Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (56 page)

The principal objective of the blockade was to prevent any shipping, Southern or otherwise, from entering or leaving the Confederacy. That meant, for much of the time, that blockade duty was an incessant string of empty, passive and depressingly boring days, waiting for the possible blockade-runner to appear over the horizon. “Dull! Dull! Dull! is the day,” wrote the surgeon of the Federal blockader
Fernandina
in his diary. “Nothing to do.” On top of the boredom, sailors had to endure
many of the same routine annoyances and bad food that soldiers onshore suffered. The
Fernandina
’s unhappy surgeon explained that “‘a life on the ocean wave’ is not a very pleasant one unless a person is fond of feasting every day on salt junk and hard tack, reading papers a month after they are published, hearing from home once a month, etc., etc.” Add to the boredom and discomfort the fierce Southern heat, and it quickly became apparent that blockade duty was anything but romantic. One sailor stationed off Wilmington, North Carolina, explained in his diary how adventurous blockade duty really was.

I told her [his mother] she could get a fair idea of our “adventures” if she would go on the roof of the house, on a hot summer day, and talk to half a dozen hotel hallboys, who are generally far more intelligent and agreeable than the average “acting officer.” Then descend to the attic and drink some tepid water, full of iron rust. Then go on to the roof again and repeat this “adventurous process” at intervals, until she has tired out and go to bed, with every thing shut down tight, so as not to show a light. Adventure! Bah! The blockade is the wrong place for it.
⁴⁴

Yet for all its discomforts, blockade duty was still preferred over service on the inland rivers or on foreign stations, chiefly because blockade duty offered the prospect of prize money to any ship’s crew that captured a merchantman trying to run the blockade. The USS
Magnolia
bagged a blockade-runner named
Memphis
in 1863, and when the
Memphis
was sold off as a prize, the crew divided up the staggering sum of $510,000. The naval lieutenant in command, who enjoyed the Melville-esque name of William Budd, took home $38,318.55 as his share, and the
Magnolia
’s ordinary seamen realized $1,350.88 each. When the ninety-day gunboat
Kennebec
could lap up over $1.5 million in prize money for its 100 officers and crewmen, and when Rear Admiral Samuel Philips Lee could pocket between $110,000 (Lee’s reported figure) and $150,000 (what Gideon Welles believed he had raked in) in prize money over the two years he commanded the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, blockade duty could suddenly seem appealing after all.
⁴⁵

The blockade came to involve more than merely sitting in ambush for Confederate blockade-runners. A surprisingly large proportion of blockade seizures were made by the little Potomac Flotilla, which ran small expeditions up the Potomac and the other Chesapeake Bay rivers to disrupt Confederate coastal trade and the smuggling of medicines and weapons through Confederate lines in Virginia.
At the other end of the scale, the navy also aimed to shut down as many major Southern ports as it could. In November 1861 the navy seized Beaufort and the Carolina Sea Islands, and the following January the army and navy together established a foothold on the North Carolina coast. In April 1862 another joint army-navy operation recaptured Fort Pulaski on the Savannah River and closed the Georgia coastline to blockade-running, while the next month Farragut and his steam sloops pushed their way past the Confederacy’s Mississippi River forts and steamed up to New Orleans. Farragut also sealed off Mobile Bay in August 1864, and in January 1865 Wilmington surrendered to yet another joint expedition led by Farragut’s stepbrother, Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. Only Charleston managed to resist the onslaught of the Federal navy. Throughout the summers of 1863 and 1864, both the army and navy attempted to capture the Charleston harbor defenses and bombard Fort Sumter (now in Confederate hands) into submission. But Sumter, and the rest of Charleston harbor, held out until February 1865, when the approach of a Federal army from Georgia finally forced the Charleston garrison to evacuate the city.

