Chapter 5
Steam and iron: the Civil War navy (1850–1865)
Even while the war with Mexico was in progress, a national debate over whether slavery should be allowed into the land acquired as a result of that war ignited sectional animosity that threatened to tear the country apart. A compromise hammered out in 1850 pleased few, and for the next decade the issue of slavery’s future affected nearly every aspect of American politics and government. That same decade witnessed a virtual technological revolution that affected large segments of American society and also transformed the tools of war. Thus the Civil War that began in the spring of 1861 saw the introduction of the military use of the telegraph and the railroad and the adoption of the rifled musket, with grooves cut into the inside of the barrel to put a spin on the projectile and thereby dramatically increase both range and accuracy. At sea the new technology included steam propulsion, iron armor, and exploding shells fired from ever-larger naval guns, many of them rifled. The Civil War also saw the first widespread use of what were then called torpedoes and later known as mines.
A technological transformation
For more than two centuries naval warships had changed little. Wooden-hull ships propelled by sails carried muzzle-loaded iron gun tubes that fired solid shot. By 1850, however, that was changing, and changing swiftly. Matthew Perry had commanded steam ships during the operations off Vera Cruz in 1847 and during his expedition to Japan in 1852. Over the ensuing decade steam ships became more ubiquitous as they became more efficient. Naval guns became much larger, measured less often by the weight of their cannon balls (e.g., 24-pounders) than by the size of their muzzles (e.g., six inches). Like the army’s shoulder arms, many of the navy’s new gun barrels were rifled, and the projectiles they fired were no longer merely solid iron balls but explosive shells. All of this occurred just in time to have a dramatic influence on the navies that fought in the American Civil War.
Though a steam vessel had begun passenger service on the Hudson River as early as 1807, the United States lagged behind European powers in adopting this new technology for its warships. One restraint was that early steam engines were remarkably inefficient, often generating only a few miles of forward progress for each ton of coal burned. In addition, however, U.S. Navy squadrons often operated three to five thousand miles from an American port where they could re-coal, making them utterly dependent on others for fuel. This logistical constraint did not affect British ships in the same way because Britain had bases all around the world.
The United States did produce the world’s first propeller-driven warship, the USS Princeton, designed by the Swedish immigrant John Ericsson. It was launched in 1843, a few months ahead of the British Rattlesnake, which also boasted a screw propeller. American enthusiasm for innovation was muted, however, when the explosion of one of the Princeton’s experimental large-caliber guns during a public relations cruise in 1844 killed the secretary of state and secretary of the navy.
Nevertheless by the 1850s lawmakers recognized that the nation’s wooden sailing navy, much of it left over from the War of 1812, was growing increasingly obsolete, and as a result Congress passed a number of bills to modernize the navy. The turning point came in 1854. The year before, Congress authorized funds to build the nation’s last all-sail warship, the USS Constellation, named in honor of one of the original Humphreys frigates. The very next year, however, Congress turned a technological page and authorized six new steam-powered frigates. Indeed in the five years between 1854 and 1859, that is, between the Kansas-Nebraska Act and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, the U.S. Navy was dramatically transformed by the addition of twenty-four major new combatants, all of them steamers and all armed with the latest and most sophisticated naval ordnance. It was the largest peacetime naval expansion since the Naval Act of 1816. Thus, though the U.S. Navy remained small by European standards, when the Civil War began, more than half of the forty-two ships on active service were of the newest and most efficient type.
By contrast, the Confederate States began the Civil War with no navy at all, and the South embraced the traditional policies of the weaker naval power: harbor defense and commerce raiding. The Confederates also sought to discover and employ technological innovations that would enable them to offset the North’s overwhelming superiority in conventional naval power.
The Anaconda Plan and the naval blockade
By far the most ambitious undertaking of the U.S. Navy during the Civil War was its blockade of the Confederate coast. In May 1861 General Winfield Scott outlined a plan for the suppression of the rebellion that included a naval blockade, a holding action in northern Virginia, and a campaign along the axis of the Mississippi River. Northern critics who were eager to crush the rebellion at once found this program too passive and dubbed it the Anaconda Plan, a derisive reference to a South American reptile that slowly strangled its prey. Even before Scott articulated that vision, however, President Abraham Lincoln had announced a blockade of the Confederate coast, doing so on April 19, 1861, only five days after the first shots of the war were fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.
