The American nation nearly tore itself apart in the years 1861–1865. The root cause of the terrible Civil War between North and South was “the peculiar institution” of slavery, but other existential issues, such as states’ rights and the preservation of the union, were initially in the forefront. The two sides engaged in a total war that could only end with the destruction of the newly formed Confederate States of America or the permanent sundering of the Union.
The end of this tragic conflict—which cost many more American lives than the combined total of all the other wars the United States had thus far fought—brought a redefined nation. Not only had sweeping social and economic changes come about with the abolition of slavery, but the reunited nation viewed itself differently. Prior to the war, Americans frequently called their home states their “country” and used the verb “are” rather than “is” when referring to the nation as a whole (as in “the United States are committed to peace”).
There were corresponding changes in naval warfare as well. Technological advances in propulsion, armor, and armament were supplemented by changes in strategy and tactics that were often characterized by what today is taken for granted as “joint warfare.” Although primarily remembered for its great land battles such as Antietam and Gettysburg, two of the three strategic elements that would ultimately decide the contest depended heavily upon naval forces.
To Choke Off and Divide
When the newly formed Confederacy of Southern states fired on the federally owned Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, making war inevitable, both sides were compelled to devise strategies to achieve their war aims. For the South, the task was simpler; the Confederacy needed only to exist to achieve its primary war aim. The task for the North was more complicated. It was apparent that bringing the errant states back into the Union was something that could not be done without force or coercion. But creating an army so overwhelming in size and power that it could conquer and hold the entire South was an obvious impossibility, so other means were necessary.
Major General Winfield Scott, hero of the Mexican War and senior military adviser to the newly elected President Abraham Lincoln, proposed a strategy that consisted of three main elements: (1) deploy an army sufficient to protect the Northern capital of Washington D.C.; (2) establish a naval blockade of the southern states; and (3) divide the South by seizing control of the major rivers that penetrated the newly formed Confederacy, especially the Mississippi.
The first of these elements was obvious. To lose the federal capital would be devastating, so defending it was imperative. As it happened, the Confederacy obligingly moved its capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond once Virginia joined the rebellion. This meant the same federal army that defended the capital might also be used offensively against the enemy capital once it was strong enough.
Even before Scott presented his strategic blueprint to Lincoln, the President declared a blockade. Lincoln understood that cutting off the Confederacy from trade with the outside world would prevent the export of cotton, the mainstay of the Southern economy, and it would also prevent the Confederacy from receiving munitions and other essential imports from industrialized Europe. Because the South had little established industry of its own, the latter was potentially devastating.
The third major element—seizing control of the major rivers—made sense both geographically and economically. The Mississippi flowed right through the Confederacy such that its loss to Union forces would cleave the new nation into separate parts that had obvious need of communication with one another. Other rivers, such as the Tennessee and the Cumberland, served as natural highways that allowed penetration into the Confederacy at key locations. The Southern economy relied on river traffic to move its goods, especially cotton, so their loss had potentially crippling effects.
At the time, General Scott’s proposed strategy was generally not well received. While Scott correctly recognized that the coming war was not going to be quick and would require a patient and expensive strategy, such things are rarely embraced at the onset of war. His strategy was dubbed “the Anaconda Plan” by those who meant to disparage it by likening it to the snake that killed its prey by slow strangulation. Much of the Northern population believed the war would be over quickly and easily, and that such things as blockades and the taking and holding of rivers were unnecessarily slow. Despite its early detractors, as reality replaced unrealistic optimism, this so-called Anaconda strategy was refined and adopted as the blueprint for Union success.
