Implications of Naval Power in the American Civil War Essay

Implications of Naval Power in the American Civil War - Essay Example It was one of the most dramatically one sided battles in Naval history on that day in March, 1862 – when the CSS Virginia defeated two federal warships, the Congress and Cumberland. The battle yielded the destruction of both ships and the deaths of at least 240 of their crew, making headway towards breaking the Union blockade of the lower Chesapeake bay. This victory over the blockade would yield any number of consequences for the war, upon which the fortunes of the slaveholding Confederacy Would rise or fall. An evacuation took place on April 20, 1861 of the Naval yards at Gosport, Virginia. The Merrimac and the Pennsylvania launched a barrage against the port with heavy batteries in addition to Marines units. The United States Navy was attempting to abandon port, within hostile Virginia even as the Confederates attempted to obstruct the channel to blockade them. The Merrimac this time being a mere wooden hulled ship as navies have used since time immemorial. The Confederates succeeded in destroying or damaging the Pennsylvania, the Delaware, the Columbus, the Columbia, the Raritan, three sloops of war, while the steam frigate Merrimac was scuttled and burned. Yet almost immediately steps were taken to raise the Merrimac and convert it into an ironclad vessel as the Confederate secretary of the Navy recommended in a letter in which he described the creation of such a vessel as "a matter of the first necessity."2 The ship was raised, and what had once been her berth deck became a gun deck, with a wooden encasement of oak and pine 2 feet thick was built first. A 20 foot wide ruled was covered with iron gratings to create four hatch ways. This wooden encasement was used as the foundation for two sheathes of iron plating 2 inches thick each. The resulting ship floated very low in the water with the 800 tons of pig iron used in total to get the ship the weight needed to allow a vessel to rest at the desired depth. The metal behemoth lay mostl y under the water line and looked perhaps not unlike the roof of a house-boat. 10 guns, including four rifles as well as 6 inchers. The engines, being essentially the same design as the steam frigate have used prior tended to be dangerous and unreliable with the new configuration but initially performed quite well before several failures. 2 SCOPE OF THE WAR On 9 March, the situation was destined to become far more complicated, as the Confederate crew observed a vessel remarkably heavy, floating low within the waters. It had to be the USS Monitor, the North's answer to the challenge of an ironclad ship, soon to render every other Naval force on the planet obsolete. The first battle began with the objective of the defense of the grounded steam frigate the Minnesota, but the implications were far greater than the fate of a single steamship. It would spark a naval arms/armor race that would reach well into the 20th century. There were more Naval actions between the years of 1861 and 186 5 on the North American Continent than the rest of the world combined throughout the 19th century. Actions ranged from the Bering Sea to the Indian Ocean, including skirmishes in the English channel, and numerous actions up and down the American coastlines and rivers, 3 including a violent naval raid in Oklahoma, as will be described below. It was the definitive, technical innovations that might be labeled 'secret weapons' that spurred the armaments that would later define the first world war. Various other aquatic contrivances besides ironclad ships had their first expression during this conflict, including submarines and torpedoes. 4, 5 The monitor itself was the New York brainchild of Swedish engineer John Ericsson. The first of many in her ship class. However it should be noted that Congress ordered an investigation on the possibility of ironclad warships in July of 1861 when it became clear that a massive struggle had begun, not simply the 'peace in 60 days' naive optimism some officials had promulgated. It was believed in most circles of military intelligence that the