Bull Run had riveted attention on the land between the opposing capitals and on the armies fighting there. Very few people were thinking of the navies and the sea. And yet it was at sea, and not on land, that the Union had a force against which the Confederates could never prevail, a force which gradually cut them off from the whole world's base of war supplies, a force which enabled the Union armies to get and keep the strangle-hold which did the South to death.
The blockade declared in April was no empty threat. The sails of Federal frigates, still more the sinister black hulls of the new steam men-of-war, meant that the South was fast becoming a land besieged, with every outwork accessible by water exposed to sudden attack and almost certain capture by any good amphibious force of soldiers and sailors combined.
Sea-power kept the North in affluence while it starved the South.
Sea-power held Maryland in its relentless grip and did more than land-power to keep her in the Union. Sea-power was the chief factor in saving Washington. Seapower enabled the North to hold such points of vantage as Fortress Monroe right on the flank of the South. And sea-power likewise enabled the North to take or retake other points of similar importance: for instance, Hatteras Island.
In a couple of days at the end of August, 1861, the Confederate forts at Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina, were compelled to surrender to a joint naval and military expedition under Flag-Officer Stringham and Major-General B. F. Butler. The immediate result, besides the capture of seven hundred men, was the control of the best entrance to North Carolina waters, which entailed the stoppage of many oversea supplies for the Confederate army. The ulterior result was the securing of a base from which a further invasion could be made with great advantage.
The naval campaign of the following year was truly epoch-******;for the duel between the Monitor and Merrimac in Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862, was the first action ever fought between ironclad steam men-of-war.
Eleven months earlier the Federal Government had suddenly abandoned the Norfolk Navy Yard; though their strongest garrison was at Fortress Monroe, only twelve miles north along a waterway which was under the absolute control of their navy, and though the Confederates', had nothing but an inadequate little untrained force on the spot. Among the spoils of war falling into Confederate hands were twelve hundred guns and the Merrimac, a forty-gun steam frigate. The Merrimac, though fired and scuttled by the Federals, was hove up, cut down, plated over, and renamed the Virginia. (History, however, knows her only as the Merrimac.)John L. Porter, Naval Constructor to the Confederate States, had made a model of an ironclad at Pittsburgh fifteen years before;and he now applied this model to the rebuilding of the Merrimac.
He first cut down everything above the water line, except the gun deck, which he converted into a regular citadel with flat top, sides sloping at thirty-five degrees, and ends stopping short of the ship's own ends by seventy feet fore and aft. The effect, therefore, was that of an ironclad citadel built on the midships of a submerged frigate's hull. The four-inch iron plating of the citadel knuckled over the wooden sides two feet under water. The engines, which the South had no means of replacing, were the old ones which had been condemned before being sunk. A four-foot castiron ram was clamped on to the bow. Ten guns were mounted:
six nine-inch smooth-bores, with two six-inch and two seven-inch rifles. Commodore Franklin Buchanan took command and had magnificent professional officers under him. But the crew, three hundred strong, were mostly landsmen; for, as in the case of the Army, the men of the Navy nearly all took sides with the North, and the South had very few seamen of any other kind.
To oppose the Merrimac the dilatory North contracted with John Ericsson the Swede, who had to build the Monitor much smaller than the Merrimac owing to pressure of time. He enjoyed, however, enormous advantages in every other respect, owing to the vastly superior resources of the North in marine engineering, armor-plating, and all other points of naval construction. The Monitor was launched at New York on January 30, 1869., the hundredth day after the laying of her keel-plate. Her length over all was 172 feet, her beam was 41, and her draught only 10--less than half the draught of the Merrimac. Her whole crew numbered only 58; but every single one was a trained professional naval seaman who had volunteered for dangerous service under Captain John L. Worden. She was not a good sea boat; and she nearly foundered on her way down from New York to Fortress Monroe. Her underwater hull was shipshape enough; but her superstructure--a round iron tower resting on a very low deck--was not.
Contemptuous eyewitnesses described her very well as looking like a tin can on a shingle or a cheesebox on a raft. She carried only two guns, eleven-inchers, both mounted inside her turret, which revolved by machinery; but their 180-pound shot were far more powerful than any aboard the Merrimac. In maneuvering the Monitor enjoyed an immense advantage, with her light draft, strong engines, and well-protected screws and rudder.