Every Ironclad of the American Civil War (Almost None of Them Could Go to Sea)
On the afternoon of 8 March 1862, a Confederate ironclad came down the Elizabeth River and destroyed the two finest wooden warships in the United States Navy in about three hours. Every navy on earth read the same report and understood the same thing. Britain had 149 wooden ships of the line that morning. Within a week the Times of London had worked out that the Royal Navy now had two ships worth counting. This is the complete inventory of what the American Civil War then produced. Both sides, all of them: the Union's monitors and river gunboats, and the Confederate casemate ships built out of railway rail in yards that had been cotton fields two years earlier. It is also the story of a dead end. The United States finished the war with more armoured warships than Britain and France put together, and almost none of them could go to sea. By 1880 its own Secretary of the Navy described the fleet as an alphabet of floating washtubs, and it ranked below Chile. CHAPTERS 0:00 Hampton Roads 1:45 The Ironclad Board 5:28 The River Fleet 10:37 The Monitor Flood 15:08 Monitors for the Rivers 17:38 The One-Offs 21:09 The Casco Scandal 23:40 Built for an Ocean They Never Crossed 25:54 The Confederate Answer 31:37 Defending the Harbours 34:46 The Last Hulls 39:52 The Dead End Two of them survive. USS Cairo lies under a roof at Vicksburg, raised out of the Yazoo mud a hundred years after she sank, with the crew's shoes and playing cards still in her. And in 2002 a salvage team lifted USS Monitor's turret off the bottom off Cape Hatteras, upside down, with the dents from Virginia's shot still in the plating. Archive photographs and period engravings from the Library of Congress, the Naval History and Heritage Command and Wikimedia Commons.
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