THE NORTH EXERTS ITS SEA POWER
While the rival armies swayed back and forth over the landscape, wreathing the countryside in smoke and visiting the dread and sorrow of long casualty lists on people of the North and the South, a profound intangible was slowly beginning to tilt the balance against the Confederacy. On the ocean, in the coastal sounds, and up and down the inland rivers the great force of sea power was making itself felt. By itself it could never decide the issue of the war; taken in conjunction with the work of the Federal armies, it would ultimately be decisive. In no single area of the war was the overwhelming advantage possessed by the Federal government so ruinous to Southern hopes.
The Civil War came while one revolution in naval affairs was under way, and it hastened the commencement of another. The world's navies were in the act of adjusting themselves to the transition from sail to steam when the war began; by the time it ended, the transition from wooden ships to ironclads was well along. Taken together, the two revolutions were far-reaching. The era of what is now thought of as "modern" warfare was foreshadowed by what happened on land; it actually began on the water, and by 1865 naval warfare would resemble the twentieth century much more than it resembled anything Lord Nelson or John Paul Jones had known.
At the start of the war the South had no navy at all, and the North had one which, although it was good enough for ordinary combat with an overseas enemy, was almost wholly unadapted for the job which it had to do now. Both sides had to improvise, and in the improvisation the South fully as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as the North. The great difference was that the North had so much more to improvise with. The South was compelled to enter a contest which it had no chance to win.
When the flag came down on Fort Sumter in April, 1861, the Federal government possessed some ninety warships. More than half of these were sailing vessels - models of their class a generation earlier, obsolete now. About forty ships were steam-driven, and a great number of these were tied up at various navy-yard docks, out of commission - "in ordinary," as the expression went. Some of them were badly in need of repair. Of the steamers that were in commission, many were scattered on foreign stations, and it would take time to get them back into home waters.
Pride of the navy was its set of five steam frigates. They were powerful wooden vessels, ship-rigged, with adequate power plants and exceptionally heavy armament - forty 9-inch rifles on the gun decks, and a few larger weapons mounted on the spar decks. They were probably as powerful as any ships then afloat. All of these were out of commission.
Then there were five first-class screw sloops, smaller and less formidable than the steam frigates but sturdy fighting craft all the same. There were four side-wheelers, dating back to the navy's first experiments with steam power: they were practically obsolete, because machinery and boilers were largely above the water line, but they could still be used. There were eight light screw sloops and half a dozen of third-class rating, along with a handful of tugs and assorted harbor craft. That was about the lot.
With this navy the United States had to blockade more than 3,500 miles of Confederate coast line. It had, also, to control such rivers as the Mississippi and the Tennessee, to say nothing of the extensive sounds along the Atlantic coast. Furthermore, it had to be prepared to strike at Southern seaports, most of them substantially fortified, and to join with the army in amphibious offensives all the way from Cape Hatteras to the Rio Grande. To do all of these things it did not have nearly enough ships, and most of the ones it did have were of the wrong kind. The powerful frigates and sloops were designed for combat on the high seas or for commerce raiding, not for blockade duty. They drew too much water to operate in shallow sounds and rivers. For war with a European power they would have been excellent, once they were all repaired and commissioned; for war with the Confederacy, they were not quite what the navy needed.
At the very beginning of the war Lincoln proclaimed a blockade of all Southern ports. This, as he soon discovered, was a serious tactical error. A nation "blockaded" the ports of a foreign power; when it dealt with an internal insurrection or rebellion it simply closed its ports. The proclamation of blockade almost amounted to recognition of the Confederacy's independent existence, and European powers promptly recognized the Southland's belligerent rights. On top of this, foreign nations were not obliged to respect a blockade unless it were genuinely effective. A paper blockade would do no good: unless the navy could make it really dangerous for merchant ships to trade with Confederate ports, the blockade would have no standing in international law. So the navy's first problem was to find, somewhere and somehow, at any expense but in a great hurry, enough ships to make the paper blockade a real one.
The job was done, but it cost a great deal of money and resulted in the creation of one of the most heterogeneous fleets ever seen on the waters of the globe. Anything that would float and carry a gun or two would serve, for most of these blockaders would never have to fight; they were simply cops on the beat, creating most of their effect just by being on the scene. Vessels of every conceivable variety were brought into service, armed, after a fashion, and sent steaming down to take station off Southern harbors: ferryboats, excursion steamers, whalers, tugs, fishing schooners, superannuated clippers - a weird and wonderful collection of maritime oddities, which in the end gave more useful service than anyone had a right to expect. They made the blockade legally effective, and their work was aided by the Confederate government's folly in withholding cotton from the overseas market. At the very least they gave the navy time to build some new vessels specially designed for the job.
