Scrapbook: The Confederacy's Recycled Ship

September/October 2003 

   The clash between the U.S.S. Monitor and the C.S.S. Virginia is regarded as the most memorable naval battle of the Civil War. This confrontation, which marked the first engagement between ironclad ships, is even more intriguing given that the Virginia was recycled from a former Union vessel, the Merrimack.
   Other than their fateful meeting in March 1862, the Monitor and Merrimack had little in common. The Merrimack, launched in Boston in June 1855, was a massive wooden frigate with a steam-driven propeller and 40 cannons, making her the pride of the U.S. Navy.
   The ironclad Monitor was designed by Swedish-American inventor John Ericsson and built with private money in Brooklyn, N.Y. Employing the industrial resources of the North, the ship was assembled in 1861 and delivered to the U.S. Navy in only four months. It was launched in January 1862 from Greenpoint, N.Y.
   The story of how these two ships came to fight each other begins in 1861 at the start of the Civil War. At that time, the U.S.S. Merrimack was under repair at the Gosport Naval Shipyard in Norfolk, Va.—the largest naval station in the country—which was commanded by Commodore Charles McCauley. Fearing that his ships would fall into Confederate hands, McCauley ordered the seacocks opened on all the vessels. Unbeknownst to McCauley, Union troops were on their way from Washington to sail these ships to safety. When the soldiers arrived, they were surprised and more than a little dismayed to find the Union fleet settling into the mud. Since rescuing the ships was out of the question, they decided to destroy the yard and set fire to the sinking vessels.
   A few days later, the Confederate militia overran the shipyard and began salvaging what it could from the devastated ships, which represented a goldmine for the South’s fledgling navy. 
   In addition to the 1,200 artillery pieces the Southerners fished from the harbor, they raised the scorched oak hull of the Merrimack. 
   While the Confederacy was short on naval power, it did have the farsighted Steven Russell Mallory as Secretary of the Navy. Unlike his Northern counterparts, Mallory was quick to realize the value of steelclad warships. Engineer William Williamson proposed recycling the Merrimack’s shell and engines into the South’s first ironclad vessel.
   This enormous task was officially begun in July 1861. At that time, Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Va., was the only sizable steelworks in the South. Then there was the challenge of finding the 723 tons of iron needed to clad the Merrimack. 
   Scrounging was the order of the day. The Gosport Naval Shipyard was stripped of all scrap and surplus iron, yielding about 300 tons. The Confederates then tore up the railroad tracks from the captured B&O line to augment the scrap supply, and Richmond even gave up its trolley tracks to the effort. 
   From July to October 1861, Tredegar Iron Works retooled its mills and devoted most of its production to make the 2-inch-thick plate needed for the ship’s armor (which was doubled in many places to give the vessel 4 inches of protection). These extra production efforts compelled the steelmaker to raise its selling price a penny to 71/2 cents a pound, bringing the total cost of the ship’s armor to $123,000. (One can only wonder what the mill paid for its scrap.)
   Reports of the Merrimack’s transformation eventually reached the North, prompting the development and construction of another ironclad—the Monitor—to rival the Confederacy’s vessel.
   When the transformed Merrimack was finally launched in February 1862, it was rechristened the C.S.S. Virginia. (Though renamed, the recycled ship is commonly referred to as the Merrimack in historical references.) To the relief of her designers, the Virginia stayed afloat. Once under steam, she set about trying to break the North’s blockade of Virginia ports at Hampton Roads.
   On her first day out—March 8, 1862 — the Virginia sunk several wooden Union ships, including the U.S.S. Cumberland and U.S.S. Congress, thanks to her guns and the 1,500-pound iron ram affixed to her bow. By the second day, March 9, the Union’s Monitor had arrived to counter the Confederate challenge. Though the Virginia was larger and carried more guns, the Monitor was more maneuverable and had a shallower draft as well as a revolving gun turret. After hours of bombarding each other, the ships battled to a draw, with neither seriously damaging the other. Still, the Monitor achieved the goal of preventing the Virginia from sinking more Union ships.
   Later, in May 1862, the Union navy bottled up the Virginia in the James River. To avoid capture, the ship was run aground, set alight by her crew, and destroyed when the flames reached the powder magazine. (For the record, her northern rival, the Monitor, didn’t fare much better—it sank off Cape Hatteras, N.C., at the end of the same year.)
  In her three-month career, the Virginia, with her scrap-iron armor and secondhand guns, made both naval and recycling history. Even after the Civil War, the Virginia continued to be recycled as nostalgic souvenir hunters scavenged pieces of her remains to keep for posterity. 

—Tom Mele, Connecticut Metal Industries Inc. (Monroe, Conn.) •

The clash between the U.S.S. Monitor and the C.S.S. Virginia is regarded as the most memorable naval battle of the Civil War. This confrontation, which marked the first engagement between ironclad ships, is even more intriguing given that the Virginia was recycled from a former Union vessel, the Merrimack.