Inauspicious Beginnings
Two of the three major components of the Union strategy required significant naval forces, yet the Union Navy began the war with several disadvantages. When the Southern states seceded, nearly a quarter of the Navy’s officers resigned their commissions and went south to serve in the newly formed Confederate States Navy. The Union Navy counted fewer than 8,000 men. Only 42 ships were in commission, some of them away on distant stations. The personnel shortcomings could be overcome over time through recruitment and training, and the ship shortages could be surmounted by a robust shipbuilding program. But the latter was initially hampered by the loss of the Norfolk shipyard in Virginia, which the Confederates captured just a week after the fall of Fort Sumter. The Union thus lost more than 1,000 cannon and great quantities of ammunition, as well as well-equipped industrial facilities capable of building and maintaining a large fleet. While most of the ships captured by the Confederates at Norfolk were decaying sailing vessels, one—the large screw-driven frigate Merrimack—would come back to haunt the Federals less than a year later.
These shortcomings notwithstanding, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles began building the navy the Union would need for victory. He was ably assisted by Gustavus Fox, a former naval officer who was appointed to the newly created position of Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Although some contended that Fox was the real power and Welles a mere figurehead, the two men actually made an efficient team who successfully piloted the Navy through the rough waters of the Civil War.
Blockade
Turning their attention to the blockade, Welles and Fox began commissioning ferryboats, yachts, freighters, and any other seaworthy vessels that could mount one or more guns to seal off the 3,500-mile-long southern coastline, with its nearly 200 rivers and various inlets and estuaries that could serve as exits or entrances. By the end of 1861, the Navy had increased its commissioned vessels to 264. The number continued to climb as the war progressed, until it reached 671 by war’s end.
Four blockading squadrons were deployed, two in the Atlantic (North and South) and two in the Gulf of Mexico (East and West), to cover the coast that extended from Alexandria, Virginia, to Brownsville, Texas. Like so many military operations, blockade duty consisted of long periods of tedium punctuated by short bursts of frenzied excitement. Endless days on station were only occasionally relieved by chasing, and hopefully subduing, a would-be blockade runner. Nights called for increased vigilance and were made laborious by frequently weighing anchor and moving stations to keep opponents off balance. One young officer on blockade duty told his mother that she “could get a fair idea of our ‘adventures’ if she would go to the roof of the house on a hot summer day” and, after spending several hours in mindless conversation to pass the time, would then “descend to the attic and drink some tepid water, full of rust,” and then “go to the roof again and repeat this ‘adventurous process’ at intervals, until she has tired out, and go to bed, with everything shut down tight, so as not to show a light.”
Although many Southern blockade runners were successful in penetrating the Union cordon of ships, the blockade succeeded in creating hardships for the Southern population and kept the Confederacy largely isolated from potential European sympathizers who might otherwise have established closer economic and diplomatic ties with the seceded states.
The Trent Affair
One blockade runner, the Theodora, successfully made it through the blockade with a cargo of potentially great strategic significance to the Confederacy. Hoping to convince England and/or France to enter the war on the side of the Confederacy—or at least strengthen trade and diplomatic ties with the two nations—Confederate President Jefferson Davis dispatched two envoys, James M. Mason and John Slidell, to Europe. Having made it through the blockade to Havana, Cuba, the two diplomatic agents then transferred to the British mail steamer Trent for further transport to England. But Captain Charles Wilkes, commanding the screw frigate San Jacinto, learned of the presence of the Southern agents on the British ship. Wilkes’ reputation was one of impetuosity, and he fully lived up to it in this instance by stopping the British ship and seizing Mason and Slidell. Northern newspapers hailed Wilkes as a hero, but the British government took a different view. Responding to what they saw as a serious breach of their neutrality, the British reinforced their garrisons in Canada and threatened an economic embargo. Recognizing that the United States was in no shape to fight more than one war at a time, Lincoln ordered the two agents to be released and directed Secretary of State William Seward to make an official apology to Her Majesty’s Government, effectively ending the affair.
