CSS Virginia: Rebuilt From the Burned Merrimack, Doomed by Its Own Draft

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In April 1861 Union forces abandoning the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk burned the steam frigate USS Merrimack, commissioned in 1856, to the waterline and scuttled her in the Elizabeth River. The water put out the fire below the surface, and when Confederate Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory had the wreck raised, the lower hull and engines were largely intact. Designers John Mercer Brooke and John L. Porter built a submerged main deck and a casemate of oak and pine 24 inches thick, covered in two crossed layers of two-inch iron plate sloped at 36 degrees to deflect shot. She carried six 9-inch Dahlgrens, four Brooke rifles and two howitzers, plus an iron ram, but at 4,000 tons her failing engines managed five to six knots and a turn took 45 minutes.

On March 8, 1862, under Captain Franklin Buchanan and with civilian mechanics still aboard, the Virginia rammed and sank USS Cumberland, losing part of her ram in the process, then forced USS Congress aground and burned her with heated shot after Buchanan was wounded. The next day USS Monitor arrived, and the two ironclads fought for hours without either armor being pierced. A hit on Monitor's pilot house blinded John L. Worden, and the falling tide sent the Virginia back to Norfolk. When Norfolk fell in May, her crew lightened her for the James River, exposing the wooden hull, and on May 11, 1862, Josiah Tattnall had her run aground near Craney Island and blown up.

• The heated shot was loaded behind a layer of wet clay or soaked wadding so it would not set off the powder.
• Shot holes in the smokestack cut the boiler draft and reduced engine power further.
• Monitor kept its turret turning away from the enemy while reloading, leaving no open gun ports to target.
• The Virginia's anchor sits at the American Civil War Museum in Richmond and her bell at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum.
• Salvaged iron was cast into the Pocahontas bell for the 1907 Jamestown Exposition.