The Confederates had been aware from the beginning of the war that the blockade represented a noose that would strangle them if they could not first find a way to cut through it. “The blockade is breaking up the whole South,” wrote “Parson” Brownlow, the Unionist Tennessean in the spring of 1862. “It has been remarked in the streets of Knoxville that no such thing as a fine-toothed comb was to be had, and all the little Secession heads were full of squatter sovereigns hunting for their rights in the territories.” So if maintaining the blockade was the item of first importance for the Federal navy, then rendering it ineffective as soon as possible became a top priority for the Confederates.
⁴⁶

Unfortunately, the Confederates had very little at hand to use as a weapon against the Federal ships. At least the Union started out with
some
kind of a navy; the Confederates had none, except for a few small sloops and revenue cutters that they were able to seize at the time of secession. By February 1862 the Confederate navy still only amounted to thirty-three ships. Nor did the Confederates have much to build with. The South had little or nothing in the way of a shipbuilding industry: it possessed few of the raw materials or manufacturing facilities for fitting and arming warships, and lacked building and repair facilities. The only naval construction yard was in the Florida harbor of Pensacola, but the waters of the harbor were controlled by Fort Pickens, whose Union garrison had clung to control of the fort even after Fort Sumter had been bombarded into surrender. Of course, Virginia had occupied the navy yard at Norfolk in April 1861, but the Norfolk yard could easily be sealed off by Federal blockading ships in Hampton Roads and at the mouth of the Chesapeake. If the South had any hope of breaking the blockade, it was going to have to be by some unexpected and unconventional means.

However, the unexpected and unconventional seem to have come naturally to the Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Russell Mallory, whose technical ingenuity single-handedly created a Confederate navy, which in turn almost broke up the Union blockade. Very much like his opposite number, Gideon Welles, Mallory laid hands on any possible weapon, any proposed invention, no matter how unlikely—mines made from beer kegs, submarines made from boilerplate, gunboats laminated with railroad iron—and floated them out to do battle with the Federal steam frigates. It was in that last category, ironclads, that Mallory came the nearest to succeeding in his schemes. Mallory, a former U.S. senator from Florida and formerly the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, was fully abreast of the latest developments in building ironclad gunboats and warships. He was aware that, however imposing the Federal steam frigates and steam sloops might seem, not a single one of them was ironclad, and the Federal ironclad gunboats being built for use on the Mississippi were strictly for the river, too small to venture out on the ocean. Let the Confederacy manage, somehow, to construct even one ironclad warship capable of steaming on the high seas, then that one ship would be more than a match for each and every one of the Federal frigates. “I regard the possession of an iron-armored ship as a matter of the first necessity,” wrote Mallory. “Such a vessel at this time could traverse the entire coast of the United States, prevent all blockade, and encounter, with a fair prospect of success their entire navy. … Naval engagements between wooden frigates as they are now built and armed will prove to be the forlorn hopes of the sea—simply contests in which the question, not of victory, but who shall go to the bottom first is to be solved.”
⁴⁷

The difficulty, for Mallory, was that nowhere in the Confederacy was there the capability of building such a ship, even if he could find enough iron plate or iron rails to armor her. Then, on June 23, 1861, two of Mallory’s lieutenants at Norfolk reminded Mallory about the scuttled steam frigate
Merrimack
in the Norfolk Navy Yard. They pointed out that a salvage company had pumped out the half-sunken shell of the frigate and placed her in dry dock, and as it turned out, the hull and boilers of the
Merrimack
were still relatively intact. It would be possible to cut away her burned-over masts and useless upper decks, rebuild her upper works with an iron casemate like one of the Crimean “floating batteries,” and arm her with enough guns to sink anything the Federal navy could send against her. Mallory bought the idea at once: he had the sunken frigate inspected, and in July 1861 work began on reconstructing the
Merrimack
as a seagoing ironclad.

