Glory In The Name

In his report to Secretary Mallory, written while he was a prisoner aboard the flagship Minnesota , Samuel Barron wrote:

They the Union ships, after some practice, got the exact range of the IX, X, and XI-inch guns, and did not find it necessary to alter their positions, whilst not a shot from our battery reached them with the greatest elevation we could get.

With the situation hopeless, Barron ordered the white flag run up.

It was not until February of the following year that the Union forces followed up their victory at Cape Hatteras with the obvious move on Roanoke Island, which would close off Albemarle Sound and threaten Norfolk from the south. When they did come, they once more came in overwhelming strength, and brushed aside the three thousand Confederate troops and the small mosquito fleet that the Confederate government allocated for defense of the island and sound.

The naval battle at Elizabeth City, a fleet action fought by two fleets of small gunboats, was one of the only such naval fights in the Civil War. Indicative of the changing nature of warfare at sea, it is also one of the few instances of hand-to-hand fighting during naval combat in that war.

In the Gulf of Mexico, Confederates and Federals played at the same game, with the Union navy attempting to further its stranglehold on Southern ports, and the Confederacy resisting with all means available, which, in the largely agricultural South, was not much. Many of the ambitious ironclad projects begun by the Confederate Navy ended up as bonfires on the ways before the ships were ever in the water. Delays were epidemic, with so few facilities in the South able to manufacture the many elements that went into an ironclad vessel.

One ship that did become operational, the first ironclad ever built in the United States, was the Manassas , built as a privateer and commandeered for naval service. In the end she proved to be more of a psychological threat than a physical one, and though she did deliver a few good hits, and stove in some planks, she was never able to sink a Union vessel. Nonetheless, she was enough to frighten Captain John Pope into abandoning the Head of the Passes, in one of the most shameful of all Civil War naval episodes, known today as Pope’s Run.

Despite that one victory, the small fleet of gunboats and even the two big forts south of New Orleans were not enough to stop Farragut’s heavy ships from fighting their way past. Had the ironclad Louisiana been operational, she might have tipped the balance in the South’s favor, but like so many of the Confederacy’s naval efforts, she was hampered by design and manufacturing problems. In the end she was no more than a floating battery, and not a terribly effectual one at that.

Like the fledgling United States Navy during the Revolution, facing the might of the Royal Navy, the Confederate Navy had an impossible task from the onset. Eighty years after the Revolution, the problem was exacerbated by technological advances that made it more difficult to compete with the industrialized North. Benedict Arnold could build a fleet of ships in the woods of New York and take on the British on Lake Champlain, but by the mid- nineteenth century, naval warfare was too sophisticated for that sort of thing. The brave men of the Confederate Navy stood up to the Union juggernaut with whatever they had that would float and mount a gun, but in the end they could do no more than delay the inevitable.