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The second of only three ironclad-to-ironclad clashes of the U.S. Civil War after Hampton Roads took place several months after the Charleston failure, on Wassaw Sound, Georgia. On 17 June 1863, CSS Atlanta rashly engaged two Union Passaic-class monitors, Weehawken and Nahant. Weehawken worked its way to within 300 yards of Atlanta and, with four hits within 15 minutes, forced its surrender. Atlanta was soon after taken into Union service and used in operations against the Confederacy, one of the very few cases of a warship being put into active service by an enemy.
USS Nahant
Inside the gun turret of the Passaic
In December of 1862, 16-year-old Alvah Hunter watched from shore as one of the U.S. Navy’s newest ironclads, the Passaic-class monitor Nahant , steamed slowly back to its berth at the Charlestown Navy Yard near Boston. Having spent months trying to convince naval authorities that he was old enough, and responsible enough, to serve as a ship’s boy, young Hunter had finally been assigned to the Nahant , and he watched with a mixture of pride and apprehension as his designated future home crept toward the wharf. It was nothing at all like the commodious ship of the line Ohio on which Hunter had spent the previous several days while awaiting assignment. For one thing, the Nahant was much smaller than the Ohio, which, in its heyday, had required a crew of over a thousand men to load and fire the 104 guns arrayed on its three gundecks, or to set the sails on its three towering masts, which rose so high above the waterline that crewmen at the main top could look down on the roofs and steeples of Boston. Stripped of its guns and much of its rigging, the Ohio was being used as a receiving ship, essentially a nautical barracks, to house the thousands of new recruits, like Hunter, who were joining the greatly expanded U.S. Navy. Though no longer considered a combat vessel, the Ohio dwarfed the little Nahant, which had no masts or spars, carried only two guns, and whose principal design feature was a stubby armored turret only 23 feet across and topped by a small round conning tower, giving it somewhat the appearance of an iron wedding cake.
In spite of that, Hunter was thrilled to catch this first glimpse of his new ship, and he pointed it out to a veteran sailor who was loitering nearby. The veteran snorted dismissively and unleashed a string of profanities at the stubby little ironclad—“the bloody old tub,” as he called it. “Them new-fangled iron ships ain’t fit for hogs to go to sea in, let alone honest sailors!” he declared. Then he turned to Hunter and offered a prophesy: “You’ll all go to the bottom in her, youngster, that’s where you’ll all go!” The old salt’s warning did not deter Hunter from his decision, nor in the end did it prove accurate, but just as the physical differences between the Ohio and the Nahant were a metaphor for the revolution in naval warfare that took place before and during the American Civil War, the old sailor’s reaction to the Nahant measured the impact of those changes on the culture of the pre-war navy.
The contracts for the Passaic class included provision for changes, in unsophisticated language similar to that applied to the first-generation ironclads. Improvements “suggested by either party, and agreed upon, shall be adopted as the work progresses. All the modifications recommended and adopted” by the contractors would be warranted “to prove successful improvements, with any other improvements the parties to this contract may agree upon.” A later clause reiterated that improvements suggested by the contractor would be guaranteed to work.
While this language seemed to protect the government’s interests, it failed to address important issues. The most obvious question was who would pay for modifications agreed upon by the government and the contractor. The case of the New Ironsides, in which the contractors were paid additional money “by bill of extras allowed by agreement,” shows what was apparently intended, but that contract was not finally settled until November 1862, long after the Passaic-class contracts were entered into. For the seagoing monitors, “Ericsson was obliged to proceed under a general promise from the proper authorities that he should be compensated for his extra work.” Welles assured him in April 1862 of the Navy Department’s “interest and disposition to act in a liberal spirit towards you” with regard to changes on the Passaics.
