Out of the hail of iron and lead fired at the CSS Virginia that day, the most significant was a single rifle bullet aimed by a Yankee sharpshooter of the 20th Indiana Infantry. Fired from the beach at 800 yards’ range, it was clearly a lucky shot, going right through the left thigh, grazing the femoral artery of the Virginia’s skipper, Franklin Buchanan. Buchanan would be laid up for months, and the history of the Confederacy’s most famous warship would be affected greatly by it.
That Old Buck could be wounded by a shorebound Yankee told a great deal about his appetite for fighting. For any other captain, that day—8 March 1862—would have been simply a shakedown cruise to test how, and even if, this strange new war vessel would work. Buchanan decided to test how it would work in battle. He took on the main fighting ships of the Union’s North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, with Hampton Roads for a battleground.
Buchanan was 61 years old and had been at sea for 47 of those years. He well knew and respected the protocol of naval warfare. That respect would lead to his wounding. After demonstrating the fearful effectiveness of his ironclad by ramming and sinking the sloop-of-war Cumberland, he turned his guns on the frigate Congress and pounded her into submission. The moment he saw white flags raised on the Congress’s gaff and mainmast, Buchanan ordered the Virginia to cease fire and sent in two of his consorts to take the surrender and aid the wounded on board.
Ashore at Newport News Point, Brigadier General Joseph K. F. Mansfield had little knowledge of naval protocol. To him it looked as if the Congress was about to be carried off by the enemy, and he ordered his field guns and his sharpshooters to open fire, white flags or no. Buchanan, enraged by this breach of battle etiquette, grabbed a rifle and climbed out of the Virginia’s casemate to return the Yankee fire personally. The Indiana sharpshooter soon put an end to his bravura performance. Old Buck was put ashore that night at his Norfolk base, never again to serve on board the Virginia.
In the storied duel the next day against the Monitor, the Virginia was commanded by her executive officer, Lieutenant Catesby ap R. Jones. Neither vessel was much damaged in the historic contest—what the Virginia suffered had come the day before against the Federals’ wooden ships—and there was every likelihood that the battle for control of Hampton Roads would be renewed sooner than later. One of the Virginia’s officers, in reference to Buchanan’s wounding, thought that “Lieutenant Jones should have been promoted .... He had fitted out the ship and armed her, and had commanded during the second day’s fight. However, the department thought otherwise . . . .” Seniority counts for much in naval service, and the Navy Department in Richmond called in Commodore Josiah Tattnall to take command of the Virginia.
By 1862 the Confederate States Navy had developed few resources, and the former steam frigate USS Merrimack, radically reconstructed and rechristened the CSS Virginia, was by far the most precious resource. Tattnall came to her command from a departmental command on the South Atlantic coast which, typically in the straitened Confederacy, was more impressive in title than in fact. Back in November 1861 his flotilla of three small river paddlewheelers, with a combined armament of six 32-pounders, had faced an enormous Federal battle fleet invading the South Carolina sounds at Port Royal. At the first shot from his opposite number, Flag Officer Samuel F. Du Pont, Tattnall had dipped his flag in salute to his old messmate and taken the only course open to him, a retreat up Skull Creek and out of harm’s way. “I think poor old Tattnall &. Co. must feel mean,” Du Pont remarked.
Tattnall was indeed old, at 66 the oldest navy man of rank in Confederate service. A native Georgian, he had first gone to sea as a midshipman in 1812. Service in the War of 1812 was followed by battles against Algerian pirates and gunboat exploits in the Mexican War. On the China station he once violated neutrality by going to the aid of a beleaguered British captain with the remark, “Blood is thicker than water.” While a perfect gentleman in manner, he was admired for his reputation as an old sea dog.
Advanced age and increased responsibility, however, brought a streak of caution to Tattnall’s sea-dog makeup. When Old Buck Buchanan steered the Virginia out into Hampton Roads on 8 March, as bold a move as it was, he had challenged only the wooden warships of the Yankee fleet. His task was to break the blockade; his responsibility was his ship. After Tattnall took command on 29 March, the situation changed, and the responsibility grew day by day. “I will never find in Hampton Roads the opportunity my gallant friend found,” Tattnall observed.
