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

Introduction

[ 1 ] or thousands of years, warships were built of wood and powered by human muscles and the wind. Gunpowder carved the first niche for chemical energy and machine-made materials, but successfully mounting and using cannon aboard ship still required vast amounts of timber and muscle power. In the mid nineteenth century, however, naval warfare changed dramatically. The Crimean War produced halting steps toward mechanized combat at sea, but not until the American Civil War did a navy conduct a campaign fought from start to finish by seagoing machines. Those machines had to be designed and built, and Civil War navies grew as much from the economic and industrial resources of the combatants as from their political and strategic thinking. In the South, modest means led to modest programs. On the Union side, a relatively well developed industrial and financial apparatus allowed the creation not only of a blockading fleet of steam-powered wooden and iron vessels but also of a strategically offensive fleet of ironclads. This study explores the Union’s industrial mobilization and the U.S. Navy’s evolution of a flexible , effective system to manage a ship acquisition program of unprecedented size and technological complexity. Although the Union’s longest-running and most consistently pursued naval campaign was the blockade of the Confederacy, the massive federal ironclad program illustrates the broadly offensive orientation of Union Navy leaders and demonstrates that they, like Army leaders, intended to carry the war to the enemy. Rich in industry and skilled manpower , the North was far better equipped to wage technological warfare than the South, and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles intended to use Northern resources to the fullest. Introduction F The experimental nature of ironclad technology complicated matters. Political and public relations imperatives rather than superior technology drove the Navy’s selection of the monitor type of ironclad (by 1862, “monitor” had become a generic term), but all ironclads were “high technology” for their day. The Navy’s backlog of orders for steam engines and the Army’s shortage of small arms suggest that merely getting manufacturers to build more copies of proven designs was difficult enough. Union shipbuilders, machine shops, and ironworks were completely unprepared for such a massive demand. The need to develop a new technology under conditions of tremendous urgency also imposed huge strains upon governmental and economic infrastructures, which were accustomed neither to large projects nor fast action. High technology, while necessary, did not itself suffice to enable the Union to create its ironclad fleet. Ships were the tangible products of a system of ship acquisition, and the system existing in 1861 was itself the product of many years of peacetime evolution. Traditional Navy shipbuilding management methods, ample for building wooden ships in ones and twos, could scarcely handle the high-quantity production of technologically advanced ironclads. Recognizing this problem, the Navy turned to private contractors to build its ships and established a “project office” system, in which Secretary Welles appointed Rear Admiral Francis H. Gregory as general superintendent of ironclads and gave him broad authority to manage the ironclad program practically independently of the existing Navy administrative system. Gregory’s office, under the de facto leadership of General Inspector of Ironclads Alban Crocker Stimers, provided desperately needed drive and direction during the critical months of 1862 and 1863. Stimers’s so-called monitor bureau also spearheaded the Navy’s deliberate attempt to broaden the North’s industrial base. The three ironclad vessels commenced in September 1861 were well within the nation’s capabilities . After the Battle of Hampton Roads in March 1862, however, Union ironclad construction shifted into high gear. By the spring of 1863, the Navy had ordered more than fifty coastal and seagoing ironclads. Despite its imperative need and its undoubted economic and industrial might, the Union could neither build all the ironclads it wanted nor build all of them at once. Besides ironclads for coastal and oceanic service, the 2 • Civil War Ironclads Navy also had to provide armored and unarmored vessels for riverine service, unarmored vessels to blockade the Southern coast, and cruisers to chase Confederate commerce raiders. All these programs competed for the Navy’s industrial, personnel, and financial resources, while the Navy as a whole competed with the Army for the nation’s resources. Urgency thus led the Navy increasingly to turn away from traditional shipbuilders. In 1862, it began a deliberate...