These included two dozen 500-ton gunboats, steam powered, of shallow draft and moderate armament - "ninety-day gunboats," they were called, because it took just three months from keel-laying to final commissioning. Deep-sea cruisers to run down Confederate commerce destroyers were built, along with forty-seven double-enders - unique, canoe-shaped side-wheelers, with rudders and pilothouses at each end, for use in the narrow rivers that fed into the coastal sounds where there was no room to turn around. The double-enders could change course by reversing their engines.
In the end the blockade was made highly effective, and by the final year of the war its effect was fatally constrictive. It was never airtight, and as long as a Southern port remained open, daring merchant skippers would slip in and out with priceless cargoes of contraband; but the measure of its effectiveness was not the percentage of blockade-runners which got through the net, but the increasing quantity of goods which the Confederacy had to do without. Under the blockade the Confederacy was doomed to slow strangulation.
For offensive operations the Federal navy was in much better shape, and the war was not very old before offensive operations got under way. Late in August, 1861, a squadron of warships commanded by Flag Officer Silas Stringham, accompanied by transports bearing infantry under Ben Butler, dropped down the coast for an assault on the Confederate forts which guarded Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina, principal entrance to the west reaches of Pamlico Sound. Stringham had two of the huge steam frigates with him, and his bombardment pounded the unprepared forts into submission. The government apparently had not done its advance planning very carefully, and for the time being neither the army nor the navy was prepared to do anything but hold the captured position. However, the operation did set a pattern, and important results would grow from it.
In November a much stronger expedition, the naval part of it commanded by Flag Officer Samuel F. Du Pont, broke into the waters of South Carolina, shelling Forts Walker and Beauregard into surrender and occupying Port Royal, which became a secure base for the blockading fleet. Early in 1862 Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough and Brigadier General Ambrose E. Burnside led an amphibious foray into the North Carolina sounds from Hatteras Inlet. Roanoke Island was seized, Elizabeth City and New Bern were captured, and powerful Fort Macon, commanding the approach to Beaufort, was taken. In effect, this action gave the Unionists control of nearly all of the North Carolina coast line and made the task of the blockading fleet much easier; it also aided appreciably to Jefferson Davis' problems by posing the constant threat of an invasion between Richmond and Charleston. Simultaneously, another army-navy expedition took Fort Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River.
Most important of all was the blow at New Orleans, largest city in the Confederacy. This was entrusted to an elderly but still spry officer named David Glasgow Farragut, who had a strong fleet of fighting craft and a flotilla of mortar vessels - converted schooners, each mounting a tub-shaped mortar that could lob a 13-inch shell high into the air and drop it inside a fort with surprising accuracy. Farragut got his vessels into the mouth of the Mississippi and in mid-April opened a prolonged bombardment of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, which guarded the approach to New Orleans. The mortar boats, commanded by Captain David Dixon Porter, tossed shells into the forts for a week; then, in the blackness of two in the morning on April 24, Farragut's ships went steaming up the river to run past the forts.
The Confederates sent fire rafts downstream, but these were dodged. A collection of armed river vessels put up as much of a fight as they could, and the big guns in the forts flailed away in the darkness, Farragut's broadsides replying, the river all covered with heavy smoke lit by the red flares from the burning rafts and the sharp flashes of the guns - and suddenly most of Farragut's ships were past the forts with only moderate damage, the Confederate vessels were sunk or driven ashore, and Farragut went plowing on to occupy New Orleans. Hopelessly cut off, the forts presently surrendered, Ben Butler came in with troops to take possession of the forts and the city, and the mouth of the great river was in Federal hands.
The capture of New Orleans strikingly illustrated the immense value of unchallenged sea power. The Federals could strike when and where they pleased, and all the Southern coast was vulnerable. The Confederates had known that New Orleans was in danger, but they had supposed that the real peril lay upriver, where Shiloh had just been lost and where Federal gunboats were hammering their way down to Memphis: coming up through the mouth of the river, Farragut had, so to speak, entered by the back door. The loss of New Orleans was one of the genuine disasters to the Southern cause, and it proved irretrievable.