From Norfolk, Tattnall could look out across the roadstead and witness an enormous buildup of Federal forces at Fortress Monroe, on the tip of the Virginia Peninsula. As March turned to April, the largest Northern army yet assembled in the war began moving up the Peninsula toward Richmond. Tattnall had to face the blockading fleet, serve as a guard to Norfolk, and block the James River route to Richmond. It became necessary to balance risk against responsibility.
The Virginia might look an impregnable ship of war, but as he familiarized himself with his new command, Tattnall grew increasingly apprehensive about her shortcomings. In drydock at the Gosport Navy Yard for repairs after the March battles, additional plating was being added below the casemate, promising to reduce her 5-knot speed, and her already sluggish handling even more. In any case the new armor did not extend all the way around the hull. The limited protection at the stem for rudder and propeller continued to cause concern. There was concern, too, about the new iron prow fitted to replace the one broken off in ramming the Cumberland.
But Tattnall’s primary concern was her power plant. The Merrimack’s engines and boilers had been troublesome from the day they were installed in 1855, and after her last prewar cruise they had been condemned. Their condition was not improved when the Merrimack was scuttled at her Norfolk berth before the Confederate takeover. Tattnall would record two engine failures during his watch on board the Virginia, and his chief engineer gave his candid opinion “that they can not be relied upon.”
To be sure, none of these shortcomings was evident to the worried Federal high command. The mere presence of the Virginia was putting an enormous crimp in Major General George B. McClellan’s plan for conquering Richmond by way of the Virginia Peninsula. His grand campaign, as McClellan liked to call it, had from the beginning rested on the premise that the Federal Navy would control both his flanks—the James and York rivers—giving him security, convenient logistical support, and on the James, allowing him to turn any obstacles with amphibious landings. On paper it was a strategy of enormous promise; in reality, as long as the Virginia remained a threat, the strategy was compromised. Already the army had gone to ground at Yorktown with a siege when it could not turn the Confederate line where it was anchored on the James by the Virginia. History knows the Virginia best for her part in the first clash of ironclad warships. Her true service to the Confederacy, however, is better measured by the stifling effect she had on McClellan’s Peninsula campaign.
The Federal naval command in Hampton Roads was totally preoccupied with the Virginia. Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough, commanding the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, had an arsenal of weapons should the Rebel ironclad again “come out.” Under him was an array of vessels, from the 47-gun frigate Minnesota (sister ship of the old Merrimack) to the 2-gun Monitor, and he told his wife he was “spoiling for a fight with the Merrimac .... I expect to sink her in ten minutes . . . .”
The apparent invulnerability of the Virginia to naval artillery—on 8 March, wrote an eyewitness, the Yankee broadsides “had no effect on her but glanced off like pebble stones”—had persuaded Goldsborough to adopt the tactic of ramming. His ramming squadron included all his heavy warships and several fast merchant steamers, such as the Vanderbilt, donated for the Navy’s use by old Commodore Vanderbilt. To give the ramming ships needed sea room, however, the Virginia would have to be lured out into the deep waters of the roadstead. Goldsborough projected the loss of half his rams in any attack.
With his ship out of drydock at last, Tattnall turned his attention to a plan of his own for any future encounter with the Federal fleet, particularly with the Monitor. He had no intention of leaving the confined waters off the mouth of the Elizabeth River to enter Hampton Roads. He knew of the Yankee rams and said he “was not coming down here to get punched; the battle must be fought up there.” He would instead challenge the Monitor to come to him, as in a tournament, and then attempt one of the oldest of naval tactics—boarding. His consort vessels would charge in from several directions, boarding parties would leap onto the ironclad’s deck, blind her with a wet sailcloth over the pilot house, drive wedges under the turret edge to jam it, and smoke out the crew by throwing lighted turpentine-soaked waste down the ventilators. Like Goldsborough, Tattnall projected the loss of half his flotilla in such an attempt. “I will take her!” Tattnall was heard to promise; “I will take her if hell’s on the other side of her!” (There is no record that the Confederate Navy Department sent on to Tattnall at this time the suggestion of one O. P. McDonald, of Hazelhurst, Mississippi. Mr. McDonald proposed firing shells—coated inside with beeswax or made of pottery—filled with nitric or sulfuric acid at the Yankee ironclad, so as to eat away her armor. It might take three or four days of such bombardment, he said, but soon enough the Monitor would “be unfit for any succeeding engagement.”)
