Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

further experiments in building ironclads. The success of the Monitor’s design induced the U.S. Navy to build sixty Monitor-type vessels, some of them big enough to carry two turrets, and even one, the Roanoke, with three, and from that point until after World War II, the turret design dominated naval ship building. The Confederates clung to the casemate design of the Virginia, and with its limited resources, the Confederate navy scraped together enough men and material during 1862 to have four large ironclads built by private firms on the Mississippi River: the Arkansas, the Tennessee, the Mississippi, and the Louisiana. None of them, however, was used well or wisely by the Confederate navy, and all of them were eventually destroyed by the Confederates to avoid Federal capture.55

Undaunted, the Confederate navy laid down twenty more casemate-style ironclads, and three new facilities for rolling iron plate were developed in Richmond, Atlanta, and northern Alabama. The overall scarcity of materials in the Confederacy, and the inadequacy of even three new mills to roll enough iron, doomed most of these ships to rot on the stocks. One of the most fearsome of them, the Albemarle, was sunk at her moorings in the North Carolina sounds by a daring nighttime Federal raid, while the 216-foot Tennessee (the second rebel ironclad to bear that name) was pounded into surrender by the combined gunnery of Farragut’s fleet at Mobile Bay in 1864.

The Confederates continued to experiment with a variety of exotic naval weapons. Commander Matthew F. Maury developed the first electrically detonated harbor mines, and between these mines and other improvised naval explosives, the Confederates sank thirty-seven Federal ships, including nine ironclads, on the waters of the Confederacy’s rivers and harbors. A four-man “torpedo-boat,” appropriately named the David and closely resembling a floating tin cigar, puttered out of Charleston on the night of October 5, 1863, with 100 pounds of high explosive rigged on a ten-foot spar that jutted out from the little metal boat’s bow. Lieutenant William T. Glassell maneuvered the David up to the side of one of the Federal blockade ships—which just happened to be one of the other Federal ironclad prototypes, the New Ironsides—and detonated the spar “torpedo.” The explosion cracked iron plates and struts in the New Ironsides’s hull, while the wash from the detonation swamped the David and drowned its small boiler fire. Glassell ordered his men to abandon ship and swim for their lives (Glassell himself was fished out of the water by a Federal schooner and made a prisoner). But his quickthinking engineer relit the boiler and navigated the unlikely little vessel back into Charleston harbor.

Far stranger than the David were the projects submitted for building submarines. The most famous of these submersibles was the H. L. Hunley, the eponymous brainchild of a civilian, Horace Lawson Hunley. Hunley’s primitive submarine successfully destroyed the Federal sloop Housatonic outside Charleston on February 17, 1864. Unhappily, the Hunley never made it back to port (her resting place on the ocean bottom, four miles off shore, would not be found until 1995), and any serious further Confederate interest in submarines went down with her.56

Even with all the inventiveness in the world at its disposal, it was apparent after the failure of the Virginia to disrupt the blockade that the Confederacy could not wait for the development of some other secret weapon to pry the blockade ships loose. So, unable to break the Federal navy’s hold on the Confederate throat, they responded by trying to get their own grip around the Federal throat by sending out commerce raiders to prey on Northern shipping.

The first great success in commerce raiding was scored by John Newland Maffitt in the Florida.57 But by far the most daring of the Confederate raider captains was Raphael Semmes, a fifty-two-year-old lawyer and former naval officer. Semmes was a strong advocate of the use of commerce raiders, and even took it upon himself in 1861 to convert an old New Orleans steamer into the raider Sumter. He made his first capture, the Golden Rocket, as early as July 3, 1861, and over the next six months he captured eighteen U.S. merchant ships, burning one and either sending the others off as prizes or releasing them on the payment of a bond. Cornered by three Federal warships in the British outpost of Gibraltar in January 1862, Semmes simply sold the Sumter, paid off his crew, and disappeared. Six months later Semmes turned up in the Azores, where he took command of James Bulloch’s newest purchase from British shipbuilders, a sleek, deadly 1,040-ton cruiser that Semmes named the Alabama.58

Over the next two years, Semmes sailed his beautiful ship, with her 144-man crew, two big pivot guns, and eight 32-pounders, across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, never calling at a Confederate port, always replenishing her supplies from captured Yankee ships or from stores purchased by Confederate agents in Cape Town, Singapore, and the French port of Cherbourg. “She was built for speed rather than for battle,” wrote her executive officer. “Her lines were symmetrical and fine; her material of the best.” By the time Semmes brought the Alabama into Cherbourg for a badly needed refitting in June of 1864, he had sunk or captured 64 Union merchantmen worth more than $6.5 million, and had even sunk a Federal blockade ship, the Hatteras—all this at an original building cost of £47,500. While anchored in Cherbourg harbor, however, the Alabama was trapped by the Federal steam sloop Kearsarge, and when Semmes and the Alabama attempted to fight their way free, the Kearsarge’s two 11-inch pivot guns sent the Alabama to the bottom. “The Alabama settled stern foremost, launching her bows high in the air” and staying “graceful even in her death-struggle.” Semmes was rescued by an English yacht and managed to make his way back to the Confederacy in October, 1864, where he was promoted to rear admiral in 1865 and, ironically, given river-defense duty below Richmond.59

The Alabama and Florida were only the most successful of