On February 17, 1862, the rebuilt
Merrimack
was launched and commissioned—and given a new name,
CSS Virginia
. The reborn steam frigate now looked nothing like its first form—or, for that matter, like anything else afloat. The Confederate engineers had cut the hull of the ship down to the waterline and then erected a
thirteen-and-a-half-foot-high iron-plated casemate on top of the hull, using two layers of two-inch-thick wrought-iron plates, eight feet long by eight inches wide; the armored casemate would be rounded at each end and with sides sloping outwards at a 36-degree angle, and roofed over by an iron grille with three hatches. Four gunports with iron shutters gaped in each side, and at each rounded end of the casemate were three more gunports for a 7-inch rifled pivot gun. Just beneath the waterline at her bow was a 1,500-pound cast-iron ram, which the ironclad could use to smash the timber hulls of the Federal blockading fleet. On February 24 the
Virginia
was given a captain, Franklin Buchanan, and on March 8 Buchanan nosed the makeshift ironclad’s way out of Norfolk and down the ten-mile-long channel into Hampton Roads.
⁴⁸

Standing out in the Roads, sealing off Confederate access to Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic, were seven ships of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron—the prize steam frigates
Minnesota
and
Roanoke
, the twenty-four-gun sail-powered sloop
Cumberland
, an obsolete forty-four-gun sail frigate named
Congress
, and an assortment of supporting craft. Shortly after 1:00
PM
, the
Virginia
bore down on them, selecting the
Cumberland
as its target as the most heavily armed ship in the line. As the startled Federal seamen beat to quarters, the
Virginia
cruised ominously past the antiquated frigate
Congress
, which unleashed a twenty-five-gun broadside at the passing monster. The broadside banged and rattled on the
Virginia
’s side, bouncing harmlessly off the iron plates and splashing hugely into the waters of the Roads. The
Virginia
then opened up on the
Congress
with a point-blank broadside of her own, dismounting an 8-inch gun and turning her “clean and handsome gundeck into a slaughter-pen, with lopped-off legs and arms and bleeding, blackened bodies scattered about by shells.” But the
Virginia
’s real object was the
Cumberland
. The Confederate behemoth bore down remorselessly on the Federal sloop as shot from the
Cumberland
’s 9-inch pivot gun made no more impression on the ironclad than the
Congress
’s guns had. The
Virginia
returned the fire, then drove directly at the
Cumberland
, crushing its ram into the
Cumberland
’s side. The stricken sloop sank bow first, its gun crews still trying to bang shot off the
Virginia
’s sides until the water closed over the ship’s unlowered flag. One hundred and twenty-one of her crew went down with her.
⁴⁹

The rest of the Federal squadron, having watched the easy destruction of the
Cumberland
, attempted to escape. But the
Congress, Minnesota
, and
Roanoke
all managed to run aground in the shallow waters of the Roads. The
Virginia
drew up behind its first antagonist, the old frigate
Congress
, and pounded it into a blazing shambles in half an hour; one of her few surviving officers struck her colors. The
Virginia
would
probably have done the same to the rest of the Federal ships had not the tide started to ebb. Anxious not to be caught aground themselves, the Confederates turned their triumphant experiment around and the
Virginia
slowly steamed back up the Roads, intending to finish off the stranded
Minnesota
the next morning. Despite being hit ninety-eight times on her armor plate, she had suffered only two of her crew killed (by a Federal shell exploding near one of
Virginia’s
gun ports) and a handful (including Captain Buchanan) wounded.

With the
Virginia
’s capabilities proven, the Confederates had only to choose how to deploy the ship next. In his original orders to Captain Buchanan, and in a follow-up letter on March 7, Mallory grandly suggested that once the
Virginia
finished off the Federal ships in Hampton Roads, she should steam out into the Chesapeake and then up the Potomac to bombard Washington. “Could you… make a dashing cruise on the Potomac as far as Washington, its effect upon the public mind would be important to the cause.” The
Virginia
could then continue on to New York and “burn the city and the shipping.” With that, “peace would inevitably follow. Bankers would withdraw their capital from the city. The Brooklyn navy yard and its magazines and all the lower part of the city would be destroyed, and such an event, by a single ship, would do more to achieve our independence than would the results of many campaigns.” Whether the
Virginia
’s unwieldy bulk ever could have survived the first pitch and roll of the open ocean, much less navigate the shallow reaches of the Potomac River, is debatable. However, Mallory
thought
she could, and what was more, so did Lincoln’s cabinet.
⁵⁰