Virginia Rampage
While blockades and coastal assaults were nothing new to naval warfare, a dramatic naval clash in March 1862 caught the attention of the world. This story began in the days just before the attack on Fort Sumter, when Secretary Welles, concerned that the federal naval base at Norfolk would be lost to the Confederacy should Virginia secede, ordered the frigate Merrimack to get underway as soon as possible. She was the most capable ship then at Norfolk—the rest were older ships whose loss would be less significant—and Welles was rightfully worried that she might fall into rebel hands. Unfortunately, Virginia seceded on the same day Welles gave the order. Through a combination of misjudgments and mishaps, the Merrimack failed to escape and was instead scuttled and set on fire by the retreating Northerners. Worse, Confederate forces raced into the shipyard and were able to put out the fire in time to prevent her complete loss. Though she burned to the waterline, the frigate’s hull and engines were only partially damaged. Welles’ Confederate counterpart, Stephen Mallory, who saw “the possession of an iron-armored ship as a matter of the first necessity,” accepted the plans of a team of visionaries who wanted to build such a vessel on the Merrimack’s remaining hull. The charred hulk was placed in a dry dock, where construction began on what would become one of the most famous ships in naval history.
Rechristened the Virginia, this new incarnation bore no resemblance to her former self. She had no masts or rigging and was encased in a double layer of two-inch iron plates bolted to an oak-and-pine frame that was two feet thick. All that could be seen above water was the 35-degree-angled iron casemate, topped by a single smokestack and pierced at regular intervals for an array of guns. Unseen was a 1,500-pound ram that protruded from her bow, pairing a centuries-old weapon the ancient Greeks used in their galleys with the dawning technology of steam propulsion.
On 8 March, with clouds of black smoke belching from her resurrected engines, the Virginia moved slowly away from the shore, her sides glistening in the midday sun from the coating of pork fat her crew had applied to make an enemy boarding more difficult. Gaining momentum as her great weight began moving down the Elizabeth River, she headed for nearby Hampton Roads, where a Union fleet had taken up blockade duty. As the cumbersome but powerful vessel reached her top speed of 6 knots, crowds waved and cheered from the banks. The Confederate Navy had been the underdog to the more powerful Union Navy since the war had begun, but now it seemed that this was about to change.
Out in the more open waters of Hampton Roads, the wooden Union ships were unaware of the impending danger, enjoying Saturday routine with laundry fluttering from their rigging, drying in the midday sun. But as the Virginia emerged from the mouth of the river and the initial shock of seeing the oddity subsided, Union sailors prepared for battle. As they watched the strange vessel approach, some remembered it as looking like a “barracks building on water,” others as a “crocodile,” and “an iron-plated coffin.”
The Virginia lost no time in pressing the attack. Passing close aboard the frigate Congress, she opened fire, then moved on to her next victim, the Cumberland, a 30-gun sailing sloop of war. After first raking her new adversary with her guns, the Virginia then rammed her. A torrent of water began filling the Union ship and she began to sink, threatening to pull the Virginia down with her, the latter’s ram holding fast. But the ram broke off, freeing the ironclad to move off and continue her rampage.
The Virginia reengaged the Congress in a one-sided battle in which Union sailors were mowed down as fires were ignited in the Congress, while the Virginia remained impervious to the best that her adversary could throw at her. The wooden frigate would continue to burn after the drubbing ceased and would succumb near midnight, when the fires reached her powder magazine and a devastating explosion finished her.
Attempting to get underway to join the battle, the 40-gun frigate Minnesota had run aground and was now a helpless target for the rampaging ironclad and several Confederate gunboats that had joined the fray. But the light of day was fading and, after some long-range exchanges of gunfire among the adversaries, the rampage ended when the iron monster returned to its lair, saving the remainder of its destruction for the next day.
It had been a very bad day for the Union Navy. When word reached Washington of the day’s events, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton told Lincoln that he feared the ironclad would “change the whole character of the war; she will destroy every naval vessel; she will . . . come up the Potomac and disperse Congress, destroy the Capitol and public buildings.”
But Welles had other thoughts on the matter. The Secretary of the Navy told Lincoln and the Cabinet that all was not lost—help was on the way.
‘Cheesebox on a Raft’
On 6 March, two days before the Virginia had gone on her rampage in Hampton Roads, an equally strange vessel had gotten underway from Brooklyn Navy Yard and headed south for the Norfolk area. Enduring heavy Atlantic seas that nearly swamped her, this vessel, which someone had described as “a cheesebox on a raft” but was officially known as the Monitor, rounded the tip of the Delmarva Peninsula on the evening of 8 March. As she steamed up the channel, her crew could hear the distant booming of gunfire, and soon they could see a Union frigate burning. It became clear that these sailors, exhausted from their battle with the elements, would have to find the strength to fight another enemy in the morning.
