John Ericsson put the finishing touches on his proposal for a new class of monitors—the Light Draft—and mailed it, together with his sketch, to the Secretary of the Navy on 9 October 1862. He had taken time from his task of designing and overseeing the construction of the monitors Dictator and Puritan to work on this proposal at the request of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox.
The success of Ericsson’s original USS Monitor against the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia, the former USS Merrimack, at Hampton Roads in March 1862 led to a crash-construction program in the North. Shipyards on the East Coast and the Mississippi and Ohio rivers competed to obtain lucrative contracts, and the Union Navy built more than 50 monitor-type vessels before the war ended.
John Lenthall, the Chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair, at first derided Ericsson’s concept, but he later designed two classes of double-turreted monitors himself: the Monadnock and the Kalamazoo. Both he and Benjamin Isherwood, Head of the Bureau of Steam Engineering, were more concerned with building ocean-going warships rather than coastal monitors. To avoid a clash between Ericsson partisans and the two bureau heads, the Navy decided to expand the New York office that supervised construction of warships by private contractors.
Seventy-one year old Admiral Francis H. Gregory was placed in charge of the office, called the Bureau of Ironclads, which had only nominal connection with the two bureaus. It was this division of responsibility for ship construction that sowed the seeds of the light-draft monitor fiasco.
As the war ground on, most of the coastline of the Confederate States was closed to vital foreign trade, either by blockade or by amphibious operations. Simultaneously, Union armies advanced into the sounds and rivers of the coast and up the tributaries of the Mississippi River. The sand bars at the inlets to Pamlico and Albemarle sounds and on the Roanoke River in North Carolina precluded the use of the heavy-draft monitor. The Confederates retreated beyond these natural obstacles and began constructing batteries on the river banks and building casemated light-draft ironclads similar to the Virginia. The combination hampered—and in many instances halted—combined operations because of the extreme vulnerability of the wooden-hulled Union warships. Clearly, shallow-draft ironclads with turret-mounted guns capable of firing in any direction, regardless of the ship’s heading, were needed. The Casco-class light-draft monitors were built to fill the requirement.
In his original proposal, Ericsson envisioned a flat-bottomed, iron-hulled “cistern . . . encased in a raft of solid timber.” The bow “ . . . extends 20 feet beyond the forward part of the iron hull while the wood work of the stern projects 32 feet aft of the iron hull. The hull is composed of beams of oak 15 inches deep placed side by side forming a solid roof over the iron hull.” This roof (deck) was to be covered with three layers of one-inch iron plate. The ship’s dimensions were: length overall—225 feet; beam—45 feet, and draft—7 feet.1
Overworked, Ericsson was not able to give time to the details of the final design, which was entrusted to Chief Engineer Alban Stimers, U.S. Navy, who became the Chief Inspector of Ironclads and head of the light-draft monitor project. Stimers had been working directly for Admiral Francis H. Gregory in New York since 1861, had worked closely with Ericsson on the construction of the original Monitor, and had been on board during her engagement with the Virginia. His views at the time coincided so closely with Ericsson’s that Admiral Samuel F. DuPont, Commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, acidly referred to him as “Ericsson’s high priest.”2
By February of 1863, the Casco-class plans called for a length overall of 225 feet, a beam of 45 feet, a draft of 6 feet 4 inches, and a displacement of 1,175 tons. They were to carry one 11-inch Dahlgren smoothbore and one 150-pounder Parrott rifle mounted in a single turret nine feet high with an inner diameter of 20 feet. The turret sides were armored with eight layers of one-inch iron plate and the cylindrical pilot house on top was made up of ten layers of one-inch iron plates. Propulsion was provided by two Stimers direct-acting, inclined steam engines, driving two nine-foot propellers.
The ships had water-ballast tanks running fore and aft on both sides of the vessel between the inner and outer hull, an unusual feature at the time. When empty, the tanks decreased the monitors’ draft by one foot to help them over sand bars—and provided an additional foot of freeboard while at sea. When going into action, the tanks were filled, which effectively increased protection for the hull, boilers, and engines. Hand-operated pumps were used to pump out the water.
Stimers was assigned to make a complete set of plans from the rough drawing and proposal Ericsson had sent to the Navy Department. Stimers was still working for Admiral Gregory, but Fox instructed him to consult with Ericsson on completing the plans.
Fox wrote to Ericsson on 21 February 1863 asking his opinion of the plans as changed by Stimers and for assurance for that they were “all right.” Ericsson replied three days later that his plan had been “frittered away,” and said that he had planned a simple open tank plated with iron and encased in a raft of timber. Among other things, he objected to the water tanks as useless and said that they would provide only an additional six inches of freeboard. Based on these objections, he refused to take responsibility for the light-draft monitors.3
Strangely, Fox did not halt the project to resolve these problems; the first of the 20 Casco-class contracts were awarded on 9 March 1863. Though Fox did speak to Stimers, his correspondence and later testimony before the Senate Committee on the Conduct of the War do not indicate that he was overly concerned about Ericsson’s objections at the time. His apparent lack of concern and his failure to assign definite responsibilities led to mutual recriminations by all concerned—government and contractors.
Stimers had been ordered to Port Royal, South Carolina, to prepare the growing fleet of monitors for their attack on the defenses of Charleston Harbor. The 7 April 1863 attack was a failure and several of the monitors were badly damaged; as a result, improvements were later incorporated into the plans of other monitors including the Casco class. These included a heavy iron ring around the outside base of the turret to prevent jamming, and increased armor on the pilot house.
