 When the bombardment of Fort Sumter signaled the beginning of the Civil War, the most powerful and technologically advanced ship that the United States Navy had in its fleet was the USS Merrimack, a wooden frigate measuring 270 feet long, weighing over 4,000 tons, and carrying 40 of the largest and most powerful guns in existence at the time. It was built in 1855, and it was designed to employ both steam power and wind power, which was common during the transition to steam power, which was not incredibly reliable at the time. By the time Lincoln took office, the Merrimack was out of commission, holed up in the Gosport Navy Yard in Virginia, awaiting repairs to its engines. When Gideon Wells took office, he appointed a controversial engine designer as the Navy's engineer-in-chief, Benjamin Isherwood, and told him to get to work on the Merrimack. Isherwood's engine was designed around a theory that upset the orthodoxy of steamships, which had been around since the beginning of the century. I'm not an engineer, so forgive me if I do a poor job at explaining this, but the basic idea was to burn fuel to heat a boiler of water to create steam. The steam would enter the engine's cylinder, and when the steam expanded, it would push a piston connected to a rod attached to wheels. When the steam expanded, it would crank the wheels. On ships, this would either be a waterwheel or a propeller. And when it contracted, the piston would compress back into the cylinder, pulling the rod back again so that the wheel would complete a rotation. Standard orthodoxy for the first half of the 19th century was to cut the steam off soon after it entered the cylinder, conserving fuel while it expanded. Back then, the Navy was actually budget conscious, if you can believe that. So the idea of conserving fuel was appealing, and the assumption was that it wouldn't really slow the ship down. But Isherwood had the crazy idea that because of the technology of the time, cylinders could not be sealed well enough to prevent the steam from escaping, which cost the ship's power. His engine was designed to use more steam for each rotation. This meant more fuel, but also far more power, as Isherwood assumed that the standard procedure was allowing steam to expand through the cracks rather than pushing entirely on the piston. Prior to taking his position in the Navy, he actually published a book called Engineering Precedence for Steam Machinery. After the book was published, it was widely ridiculed. One critic took offense at Isherwood's arrogance in presenting a, quote, mere hypothesis of his own that he has printed in a book, end quote. But Gideon Wells apparently had more faith in Isherwood's ideas. He was sent to Gosport on April 10, only days before the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Isherwood had only arrived in the Virginia Navy Yard on the 14th, the day after Sumter surrendered. Working with a team of mechanics, Isherwood was able to successfully repair the Mary Mac in only three days, finishing the repairs on the same day that Virginia seceded. The next day, the ship was ready to sail, and the chains that bound it to the dock had even been replaced by ropes so axmen could cut them free at a moment's notice. Isherwood wanted to take the ship to a safer yard immediately, but the commander of the Navy Yard, Captain Charles Macaulay, wavered. His orders had been to be ready to take the Mary Mac, but he was waiting on the final order to do so. Isherwood tried to plead with him, but to no avail. He immediately went to Washington, arriving on the 19th, and spoke to Gideon Wells, who was furious at Macaulay. He immediately ordered reinforcements to Norfolk, along with Commodore Hiram Pauling, who was to relieve Macaulay from command. Pauling and his 349 men arrived at the Navy Yard on April 21, but the delay had been too long. Members of the Virginia militia had already organized around the yard ready to seize it. Pauling knew he couldn't hold them off long enough to retrieve the ships or the massive supply of weapons and ammunition, so he ordered his men to destroy everything. The men took sledgehammers and tried to destroy the many cannons in the yard, but they were too strong and their efforts were in vain. But before they left, they poured lines of gunpowder all over the docks and set fire to them as they departed. The secessionists were able to seize the bounty of artillery and ammunition, which would prove to be enormously valuable for the Confederacy at the start of the war. But they were forced to watch helplessly as the fire took hold of the Merrimack, running up her masts and spreading around her wooden body until she sunk into the shallow waters of the yard. The powerful Merrimack was lost to the Union, but at least they kept it out of the hands of the Confederacy as well. When Stephen Mallory took office as the Confederate Secretary of War, his priority was to build iron warships. A week after the burning of Gosport, he told the Confederate Committee on Naval Affairs, quote, I regard the possession of an iron-armored ship as a matter of the first in necessity. Inequality of numbers may be compensated by invulnerability, end