Monitor vs Merrimac. Merrimac had more guns, but monitor had heavier guns, and a turret that allowed it to always fire on the Merrimac. Merrimac was also underpowered, and very difficult to steer. Though both ships suffered some damage, the Merrimac retired first. The Merrimac never fought another battle. It was scuttled to prevent it coming into union possession. BOB HOLLAND
What If: The Confederate Navy Triumphant
Yorktown, Virginia
At Yorktown, on the James Peninsula jutting between the York
and James Rivers in the sovereign state of Virginia, the thick fog had lifted
by mid-morning to reveal a line of trenches separating two armies. Guns silent,
regiments of both sides stood at parade rest. Promptly at 10.00 a.m., the
easternmost army began to stack its weapons, then to march in what seemed
unending lines through the ranks of its captors. A military band set the tone
for the event, playing an old tune (one learned by the bandmaster from his
grandfather, whose father had heard the same song played here years before):
The World Turned Upside Down.
Later that day, as two generals met at Yorktown (the one to
surrender his sword, the other to commiserate with his vanquished former
brother-in-arms), another ceremony took place at a fortress on the tip of the
Peninsula. Here, the commandant surrendered his sword and his command to a
battered naval captain (left arm in a sling and right eye bandaged) accompanied
by a rather roly-poly civilian. When the exuberant politician and his entourage
posed for pictures alongside the shamed enemy officer, the naval captain
slipped away to the parapet. There he gazed into the harbor at his similarly
battered vessel. As the gusting wind streamed its tattered red, white, and blue
banner from the ship’s oft-fished flagstaff, he tried to recall what it was
that the newspapers had quoted the President as saying a few weeks ago. “In the
end, it will not be the ships of iron but rather the steel wills of our loyal
sons that decide the outcome of this struggle.”
“Perhaps Davis is right,” thought Catesby ap R. Jones
(captain of the C.S.S. Virginia by the grace of God and the commission of the
Confederate Congress), “but I rather think that we were just damn lucky, and I
will take all the iron ships that I can get.”
Prelude
The election of Abraham Lincoln as the sixteenth president
of the United States in November 1860 launched his nation into a bloody civil
war. South Carolinians had sworn that victory for the Black Republican would be
followed by the secession of slave-holding states from the Union. They, and
like-minded cohorts in the remaining six states of the Deep South, made good on
their promise as the lame-duck President Buchanan did little (and the
president-to-be even less) to prevent this fracture of a nation.
Secession tested loyalties. Military and naval officers as
well as private citizens had to choose between regional affiliation and duty
(often sworn duty) to the concept of an indivisible national entity. Even
without consideration of duty, the choice was not always easy since ties of
clan, friendship, and economics frequently crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. Here
and there, voices of sanity competed with hawkish cries and strident martial
airs, their pleas for logic and reason unheeded. They, too, eventually
succumbed to the madness of fratricide.
One such voice belonged to William Tecumseh Sherman,
President of Louisiana Seminary of Learning and Military Academy. A Northerner
by birth and a graduate of West Point, Sherman had come to appreciate the
cultured pace of life in the South. Despairing at the news of South Carolina’s
break from the Union, he wrote a stirring and prophetic letter to his friend,
Professor David F. Boyd:
“You, you the people of the South, believe there can be
such a thing as peaceable secession. You don’t know what you are doing. I know
there can be no such thing… You people speak so lightly of war. You don’t know
what you are talking about. War is a terrible thing… The Northern people not
only greatly outnumber the whites at [sic] the South, but they are a mechanical
people with manufactures of every kind, while you are only agriculturalists…
You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical
and determined people on earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail… At
first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, and
shut out from the markets of Europe by blockade, as you will be, your cause
will begin to wane…”
They did not listen; the general Southern populace was
firmly ensnared in the rage militaire. As the break-away states began to seize
arsenals and properties of the United States, some cooler heads closely
considered the exact arguments that Sherman had addressed to his friend. A
number of those calculating thinkers joined the secessionist congress, meeting
in Montgomery, Alabama, in early February 1862. Though a constitution would not
be adopted until the eleventh of the following month, the Provisional Congress
of the new Confederate States of America elected Jefferson Davis as its first
president, with Alexander Stephens as his vice-president. Davis immediately
sought to make sense of the madness by seeking qualified men to assume the key
cabinet positions in his government. When, on February 21, Congress created a
Department of the Navy, Davis immediately called upon his old friend Stephen R.
