The fighting did not cease, for all the promises or the threats of the government. But always, it is credibly declared, the first cause of an Indian outbreak was a wrong inflicted upon some tribe. And always, in the latter days as in the earlier period, it has meant one more effort on the part of the old warriors to regain the power they saw slipping away so fast. Both these causes entered into the awful Sioux War in Minnesota in 1862. Suffering from piled-up wrongs, smarting under the loss of power, and conscious that the Civil War was their opportunity, a party of one hundred and fifty Sioux began the most horrid massacre known for fifty years; the beginning of a struggle which lasted more than a year, and which was remarkable for the steadfast fidelity of the Christian Indians, to whose help and succor whole bodies of white men owed their lives. Four years later, in 1866, the discovery of gold in Montana caused the invasion of the Sioux reservation, and Red Cloud set about defending it. Scarcely more than thirty years old, but no mean warrior, he fought the white man long and desperately and with the cunning of his race.
This outbreak was scarcely quieted when another occurred. As was its wont, the government forgot the promises of its treaty of peace, and a small band of the Cheyennes retaliated with a raid upon their white neighbors. General Sheridan made this the occasion he was seeking for a war of extermination, and in November, 1868, Lieutenant Custer fell upon Black Kettle’s village and after a severe fight destroyed the village, killing more than a hundred warriors and capturing half as many women and children. The next year General Sheridan ordered the Sioux and Cheyennes off the hunting grounds the treaty had reserved to them, but these were the strongest and bravest of the tribes and they resisted the order. A number of Civil War heroes, Crook, Terry, Custer, Miles and McKenzie, led our troops, and among the chiefs whom they met in a long and desperate struggle were Crazy Horse and Spotted Tail, notable warriors both. At the battle of the Big Horn, by some misunderstanding or mismanagement, General Custer was left with only five companies to meet nearly three thousand savage Sioux. He fought desperately until the last, but he was killed and his command so utterly destroyed that not a single man was left alive. The attempt to remove the Modocs from California to Oregon in 1872 was the signal for a new war; and a year or two afterwards similar results followed when it was attempted to push the Nez Perces from the homes they had sought in Oregon to a new reservation in Idaho. This tribe, under its famous leader, Chief Joseph, was hard to conquer. The military organization, the civilized method of warfare, and the courage and skill of the tribe were publicly complimented by Generals Sherman, Howard and Gibbons, who declared Chief Joseph to be one of the greatest of modern warriors.
In 1877, discouraged by the failure of our efforts to hold the Indians in check, it was determined by Secretary Schurz, then in charge of the Department of the Interior, to remove them all to the western part of the Indian Territory, where the tribes in possession agreed to cede the necessary land. It was hoped to create there an Indian commonwealth, but trouble arose from the attempt to carry out the well-meant effort. A single story, the story of the Northern Cheyennes, will illustrate the wrongs the Indian suffered, as well as those he inflicted. The Cheyennes, as has been seen, were a tribe of valiant warriors, some of them at home in the hills of the North, some residing in the hills of the South. The Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Kiowas and Comanches were banded together in a close and common bond, and, at first the friends of the government, had become frequently its enemies, by reason of broken faith, cruel treatment, injustice, and downright wrong. That chronicle of misery, “A Century of Dishonor,” contains forty pages of facts taken from the government records, which relate the inexcusable and indefensible treatment of the Cheyenne tribe by the government, and their vain endurance of wrongs, interspersed with savage outbreaks, when human nature could endure no longer. It includes the account of a massacre of helpless Indian women and children under a flag of truce; a war begun over ponies stolen from the Indians, and sold in the open market by the whites in a land where the horse thief counts with the murderer; another incited by a rage against a trader who paid one dollar bills for ten dollar bills; and tells of whole tracts of land seized without compensation by the United States itself.
The Northern Cheyennes had been taken by force to the Indian Territory, and in its severe heat, with scant and poor rations, a pestilence came upon them. Two thousand were sick at once, and many died because there was not medicine enough. At last three hundred braves, old men and young, with their women and children, broke away and, making a raid through Western Kansas, sought their Nebraska home. This was not a mild and peaceable tribe. It was fierce and savage beyond most, and its people were wild with long endured injustice and frantic with a nameless terror. Three times they drove back the troops who were sent to face them, and, living by plunder, they made a red trail all through Kansas, until they were finally captured in Nebraska in December. They refused to go back to the Indian Territory, and the department ordered them to be starved into submission. Food and fuel were taken from the imprisoned Indians. Four days they had neither food nor fire—and the mercury froze at Fort Robinson in that month! And when at last two chiefs came out under a flag of truce, they were seized and imprisoned. Then pandemonium broke loose inside. The Indians broke up the useless stoves, and fought with the twisted iron. They brought out a few hidden arms, and, howling like devils, they rushed out into the night and the snow. Seven days later they were shot down like dogs.