quote. But when he said this, he didn't even have the ships to put iron plates over. An old joke about the Confederate Navy depicted a reporter asking a Navy official, Sir, is your Navy iron plated? To which Mallory would reply as the punchline to this joke. Sir, our Navy is barely even quantum plated. But on May 30th, Stephen Mallory received a telegram that he didn't think much of at the time. The telegram is short, quote, we have the Merrimack up and are just pulling her into dry dock, end quote. After they inspected the ship's damage, they found that the fires that had sunk it never reached the recently repaired Isherwood engines. The Confederacy now had possession of the most powerful ship that the U.S. Navy had ever built, equipped with fully functioning engines of the most advanced design. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast Historical Controversies. In the previous episode, we looked at the often neglected but extremely important Burnside Expedition in which the Union took control of the North Carolina coast. While these Union victories were causing an uproar in the Confederacy, Stephen Mallory was already working on a game changer with his iron clad ship. While Burnside was conquering North Carolina, the coast of Virginia by early March would have a new defender that seemed impervious to Union assault. This would genuinely change the face of naval warfare for the United States. John Mercer Brooks spent most of the 1850s on the Atlantic Ocean, charting the coasts of Alaska and Siberia and Japan. His new charts were unique as they included measurements of the ocean's depth using a sounding device that Brooks designed himself. When he returned home in early 1861, Congress finally paid him $5,000 for his invention, which would be used by the U.S. Navy for decades. Brooks took his $5,000 and invested it in Confederate war bonds, even before his home state of Virginia seceded. Brooks was an adamant secessionist, and when Virginia finally joined the Confederacy, he was hoping for war. He told his wife, quote, politically speaking, it will be best for the South to have war for some time to break up all the old connecting ties. I despise the North, end quote. But Brooks' resignation from the U.S. Navy was a disappointment to Gideon Wells. Brooks was intelligent, inventive, and extremely capable. When Lincoln announced his blockade, Brooks immediately started to think about how to construct an iron-armored warship. He sketched out a design and brought it to Stephen Mallory on June 23rd. He borrowed part of the design from iron-plated ships used in the Crimean War, where the sides were tilted to deflect shots. But another part of his design was more original. This was the submerged hull, which he received a patent for. The problem of iron ships was that they were so heavy that to make them buoyant, they would have to be incredibly broad, which would prevent easy movement through the water. But Brooks had the idea of extending the hull of the ship underwater. So if you've ever seen a picture of these ships, the bulk of it is completely submerged. Instead of sitting mostly on top of the water, the ship was almost entirely submerged. So it looked kind of like a surfacing submarine. In fact, I showed a drawing of the Merrimack to my best friend, who's an officer in the Coast Guard, and asked him if they still had ship designs like that. And he thought I was showing him a submarine, because narcosubmarines that drug smugglers use are very similar to this still. So this ironclad looks like what today would be called a semi-submersible submarine, which I didn't know when I actually started writing this episode. So the only part that was sticking out of the water was a much smaller top piece that had the cannons poked through it. And underneath the surface was the bulk of the ship with most of the crew inside. On top of the exposed section would be railings where the exterior crew would operate. When Brooks showed his design to Stephen Mallory, Mallory immediately accepted it and hired a Navy architect to help Brooke build his ship. The architect Mallory hired was John Luke Porter. Brooke and Porter would butt heads a great deal during their work, but they would prove to be an effective team. Porter got along much better with the Confederate Navy's engineer and chief, William Williamson. Porter and Williamson went to the South's largest industrial plant, the Tredegar Ironworks, to see how they could solve their first problem, finding the iron plates to clad the ship in. The owner of the ironworks was Joseph Reed Anderson. He gave the pair bad news. It would take months for his factory to produce the plating they needed, and that was if they could even get him enough iron to do it. So Williamson and Porter met with Brooke at the Gossport Navy yard to see what could be salvaged, and while there, they inspected the Merrimack. Over the past month, workers had been pumping out the water. The hole was charred from the fire that sunk it, but it still looked sound, and the engines were unharmed. Brooke saw no reason that his design couldn't be used on the Merrimack. The other two men agreed, and they