Mallory of Florida to become the Secretary of the Navy.
Planning the Impossible
As a former United States Senator, one of Mallory’s many
appointments had been to the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, a position that he
had held for a decade. There he had championed a stronger U.S. Navy, pushing
programs ranging from shipbuilding to mandatory performance reviews for
officers. The irony of the situation, as he assumed the title of Secretary of
the Navy, was not lost on Mallory: without his efforts the mariners of his
former country would have been far less able to prosecute war upon his new
homeland—a homeland miserably prepared for a war at sea.
Sherman had been correct—agriculture was the South’s
economy. There were few seagoing vessels based in the states of the Deep South,
and it possessed no ships of war. Aside from scattered fishermen, the South
produced few mariners, and those of Southern extraction had been on New England
vessels for so long that even fewer would return home. New Orleans had a
relatively large shipyard and Pensacola a smaller one while a number of
civilian contractors existed in scattered ports, but the new nation lacked
ordnance and powder factories, ironworks, machine shops, canvas lofts, and
ropewalks. Sadly, the transport infrastructure in the Confederacy was almost as
weak as its shipbuilding facilities. Rather than extensive railroads and
macadamized roads, Mallory’s new country had long depended on its numerous
inland waterways and a well developed coastal trade for its transport needs.
The Secretary more than suspected that the Union Navy would soon seek to
disrupt such watery highways.
Nor did it take a genius to realize the manner in which the
U.S. Navy would prosecute its war against a South so absolutely dependent upon
trade with Europe. With only 42 active vessels (and many of those scattered on
distant stations around the globe), the Union’s Secretary of the Navy, Gideon
Welles, would put a token blockading force off each Southern port while
aggressively converting to warships anything that would float and building
vessels as rapidly as possible. As excess forces came available, they would be
used to capture island bases to support the blockade, or simply to capture
Southern ports. Meanwhile, rapidly converted gunboats would support a Union
thrust down the Mississippi River, effectively isolating the Trans-Mississippi
command from the remainder of the Confederacy.
As Mallory began to organize his department he carefully
considered, then prioritized, the needs of his nation based upon the obvious
enemy plans. First, the defense of the Mississippi River and the nation’s ports
clamored for attention. Second, a means to defeat any Union blockade must be
found. Third, the vulnerability of the commerce of the North, spread widely
across the Seven Seas, must be exploited. And, an unlikely fourth, if possible
the war must be taken to the coasts and port cities of the United States. To
accomplish any of these goals, Mallory had to build a navy from scratch. At the
same time, he found himself forced to wage political war against a president
whose knowledge of naval matters could be “captured in a thimble, still leaving
room for a lady’s thumb” and against a congress divided by the very states’
rights that had created it.
Mallory’s initial defensive plan stressed strong land
fortifications at harbor mouths and along the Mississippi River and its key
tributaries. At each port, and along the Mississippi, gunboat squadrons would
be needed to support the fortifications and to assist defending Confederate
field armies. At the same time, transports would be in desperate demand to
supplement the underdeveloped rail system of the South. By early March 1861,
the Confederate Navy consisted of only ten vessels, ranging from the antiquated
sidewheeler Fulton (U.S.S. Fulton until taken while in ordinary at Pensacola)
to revenue cutters and slavers seized by the provisional government.
Altogether, they mounted only 15 guns. Incorporation of state navies would
eventually add fewer than two dozen small warships to these forces, all as
miserably armed as the original ten vessels. This fell far short of the hundred
or more strongly armed ships needed for defensive purposes alone.
To add to the woes of the secretary, heavy artillery and
munitions were in short supply. To equip new fortifications adequately meant
denying strong firepower to converted warships. The South also lacked foundries
and machine shops; in fact, it did not possess any of the facilities to build
the steam power plants needed in modern warships, and could provide fittings
such as shafts and screw propellers only with great difficulty. Of course, neither
engines nor screws would be in great demand until adequate shipyards could be
erected. When, on March 15, Congress approved the construction or purchase of
ten additional vessels for port defense, Mallory remained uncertain as to
whether engines and armament could be obtained for them.
A Turning Point
It must have galled Mallory to realize that each day over a
dozen modern commercial steamships entered and exited the ports of his nation
and that the seizure of even a few of them would have provided the nucleus of a
blue-water navy for the Confederacy. However, they flew the flags of European
nations, and Mallory knew that recognition by and support from those very
nations provided the only hope for final independence of the Confederacy. It
was his concern with the perception of his homeland by these foreign countries
that led to heated words between President Davis and his Secretary of the Navy
at a Cabinet meeting on the afternoon of March 18.
