prominent historian of Confederate diplomacy agreed. The blockade, wrote Frank L. Owsley, was an "absurdity," "scarcely a respectable paper blockade," "old Abe's . . . practical joke on the world."9
But most southerners who lived through the blockade gave a different answer. "Already the blockade is beginning to shut [ammunition] out," wrote Mary Boykin Chesnut on July 16, 1861. It was "a stockade which hems us in," she added in March 1862. In July 1861 a Charleston merchant noted in his diary that the "blockade is still carried on and every article of consumption particularly in the way of groceries are getting very high." Four months later he wrote: "Business perfectly prostrated everything enormously high salt selling at 15 and 20 cents a quart hardly any shoes to be had dry goods of every kind running out." A southern naval officer conceded after the war that the blockade "shut the Confederacy out from the world, deprived it of supplies, weakened its military and naval strength."10
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