Born in Ohio and raised in Wisconsin, Steven Wilson has been fascinated by
history since he was a child. One of his first books, a birthday present
from his aunt, was THE CIVIL WAR by Bruce Catton. He was equally enthralled
by motion pictures, working in his great-uncle's theater at the age of
seven, hauling tins of un-popped popcorn to the concession counter.
He's held a variety of jobs including tower clock repairman, factory worker,
shoe salesman, stock boy, roofer, construction worker and now, museum
curator. Wilson began writing novels in 1993, after a sketchy attempt to
write short stories.
His eclectic interests include motion picture history, movie soundtracks,
19th Century military history, and World War II. He works fulltime as a
curator and museum consultant and writes part-time. He considers research as
least as important as the writing, and plans to write some non-fiction works
in the future.
Website: www.huntersandthehunted.com/
E-Mail: readermail@HuntersAndTheHunted.Com
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It was a pivotal moment in American (and world) naval history
-- the emergence of the iron-clad battleship C.S.S. Virginia during
the Civil War.
There are moments in military history, which define the ending of
one thing, and the beginning of another. At Midway, it was the eight
minutes that saw the destruction of three Japanese aircraft carriers.
In Dallas, it was the time that it took to chamber three rounds.
Off the coast of Ireland it was the moment that RMS Lusitania filled
the periscope of a German U-boat and changed the course of the war.
For the navies of the world in the early afternoon of March 8, 1862,
it was the sight of cannon balls bouncing off the ironsides of C.S.S.
Virginia.
The Union fleet standing off Fort Monroe and Hampton Roads in early
March 1862 was impressive. It included the U.S.S. Congress
and U.S.S. Cumberland between the Middle Ground of the Roads
and Newport News, and the U.S.S. St. Lawrence, U.S.S. Roanoke,
and U.S.S. Vanderbilt close to the protective guns of Fort
Monroe. Between the two forces was the U.S.S. Minnesota,
a sailing frigate. Moored next to these Union vessels in Hampton
Roads, unseen by the sailors who hung their laundry under a clear,
warm sky was disaster. The C.S.S. Virginia, once the U.S.S.
Merrimac, was coming down the James River.
The U.S.S. Merrimac, a steam frigate, had been waiting idly
at the naval yard at Gosport, Virginia for desperately, needed engines,
when she was fired and abandoned by retreating federals. The Union
commander apparently panicked and, after destroying several ships
that the United States Navy would sorely miss, abandoned nearly
1,200 cannon to the confederates. The Merrimac never had
a chance to fire a shot at her attackers. Not as the Merrimac.
And not as a steam frigate.
She was not the first ironclad to go to war, or even the first ironclad.
The French La Gloire and English Warrior were both
constructed in 1858 by countries, which felt that iron had a place
on the high seas. In appearance they were little different than
steam frigates of the period but iron plating was a critical part
of their construction. Warrior was all-over iron with the
greatest concentration amidships to protect her engines and magazines.
La Gloire was iron on wood; an arrangement that led to the
need for continuous repair because the two substances did not get
on well together, a condition that would be more than apparent just
a few years later. The U.S Navy's first encounter with ironclads
was the U.S.S. New Ironsides. Crude and ungainly looking,
this ship was to see action in the Civil War but unlike her famous
namesake, she would achieve recognition as nothing more than a gun
platform. So the precedent was there, big ships, big guns, and sea-shaking
broadsides.
But for now, smoldering in the debris covered waters of the naval
base that should have been her sanctuary, her magazines intact and
her hull relatively untouched was opportunity, and her name was Merrimac.
What remained of the U.S.S. Merrimac was raised and plans began
immediately to turn her into an ironclad. "I regard the possession
of an iron-armored ship as the first necessity," Stephen Mallory,
secretary of the Confederate Navy, said. He expected such a ship to
range up and down the coast, destroying blockading vessels with impunity.
Merrimac's blackened skeleton was cut away down to her berth
deck and that deck then became her gun deck. A casement approximately
160-feet long was built over her 275-foot hull, and 4 inches iron
plating was mounted atop this 2-foot thick pine and oak frame. The
result was a huge interior of guns and machinery with the only natural
light coming from the grating overhead or through the gun ports. The
heat and smoke generated during battle must have turned this cavern
into the lowest reaches of hell. But as primitive as the Merrimac,
now rechristened the C.S.S. Virginia may appear today, she
was a most threatening weapon in the hands of some very determined
men.
