Morris Island and the Civil War by C. Russell Horres Jr

Author:C. Russell Horres Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Two of the best rifled cannons of the Civil War. The Parrott weighed 9,700 pounds. The Brooke, eleven inches shorter, weighed 10,700. They could fire 6.4-inch, 100-pound projectiles over five miles. Courtesy of the author.

Rumors and reports from spies about the Confederate work on the ironclad created a great deal of concern in Washington, even fears the vessel would steam up the Potomac and demand the surrender of the city. On August 7, the same day the army contracted for seven Eads river ironclads, the navy requested proposals for its own ironclad to be submitted in a month. Fortunately, Swedish American inventor John Ericsson was betting on the government purchasing his ironclad and signed contracts for the iron and hull on October 25; he was already building the engines before the contract was signed. Although Ericsson received most of the credit for the design, the revolving turret was the invention of Theodore Ruggles Timby, who had conceived of the design 20 years earlier.113 This likely accounts for the speed at which the innovative craft was built—only 118 days. It was commissioned the Monitor on February 26 and was towed and steamed to the Chesapeake, nearly sinking on the way. It clashed with the Virginia on March 9 off Hampton Roads and effectively ended the Virginia’s predation on wooden warships. On February 13, 1862, almost seven months after the Confederates began the Virginia project, President Lincoln signed into law HR 153, an act authorizing the construction of twenty steam-powered ironclad gunboats.114 The act did not specify the design to be employed, as several ironclad concepts were being explored. On February 21, 1862, a contract was let to John Ericsson to build more of them. In April 1862, Admiral David Farragut, in wooden ships, fought his way past Forts Jackson and St. Philips and quickly captured New Orleans. Confident with the success of the Ericsson monitor, the U.S. Navy proposed using the new ironclad ships to run by the harbor forts and force the surrender of Charleston. It began to build a fleet and assemble it at Port Royal.115

The Confederates were aware of the operation when the navy began moving the ironclads down the coast. Two days out of Hampton Roads, the original Monitor foundered in a storm and sank on December 31 with a loss of four officers and twelve crewmen. The ironclad Passaic almost met the same fate on the journey, certainly an inauspicious beginning. The secretary of the Confederate navy, Stephen Mallory, wrote to Lieutenant William A. Webb, on special duty at Charleston, very detailed instructions on February 19 on preparing a fleet of small boats to board the monitors with ladders with a party of ten or twenty sailors, dropping powder charges down the smokestacks, driving iron wedges between the turret and the deck to disable it and smoking the crews out with burning sulfur. The plan was to hold these small boats behind Fort Sumter should the ironclads run past the forts.116 There was another card in the defense of the harbor: the torpedo, known today as a mine.

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