In their famous battle, the Alabama (right) and Kearsage circled and fired for an hour at a range of 900 yards. The Alabama sank after many direct hits.
The most famous Civil War contest between ships occurred March 9, 1862, in Hampton Roads, Va. The Confederates had raised from the bottom of Norfolk harbor the Federal warship, Merrimac. John Mercer Brooke and John L. Porter had then converted the craft into an ironclad vessel which the Confederates rechristened the Virginia. Sloping iron plates four inches thick protected her decks. The ironclad carried a battering ram weighing 1,500 pounds, plus ten guns. On March 8 the Virginia steamed into Hampton Roads. She easily destroyed two wooden Federal warships and ran a third aground.
The Monitor (left) was the creation of Swedish-born John Ericsson, who had difficulty in selling his strange vessel to the Federal navy. The re-christened Merrimac (right) carried more guns, but so difficult was the ship to maneuver that it required 30 minutes to turn it around.
On the following day, however, the North came forward with a revolutionary weapon of its own. This was the Monitor, so weird-looking a craft that sailors referred to it as a “tin can on a shingle.” The three-hour battle between the Monitor and the Virginia was a draw. Neither ship could pierce the plating of the other. Yet this indecisive battle caused a revolution in naval craft, for it foreshadowed the day when wooden ships would be obsolete.
Two months later, trapped in Hampton Roads, the Virginia was run aground and destroyed. In December, 1862, the Monitor went down in an Atlantic storm near the North Carolina coast.
The Confederates made several notable innovations in the field of naval warfare.
One was an ironclad ram that had the appearance and characteristics of a monster. This was the Arkansas, which the Confederates somehow put together in the summer of 1862 to combat Federal ships on the Mississippi. Constructed of wood, railroad rails, wire, and bits and pieces of iron collected from all over the South, the Arkansas scattered several Federal gunboats, created panic on the Mississippi, and managed to survive a heavy Federal bombardment near Vicksburg.
At Baton Rouge, however, the ironclad’s engines failed. The ram’s commander, Lieutenant H. K. Stevens, ordered the helpless ship destroyed. The Arkansas enjoyed only one month of action; yet Federal Admiral David Farragut called the end of the Arkansas “one of the happiest moments of my life.”