On the morning of 11 April, Federal lookouts sighted a column of black smoke rising over Norfolk. Then the column was seen to advance slowly, and finally out of the haze at the mouth of the Elizabeth appeared the monster and her consorts. The cry was raised, “Here comes the Merrimack!” a watching Federal soldier wrote. “Such a scatteration of vessels as ensued was quite a sight: the roads were full of transports of all sorts, steam and sail, and those which lay farthest up got underway in a hurry.” He thought the Rebel ironclad resembled “an immense sperm whale half out of water, or a Noah’s Ark.” Another Yankee soldier said the scene reminded him of “a medieval knight in armor riding down the lists, followed by his squires, to challenge the opposing forces.”
The Monitor and Goldsborough’s ramming squadron had steam up and promptly cleared for action. Then the Virginia stopped, and Tattnall dipped his colors to signal his readiness for the joust, but the Monitor made no move toward her. Tattnall shifted his position back and forth, still attracting no response. A Rebel gunboat dashed forward and swept up three small storeships that had not moved away quickly enough. Their ensigns were flown upside down to flaunt the capture, but the insult did not tempt Goldsborough into an attack. All day the stand-off continued, with neither commander willing to alter his tactical plan. Finally, throwing a few contemptuous long- range shots, the Virginia turned back to her berth.
Confederate General Robert E. Lee, acting as military adviser to President Jefferson Davis, tried to prod Tattnall into a more aggressive stance. Lee urged that the Virginia steam across Hampton Roads under cover of night and up the York River, to get in among McClellan’s transports. “In this manner she could so cripple their means of no scheme but his own, which was to fight, if there was a fight, in his own waters.
But time had nearly run out for the Confederate army besieged at Yorktown, putting Tattnall in a quandary. As April turned toward May, Johnston warned that he could not hold his lines much longer, and if he had to retreat up the Peninsula, it would be impossible to hold on to Norfolk for very long. If Norfolk was lost, so would be the Virginia’s berth. While this reality was seen easily enough, Confederate authorities were slow to face up to the consequences.
Major General Benjamin Huger’s Norfolk garrison might be evacuated on short notice, but the important resources of the Gosport Navy Yard required far more immediate attention than they were getting. This included all manner of valuable machinery and on the stocks several unfinished gunboats and an ironclad known as Virginia No. 2. As for Virginia No. 1, Tattnall would continue to guard Norfolk for as long as needed, then take course up the James to some new position to aid in the defense of Richmond.
The best site for this appeared to be 85 miles upriver at Harrison’s Landing, some 35 miles by water from the capital, where the Virginia might be coaled and provisioned supplying their army, as to prevent its moving against Richmond,” he explained. The ironclad would then return by night to resume the defense of Norfolk and the James. General Joseph E. Johnston, commanding the beleaguered Rebel forces at Yorktown, seconded the proposal.
The prospect of such a sortie horrified Tattnall. His pilots told him that such a move by night was impossible. He felt it equally impossible for him in daylight to survive the gauntlet of Federal batteries at Fortress Monroe and the numerous Federal warships and ramming ships in the roadstead. Even if he somehow reached the York, he predicted any transports there would flee to shoal waters where the deep-draft Virginia could not follow. The whole scheme was out of the question. Josiah Tattnall would risk while acting as a floating battery to close the river to the Yankees. Tattnall would testify that his two shipboard pilots, William Parrish and David Wright, assured him that if the Virginia was lightened to 18 feet draft, from her current 22-1/2 feet, she could easily pass the bars and shallows in the James to reach Harrison’s Landing. This judgment the pilots “asserted again and again,” Tattnall said.