Perhaps the most disruptive change in the Passaics involved increasing the size and power of their ordnance. The Monitor’s 11-inch guns did some damage to the Virginia, but Fox wanted decisive results; 11-inch guns, he opined, were entirely inadequate against armored vessels. Seeing an 15-inch Army Rodman gun at Fort Monroe shortly after the Monitor- Virginia battle, he decided that the Navy must also have 15-inch guns. He directed Captain John A. Dahlgren, the Navy’s premier ordnance expert and then commandant of the Washington Navy Yard, to design them. Fox’s move to deal with this issue again showed the Navy’s perception that the monitor program’s biggest hurdles were technological.
Dahlgren undertook the new gun, but reluctantly; he disliked following in Thomas Rodman’s footsteps, and the project’s accelerated timetable meant that he could not subject the weapon to the rigorous testing that was his trademark. He did not put his heart into the project; instead, he carefully laid the groundwork to dissociate himself from the design if it failed. Technical problems bedeviled the 15-inch gun, stemming from its new-to-the-Navy technology and its accelerated development, and production started very slowly. The first piece, slated for testing at the Washington Navy Yard, had not arrived by the end of September 1862; two others were then on their way to New York.59 By that time, Ericsson was to have completed six monitors, carrying twelve of the guns.
For Ericsson, the change in caliber was critical. He had designed the Passaics’ gunports for 11-inch Dahlgren smoothbores (or perhaps for the projected 13-inch Dahlgren, which did not appear until 1864). Although he received copies of the plans for the 15-inch when Dahlgren drew them in April, Ericsson failed to redesign the gunports. When the time came to place the guns in the turrets, the muzzles would not fit through the ports. A disadvantage of concurrent production of multiple identical units is that if something is wrong with one, the same thing is wrong with the rest. At the intersection of two technologically risky development programs, the Passaics were being built to carry guns of untested design, which had not yet been manufactured, and which they would in any case be unable to fire.
Other changes were smaller but equally vexatious. Percival Drayton, a highly respected naval officer, was ordered in late September to the Passaic as her prospective commanding officer. He immediately began to find deficiencies that Ericsson, no sailor for all his marine engineering experience, had overlooked. Besides the gunport problem, Drayton noted that but for his input, “we should have had no compass or any means of being towed. . . . [and] there would have been no possible means of clearing the anchor.” Ericsson, he wrote, “ignores every single thing but impenetrability, and that only in the turret.”
“All the reports you may have seen in the papers about the trials having been quite successful are mere interested lies, written for glorification of civilians and injury of the Navy,” Drayton wrote Du Pont after several unsuccessful experiments. Better pleased with the Passaic once had Ericsson incorporated his own suggestions, however, Drayton believed that “when the Navy get fairly hold of [the monitors], we will suggest many improvements, beyond mere engineers and mechanics.”
For his part, Ericsson complained of the engineering ignorance of seagoing officers. Calling Drayton “only a seaman,” he declared that Drayton “evidently does not understand the question [of Passaic’s speed] which is purely one of engineering.” Attacking the tactical opinions of another monitor captain, Ericsson noted that naval officers were “now handling not ships but floating fighting machines and that however eminent their seamanship, they cannot afford to disregard the advice of the engineer.” Inveighing against “useless articles and contrivances which are absolutely dangerous and in the way,” Ericsson noted: “Much useless weight was put into the Passaic against my remonstrance to please her Commander.”
Both points of view had elements of validity. Stimers, an engineer with seagoing experience, summed up the impact on the ships when he wrote that the myriad details needed for a seagoing vessel “must in nearly all cases be designed and often the term invented is more correct.” This added significantly to the time required to finish the ships, but once one was completed, he opined, the others would follow rapidly.
Stimers’s prediction appears to have been borne out. The class leader, the Passaic, was commissioned November 25, 1862, the problems with her 15-inch gun having been at least partially solved. Two ships followed in December 1862, two in January 1863, and three more in February 1863. The Navy Department kept up the pressure, but the general inspector could not concentrate solely on expediting the Passaics. In the summer of 1862, Stimers had added another class of vessels, the “harbor and river monitors,” to his growing responsibilities.
