which said: “Whereas we had available for immediate purposes one hundred and forty-nine first-class war-ships, we have now two, these two being the Warrior and her sister Ironside. There is not now a ship in the English navy apart from these two that it would not be madness to trust to an engagement with that little Monitor.” The Admiralty at once proceeded to reconstruct the navy, cutting down a number of their largest ships and converting them into turret or broadside iron-clads.
The same results were produced in France, which had but one sea-going iron-clad, La Gloire, and this one, like the Warrior, was only protected amidships. The Emperor Napoleon promptly appointed a commission to devise plans for rebuilding his navy. And so with all the maritime powers. In this race the United States took the lead, and at the close of the war led all the others in the numbers and efficiency of its iron-clad fleet.
It is true that all the great powers had already
REMODELING THE “MERRIMAC” At the Gosport Navy Yard.
c it-־— experimented with vessels partly ar-*• ־'	mored, but very few were convinced
of their utility, and none had been tried by the test of battle, if we except■ a few floating batteries, thinly clad, used in the Crimean War.
In the spring of 1861 Norfolk and its large naval establishment had been hurriedly abandoned by the Fédérais, why no one could tell. It is about twelve miles from Fort Monroe, which was then held by a large force of regulars. A few companies of these, with a single frigate, could have occupied and commanded the town and navy yard and kept the channel open. However, a year later, it was as quickly evacuated by the Confederates, and almost with as little reason. But of this I will speak later.
The yard was abandoned to a few volunteers, after it was partly destroyed, and a large number of ships were burnt. Among the spoils were upward of twelve hundred heavy guns, which were scattered among Confederate fortifications from the Potomac to the Mississippi. Among the ships burnt and sunk was the frigate Merrimac of 3500 tons and 40 guns,
THE BURNING OF THE FRIGATE “MERRIMAC” AND OF THE GOSPORT NAVY YARD.
could be made available for service. The seizures of other United States vessels included six revenue-cutters, the Duane at Norfolk, and William Aticen at Charleston, the Lewis Cass at Mobile, the Robert McClelland and the Washington at New Orleans, and the Henry Dodge at Galveston; three coast-survey vessels, the schooners Petrel and Twilight, and the steam-tender Firefly ; and six or eight light-house tenders. As all of these were small, and most of them were sailing vessels, they were of little value.
Several coasting or river steamers belonging to private owners, which were lying in Southern waters when the war broke out, were taken or purchased by the Confederate Government. . . .
antagonist; and it should by that time have replaced every one of them by war-ships of the period. . . .
The South entered upon the war without any naval preparation, and with very limited resources by which its deficiencies could be promptly supplied. Indeed, it would hardly be possible to imagine a great maritime country more destitute of the means for carrying on a naval war than the Confederate States in 1861.
No naval vessels, properly speaking, came into their possession, except the Fulton, an old sidewheeler built in 1837, and at this time laid up at Pensacola, and the sunken and half-destroyed hulks at Norfolk, of which only one, the Merrimac,
THE FIGHT BETWEEN THE “ MONITOR” AND “MERRIMAC.”
BUILDING THE “MERRIMAC,” AND THE CONFEDERATE SIDE IN THE BATTLE.
BY JOHN TAYLOR WOOD, COLONEL, C. S. A.
Lieutenant on the “Merrimac.”
to twelve hundred men, which, from the destruction of the Spanish Armada to our time, had done most of the fighting, deciding the fate of empires, were at once universally condemned as out of date. Rams and iron-clads were in future to decide all naval warfare. In this battle old things passed away, and the experience of a thousand years of battle and breeze was forgotten. The naval supremacy of England vanished in the smoke of this fight, it is true, only to reappear some years later more commanding than ever. The effect of the news was best described by the London “ Times,”
THE engagement in Hampton Roads on the 8th of March, 1862, between the Confederate ironclad Virginia, or the Merrimac (as she is known at the North), and the United States wooden fleet, and that on the 9th between the Virginia and the Monitor, was, in its results, in some respects the most momentous naval conflict ever witnessed. No battle was ever more widely discussed or produced a greater sensation. It revolutionized the navies of the world. Line-of-battle ships, those huge, overgrown craft, carrying from eighty to one hundred and twenty guns and from five hundred