Experiences like this soon ended the attempt to gather together all our Indian wards, and we returned to the old plan of the reservations, but with little more certainty of peace than before. Again and again starvation was followed by fighting, nameless outrages upon the Indian by cruel outrages upon the white man. Whether Apaches under Geronimo in New Mexico, or Sioux in Dakota, it was the old story over again. Thus, with constant danger menacing the white settler from the infuriated savage Indian, and constant outrage upon the red man by rapacious and cruel whites, the government found a new policy necessary. This policy was inaugurated by a strange and unusual sequence of events. In 1869 a sharp difference arose between the two Houses of Congress over the appropriations to pay for eleven treaties then just negotiated, and the session closed with no appropriation for the Indian service. The necessity for some measure was extreme; the plan was devised of a bill which was passed at an extra session, putting two millions of dollars in the hands of President Grant, to be used as he saw fit for the civilization and protection of the Indian. He immediately called to his aid a commission composed of nine philanthropic gentlemen to overlook the affairs of the Indian and advise him thereupon. This commission served without salary and continues to this day its beneficent work. Another valuable measure followed. At the next Congress a law was enacted forbidding any more treaties with Indians, and thenceforth they became our wards; not foreigners and rivals, as practically the case before.
The war of 1877 had indirectly another beneficent result, most far-reaching in its consequences. Among the brave men who had fought the Cheyennes and Kiowas and Comanches, was Captain Richard H. Pratt, who was put in charge of the prisoners who had been sent to Fort Marion, Florida, as a punishment worse than death. They were the wildest and fiercest warriors, who had fought long and desperately. On their way East they killed their guard, and repeatedly tried, one and another, to kill themselves. But Captain Pratt was a man of wonderful executive ability, of splendid courage and great faith in God and man. By firmness and patience and wondrous tact he gradually taught the savages to read and to work, and when after three years the government offered to return them to their homes, twenty-three of them refused to go. Captain Pratt appealed to the government to continue their education, and General Armstrong, with his undying faith in human beings as children of one Father and his sublime enthusiasm for humanity, received most of them at Hampton Institute, the rest being sent to the North under the care of Bishop Huntington, of New York. In the end these men returned to their tribes Christian men, and, with the seventy who returned directly from Florida, they became a power for peace and industry in their tribe. Out of this small beginning grew the great policy of Indian education, and the long story of death and destruction began to change to the bright chronicle of peace and education.
What, then, is the condition of the Indian to-day? In number there are scarcely more than two hundred and forty thousand in the whole country. Of these less than one-fifth depend upon the government for support. All told, they are fewer than the inhabitants of Buffalo or Cleveland or Pittsburg, yet they are not dying out, but rather steadily increasing. They are divided and subdivided into many tribes of different characteristics and widely different degrees of civilization. Some are Sioux—these are brave and able and intelligent; they live in wigwams or tepees, and are dangerous and often hostile. Some are Zunis, who live in houses and make beautiful pottery, and are mild and peaceable, and do not question the ways of the Great Father at Washington. Some are roving bands of Shoshones, dirty, ignorant, and shiftless—the tramps of their race—who are on every man’s side at once. Some are Chilcats or Klinkas, whose Alaskan homes offer new problems of new kinds for every day we know them. And some are Cherokees, living in fine houses, dressed in the latest fashion, and spending their winters in Washington or Saint Louis.
Yet these, and many of other kinds, are all alike Indians. They have their own governments, their own unwritten laws, their own customs. As a race they are neither worthless nor degraded. The Indian is not only brave, strong, and able by inheritance and practice to endure, but he is patient under wrong, ready and eager to learn, and willing to undergo much privation for that end; usually affectionate in his family relations, grateful to a degree, pure and careful of the honor of his wife and daughter; and he is also patriotic to a fault. He has a genius for government, and an unusual interest in it. He is full of manly honor, and he is strongly religious. His history and traditions have only recently been traced, to the delight and surprise of scientific students. His daily life is a thing of elaborate ceremonial, and his national existence is as carefully regulated as our own, and by an intricate code. It is true that our failure to comprehend his character and our neglect to study his customs have bred many faults in him and have fostered much evil. Our treatment of him, moreover, has produced and increased a hostility which has been manifested in savage methods for which we have had little mercy.