It was after the discussion of old Sam Houston’s refusal to
swear an oath to the new Confederate government of Texas and the steps to be
taken to force the surrender, preferably without bloodshed, of Fort Pickens in
Pensacola and Fort Sumter in Charleston that Jefferson Davis announced his
intention to issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal to Southern ship owners.4
Mallory reminded the president that privateering had been labeled illegal by
the Declaration of Paris of 1856. Davis responded that neither the United
States nor the Confederate States had signed that agreement, and thus he was
not bound to follow it. Furthermore, South Carolina’s congressmen thought
privateering a fine idea—in fact had suggested it to him because privateering
had been profitable for Charleston in the past. Then the tone of the meeting
intensified.
Mr. M. {Secretary Mallory} questions: “These are naval men?”
President {Davis}: “Well, no, at least I don’t think so.”
Mr. M.: “Do they have extensive connections with European
governments, then?”
President: “No, but they…”
Mr. M. (growing red in the face, interrupting): “Then I must
say that this is idiocy! We have no ships! We have no engines! We have no
cannons! And we cannot anger the very people that we hope to sustain us in our
hour of need! Such action would be as asinine as this proposal for a cotton
embargo of European markets that is spreading through the newspapers!”
President (agitated): “I will not have…”
[At this point, the handwriting of the note taker becomes
illegible as if scribbled hurriedly, though “Damn you!” appears at least once.]
Mr. M. leaves the room after threatening to tender his
resignation.
President: “My apologies gentlemen, but better ended now
than later. Let us move on to the discussion of the cotton embargo proposed by
the representatives from Texas…”
The next afternoon, Secretary Mallory approached the
president in private (resignation in hand, it should be added). Though their
meeting is not recorded, President Davis’s appointment book for that day notes
that all meetings after Mallory’s appearance were canceled. It can be assumed
that both men realized that the pressure of forming a new nation had led to the
harsh words of the preceding day. Apparently, Mallory managed to sway the often
unswerving Davis to his point of view, as two days later (and with the support of
Davis), he addressed Congress on naval matters. If a nexus can be identified
wherein the course of the Confederacy turned sharply from potential disaster to
possible success then this speech marks that juncture of time and action:
“Honored representatives of this Confederacy, I thank you
for the time to discuss the needs of our naval establishment and the situation
in which the coming conflict—and have no doubt that it will come—finds us. We
are a newly birthed nation whose life blood is commerce. We lack the
self-sufficiency of a long established country, and we require access to
Europe. Our cotton must reach the markets of the old countries, and we must
have European goods unloading in a constant stream at our wharves if we hope to
see this great endeavor succeed.
Sadly, our seaports and rivers are vulnerable to any
aggressor. The loss of even one major port, once overrun by an enemy army
supplied from the sea, will be a dagger aimed at our heartland. Already, the
United States refuses to surrender the forts at Charleston and
Pensacola—bastions that by right belong to our nation. Two of our great ports
are thus already plugged, and near a hundred ships under the Stars and Stripes
ready to blockade the rest.
Yet we do not have a single ship capable of challenging
potential blockaders. Our handful of gunboats mount fewer guns than one
first-rate screw frigate. Yes, we have gunboats building, but there is no
guarantee that we can find the engines to power them or the cannons to give
them teeth. We have neither foundries nor machine shops, though they do
exist—in Europe.
Now two bills, the one for the establishment of
privateers and the other for an embargo, and both quite damaging to our
maritime position, may well appear before you. They must not be passed. International
law, as observed by the great nations of Europe, prohibits private vessels of
war. For us to flaunt that law would be viewed as the naive arrogance of mere
children and would not create the friends that we so dearly need. If any man
would serve this nation rather than seek to line his own pockets, then let him
enlist himself and his ship in this glorious cause! There will still be prizes,
but let us not anger our friends across the Atlantic with the legitimacy of
their taking.
As for this cotton embargo, do not allow it! When has an
embargo succeeded? Did those of the founding fathers prevent their bloody
struggle against tyranny? Did Jefferson’s embargo (and the hardship that it
caused, you learned at your father’s knee!) stop a war? Did Madison’s embargo
during that same war do ought but make the common people hate him? Now is the
time that we must establish our credit abroad! We must show the nations of
Europe that we value our economic ties! We must let them know that the mills of
Lancashire and the looms of France will not wait on us! And if the bales stop
flowing and their mill workers cry of hunger and need, it will not be on this
Confederacy that those powerful Admiralties turn their ire. Oh no, gentlemen,
to us they will extend their hands to reach the one that we have already given
them.
