Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization (review)

William H. Roberts has produced an excellent study of the design and production of the U.S. Navy's Civil War monitors that will interest historians of technology, business, the military, and maritime affairs. Roberts effectively explores the "Union's industrial mobilization and the U.S. Navy's evolution of a flexible, effective system to manage ship acquisition of unprecedented size and technological complexity" (p. 1).

The Battle of Hampton Roads between Monitor and Virginia took place in September 1862. By the spring of 1863, the U.S. Navy had fifty-plus ironclads on order and there was a clear need to broaden the Union's industrial base. As part of this effort, contracts were issued to builders on inland waterways, and Roberts makes illuminating comparisons between their efforts and those of traditional seaboard shipbuilding firms. Of even more interest is his thorough delineation of the history of the navy's ironclad administration and the creation of what, one hundred years later, would be termed a project office.

Civil War Ironclads is presented in ten chapters, beginning with the role of Gustavus Fox, assistant secretary of the navy and ironclad aficionado, and his support of John Ericsson's monitor clique. Roberts then introduces the reader to Alban C. Stimers, heretofore best known in naval history as the engineer that Rear Admiral Samuel F. DuPont sought to blame and court-martial for the failed 1863 ironclad attacks on Charleston. Thanks to Roberts's careful research, the reader is exposed to many other dimensions of Stimers, who was actually one of the most important figures in the ironclad's history. It was Stimers who oversaw private-sector construction of the improved monitors of the Passaic class. Later, his duties included responsibility for detailed design of new shallow-draft harbor and coastal monitors, as well as the aforementioned expansion of construction to the industrial terra incognita of cities sited on the Union's riverways.

Combat operations provided feedback to Stimers and his ironclad inspectorate, and Roberts deftly describes the debate about whether it was better to rush completion of designs with known weaknesses and apply fixes later, or to implement redesign on the building ways ("continuous improvement"). Continuous improvement won out. As a result, "cost overruns and delivery delays" (p. 121) became commonplace as contractors came under tremendous pressure from the inflationary nature of the Northern wartime economy.

Amid the significant difficulties of the large shallow-draft monitor program, Stimers sought to consolidate his power by proposing the establishment of a Bureau of Iron Clad Steamers. His plans ran into significant opposition from the established bureaus of Construction and Repair and Steam Engineering, and his power within the navy eroded with the launching of the shallow-draft monitor Chimo in March 1864. It was immediately obvious that something was wrong. With her coal bunkers partly empty and no ammunition on board, the stern was "3 or 4 inches under water" (p. 159). When a second shallow-draft monitor, built at another shipyard, displayed a similar proclivity to sink, Stimers's career was added to the price of making these ships seaworthy.

The lessons of the navy's wartime industrial mobilization, as typified by the monitor program, were soon forgotten. According to Roberts, the advent of the "New Navy" during the 1880s occurred in an environment in which contracting practices had regressed to equal those of the 1850s. He links this to the negative technological momentum attending the ironclad program. The continuous-improvement method of construction, combined with the navy's parsimony in paying for design changes and the inexperience of many builders, served to deprive firms of capital sufficient to survive the postwar contraction. Ericsson had touted his monitors as being good for fifty years, yet only litigation involving their builders lasted that long. The final case was dismissed in 1919.

Roberts's study...