brought the idea to Stephen Mallory, who gave them in the green light to start working. Porter immediately started to sketch out the plans for Brooke's design. The new commander of the Gossport Navy yard, French Forrest, was skeptical. He didn't think the Merrimack was worth salvaging to begin with, and he only had it pulled up because he was ordered to do so. Now looking at Porter's plans, he said that the Merrimack would earn the honor of being the only warship to sink two times in one year. According to Porter's account, Forrest was the norm, not the exception. Almost nobody thought the ship would float, or it would at least have other problems. Porter wrote, quote, I received but little encouragement from anyone. Hundreds, I may say thousands, asserted she would not float. Some said she would turn bottom side up. Others said the crew would suffocate. The most wise said the concussion and report of the guns would deafen the men. Some said she would not steer, and public opinion generally about here said she would never come out of the dock, end quote. Tredegar Ironworks was working at full capacity to provide the iron plating for even this design, which was far less resource intensive than the original idea to build a ship from scratch. Brook wanted three inch iron plating, but there wasn't a factory in the south that could produce them. Tredegar could produce two inch plates, but this wasn't enough for Brook. So instead they produced one inch plates, and the plan was to layer them three on top of each other. Iron was tough to come by throughout the war. Anderson bought what he could, but most of the iron his factory used before the war had come from the north. So he was scrounging for new sources. The most immediate solution was for Stonewall Jackson to have his men tear up the Baltimore and Ohio railroad tracks in northern Virginia and send it the salvaged iron to Tredegar. Taking iron from wherever he could get it, Anderson produced the plates as fast as he could. The whole of the ship would remain wooden, likely due to the scarcity of iron rather than buoyancy issues. Since Brook's design called for it to be completely submerged, which is not how the original Merrimack floated, the surrounding water would provide a layer of protection. The smaller top portion, the truss, that would be exposed would receive the iron plates. The people building the ship were dealing with a lot of unknowns. Not only did some people believe the ship wouldn't float, even if it did, it only mattered if the armor proved effective, which was hardly certain. So on August 31st, they decided to test it. Using an eight inch gun, meaning that the ball had fired away more than 100 pounds, they fired a shot from 300 yards away. The iron plates where it struck split apart and the wood behind them was damaged. Three inch plates weren't enough. Brooks added a fourth plate to the layer and conducted the test again. This time the iron plates broke but the wood behind it survived. So Brooks revised to the plan to use four inch armor plating, which meant Tredegar had to start producing two inch plates that could be stacked in pairs. But this wasn't the biggest issue. The iron works didn't have the equipment necessary to punch bolt holes through plates this thick. Instead they had to slowly and laboriously drill the holes before putting the plates in place. When the plates were shipped to the Navy Yard, the builders then had to fix the plates to the 150 foot long and 24 foot wide truss that would sit above the water by drilling into the wood, blinded the copper bolts that held the wood together. If they had a bolt, they had to plug the hole with a piece of wood called a tree nail and send the plate back to be reworked with new holes. All this drastically slowed down construction. And in the fall of 1861, the Merrimack was consuming the vast majority of Tredegar's resources. By February of 1862, when Tredegar finished to the last bit of plating, they had rolled a total of 733 tons of iron for the ship. Another thing that slowed them down by the way was the difficulty in transporting the iron. With all the iron being allocated to the Merrimack, the South was handicapping its own railroad networks. In November, one of the managers at Tredegar told the Goss Port Navy Yard, we have iron for the Navy that has been lying on the bank for four weeks. Several sizes are ready to go down. The railroad has been unable to transport it." End quote. So this is interesting enough to warrant a quick economic aside. In human action, Ludwig von Mises included a chapter on the economics of war. And in it, he said that the calculation problem would affect countries controlling the wartime economies, which was the case for the Confederacy. Because government officials were allocating their scarce supply of iron to prioritized activities, they were pulling it away from alternative lines of use. In a market economy, of course, profit and loss calculations make it possible to allocate resources toward their most important uses, but government bureaucracies have no substitute for this. So the Merrimack got its iron, but in a way that constrained other important wartime