Yet if the Lincoln government had the enormous advantage that goes with control of the sea, the Confederacy made valiant attempts to redress the balance. The South lacked a merchant marine and a seafaring population, and it had very little in the way of shipyards and the industrial plant that could build machinery and armament for warships, but it had vast ingenuity and much energy, and its naval authorities, working with very little, accomplished much more than anyone had a right to expect. Not even the Yankees were any more inventive: the chief difference was that it was easier for the Yankees to turn an invention into a working reality.
The case of the Merrimac offers an interesting example.
IRONCLAD SHOWDOWN: MERRIMAC V. MONITOR
Merrimac was one of the Federal navy's great steam frigates. Her engines were in bad order, and when the war began she was laid up in the Norfolk navy yard, out of commission. Situated in an ardently pro-Confederate community, the navy yard was quickly lost; and by seizing it on April 20, 1861, the Confederates acquired not only the physical plant but more than a thousand powerful cannon, which served to arm Confederate forts all along the seacoast.
When the Federals were driven from the yard they set fire to Merrimac and scuttled her, but Confederate engineers had little trouble raising the hulk, and on inspection it was found sound, only the upper works having been destroyed by fire. The imaginative Southerners thereupon proceeded to construct a fighting ship the likes of which no one had ever seen.
Merrimac's hull was cut down to the berth deck, and a citadel with slanting sides was built on the midships section, with ports for ten guns. The walls of this citadel were made of pitch pine and oak two feet thick, and on this was laid an iron sheathing four inches thick. An open grating covered the top of this citadel, admitting light and air to the gun deck. An armored pilothouse was forward, and a four-foot iron beak was fastened to the bow. When she left the dry dock, Merrimac, rechristened Virginia, looked like nothing so much as a barn gone adrift and submerged to the eaves. The decks forward and aft of the citadel were just awash. Merrimac's engines, defective to begin with, had not been improved by the fact that they had spent weeks under water, but somehow the engineers got them into running order, and the ship could move. She could not move very fast, and she was one of the unhandiest brutes to steer that was ever put afloat: but in all the navies of the world there were not more than two ships that could have given her a fight. (The French had one ironclad frigate, and the British had another; all the rest of the world's warships were made of wood.)
It should be pointed out that since warships had never worn armor, no one had ever bothered to create an armor-piercing shell, and Merrimac's iron sides - very thinly armored, by later standards - were impervious to anything the ordinary warship could fire at her. It developed, as the war wore along, that the only way to deal with an ironclad was to fire solid shot from the largest smoothbore cannon available - 15-inch, if possible - at the closest possible range. These would not exactly pierce good iron sheathing, but repeated blows might crack it so that other projectiles might pierce it. This worked sometimes, and sometimes it did not; but when Merrimac left the Elizabeth River, on March 8, 1862, and chugged laboriously out into the open waters of Hampton Roads, none of the Federal warships in sight mounted guns that could do her any particular damage.
On her first day in action Merrimac created a sensation and put the Lincoln administration - especially Secretary of War Stanton - into something like a panic. She destroyed two of the navy's wooded warships, Congress and Cumberland, drove the big steam frigate Minnesota aground, and was herself so little damaged by the shot which the Union warships threw at her that it almost looked as if she could whip the entire Federal navy. When evening came Merrimac went back into her harbor, planning to return in the morning, destroy Minnesota, and sink any other ships that cared to stick around and fight.
The next day, March 9, brought what was certainly the most dramatic naval battle of the war - the famous engagement between Merrimac and Monitor.
It had taken the Confederates many months to design and construct their pioneer ironclad, and word of what they were doing quickly got North - very few military secrets were really kept, in that war - and the Federal Navy Department had to get an ironclad of its own. It went to the redoubtable Swedish-American inventor John Ericsson for a design, getting a craft which in its own way was every bit as odd-looking as the rebuilt Merrimac. Ericsson built a long, flat hull with no more than a foot or two of freeboard, putting amidships a revolving iron turret mounting two 11-inch guns. A smoke pipe came up aft of this, and forward there was a stubby iron pilothouse; people who saw Monitor afloat said she looked like a tin can on a shingle. This craft was finished just in the nick of time, came down to the Chesapeake from New York in tow of a tug, almost foundering en route - neither of these great ironclads was very seaworthy - and steamed in past the Virginia Capes late in the afternoon of March 8, just as Merrimac was completing her day's chores. Next day the two ships met in open combat.
