378 : The Atlantic 



agricultural area with few developed industrial resources. The Federal 

 Navy commenced at once an effort to establish a blockade of the 

 Southern ports. The South encouraged blockade runners and many 

 different ships, both of American and foreign origin, were put into 

 operation as blockade runners. Privateering was also a method natu- 

 ral and serviceable to the hard-pressed South. The South had a third 

 naval hope or ambition : this was to create a small but effective fleet of 

 armor-plated vessels. 



The United States Navy had been dilatory and inert in its whole 

 attitude on ironclad vessels. Robert L. Stevens had originally submit- 

 ted to the navy and to Congress plans for an ironclad vessel shortly 

 after the War of 1812, but thirty years passed before he was finally able 

 to commence construction and he died before his proposed ship could 

 be brought to completion. Farragut had applied for permission to 

 observe and study naval operations during the Crimean War but had 

 been officially denied this opportunity. 



The Southern commanders, Porter and Brooke, saw an opportunity 

 of beating the Northern wooden navy by creating and employing iron- 

 clad vessels, and with this in mind they proposed the plan of armor- 

 ing and utilizing the Merrimac. The Merrimac had originally been 

 built in 1855 in Charlestown, Massachusetts and was then a forty- 

 gun steam frigate of rather novel type. She had been wrecked, scut- 

 tled and sunk at the time that the Federal government abandoned the 

 Norfolk navy yard. 



The plan of Porter and Brooke called for raising this vessel, cutting 

 her down to the water line and erecting on her new deck a sloping 

 structure to house two broadsides of four guns each and two rifled 

 guns firing forward and two aft; the whole ship to be covered with a 

 double thickness of two-inch iron plates laid over and fastened to a 

 massive wooden structure. This amor-clad floating battery the South- 

 erners christened Virginia, but she has still always been known to 

 history as the Merrimac. 



Every effort was made to complete this vessel as rapidly as possible 

 for there were rumors abroad that the North was bringing to comple- 

 tion the strange structure developed by Ericsson called the Monitor. 

 After feverish work Merrimac was ready to proceed into battle on 

 March 8, 1862, and early in the morning she moved into Chesapeake 

 Bay. 



The USS Congress first saw her proceeding under a cloud of smoke 

 at 8:30 A.M. The Merrimac led a little group of five small Confederate 

 warcraft. Arrayed against them were five large Federal vessels. In 

 addition to the Congress of fifty guns, there was also the fifty-gun St. 