Both at the time and subsequently, many questioned Lincoln’s use of the term blockade, which seemed to imply that the Confederate states constituted a foreign belligerent rather than a rebellious section of the United States, as Lincoln consistently maintained. Moreover the declaration appeared monumentally ambitious, even preposterous. International law held that no blockade was legally binding unless there was a naval squadron physically present off the coast to enforce it, and it was hard to imagine how a navy of only forty-two ships could blockade a coastline that was 3,500 miles long. As a result Lincoln’s proclamation provoked skepticism in Europe and ridicule in the South.
To make the blockade a reality, the United States embarked on an unprecedented naval expansion. Between 1861 and 1865 the Union navy increased from forty-two ships to more than six hundred. Most of the new ships were converted merchant steamers since it was much quicker and cheaper to modify an existing vessel to wartime use than to build a new ship from the keel up. Often this transformation involved little more than strengthening the decks to bear the weight of the naval guns and adding a magazine below the water line. These converted vessels were unlikely to contend successfully with the warships of European navies, but they were more than sufficient to catch or deter unarmed blockade-runners.
Manning this greatly enlarged navy was another challenge. Officers who had languished for two decades or more at the rank of lieutenant found themselves elevated swiftly to command positions, and new volunteer officers became instant lieutenants. The enlisted force grew from a few thousand to over a hundred thousand. Some were farm boys seeking adventure; some hoped to avoid service in the expanding army, especially after conscription was enacted in 1863. Many had never seen the ocean. Free blacks had always constituted a part of the navy’s enlisted force, and now former slaves, called “contrabands” in the parlance of the day, enlisted as well. Many of these were escaped slaves who flagged down U.S. Navy vessels off the South Atlantic coast and asked to join the crew. Starved for manpower as they were, most officers simply added their names to the ship’s roster.
In June 1861 a Navy Department circular established the designator “nurse.” Though these positions were intended to be filled entirely by men, a handful of women also served as nurses, both on hospital ships and in navy hospitals ashore. Aside from that, the U.S. Navy remained an all-male service through the nineteenth century.
By the end of 1861 the Union had more than two hundred ships on the blockade, and while southern blockade-runners still got through with annoying regularity, the tightening grip on the southern coastline soon began to affect the South’s economy. While the Confederacy managed to import an impressive amount of munitions to sustain its field armies, the blockade fueled inflation, depressed civilian morale, and contributed to a growing war weariness among the southern population.
The clash of ironclads
Aware that the South could never match the North in terms of the number of ships it produced, the Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen R. Mallory, sought a technological shortcut: an iron-armored ship that by itself could neutralize a whole fleet of wooden warships. The steam frigate Merrimack had been abandoned by the U.S. Navy when it evacuated Norfolk, and atop its hull Confederate authorities constructed a squat superstructure with sloping wooden walls that were two feet thick covered by two layers of two-inch iron plate. The designers also attached a 1,500-pound ram to its prow. The reconfigured vessel, armed with ten heavy guns, was rechristened the CSS Virginia.
In Washington, Union Navy Secretary Gideon Welles was aware of the conversion of the Merrimack into the Virginia. In response he appointed an Ironclad Board to consider proposals for a Union counterweapon, and one of the three designs subsequently accepted by this board was that of John Ericsson. His design called for a vessel with a flat deck barely above the waterline, in the center of which was a cylindrical rotating tower containing two enormous 11-inch guns. With some skepticism the Ironclad Board awarded Ericsson a contract that required him to complete this vessel, eventually dubbed the Monitor, in only one hundred days. Ericsson beat that deadline by seven days, though last-minute adjustments and testing took another few weeks; as a result the Monitor did not leave New York for Hampton Roads, Virginia, until March 6, 1862. As it happened, she would be late by exactly one day.