necessities, such as the railroads that needed iron for track maintenance. And there was no mechanism in place to judge which function was the more important use of that iron. With the exception of Geoffrey Rogers Hummel, I'm not aware of any historian who has offered an economic analysis of the Confederate war effort that considers these important, but less visible, opportunity costs for what are typically heralded as highly visible successes. I'll eventually devote at least one episode to the wartime economy, but this is worth pointing out for the moment. But over the course of several months, they finally got the armor in place. The next step was putting the cannons on board. The original Merrimack had been equipped with Dahlgren guns. These were guns designed by John Dahlgren, modified after the French innovations that could fire shells at a flat trajectory. I went over the innovations in cannon technology that changed to the course of the Civil War a few episodes ago, but I don't think I was fully clear about the timeline of everything then because I was giving more of a general overview. The Dahlgren cannons, unlike their French antecedents, could fire both a shot or a shell at a flat trajectory. Earlier in the century, exploding shells could only be fired out of a mortar, which sent the shell in an arc. This was effective enough for land battles, but it was useless for naval warfare, as mortars were inaccurate and required stable ground. They were also useless for battles between ships where the one firing would be rocking about in the water and the target would be mobile. So this French military man designed a cannon that could shoot shells at a flat trajectory but his guns could not fire solid shots. But a flat trajectory made them far more likely to hit a moving target and they also hit with a stronger impact. This technology was so superior to the traditional short range guns that could only fire shots that when they were tested in 1824, it only took 16 hits for the French to demolish one of their older gigantic warships. Dahlgren designed a gun that could do better firing either shells or shots at a flat trajectory. His guns were also bigger. The earlier guns couldn't fire large ammunition because the powder would cause the gun to explode. Dahlgren designed a cannon that looked like a soda bottle. It was flat on the bottom and narrow at the muzzle. It was cast with thick iron and could absorb the strength of the more powerful shot. So when the Merrimack was built, this was the most advanced naval gun in existence. But the Dahlgren guns were still smoothbore which meant their range was limited. When Mallory was working to build a superior ship for the Confederacy, he wanted rifled cannons. While Porter was overseeing the armor plating for the Merrimack, Mallory put Brooke to work on designing a rifled gun specifically for naval warfare. Rifled cannons already existed for land-based artillery but they were completely unknown in naval battles at the outset of the Civil War. Dahlgren was already working on a rifle design but it had yet to be produced. Mallory wanted to change this. It wasn't enough to have a ship that would be impervious to Union fire. He wanted it to be the most destructive thing on the water as well. So Brooke designed a rifled version of the seven inch Dahlgren and the first one was cast in November of 1861. When it was tested, it was able to fire a 100 pound shell nearly five miles. This was incredible. In the modern era of nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers, it's hard to imagine what an incredible advance in weaponry this was at the time. An armored warship that could fire exploding shells horizontally at targets that were miles away would essentially be a naval super weapon in 1861 and that is exactly what Stephen Mallory wanted. When the Tredegar ironworks wasn't producing iron plating, they were working to fulfill an order for hundreds of these new rifled cannons and the first two it produced would be put on the Merrimack one at each end. The broad side of the ship would be armed with a six inch rifled cannon of Brooks's design and three nine inch smoothbore Dahlgren's on each side, giving the ship 10 guns total. The gun ports had iron shutters that could be pulled down to protect the guns when they weren't being fired and the boiler room was fitted to be able to heat up shots to load the guns with hot shots, which if you remember from an episode at the very beginning of the season was a solid shot that was heated before being loaded so that it could set fire to wooden targets. But Mallory always wanted to equip the ship with a rather antiquated piece of weaponry, a ram. Fixing a long ram with a metal tip to the bow of a ship allowed ships going back to the old Roman galleys to charge enemy ships and pierce the holes, sinking them. But rams were hardly useful anymore. Kind of how rifled muskets had made bayonets nearly obsolete, the use of cannons on warships, even before the long range rifled cannons were used, made it where a charging ship would be easily cut down before it could ram its target. But Mallory was thinking about the scarcity of gunpowder