faces of the civil war navies: an album of union and confederate sailors

Even the Arkansas, an uncompleted warship, created consternation in two Union fleets on the Mississippi in mid-1862. Had the two large ironclads, the Louisiana and the Mississippi, been ready, the attack on New Orleans might have had a different ending. A month later, despite fears that the Confederates would have three ironclads waiting for then Captain David Farragut’s fleet, the Federal fleet captured New Orleans before the two largest Confederate ironclads became fully operational. The Monitor neutralized the Virginia, and the Federal fleet in the Chesapeake was never again seriously challenged. The Virginia's success panicked some of Lincoln’s cabinet members fortunately for the North, the USS Monitor arrived before the Virginia could wreak further havoc upon the fleet.

The Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia ( with Captain Raphael Semmes) temporarily terrorized a formidable Union fleet in Hampton Roads during March. The seceding states possessed no vessels capable of fighting against the best frigates in the Federal navy, nor did those states possess most of the necessary raw materials and industries needed to build modern warships.ĭespite the Confederacy’s handicaps in creating a navy, its embryonic fleet came tantalizingly close to upsetting the Federal navy’s superiority in March and April of 1862. Jefferson Davis chose Stephen Mallory as Secretary of the Navy. The infant Confederate government quickly established a naval organization. The Federal government’s naval superiority allowed it to project power along thousands of miles of coastline and rivers, subsist large armies in Virginia, and slowly strangle the southern economy by stymieing imports of European and northern manufactures and foodstuffs, as well as of exports of southern staples, primarily raw cotton. The Union navy’s control of the American waters was a decisive element in the outcome of the Civil War.

Faces of the civil war navies: an album of union and confederate sailors