On 27 April Johnston warned Richmond that his evacuation of Yorktown was imminent, but a full week would pass before the stores and machinery began to be moved out of the Navy Yard. By 4 May Johnston’s army was in retreat from Yorktown, yet it was the sixth before the unfinished gunboats and the Virginia No. 2 were started on their way up the James under tow toward Richmond. Other Navy Yard equipment and Huger’s garrison troops were being moved from Norfolk by rail, but it was a slow and much delayed process. As long as it lasted, Tattnall had to keep the Virginia in fighting trim—at her 22-1/2-foot draft—to guard the movement. Still, the Federals made no move to interfere, and despite all the fumbling, the operation might have proceeded to a successful conclusion but for two men—a tugboat captain named James Byers, and Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.
Captain Byers was a New Jersey man working for a tugboat company in nearby Albemarle Sound when the Confederates took over his craft. Unwisely (as it turned out) Byers was allowed to stay on as captain of his tug, the John R. White. On 8 May, working in the Elizabeth River, the White suddenly bolted for Hampton Roads and the Yankees. Captain Byers spilled out the details of the Norfolk evacuation and added, “the Merrimack is still commanded by Tattnall, and has orders to run either for the York or James River.”
Just then Lincoln was at Fortress Monroe to see if he could speed up McClellan’s slow-moving campaign. He seized on Captain Byers’s story. Norfolk must be only lightly defended; why were the Army and the Navy not proceeding against it or trying to get control of the James? No one had an answer for that, and the president, as commander- in-chief of the nation’s armed forces, began personally to mobilize an offensive. He had the Navy send a reconnaissance up the James, and put the shore batteries guarding Norfolk under fire. The Fortress Monroe garrison was alerted for a landing and march on Norfolk, with the President personally reconnoitering the beaches. On 10 May, landing at Ocean View on Chesapeake Bay, northeast of Norfolk, the troops began their march on the town.
Earlier, when Goldsborough’s warships opened their bombardment on Norfolk’s defending batteries, Tattnall had taken the Virginia down to the mouth of the Elizabeth to drive them away. The mutual game of bluff, first played on 11 April, was repeated with the same lack of result, except that it further postponed any preparations for lightening ship for the Virginia’s voyage up the James. Instead of returning to the Navy Yard, she remained on guard at an anchorage below Sewell’s Point, Norfolk’s outermost defensive work.
At mid-morning on 10 May the Virginia’s lookouts noticed that no Confederate flag was flying over the Sewell’s Point battery. Tattnall was supposed to receive advance warning from General Huger when the army moved out, but in the excitement of the Yankees’ advance the matter was overlooked. Tattnall sent his flag lieutenant ashore to find out what was going on. He had to go some distance to find out, and when he returned he brought stunning news. The shore batteries were abandoned, Huger and the Army were gone, the mayor of Norfolk was just then handing the key to the city to the invaders, and the Gosport Navy Yard was in flames. The Virginia was cut off from her base and was the only Confederate presence left in the area.
Tattnall had a plan for this crisis, of course, but he had expected a good deal more time to carry it out, and the facilities of the Navy Yard to assist him. Now everything would be makeshift. He called all hands on deck and told them they must lighten ship enough to run up the James and guard Richmond against the invaders—and they must do this before high tide at dawn the next day. He was answered with three cheers, and the crew went to work. The time was 1900.
In reconstruction the old Merrimack had been cut down to the berth deck and heavily ballasted, so that in fighting trim her decks were below the water line, leaving only the casemate showing. The primary way to raise her was to remove the ballast; that and everything else that could be spared was thrown overboard. The Virginia would be left with little more than her armament, powder, and shot. The task of lightening would have gone faster by removing part of the battery, but there was no crane at the Sewell’s Point anchorage. Reducing draft to the required 18 feet meant raising the ship four-and-a-half feet.
At 0100, with the work well advanced, pilots Parrish and Wright went to Tattnall and dropped a bombshell. Even drawing only 18 feet of water would not allow the Virginia to pass the first of the James’s sandbars, they announced. The wind was wrong. It was westerly, pushing against the tide. They would never make it through.
For Tattnall this must have seemed the last straw. He was unwell that night and feeling his years, and so much already had gone wrong. The army had let him down, and his two pilots, who in days past had repeatedly assured him his ship could be saved, were saying that she could not be saved after all.