On March 8, while the Monitor was en route from New York, the Virginia, under the command of Captain Franklin Buchanan, emerged from her dry dock in the Portsmouth Navy Yard and steamed out into Hampton Roads. Buchanan directed his balky vessel across the roadstead toward the wooden-hull sailing frigate USS Cumberland and smashed the Virginia’s iron ram deep into her starboard side. Down in the Virginia’s fire room, the ship’s engineer, E. A. Jack, felt “a tremor throughout the ship, and [he] was nearly thrown from the coal bucket upon which [he] was sitting.” The Cumberland began to sink almost at once, going down with her guns firing and her flag flying. Buchanan then directed the fire of his ship’s ten guns at the nearby USS Congress, which caught fire and later exploded in a giant fireball. In a single day one Confederate ironclad had sunk two U.S. Navy warships and killed 240 American sailors, the worst one-day loss in U.S. Navy history until World War II.
That night, near midnight, the USS Monitor arrived in Hampton Roads, and the next morning the two ironclads engaged one another for four hours, during which they often fought hull-to-hull. Neither ship was able to inflict serious damage on the other, and the outcome was a tactical draw. Nevertheless the arrival of the Monitor had effectively neutralized the offensive potential of the Virginia and allowed the Union navy to retain its position in Hampton Roads. A few weeks later, when U.S. Army forces compelled the Confederates to evacuate Norfolk, the southern ironclad lost her base, and Confederate authorities destroyed her to prevent her from falling into the hands of the Yankees.
Over the next three years both sides built more ironclad warships. In that arms race the Union had all the advantages, for it had a far more robust maritime infrastructure. The Confederacy laid down a total of fifty ironclads though many of them never got to sea for lack of engines, or armor, or both. One Confederate innovation was the submarine H. L. Hunley. Built initially with private funds, it was taken over by the Confederate government and manned by volunteers. On February 17, 1864, the Hunley crept out of Charleston Harbor and sank the blockading ship USS Housatonic, though the submarine’s entire crew was also lost. Such innovations notwithstanding, the Union could, and did, simply outbuild the Confederacy. Before the war was over, the Union produced more than sixty monitor-type ironclads, each class of them larger and more powerfully armed than the one before.
The advent of iron-armored warships during the Civil War fell short of being a full-scale technological revolution. Ever thicker armor led to ever larger naval guns, until it became evident that to make a ship invulnerable would render her virtually immobile. Armor continued to be used in warship construction after the war, but it was applied selectively, to protect engine spaces or magazines. The Monitor’s rotating turret proved a more durable innovation and characterized warship construction well into the twenty-first century.
Confederate commerce raiding
Commerce raiding was the traditional recourse for nations engaged in wars with superior naval powers. Though privateering had been the most effective form of commerce raiding in America’s earlier wars, that option was not available to the Confederates because the Union blockade made it all but impossible for privateersmen to bring their prizes into southern ports to be condemned, and a British declaration of neutrality closed British ports to them as well. That removed the profit motive, so would-be privateersmen turned instead to blockade running. As a result Confederate commerce raiding had to be conducted by warships of the small Confederate navy, most of which were obtained surreptitiously from British builders.
The most prominent of these raiders was the CSS Alabama. Commanded by Captain (later Rear Admiral) Raphael Semmes, the Alabama conducted a two-year cruise over three oceans, during which it captured sixty-eight prizes. Since Semmes could not send those prizes into port, he burned them, using four of them to rid himself of his accumulated prisoners. The Alabama also fought and sank the USS Hatteras in the Gulf of Mexico in January 1863, which was the first time a steam-powered warship sank another steam warship in battle. The Alabama was finally cornered in Cherbourg, France, in June 1864 by the USS Kearsarge, commanded by Captain John A. Winslow. After an hour-long battle the Alabama sank just outside French territorial waters, though Semmes himself and most of his officers escaped to a nearby British yacht.
Another famous Confederate raider was the CSS Shenandoah, commanded by James I. Waddell, which Mallory sent to the north Pacific to attack the American whaling fleet there. After a six-month cruise around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, and into the Pacific, Waddell caught and destroyed twenty-three American whaling ships in the Bering Sea in the spring and summer of 1865. Not until August 9 did Waddell learn that the war had ended in April. Fearing that he might be hanged as a pirate, he decided to take his ship back to Liverpool, England, where he arrived in November 1865, thirteen months after he had set out and seven months after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox.
