The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (104 page)

Engineering difficulties notwithstanding, the British and French remained locked in a naval arms race and by midcentury they had a hundred steam warships between them; the rest of the world’s navies had a total of eighteen. The rivals set aside their differences to support the Ottoman Empire against encroaching Russian influence in the Caucasus,
Persia, and the Near East, the gateways to
British India, and to keep Russian warships out of the Mediterranean. Non-Turkish warships had been prohibited from transiting the
Bosporus and Dardanelles until 1833, when the Ottomans secretly granted the Russian fleet freedom of passage. Citing the “
ancient rule of the Sultan,” which had closed the straits in 1475, the
London Straits Convention of 1841 revived the prohibition, thus corralling Russia’s Black Sea fleet. When war began in October 1853, a Russian battleship fleet sailed to
Sinop—twice as far from
Istanbul as from
Sevastopol—and using the new explosive shells developed by France’s Admiral
Henri-Joseph Paixhans destroyed an Ottoman frigate squadron. The Ottomans welcomed the British and French fleets into the Black Sea, and while Russian and Turkish armies battled in the
Balkans and Caucasus, French and English ships bombarded the forts at Sevastopol, in the
Crimea, and Kinburn, in the Dnieper estuary. Although the steamships could enter and withdraw from action at will, their wooden hulls were vulnerable to Russian shell fire, and the French built a collection of
floating batteries sheathed in four-inch iron plate that withstood shelling even when well within range of the forts. After the war, the
Treaty of Paris opened the Black Sea to the merchant shipping of all nations, but the sea was “
perpetually interdicted to the Flag of War, either of Powers possessing its coasts, or of any other power,” a condition that Russia repudiated in 1870 when it began building a new Black Sea fleet.

Impressed with the destruction of the Ottoman fleet at Sinop by exploding shells and the resilience of the French ironclads in the Crimea, France’s surveyor of the navy, Stanislas Dupuy de Lôme, designed
La Gloire,
whose wooden hull was clad with iron plate and reinforced with iron fastenings. With
a single iron deck, the single-screw, three-masted ship mounted thirty-six 6.4-inch (16.2 cm) muzzle-loading, rifled guns. Far from helping the French achieve naval superiority over the British, however,
La Gloire
prompted the
Royal Navy to develop plans for what became the most powerful and heavily armored ship afloat. Launched in 1860, at 128 meters
HMS
Warrior
was half again as long as the 120-gun first-rate
HMS
Howe
.
Warrior
’s primary armament consisted of thirty 68-pounder and ten 110-pounder breech-loading guns, twenty-six of which were mounted on the main deck within a central citadel, essentially an armor-protected box. Her superior speed enabled her to outdistance and outmaneuver any battleship then afloat, and although designed to fight under steam, she was rigged as a three-masted ship and her ten-ton, two-bladed propeller could be hoisted free of the water to reduce drag when under sail. Classified as a forty-gun
frigate, during her trials she received the accolade that defined her challenge to the existing naval order: “
She looks like a black snake among the rabbits”—the rabbits being the stubbier, high-sided ships of the line like the
Howe
.

By the 1870s, all the world’s major navies had converted to iron-hulled, steam-powered ships armed with exploding-shell guns and armor protection for their vital spaces, including engines, primary batteries, and magazines, a wholesale transformation that resulted from the experience gained in the American Civil War. Commerce raiding and naval warfare on the coasts and rivers of the United States played critical roles in the conflict, but these are regarded as something of an aside because the war’s most obviously decisive battles took place on land and there were no fleet actions to speak of. When hostilities began, the
U.S. Navy had about nine thousand men and forty-two ships, a dozen of the Home Squadron, and the rest dispersed among the Mediterranean,
Brazilian, Pacific, and
East Indies Squadrons to protect American commercial interests, and the African Squadron, which patrolled against slave traders. With fifty-three hundred ships, the
United States
merchant marine was second only to that of Great Britain, with fifty-eight hundred; together the two nations accounted for 82 percent of the world’s registered ships. Yet with no imminent threats to its commercial or territorial security, the U.S. Navy was under no compulsion to keep pace with the latest developments in the European navies.
John Ericsson’s sloop of war
USS
Princeton
(1843) was among the first screw-propelled warships ever built, and the navy adopted ordnance officer
John A. Dahlgren’s shell gun in the 1850s, but the navy’s
technological innovations were otherwise few. The Civil War changed everything. Whereas the prewar fleet consisted mostly of sail-powered ships with a handful of side-wheelers, about 10 percent of the seven hundred ships commissioned during the war were iron or ironclad vessels, many of them monitors and
gunboats without sailing rigs of any kind and most of them propelled by screws rather than paddles. While the Confederacy produced far fewer ships, unrigged armored vessels, including primitive
submarines, made up an even higher proportion of the Southern fleet.

The Union and Confederacy approached the naval war from distinct positions. Small though the U.S. Navy was—and about 10 percent of the officer corps resigned their commissions to serve the South—the North had the shipbuilding expertise, industrial infrastructure, and manpower to expand its fleet with relative ease. The South had no warships and limited shipbuilding capacity because it had traditionally depended on the Northern states for most of its industrial manufactures and foreign trade. That the naval conflict would be an instance of what is now called asymmetric warfare was clear from the outset, when Confederate president Jefferson Davis issued letters of marque to anyone who sought to capture Northern shipping. President
Abraham Lincoln responded by warning that “
If any person, under the pretended authority of said [Confederate] States … shall molest a vessel of the United States or the persons or cargo on board of her, such person Will be held amenable to the laws of the United States for the prevention and punishment of piracy.” In a word, death.