Buchanan had warned Tattnall not to trust the Virginia's pilots, and in the aftermath of the crisis Tattnall would go as far as to accuse the two of them of cowardice and even treachery. But at that moment, in the dark, early hours of 11 May, he raised no questions. He surrendered to his caution. He might have set his jaw, swore against hell and high tide that he would save his ship, and ordered the pilots, at gunpoint if necessary, to take him upriver. Surely that is how Old Buck would have done it. Tattnall could not bring himself to follow that course.
Certainly, it was a course of great risk. Whatever stage the lightening had reached, they would have to start upriver before light to avoid being spotted. The casemate would be out of the water, exposing the belt of armor of lesser thickness. In a pitched battle the Virginia might no longer be invulnerable. Perhaps her engines would fail. Perhaps they would ground, and before the ship could be fired, they might fall to the enemy.
Yet all these risks were present had the pilots never come to Tattnall with their fears. Likely their tale of wind and tide—which in hindsight was thought to be a lie—was for Tattnall almost a relief. Here was reason enough not to take a decision he must have dreaded. The vehemence with which he later condemned pilots Parrish and Wright suggests how much this opportunity to shift responsibility to other shoulders meant to him.
What Tattnall lacked at this moment of decision was the ability to view his situation in realistic perspective. (It was an ability General Lee conspicuously possessed, for example, and one General McClellan conspicuously lacked.) Tattnall could see only the Virginia’s shortcomings and the dangers confronting him. He had no sense of the fear and respect with which the enemy viewed the Virginia. Flag Officer Goldsborough would confess that this night had been a sleepless one for him in expectation of what the new day would bring. His pursuit of the Virginia up the James would have been a stern chase in a channel too narrow for his rams to maneuver and too shallow for such heavy craft as the Minnesota to follow. It is by no means certain he would have risked shifting the Monitor’s tactics from defense to offense, nor is it certain how the Monitor would have fared against the steel- tipped bolts the Virginia was carrying in place of her previous percussion shells. Whatever Goldsborough’s plan for pursuing the Rebel ironclad, it surely carried less menace than Tattnall imagined.
However that may be, Tattnall did not hesitate over his decision. He cast off from the Sewell’s Point anchorage and steered the Virginia across the mouth of the Elizabeth to the shoals off Craney Island—still Confederate- held territory—and ran her aground. The crew was taken off and a powder train laid to the magazine, and the ship was set afire.
In the predawn hours of 11 May, watchers at Fortress Monroe and in the Federal fleet saw a white glow become steadily brighter in the distance across Hampton Roads. At 0458, with what witnesses most commonly described as a thunderclap, the fire reached the Virginia’s magazine, “thus forever laying this terrible ghost which has haunted us for so long,” as President Lincoln’s secretary put it. Light Federal craft were soon on the scene collecting souvenirs from the great circle of floating debris. From one of the Virginia’s splintered timbers a walking stick was carved for the president.
Tattnall’s decision did not sit well at Richmond. President Davis called it “hasty.” Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory was blunt in his condemnation: “The destruction of the Virginia was premature. May God protect us & cure us of weakness & folly.” A court of inquiry agreed, judging the ship’s destruction “unnecessary at the time and place it was effected.” Tattnall was granted a court martial. In his testimony he defended his actions in great detail, asking, after the pilots presented him with their opinion, “on what else could I rely?” He charged that the pilots were guilty of more than misjudgment: “a much darker stain is attached to their conduct.” Tattnall was acquitted of all charges of culpability, negligence, and “improvident conduct.”
Thus ended the 65-day life of the CSS Virginia. She had ushered in a new age of naval warfare, and she played a major role in gaining the Confederates a desperately needed month in which to gather forces to meet McClellan’s grand army. Even so, had Tattnall been willing to risk all to save his ship, the Virginia might have played an even more decisive role in the campaign.
In early July, when Lee drove McClellan back from Richmond in the Seven Days’ Battles, the Yankee Army was able to reach a safe haven at Harrison’s Landing on the James. At the time, had it been the CSS Virginia lying off Harrison’s Landing instead of a squadron of Yankee gunboats, the campaign would have followed a very different course. Back when Old Buck Buchanan took the Virginia’s helm, Secretary Mallory had told him that “here was the opportunity and the means of striking a decided blow for our Navy. . .” In the end, the opportunity was only half realized.