and the advent of steam. The shortage of gunpowder meant that no matter how powerful the cannons were, the Merrimack might face a situation where they were useless. The steam engines, especially the ones on the Merrimack that used Isherwood's innovation, made ships faster so they could close in on a gun much more quickly than the sailing ships that first mounted naval cannons. So he figured that the ram might be made useful once again. As we will see in the next episode, he would be proven correct. He had a 1500 pound, three foot long ram mounted below the waterline of the ship. He wanted it to be bigger, but the scarcity of iron forced him to settle for what he could. With the iron plating in place, the ram fixed and the artillery mounted, the ship was complete. The question remained though, would it even float? On February 13th, they found out. They flooded the dry dock that the Merrimack was sitting on and its iron truss stayed above the water. Inspectators watched as the ship floated into the Elizabeth River with only five Marines brave enough to stand on its deck during the test run. Now that they knew the ship could float, Stephen Mallory needed to find somebody to command it. For this, he turned to Franklin Buchanan, the founder of the US Naval Academy in 1845. Buchanan was a reluctant Confederate. He was from Baltimore, Maryland. Although he did not take part in the Pratt Street riots of his city, he shared their sentiments. He was dismayed by the election of Abraham Lincoln writing to a friend, quote, we can never again feel as proud of the flag we sail under, end quote. He expected Maryland to secede and he was ready to join the Confederacy in defense of his state. In anticipation of the secession he thought was certain, he went to Gideon Wells on April 22nd to resign his position in the US Navy. He told Wells that it was, quote, the most unpleasant duty I have ever performed. Wells was sad to see him go, but Buchanan told him that he had to stand by estate, quote, when the blood was flowing in the streets, end quote. Wells merely responded, quote, every man has to judge for himself. Buchanan's position in the Navy at the time was commander of the Washington Navy Yard and his replacement was none other than John Dogren. But Buchanan's resignation was premature. Maryland did not secede. Once he realized that Maryland was going to stay in the Union, Buchanan went to see Wells again to ask him to withdraw his resignation. Wells had no sympathy for the Southern sympathizer, coldly telling him, quote, by direction of the president, your name has been stricken from the roles of the Navy, end quote. Buchanan was outraged at the offense. In the minds of the Lincoln administration, Buchanan's loyalty should have been with the Union first in his state second, but Buchanan believed that his loyalty to Maryland superseded the nation, which was not an uncommon view at the time. Robert E. Lee did not want Virginia to secede, but it was his loyalty to Virginia that compelled him to join the Confederacy. Buchanan thought this should be understandable enough to Wells and Lincoln, and he was offended when he was turned away. It wasn't helped by the fact that he already viewed Lincoln as a tyrant and thought the early policies against Maryland were criminal. He wrote a letter to his nephew saying, quote, my intention is to remain neutral, but if all law is to be dispensed with and a coercive policy continued, which would disgust barbarians and the South literally trampled upon, I may change my mind and join them, end quote. Buchanan already believed that the North was unjustly interfering with slavery and that the Republicans were engaged in a conspiracy to foment insurrection in the South, determined to get the slaves to rise up, end quote, cut the throats of their masters, the land to be given to Northerners, end quote. He called the Civil War the quote, unquote, war of races and said that, quote, the Negro is the cause of it all, end quote. He may have already been looking for an excuse to go South and if he was, it wouldn't take long for him to find justification. In June, a group of New York volunteers were sent around Baltimore to remove the ammunition from the local armory. Buchanan lived near the armory and the New Yorkers noted that the front gates of his home were decorated with two cannonballs fixed on top of the gate posts. These were souvenirs Buchanan had taken home with him from the Mexican American War. The New Yorkers took the cannonballs and this was the last straw for Buchanan. He transferred his property into his wife's name so the government wouldn't confiscate it and he went into Richmond. Stephen Mallory immediately gave him an officer's commission and appointed him as chief of the Bureau of Order and Detail. This was a high office but it required him to deal with dull matters revolving around supply requests. He spent the end of 1861 and January of 1862 behind a desk but on February 24th, Mallory came to Buchanan with the offer of a more exciting job, commander of the Merrimack. With its completion, by the way, the Merrimack was rechristened the CSS Virginia. In these episodes, I will continue to