May 11

The American Civil War is marked by extraordinary brutality, much death and even more international intrigue. Brisk naval warfare is not generally associated with that war. However, the Confederacy waged war against the Union off the coasts of New England and South America, and virtually all the ports in between and came remarkably close to winning the Civil War. Another of its hallmarks is the technological advances in the means by which war was waged. One advance was in the area of naval warfare. This war saw the introduction of iron clad ships of war. The abandoning wood in the construction of war ships was illustrated by the ironclads (The Monitor and Merrimack being the most famous examples) and the battles that they fought. Despite the impression that the Civil War was fought primarily on land, the Confederacy, with the assistance of both France and Great Britain, waged a very aggressive maritime battle against the Union. In the Battle of Hampton Roads, the Union’s ironclad USS Monitor faced the Confederacy’s own iron clad, the CSS Virginia. On the 11th in 1862, the crew of the Virginia scuttled her. In a striking bit of irony, the CSS Virginia had been built using the remains of the Union’s steamship the USS Merrimack (a screw frigate and namesake of the ironclad), which the Union had earlier set on fire in an unsuccessful attempt to scuttle it to prevent its being taken into service by the confederacy’s naval forces.