The issues in this naval bill now before you are
self-evident. But I would like to summarize the key items. The bill proposes
the immediate establishment of a National Naval Arsenal at New Orleans, to include
a powder mill, a naval cannon foundry, a general purpose foundry, four new
slips for large vessels, a drydock, and boiler and engine manufacturies. As the
manufacturies will not be ready for at least a year, agents will be authorized
to purchase engines and miscellaneous accoutrements abroad for the building of
four warships at New Orleans capable of challenging and defeating any
blockading force on our coasts. Nor will we neglect our Atlantic coast while
this force is building; large gunboats will be bid to private contractors in
the ports designated by this bill. Again, agents dispatched to Europe will
endeavor to purchase engines for these vessels. Artillery and munitions for
coastal fortresses must be ordered as well. Sundry other items also appear in
the bill.
Honored representatives, this will not come cheaply. No
navy ever has. We may well mortgage our future for a generation—but, I promise
you, there will be a future to mortgage. Without this effort, without this
great outlay of wealth, that future may not arrive at all. Let us not quibble
over dollars. They are small things when stacked beside our freedom. Had the
Athenians quibbled when Themistocles asked that their silver be turned into
warships, then the iron heel of a Persian tyrant would have trampled that
glorious democracy. Had the Roman senate held close the coins needed to build a
navy (and to build another when storms destroyed the first!), that fair
Republic would have fallen to the mercantile tyranny of Carthage. I do not know
exactly what lies before us, but I do know this: To surrender the sea is to
surrender our democracy and our republic. And we must not let that happen.”
Within days, newspapers began hailing Mallory as the
“Southern Themistocles.” The passage of the new naval appropriations was never
in doubt, and though the price of “Mallory’s Navy” would create a national debt
that would not be repaid during his lifetime, at least there would be a nation
to repay it. Within a week of the speech, the first naval purchasing agents sailed
for Europe, but by then the Confederacy’s prominent Secretary of the Navy had
turned his attention to other opportunities.
Yards for the Confederate Navy
By the end of March, even faint hopes of reconciliation
between the Confederacy and the United States had evaporated. Lincoln decided,
in the waning days of that month, to hold Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens. The
border states, especially North Carolina and Virginia, had already rejected
secession once—now their loyal and disloyal citizens alike waited nervously for
the first fratricidal shells to fall. Of course, some citizens alleviated their
nervousness with action, especially in the organizing of militia and
“volunteer” units. In wavering Virginia on the third day of April, one such
unit, the Washington Rifles, elected a 37-year-old graduate of West Point as
its captain. William Edmundson Jones, better known as “Grumble” to those around
him, was an experienced soldier and local politician. Little could he have
imagined on that day that his loyalty to Southern ideals would place him first
on the field of battle for his state.
In Montgomery, Mallory still wrestled with creating a navy.
Delegating minor tasks such as the creation of uniforms, flags, and forms to
his growing staff, he focused on placing ships and men on the water. To lure
those who would have become privateers, Mallory offered generous bounties for
prizes taken by the Confederate Navy—75 percent of auction value, as well as
gun money and head money for enemy warships, to be divided among crew and
officers. To encourage ship owners to risk their vessels in national service,
Mallory promised 20 percent of the auction value of each prize for division
among the owners of vessels loaned to the national government for conversion to
warships. By the end of the first week of April, a dozen large steamers and
three times as many smaller vessels had been deeded to the government. Hundreds
of men—including far too many whose only experience of salt water had been that
prescribed by a physician for sore feet—had flocked to recruiters in ports
throughout the Confederacy, ready for their share of the prize money.
Over the following months, the Confederate naval apparatus
would take shape, but in those first weeks Mallory and his subordinates faced
overwhelming logistical restraints: no uniforms, few barracks or tents, little
preserved food and naval stores, a severe shortage of artillery and munitions,
a lack of drydocks and experienced artificers to convert their new found wealth
of vessels to something resembling a navy, and a shortage of experienced naval
officers to bring order to the chaos in every Southern port.