Like the ironclad Virginia, the Monitor was unique in all the world. Unlike her Confederate counterpart, the Monitor had been built from the keel up as a new kind of ship, rather than using the remnants of a traditional wooden vessel. When word had reached Secretary Welles that the Confederates were building some sort of ironclad in Norfolk, he had convened an “ironclad board” that ultimately chose a radical new design that incorporated armor and included other brilliant innovations, such as a forced-air ventilation system that fed the boilers and provided comfort to the crew. A very low, flat deck with little freeboard covered a submerged hull where the engines and crew’s quarters were located. Two large guns were housed in a revolving turret that could train about to bring the guns to bear on a target, rather than having to maneuver the entire vessel to accomplish the same.
At about 0730 on the morning of 8 March, excited voices reported that the Virginia was underway and heading straight for the helpless Minnesota, the latter still hard aground. The Monitor’s crew raced to their stations, closing hatches behind them, removing the stack, and placing protective covers over her running lights. Within minutes, she was underway and steaming toward her Confederate counterpart.
To those watching from shore, it was evident that the Virginia was much larger than the Monitor, and many anticipated seeing a quick end to this Union newcomer. But this was not to be. The first-ever battle between ironclads began when the Monitor fired a shot that struck the Virginia but merely glanced off. The Virginia responded with a broadside that yesterday would have destroyed a wooden ship of the same size, but her shots too failed to penetrate the “cheesebox.” For the next four hours the two ferrous monsters traded shots, pirouetting about one another, sometimes so close they nearly collided. Inside the ironclads, the din was almost unbearable as striking shots reverberated throughout their echo-chamber hulls. But the shots glanced off the Monitor’s whirling turret and off the Virginia’s sloping sides, causing no more than dents and the awful clatter. It was clear that each had met her match, yet neither was able to prevail. When the Virginia at last retreated once again to the Elizabeth River, the battle ended in a draw.
Both sides would claim victory in this first clash of the ironclads. Northerners could rightfully claim that the Monitor had prevented the Virginia from her mission of destroying the Minnesota and the other remaining Union ships in Hampton Roads, but the Virginia’s continued presence in the area prevented the already cautious Union General George McClellan from initiating a quick offensive in his planned Peninsular Campaign, which gave the Confederates needed time to prepare their defenses of Richmond, capital of the Confederacy.
Circumstances would prevent these two ships from a rematch. The Virginia would survive only another two months. On 11 May, with Norfolk about to fall to Union forces, Confederate sailors destroyed her to keep her from falling into enemy hands. The Monitor lasted until the end of that same year, when she was lost in a storm off Cape Hatteras on New Year’s Eve as she headed south to participate in blockade operations.
Although those two ships would never fight one another again, the day of the ironclad had clearly dawned. The Virginia’s rampage the day before the Monitor arrived conclusively proved that wooden warships could not stand up to these new armored vessels. Many more ships would fight in the Civil War behind shields of armor and with steam-powered engines, revolving turrets, and other new inventions. These vessels would soon take control of the seas from those beautiful wooden sailing ships with their webs of lines and clusters of billowing canvas. When the United States fought the Spanish-American War just 36 years later, the two major naval engagements of the clash would be fought by cruisers and battleships made of steel, slugging it out with breech-loading, rifled guns in rotating turrets. The clash between the Monitor and the Virginia marked the beginning of a revolution and the end of an era.
New Orleans
Meanwhile, far down the Mississippi, where the great river emerged from the continent to flow into the Gulf of Mexico, Flag Officer David Farragut was preparing to capture the key city of New Orleans. The Confederacy’s largest and richest city, New Orleans was also the South’s most important seaport, and its fall to Union forces would be a severe blow to the Confederate cause.