The manufacturing resources available to the South were just a fraction
of those possessed by the North so it required some very innovative
thinking to even the odds. The result was the Virginia with
her four-foot cast-iron ram and her spar torpedo-essentially low
pole with an explosive charge on it, extending from the bow. The
ram was a very romantic concept and its appearance on Virginia
influenced naval architecture to some time but as a practical weapon,
it was not very successful.
Virginia's success lay in her iron skin, stout wooden timbers,
and ten massive cannon, and the fact that she could steam in close
to the wooden walls of conventional vessels and destroy them. This
was brute strength; there was no finesse about it.
A quartermaster aboard the Union Congress the morning of
March 8, 1862, noted smoke far up the James River and commented
to an officer: "I believe that thing is coming down at last, sir."
The construction of C.S.S. Merrimac was not a well-kept secret,
nor was the Union's response in the U.S.S. Monitor. What
was not known is how would "that thing," do in battle. No one, especially
the men encased in her iron body, knew. Her unreliable engines,
the thing that had taken her to Gosport before the war, were now
even more so-they were not likely to function smoothly for more
than six hours at a time. And the iron sheathing that made her a
formidable weapon placed even more demands on the engines. She moved
through the war at an inevitable pace but someone walking along
the riverbank could easily keep pace with her progress. It took
her 35 minutes to turn, she had a 22-foot draft, and none of her
guns had been fired. She was slow, cumbersome, unreliable, and the
question that plagued the mixed crew of soldiers, sailors, and landsmen
was; could she fight?
She moved toward Hampton Roads accompanied by a tiny flotilla of hangers-on;
the Yorktown, Jamestown, Beaufort, Raleigh, and Teaser. They were
there to lend assistance in a fight but it's also likely that they
went along if the temperamental Virginia decided that she had
no desire to fight that day and simply shut down.
A Union gunboat spotted her first, got off a 32-pound shot, and
retired in haste to the Roads. That thing was, indeed, coming down.
She approached U.S.S. Cumberland, who fired on this huge barn roof
with a chimney (the description of one observer), followed by the
U.S.S. Congress and assorted shore batteries. For the men
inside the Virginia it must have been like working in a smoke-filled
bell suspended over a raging fire. The solid shot and shells crashed
against the iron sides in an unending barrage that robbed the men
of their hearing. The timbers cracked like gunshots and tortured
wood against wood squealed in pain as every gun that could be brought
to bear, pummeled the C.S.S. Virginia.
For more than an hour the Confederate warship steamed unharmed through
the continuous bombardment of Union guns, a thunderstorm of explosives
that would have reduced a wooden-hulled vessel to kindling. Finally,
Virginia was satisfied to answer. The port shutter was raised
on her bow and the 7-inch pivot gun run out. After sighting on a target
it fired, the shell striking the after-pivot gun on U.S.S. Cumberland
and killing or wounding most of the gun crew. She sailed blithely
past Congress who continued to pour round after round into
her with no effect, and chose Cumberland as her first victim. Congress
had not escaped Death's scythe, she had simply been put on notice.
"Our clean and handsome deck," one shocked Union officer recalled
of Congress's first, brief encounter with Virginia,
"was in an instant changed into a slaughter-pen, with lopped-off legs
and arms, and bleeding, blackened bodies scattered about by the shells,
whilst blood and brains actually dripped from the beams."
It was just before three that Virginia, impervious to the constant
fire of the sloop Cumberland, sunk her cast-iron ram into the
wooden ship's side. Cumberland heeled over, mortally wounded,
while the men inside Virginia felt no more than a coarse shudder.
The Confederate ship reversed her engines and withdrew from Cumberland's
body, leaving the ram behind. The loss of the ram created leaks in
Virginia's bow but did not prevent her from backing off and
pounding her hapless victim with point-blank fire for almost thirty
minutes. U.S.S. Cumberland finally succumbed to the bombardment,
slowly sinking into the waters of the Road, which did her the service
of washing the blood and carnage of battle from her decks, and hiding
her wounds.
The men aboard U.S.S. Congress watched with stunned horror
as Cumberland died, and Virginia turned on them, black
smoke billowing from its funnel riddled by gunfire, its blank gun-port
eyes fixed resolutely on the next to die.
To Be Continued
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