British reaction was swift and negative; one parliamentarian declared that “
Anybody dealing with a man under those circumstances as a pirate and putting him to death would … be guilty of murder” and another insisted that the Northern states “must not be allowed … so to strain the law as to convert
privateering into piracy, and visit it with death.” Five years before,
Great Britain had helped draft the
Declaration of Paris ending
privateering and clarifying the rights of belligerents and neutrals. The four points of the declaration were short and to the point:

Fearful that in a war against a European power the government might need to issue letters of marque to augment its inferior forces, the United States had declined to ratify the agreement. As the superior power against the South, the Lincoln administration now sought to sign the Declaration of Paris, but the British and French demurred until the conclusion of hostilities. Lincoln’s resolve was tested when Confederate privateer
William W. Smith was captured, tried for piracy, found guilty, and sentenced to die. President Davis asserted that Smith was not a common criminal and that his government would execute one high-ranking Union prisoner of war for every Southerner executed for piracy. The U.S. court’s ruling was overturned, and Smith and other Confederate privateers were thereafter treated as prisoners of war.

At the same time,
Lincoln declared a blockade to prevent the Confederacy from trading cotton for munitions and other necessities. Stopping trade at Southern ports without involving foreign powers posed a different problem for Lincoln. Issuing an executive order to close ports and arresting ships for violating municipal law would uphold the government’s position that the United States faced nothing more than a domestic insurrection and that the Confederacy had no standing as a sovereign state. However, the detention of foreign ships for smuggling would antagonize Britain and
France, which were already suspected of Southern sympathies. The alternative was to blockade the South, an act of war that gave the Confederacy the status of an independent belligerent and required the deployment of massive numbers of blockading ships. Lincoln chose the latter option and by July there were squadrons off most major ports along the twenty-five-hundred-mile coast from
Virginia to Texas. The dramatic escapades of
blockade-runners give the impression that the blockade was ineffective, yet more than two-thirds of the three hundred blockade-runners were eventually captured or destroyed. Moreover, there were only thirteen hundred attempts to slip the blockade. Before the war, the
country’s largest export ports after New York were New Orleans,
Mobile,
Charleston, and
Savannah, and more than three thousand ships cleared the
port of New Orleans alone. The blockade drove up the cost of imports, reduced the government’s revenues from trade, and hobbled the South’s ability to pay for or import war matériel from abroad.

The
Confederate States Navy’s offensive capability depended on nine
commerce raiders, five built in Great Britain, which between them captured more than 250 merchantmen. After the war the United States argued that in letting
the Confederacy acquire ships from English and Scottish yards, Great Britain had violated its
neutrality and was therefore liable for the destruction wrought by the British-built raiders. The
Alabama
claims (so-called because the CSS
Alabama
alone accounted for five million dollars in losses) were resolved under the Treaty of Washington (1871), by which an international tribunal found that Britain had not exercised “due diligence” and awarded the United States $15.5 million in damages. The outright loss of merchant ships was aggravated by the tenfold increase in the cost of insurance on American ships and the consequent transfer of more than a thousand vessels—more than eight hundred thousand tons of shipping—to foreign, mostly British, registry to give them the protection of a neutral flag. The American merchant marine never recovered, thanks to a combination of protectionist legislation that prevented the purchase of foreign-built ships or the return to American registry of any ship sold foreign; prohibitive tariffs that inhibited the growth of iron shipbuilding; and a redirection of national investment toward inland development.

Lacking the wherewithal to build a fleet comparable to the Union’s, Confederate navy secretary
Stephen Mallory determined to shift the terms of the contest. “
I regard the possession of an iron-armored ship as a matter of the first necessity,” he wrote in May 1861; “inequality of numbers may be compensated for by invulnerability; and thus not only does economy but naval success dictate the wisdom and expediency of fighting with iron against wood.” The South embarked on a campaign to convert existing vessels into ironclads that could operate with impunity against wooden ships. The first was built around the hull of the screw frigate USS
Merrimack,
which was captured with the
Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk, Virginia. The result was the central battery frigate CSS
Virginia,
with a forty-three-meter-long casemate consisting of a sixty-one-centimeter-thick shell of
oak and
pine sheathed with ten centimeters of rolled iron and armed with twelve guns.

To counter the threat posed by the
Virginia,
the U.S. Navy ordered prototypes of armored steamships of distinct design: two broadside ironclads, and one with a revolving turret,
John Ericsson’s
Monitor.
Revolutionary in the extreme, the
Monitor
was the first practical warship built without a sailing rig or oars. The vessel consisted of a hull fifty-five meters long by nearly thirteen meters in beam upon which rested an iron “raft,” the dual function of which was to protect the hull from ramming and to provide the vessel with stability in a seaway. Driven by a single propeller, she could steam at six knots. Visually and technologically, the
Monitor
’s most distinguishing feature was
its rotating turret. Measuring six meters in diameter and nearly three meters high and mounted on a steam-powered spindle, it incorporated two seven-ton Dahlgren smoothbore shell guns. The resulting profile earned the
Monitor
the epithet “cheesebox on a raft.”

The
Virginia
handily sank two wooden steam frigates and damaged a third off Norfolk before being brought to battle by the
Monitor
on March 8, 1862. The ships fought at close range for four hours, but neither was able to inflict decisive damage on the other. Injuries were few: the
Monitor
had 1 wounded, and the
Virginia
2 dead and 19 wounded. (By way of comparison, in 1812 a fifteen-minute engagement between the evenly matched wooden frigates
USS
Chesapeake
and
HMS
Shannon
killed 78 and wounded more than 150.) The Confederates were eventually forced to destroy the
Virginia
on their retreat from Norfolk, and the
Monitor
sank at the end of the year while under tow to Wilmington,
North Carolina. Their premature ends notwithstanding, it was clear that though the two ships had failed to destroy each other, they had rung the death knell of the wooden warship.