When, on April 7, Davis notified his secretary of the navy
that the governor of South Carolina had ordered communications between Fort
Sumter and Charleston cut in preparation for forcing the issue of ownership of
the bastion, Mallory requested permission to initiate what in modern parlance
would be called a “black op.” With the president’s approval, Mallory dispatched
a trusted lieutenant to Virginia with a written plea to an old acquaintance,
the governor of that wavering state. Though the actual missive was destroyed by
the governor, its contents remain well known: if Virginia should join the
Confederacy, then every effort must be made to secure the Gosport Naval Yard
near Norfolk. If the yard could be taken quickly, the Confederacy would gain a
well-stocked, first-class naval facility. And Mallory did not trust the United
States simply to turn it over to its rebellious sons. The governor shared
Mallory’s concern, and quietly called upon an old and trusted friend, Grumble
Jones (breveted to major), to begin shifting his company to Norfolk. There
Jones would take command of local militia. Working with Southern sympathizers
stationed at the yard, Jones was ordered to seize the facility if Virginia
prepared to leave the Union.
At 04.30 a.m. on April 12, the first shots struck Fort
Sumter. The following day, Major Robert Anderson surrendered his battered
command. Two days later, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers as a force to
march south and end the rebellion. Missouri and Kentucky refused to send
soldiers against their sister states, while Virginia, North Carolina,
Tennessee, and Arkansas took the first steps to leave the Union and join the
Confederacy. On April 17, Virginia’s legislature officially voted in favor of
secession, and its governor telegraphed Grumble Jones to act immediately. By
11.00 p.m. Jones had led his forces through the main gate at Gosport,
skirmishing as they went with a small guard of Marines and sailors. As Jones
wrote:
“Forming the Rifles into a volley line in the field
across from the gate, I called upon the officer of the guard to surrender his
small force in the name of the Sovereign State of Virginia and the Confederate States
of America or I would order my men to fire. Before he could reply, the boys
being a mite high strung had heard the word fire, released a shamefully ragged
volley, and headed for the gate in what they thought was a charge. The Union
boys took off, and a race commenced that did not end until my boys had followed
some of them onto a big ship docked in the harbor. Following at a more sedate
pace, I took the color guard to the quarters of Commodore [Charles S.] McCauley
and allowed him to change from his nightshirt to a uniform before accepting his
sword. The next morning we locked up 107 prisoners, all those who refused to
swear allegiance to Virginia or the Confederacy, and began to organize
batteries to receive the expected Yankee visitors. Losses all around were about
23 wounded or injured—mostly from fist fights and stumbling around boats.”
It was well that Jones organized his defenses so quickly, as
Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had already dispatched Captain Hiram
Pauldry’s Pawnee with a force of Marines from Washington to burn the yard.
Pauldry’s arrival at Norfolk was met with enthusiastic though inaccurate fire
from shore batteries. Unwilling to risk his ship and Marines against an
obviously prepared defense, Pauldry returned to Washington.
According to his clerks, Mallory danced in delight when he
first heard the news of the capture of the yard, complete with its large
drydock, ropewalks, foundry, machine shop, boiler shop, covered ways, and
overflowing store houses. Some 1,200 cannon, including over 50 of the new
Dahlgren guns, and tons of munitions were among the booty. Best of all, along
with several old sailing ships stored in ordinary and the yard’s steam tugs,
Jones had captured the seven-year old screw frigate Merrimack. Docked for
repair of its ailing steam engine, the ship had been rigged for scuttling, but
the headlong charge of the Washington Rifles had captured the vessel before its
captain could react. Mallory wasted little time in shifting war materials from
the naval yard to his scattered squadrons forming at Southern ports.
Though Mallory could immediately use the materials captured
at Gosport, the use of the vessels captured there was a tad more perplexing.
Those ships ranged from the antique frigate United States (of War of 1812 fame)
to the old 74-gun ship of the line Pennsylvania and, of course, the modern
Merrimack. The non-steam warships were so vulnerable as to be useless, except
as floating batteries. Even the Merrimack, despite being a first-rate steam
frigate, did not stand a chance against an entire fleet and could only be used
as a raider if it could escape the Union vessels soon to invest Hampton Roads.
Similarly, the yard itself remained relatively useless unless the blockaders
could be defeated. Mallory foresaw only one answer to this dilemma, proposing
on April 26:
“… to adopt a class of vessels hitherto unknown to naval
service. The perfection of a warship would doubtless be a combination of the
greatest known ocean speed with the greatest known floating battery and power
of resistance…”
That answer was to build, to convert, or to acquire seagoing
ironclad vessels.