But we have not always given the same admiration to warlike virtues when our enemy was an Indian that we have showered without stint upon ancient Gaul or modern German. The popular idea of the Indian not only misconceives his character, but to a large degree his habits also. Even the wildest tribes live for the most part in huts or cabins made of logs, with two windows and a door. In the middle is a fire, sometimes with a stovepipe and sometimes without. Here the food is cooked, mostly stewed, in a kettle hung gypsy-fashion, or laid on stones over the fire. Around the fire, each in a particular place of his own, lies or sits the whole family. Sometimes the cooking is done out of doors, and in summer the close cabin is exchanged for a tepee or tent. Here they live, night and day. At night a blanket is hung up, partitioning the tent for the younger women, and if the family is very large, there are often two tents, in the smaller of which sleep the young girls in charge of an old woman. These tents or cabins are clustered close together, and their inhabitants spend their days smoking, talking, eating, or quarreling, as the case may be. Sometimes near them, sometimes miles away, is the agent’s house and the government buildings. The Indian AgenciesThese are usually a commissary building where the food for the Indians is kept, a blacksmith shop, the store of the trader, school buildings, and perhaps a saw-mill. To this place the Indians come week by week for their food. The amount and nature of the rations called for by treaties vary greatly among different tribes. But everywhere the Indian has come into some sort of contact with the whites, and usually he makes some shift to adopt the white man’s ways. A few are rich, some own houses, and almost universally, at present, government schools teach the children something of the elements of learning as well as the indispensable English.
The immediate control of the reservation Indian is in the hands of the agent, whose power is almost absolute, and, like all despotisms, may be very good or intolerably bad according to the character of the man. The agencies are visited from time to time by inspectors, who report directly to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs,—an officer of the Interior Department and responsible to the secretary, who is, of course, amenable to the President. In each house of Congress is a committee having charge of all legislation relating to Indian affairs. Besides these officials there is the Indian Commission already mentioned. The National Indian Rights Association and the Women’s National Indian Association are the unofficial and voluntary guardians of the Indian work. It is their task to spread correct information, to create intelligent interest, to set in motion public and private forces which will bring about legislation, and by public meetings and private labors to prevent wrongs against the Indian, and to further good work of many kinds. While the Indian Rights Association does the most public and official work for the race and has large influence over legislation, the Women’s Indian Association concerns itself more largely with various philanthropic efforts in behalf of the individual, and thus the two bodies supplement each other.
Hopeless and impossible as it seemed to many when this effort began to absorb the Indian, to-day we see the process well under way and in some cases half accomplished; and in this work the government, philanthropy, education and religion have all had their share, and so closely have these worked together that neither can be set above nor before the others. We began to realize, it is true, that our duty and our safety alike lay in educating the Indians as early as 1819, when Congress appropriated $10,000 for that purpose, and still earlier President Washington declared to a deputation of Indians his belief that industrial education was their greatest need; but it is only within recent years that determined efforts have been made or adequate provision afforded. Beginning with $10,000 in 1819, we had reached only $20,000 in 1877; but the appropriation for Indian education is now over $2,500,000. With this money we support great industrial training schools established at various convenient points. In them several thousand children are learning not only books, but all manner of industries, and are adding to study the training of character. There are more than 150 boarding schools on the various reservations teaching and training these children of the hills and plains, and many gather daily at the three hundred little day schools which dot the prairies, some of them appearing to the uninitiated to be miles away from any habitation. This does not include the mission schools of the various churches. But all together it is hoped that in the excellent government schools now provided, in the splendid missionary seminaries, and in the great centres of light like Hampton and Carlisle and Haskell Institute, we shall soon do something for the education of nearly or quite all the Indian children who can be reached with schools. At present the daily school attendance is over 20,000.
The two great training schools at the East, Hampton and Carlisle, have proved object lessons for the white man as well as the Indian, and the opposition they constantly encounter from those who do not believe that the red man can ever receive civilization is in some sort a proof of their value. In the main, they and all their kind have one end—the thorough and careful training in books and work and home life of the Indian boy and girl—and their methods are much alike. Once a year the superintendents or teachers of these schools go out among the Indians and bring back as many boys and girls as they can persuade the fathers and mothers to send. At first these children came in dirt and filth, and with little or no ideas of any regular or useful life, but of late many of them have gained some beginnings of civilization in the day schools. They are taught English first, and by degrees to make bread and sew and cook and wash and keep house if they are girls; the trade of a printer, a blacksmith, a carpenter, etc., if they are boys. They study books, the boys are drilled, and from kind, strong men and gentle, patient women they learn to respect work and even to love it, to turn their hands to any needed effort, to adapt themselves to new situations.
It is charged that the Indian educated in these schools does not remain civilized, but shortly returns to his habits and customs. A detailed examination into the lives of three hundred and eighteen Indian students who have gone out from Hampton Institute has shown that only thirty-five have in any way disappointed the expectations of their friends and teachers, and only twelve have failed altogether; and the extraordinary test of the last Sioux war, in which only one of these students, and he a son-in-law of Sitting Bull, joined the hostiles, may well settle the question. A recent statement says that 76 per cent. of the school graduates prove “good average men and women, capable of taking their place in the great body politic of our country.”