refer to the ship as the Merrimack for the sake of simplicity. Even in records left by the Confederates, the ship continued to be often referred to as the Merrimack though official reports refer to it as the Virginia. When Buchanan arrived in Norfolk, the Confederacy knew the ship could float but little else. In the letter to Buchanan offering the job, Mallory said quote, its powers are unknown. Buchanan would be responsible for finding out exactly what the new ship was capable of. He also had to get a crew. He found a chief engineer for the ship in Ashton Ramsey who worked the engines for the Merrimack prior to the war before his resignation from the US Navy. He wasn't happy about the job. He hated the steam room of the ship and he was hoping to see action early in the war but he was willing to do his duty, whatever that may be. He had such little faith in the reliability of the ship's power plant that when he was ordered to man it, one of his friends, a fellow officer, wrote him a letter saying quote, goodbye Ramsey, I shall never see you again. She will be your coffin, end quote. Some of the crew on the new ship eagerly volunteered, excited to be part of history. Others were enticed by the pay offer to them but hardly seemed reliable. One naval officer participating in recruitment wrote quote, some of the so-called volunteers had bad characters from their commanding officers who could not manage them and were brought on board in double irons, end quote. I don't know how common the practice was but it wasn't unheard of for ship crews to be shackled so they couldn't abandon their posts during storms and whatnot which would obviously put the entire crew in danger. The crew was trained to work the cannons while the officer struggled to get gunpowder from Richmond who was being stingy as ever with their ordinance supplies when it came to anything Navy related. Inside the ship was miserable as water leaked into the submerged hole, leaving everything inside dank and uncomfortable. She also had the problem of being too buoyant because of the modified iron conserving design that left the whole of the ship wooden. It had to be fully submerged to protect it from Union cannons but the Merrimack sat high enough in the water that a chunk of the wooden hole sat above the water line. So Porter had taken every piece of scrap metal he could find around the Navy yard and piled it on top of the ship to weigh it down. When Buchanan first laid eyes on the Merrimack only the top truss was showing but it was littered with trash metal which you won't see in any of the aesthetic artist renderings of the ship. The Merrimack was accompanied by a handful of other ships making up a small fleet dubbed the James River Squadron. Mallory had made Buchanan a Commodore which put him in charge of the entire fleet but the Merrimack was the centerpiece of it all and even though its exposed truss was much smaller than the submerged hole even this portion of the ship dwarfed to the small wooden steamers that floated to its side. Buchanan wanted to get the ship in the ocean as soon as possible but he had to wait until Richmond finally delivered the full supply of gunpowder the Merrimack needed. This came on March 5th and with the power loaded up Buchanan gave the orders to prepare for departure. He wanted to have the ship off the coast of Newport News by the 7th with the intention of destroying two Union frigates the Congress and the Cumberland. The Merrimack would be tested in combat but bad weather delayed him again and he didn't depart until the 8th when they finally took off the wharves around the ship were crowded spectators. One man apparently shouted quote go on with your old metallic coffin she will never amount to anything else end quote Buchanan and his officers were already nervous about the trip. By now the men had heard stories about Buchanan's request to be taken back into the US Navy and how he'd been rejected before joining the Confederacy. They weren't incredibly confident in his loyalty and Buchanan knew it. He had to prove himself and an account left by one of his men Buchanan said to his crew quote I heard when I came to the command of this vessel a spursion upon my loyalty and doubt of my courage and zeal. I promise you that when this day's work is over there will be no more calls for any such unjust suspicions. End quote. Almost as soon as they broke out of the river and into the ocean they could see the union ships in the distance. For most Civil War sailors service consisted of a long duration of boring non-action before anybody saw combat. For the crew of the Merrimack things would be different as they would face the enemy in battle before the day was done. We will pick up the story there in the next episode. Historical controversies is a production of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. If you would like to support the show please subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher and leave a positive review. You can also support the show financially by donating at Mises.org slash Support HC. If you would like to explore the rest of our content please visit Mises.org. That's M-I-S-E-S dot O-R-G.