While the city itself was rather vulnerable, the approaches to it were not. At Plaquemine Bend downriver from the city, the substantial Forts Jackson and Saint Philip straddled the river, bristling with 74 and 52 guns respectively and manned by a total of more than 1,000 men. To make matters worse, the Confederates had created a barrier boom across the river by connecting a number of hulks together with heavy chains that would make passage impossible until it could be eliminated or at least penetrated.
On 18 April 1862, a Union flotilla of 20 mortar boats under the command of Commander David Dixon Porter—son of David Porter who had achieved much fame in the War of 1812—moved into position downriver of Fort Jackson. They anchored such that they were shielded from the fort’s guns by a bend in the river but were able to reach their target by firing their high-trajectory weapons over the trees that crowded the shore. The mortars on these boats were monsters weighing nearly 9 tons each that fired one 13-inch shell every 10 minutes. For five days the shelling continued, hurling nearly 17,000 rounds at Fort Jackson. Despite this heavy bombardment, it became apparent to Farragut that he was not going to destroy the fort, nor was it going to surrender. He was going to have to chance running the gauntlet.
Before his flotilla could make the run, however, the hulk-and-chain barrier boom would have to be penetrated. This task fell to the gunboats Itasca and Pinola, who braved the heavy—but fortunately inaccurate—Confederate gunfire to break the barrier. When attempting to rig one of the hulks with explosives failed, the mission was eventually accomplished by using a chisel to break the chain.
At 0200 on 24 April, Farragut got his flotilla underway. Despite heavy enemy gunfire and some additional complications—including Farragut’s flagship Hartford running temporarily aground and being set on fire by a Confederate fire raft—most of the flotilla succeeded in getting past the forts with amazingly few casualties.
But the night’s travails were not over. Farragut next had to contend with a Confederate flotilla consisting of the ironclad ram Manassas and nine gunboats of various sizes and firepower. In addition, the ironclad Louisiana—though unable to get underway because her engines were not functioning—was anchored close enough to the action to deliver some potent firepower. A melee ensued with ships careening about in darkness augmented by heavy smoke but pierced by frequent flashes of fire. The battle continued until daylight revealed that the Union Navy had prevailed. The Confederate flotilla had been destroyed, and only one federal ship had been lost.
After burying his dead—miraculously only 39 of them— and making necessary repairs, Farragut headed upriver again. Exchanging fire with two Confederate batteries just a few miles below New Orleans, the Union ships soon after arrived at the city and dropped their anchors. The river was swollen with spring rains and its crest was very near the tops of the levees that protected the below-sea-level city. This gave the ships the tactical high “ground,” their formidable guns looming above the streets of the city, which the Confederate troops had earlier abandoned. With appropriate discretion, the city fathers surrendered New Orleans.
It was a great Union victory. A vitally important city was lost to the Confederacy, and two weeks later, Louisiana’s capital city of Baton Rouge surrendered to a lone Union warship. The Confederates also were forced to destroy the Mississippi, then under construction at New Orleans. It was the most powerful ironclad that the Confederacy would ever attempt to build. With their supply lines now cut, Forts Jackson and Saint Philip eventually surrendered as well. Perhaps most significant of all, more of the Mississippi was now under federal control—a key component to the so-called Anaconda strategy that would eventually win the war.
Three More Years
Less than a month after the fall of New Orleans, on 10 May 1862, Norfolk Navy Yard was recaptured by Union forces. On the same day, the Confederates mounted an impressive attack on Union Navy ships that were bombarding Fort Pillow on the Mississippi, sinking one federal gunboat and damaging another enough to force her aground. These two contrasting events were emblematic of what was to follow—alternating victories and defeats for both sides that would prolong the war for another three costly and bloody years. Through this trying time, in which Americans killed one another in astounding numbers, when brothers fought one another, when the tide of battle ebbed and flowed for both sides, keeping hopes for victory alive and the killer angels continuously relevant, the Union Navy carried out its share of the grand strategy, sometimes supporting the Army, sometimes acting alone.
To be continued . . .