Stimers and Ericsson quarreled in February 1864 when Stimers was in Washington to test a turret plate according to instructions supplied by Ericsson. The plate failed the tests, whereupon the Swede claimed that Stimers had neither followed his instructions nor conducted the test properly.4
Ericsson’s ire, never difficult to arouse, probably had been on the rise as the result of correspondence with Fox the previous winter. Whatever the case, an unbridgeable gulf grew between them from this point on, and Ericsson, as his later letters to Fox show, could be an extremely vindictive man.
All of this guaranteed numerous design changes, delays in getting drawings to the builders, and conflicts with the contractors concerning expenses and payments. The testimony of Nathaniel McKay, builder of the light-draft monitor USS Squando, at a Court of Claims hearing in August 1873 is instructive. He stated that the vessels were:
. . . constructed on four or five different plans, and no two plans corresponded with each other in any particular, form or specification. The officers in charge of those vessels didn’t know from day to day what plan they should adopt; they were waiting the development of some battle before some southern fort, or some orders from the Bureau at Washington; and when those battles were fought every engineer suggested something in regard to the vessels, and there were changes from the commencement to the end. Hardly a week elapsed during the construction of these vessels that we didn’t have a change of great importance, sometimes adding thousands of dollars to the vessel and delaying completion of it.
It was impossible to complete the vessels within the contract time on account of so many changes and delays in the plans. We didn’t receive plans for sometimes eighteen months.5
The combination of light draft and low freeboard left almost no margin for error in weight calculations because the ships—even under normal conditions—operated on the edge of foundering. But mistakes were made and the design changes incorporating the turret ring and additional armor compounded them. Not until the launching of the USS Chimo at Boston in May of 1864, however, were they finally manifested.
The ship was designed to have a minimum of 12 inches of freeboard but the Chimo’s main deck forward had only seven inches while the after portion was one inch underwater. All twenty of the light drafts were affected and construction came to a halt.
Throughout June and July a flurry of letters and telegrams passed between Washington, Boston, New York, and the other yards where the ships were being built. Realization dawned that Ericsson had not been consulted regarding the final design and Admiral Gregory asked him for recommendations. By mid-June Gregory decided to raise the decks of 14 of the ships by 22 inches and remove the pipes and valves from the water tanks.
Chief Engineer William W. W. Wood, who replaced the discredited Stimers, requested estimates for the alterations from the contractors in early July. By September agreement was reached concerning the cost of renovations and work on the monitors resumed. The changes and ensuing delays cost both the Navy and the contractors dearly. The contractors’ lawsuits to collect payment for this extra work in the U.S. Court of Claims lasted into the first decades of the 20th century.
Confederate action in the spring of 1864 prompted the Union Navy to complete one of the vessels and send her south that summer. The Confederate ram Albemarle, operating in conjunction with land forces, had pushed Federal troops out of Plymouth, North Carolina, in April of 1864 and had attacked Union warships, sinking one and damaging another in mid-May. Since the Federal ironclad ships drew too much water, the Navy Department ordered the USS Tunixus to be completed with turret, guns, and stores; she left Philadelphia on her maiden voyage on the afternoon of 12 July bound for the North Carolina sounds. As she steamed through the gentle swells of Delaware Bay, however, she began to flood. Water washed up over the deck, which was only an inch or two above the waterline, and down into the hull so rapidly that the pumps could not keep up with it. After a harrowing 12-hour voyage, the ship barely made it back under tow to the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
Nevertheless, the decision was made to finish all 20 of the ships, although five were to be completed as torpedo boats without turret and pilot house. The Casco, one of the five, served briefly with the James River Squadron in Virginia in early 1865. Because of their slow speed and single exposed pivot gun they were considered failures as torpedo boats.
By May 1866, all of the Casco-class monitors had been completed and delivered to the Navy. Only eight were commissioned and of these only the Suncook, which saw service as a guard ship at Charleston, South Carolina, remained in service longer than six months; the last of the light-draft monitors was finally broken up in 1874. The vessels ultimately cost the U.S. Government more than $9 million dollars. Frank M. Bennett, in his 1896 book The Steam Navy of the United States, wrote “ . . . these monitors failed to fulfill their mission and never rendered any service of value to the government.”6
The light-draft monitors offer an early example of what can go wrong during a time of rapid technological change. In 1865, the Senate Committee on the Conduct of the War observed that one or two of the vessels should have been built to test the design.7
In the years since the Civil War, disregard of such advice has frequently proved costly to the taxpayers. Many of the problems discovered during the construction of the light-draft monitors, primarily in the area of communications between design agent and contractors, plague the U.S. Department of Defense to this day.
1. Ericsson to the Secretary of the Navy, 8 October 1862, “Papers of John Ericsson,” U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
2. John D. Hays, ed., Samuel Francis DuPont, A Selection of his Civil War Letters, Vol. II, (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1969), p. 467.
3. Ericsson to Fox, 21 February 1863, “Papers of John Ericsson.”
4. Stimers to Ericsson, 24 February 1864, “Papers of John Ericsson.”
5. Testimony of N. McKay, August 1873, U.S. Court of Claims, Number 6326.
6. Frank M. Bennet, The Steam Navy of the United States, (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Warren & Co., 1896), pp. 392-395.
7. Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Vol. III, “The Light Draft Monitors,” (Washington, D.C., 1865), pp. I-IV.