The fight was singularly indecisive. Each ship took a sound hammering, but neither one was badly damaged. Although Merrimac, in the end, retired to a safe spot in the Elizabeth River, Monitor did not try to follow her, nor did the Federal craft ever attempt to force a finish fight. Merrimac destroyed no more Union warships, but she remained afloat until May 10, effectively keeping the Federals out of the James River; indeed, her continued existence was one of the reasons why McClellan was so very slow in moving up the Virginia Peninsula. She was lost, finally, when the Federals occupied Norfolk, which left her without a home port. She drew too much water to go up the James to Richmond, and she was far too unseaworthy to go out into the open ocean, and her crew had no recourse but to scuttle her. But by any standard she had been a success, she had helped to create a revolution in naval warfare, and her design and construction proved that Southern engineers were quite as ready as Yankees to move into the new mechanical age.
If the South had had Northern industrial facilities, the story of the war at sea might have been very different. A number of ironclads on the Merrimac pattern were built, and most of them were highly serviceable. There was Arkansas, built in Memphis, Tennessee, which ran straight through a fleet of Yankee gunboats above Vicksburg, outfought the best the Yankees could send against her, and was destroyed by her own crew when her engines failed and sent her hopelessly aground near Baton Rouge. There was Albemarle, which shook Federal control of the North Carolina sounds until young Lieutenant William Cushing sank her with a torpedo; and there was Tennessee, which singlehandedly fought Farragut's entire fleet at Mobile Bay in the summer of 1864, surrendering only after having survived one of the most one-sided contests in naval history. As a matter of fact, a Confederate ironclad almost saved the day at New Orleans. A very heavily armored vessel named Louisiana was built to hold the lower river, but Farragut came along before she was quite ready: her engines were not serviceable, and her gun ports needed to be enlarged so that her guns could train properly, and she was tied to the bank, virtually useless, when the Federal fleet steamed by. When the forts surrendered, Louisiana was blown up.
The marvel in all of this is not that the Confederacy did so poorly with its navy, but that it did so well. Almost uniformly, her ironclads gave the Federal navy much trouble, and it is worth recording that most of them finally failed not because they were poorly designed, but because the industrial facilities that could put them into first-class shape and keep them there did not exist. The South was painfully short of mechanics, short of metal, short of fabricating plants; there was never any chance that she could create a fleet solid enough to go out and challenge the Federal navy, and what was done had to be done on a bits-and-pieces basis. All things considered, the Confederate Navy Department acquitted itself very well.
ASSESSING THE CONFEDERATE NAVY
Confederate commerce raiders drew a great deal of attention during the war and in the generations that followed, but although they were a most expensive nuisance to the North, they could never have had a decisive effect on the course of the war. The best of them, like Alabama and Shenandoah, were built in England: ably commanded, they roamed the seven seas almost at will, helping to drive the American merchant fleet out from under the American flag but ultimately having only a minor bearing on the war itself. Toward the close of the war English yards did undertake the construction of a number of ironclad rams for the Confederacy, ships meant for close combat rather than for commerce destroying, and if these had been delivered they might have changed everything. But their construction and intended destination became known, the United States government plainly meant to go to war with Great Britain if they were actually delivered, and in the end the British government saw to it that they were kept at home.
Far more important to the Southern cause than the commerce destroyers were the blockade-runners. Most of these were built abroad for private account - long, lean, shallow-draft side-wheelers, for the most part, capable of high speeds, painted slate gray to decrease their visibility, and burning anthracite coal so that smoke from their funnels would not betray them to the blockading fleets. In the usual course of things, goods meant for the Confederacy were shipped from England (or from a port on the Continent) to Nassau, in the Bahamas - a little port that enjoyed a regular Klondike boom while the war lasted. There the cargoes were transferred to the blockade-runners, which would make a dash for it through the Federal cruisers to some such Southern seaport as Wilmington, North Carolina. Many of these were caught, to be sure, but many of them got through, and profits were so remarkable that if a ship made one or two successful voyages her owners were money ahead, even if thereafter she were captured. On the return trip, of course, the blockade-runners took out cotton.
Not all of the material imported via these vessels was for military use. It paid to bring in luxuries, and so luxuries were brought in, to be sold at fanatic prices; and eventually the Confederate government took a hand, outlawing the importation of some luxuries entirely and stipulating that one-half of the space on every ship must be reserved for government goods. Tightly as the Federal squadrons might draw their patrols, they were never able to stop blockade-running entirely; it ceased, at last, only when the last of the Confederate ports was occupied. But if the traffic could not be entirely stopped, it was increasingly restricted, and the very fact that the blockade-runners could make such outlandish profits testified to the Southland's desperate shortage of goods from the outside world.