While it did not affect the outcome of the war, Confederate commerce raiding did inflict a disproportionate amount of damage on Union shipping for a relatively small investment. Altogether Confederate commerce raiders captured and destroyed some 284 U.S. merchant ships. After the war the United States protested to the British that their complicity in building and fitting out the raiders had prolonged the war. Britain agreed to arbitration, and in 1871 an Anglo-American tribunal awarded the United States $15.5 million for the destruction wrought by the commerce raiders.
The river war
The U.S. Navy also played an important, even indispensable role in the campaign on the western rivers—the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and especially the Mississippi. An essential element of any riverine campaign is close cooperation between the army and navy commanders, but during the Civil War there was no established protocol for such cooperation, which meant that success depended heavily on the willingness of the two services to work together. For the most part this proved adequate.
As in the saltwater war, the Union had the necessary resources to construct specially designed armored warships for the western rivers. Bridge builder James Buchanan Eads designed ironclads with flat bottoms that, despite their great weight, could maneuver in relatively shallow water. These vessels played an important role in the Union seizure of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River in February 1862, and the capture of Island Number Ten on the Mississippi River in April. In the Battle of Memphis in June, the wooden vessels of the Confederate River Defense Fleet were all but annihilated.
Meanwhile, at the southern end of the Mississippi, Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut led his oceangoing wooden warships past the large masonry forts guarding the approach to New Orleans, fought a spirited engagement with the Confederate defense fleet, and compelled the surrender of the South’s largest city on April 25, 1862. Farragut became America’s first rear admiral and was subsequently elevated to the rank of full admiral. By the spring of 1862, Union naval forces had seized control of both ends of the Mississippi River. Only the Confederate citadel of Vicksburg, Mississippi, held the two halves of the Confederacy together.
The Union campaign to seize Vicksburg lasted most of a year and was marked by a number of false starts and disappointments. Then, in the spring of 1863, Farragut’s foster brother, Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter, led a portion of his river fleet past the Vicksburg batteries in order to transport the soldiers of Grant’s army across the river so they could approach Vicksburg from the east. That proved decisive, and after a dramatic campaign ashore and a lengthy siege of the city, Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, 1863. After that, as Lincoln put it, the Father of Waters once more flowed “unvexed to the sea.”
The battle against the shore
Part of the Union blockading strategy was the seizure of ports along the Confederate coastline. This began early, with the capture of Port Royal, South Carolina, in November 1861, and continued throughout the war. By 1864 only three major port cities remained in Confederate hands: Mobile, Alabama; Charleston, South Carolina; and Wilmington, North Carolina. These proved especially resilient not only because of local geography but also because of the threat of Confederate mines, or what were then called torpedoes. The widespread employment of underwater mines was one of several portents that the Civil War marked a change not only in technology but also in military ethics. Placing explosive devices in the path of the enemy, like wrecking railroads or destroying private property, had been all but unthinkable in 1861, yet by 1864 they had become routine. Along with the threat of ironclads, the use of underwater mines constituted a new danger for the blockaders and a significant shift in the character of naval warfare.
In August 1864 Farragut effectively closed Mobile Bay to blockade-runners when he charged into the bay, damning the torpedoes, and defeated the rebel ironclad Tennessee. Charleston proved tougher; it did not fall until late in 1864, when it was cut off by General William Tecumseh Sherman after his March to the Sea. Wilmington, defended by an enormous earthwork called Fort Fisher that guarded the entrance into the Cape Fear River, was the last holdout. Fort Fisher fell in January 1865 following a furious naval bombardment by no less than forty-four Union navy warships and an overland assault by Union army forces assisted by a landing party of sailors and marines. This cut off the last source of external supplies for the Confederate army defending Richmond. Four months later Lee’s beleaguered army evacuated the Confederate capital and began its march to Appomattox Court House.
4. In this painting by William Overend, David Glasgow Farragut appears almost nonchalant as he presides over the Battle of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864. Alongside Farragut’s flagship USS Hartford is the dark hull of the Confederate ironclad Tennessee. This was the battle in which Farragut damned the torpedoes as he charged into Mobile Bay.
The Union navy played a conspicuous and essential role in the final victory, and by the spring of 1865, when Lee surrendered his army to Grant, the navy had grown to sixteen times its prewar size and boasted some of the most advanced warships in the world.