In 1887 a new step was taken for the advancement of the Indian, in the passage of the Severalty Act, by which homesteads of 160 acres were set aside for each head of a family willing to accept the proffer, and smaller homesteads for other members of the family. These were to be free from taxation and could not be sold for twenty-five years. They might be selected on the reservation of the tribe or anywhere else on the public domain. This allotment of land carried with it all the rights, privileges and immunities of American citizenship. In case the Indian should not care to take up a homestead, he could still become a citizen if he took up his residence apart from the tribe and adopted civilized habits. The purpose was to break up the tribal organization which had stood so greatly in the way of the beneficent purposes of the government, and to convert each Indian into an individual citizen of the United States.
The effort has been attended with highly encouraging success. Within twelve years after the law was passed 55,467 Indians had taken up homesteads, aggregating in all 6,708,628 acres. Of these agriculturists, more than 15,000 were heads of families, around whose farms were gathered the smaller ones of the other members of the family. The change to the independence and responsibilities of United States citizenship was so sudden as to prove a severe strain to the Indian, accustomed to consider himself a fraction of a tribe and lacking the full sense of individuality. Yet the failures have been very few, and we begin to see our way clear to a final disposal of the long-existing Indian question.
As regards the effect of religious training upon the Indians, it may be said to be quite encouraging. Of the 33,000 Sioux, for instance, 8,000 are now church members. The Presbyterian Church numbers nearly 5,000 Indian members and 4,000 Sunday-school pupils; while the total number of church communicants among the Indians is nearly 30,000.
Thus, with the close of the nineteenth century, there is good reason to hope for the end of a serious difficulty that has confronted the whites since their first settlement in this country nearly three hundred years ago. War, slaughter, injustice, wrongs innumerable have attended its attempted solution, which long seemed as if it would be reached only when all the red men had been exterminated. Fortunately it was justice, not slaughter, that was needed, and the moment our government awoke fully to this fact and began to practice justice the difficulty began to disappear. To-day just treatment, education, religious training are rapidly overcoming the assumed ineradicable savageness of the Indian, while the breaking up of the tribal system promises before many years to do away with the political aggregation of the Indians, and distribute them among the other citizens of our country as members of the general body politic. Thus has the nineteenth century happily disposed of an awkward problem that threatened seriously the successful development of our nation a century ago.
In scarcely any department of human industry are the changes produced by the progress of civilization more strikingly seen than in the navy. When America was discovered the galleon and the caravel were the standard warships of the world—clumsy wooden tubs, towering high in the air, propelled by sails and even oars, with a large number of small cannons, and men armed with muskets and cross-bows. Such was the kind of vessels that made up the famous Armada, “that great fleet invincible,” which was vanquished by the smaller and lighter crafts of Britain. Three hundred years have passed, and what is the warship of to-day? A low-lying hulk of iron and steel; armed with a few big guns, each one of which throws a heavier shot than a galleon’s whole broadside; driven resistlessly through the water by mighty steam engines; lighted and steered by electric apparatus, and using an electric search-light that makes midnight as bright as day. All the triumphs of science and mechanic arts have contributed to the perfection of these dreadful sea monsters, a single one of which could have destroyed the whole Armada in an hour, and laughed to scorn the might of Nelson at Trafalgar.
And in the development of this modern warship no other nation on earth has won as much credit as the United States, the whole career of which upon the sea has been one of glory and success, while its inventors and engineers have gained as much renown as its admirals and sailors, in their development of new ideas in naval architecture and warfare. Of all ocean exploits in history that of John Paul Jones in the Bon Homme Richard ranks first. Lord Nelson himself scarcely showed such indomitable pluck and intrepidity. And in the war of 1812 American ships and sailors took from Great Britain the credit of being the mistress of the seas, winning gallantly in every conflict where the forces engaged were at all near equality.
This good work of the sailors was aided by that of the shipwrights, the Americans winning battles largely because they had better ships than their opponents. But their success was also in great measure due to the superiority of their ordnance and the better service of their guns. It was to the careful sighting of the pieces that our sailors owed much of their victorious career. While most of the British shot were wasted on the sea and in the air, nearly all the American balls went home, carrying death to the British crews and destruction to their hulls and spars, while the American ships and sailors escaped in great measure unharmed.
As regards the work of our naval inventors, it will suffice to say, that the Americans, while not the first to plate vessels with iron, were the first to do so effectively and to prove the superiority of the ironclad in naval warfare. The memorable contest in Hampton Roads between the Monitor and the Merrimac made useless in a day all the fleets of all the nations of the world, and caused such a revolution in naval architecture and warfare as the world had never known.
The fleet with which the United States entered the nineteenth century was due to the depredations on American ships and commerce of the war vessels of France and Great Britain. This roused great indignation, particularly against France. While England contented herself with stopping American ships on the high seas and impressing sailors claimed to be of British birth, France seized our ships themselves, under the pretext that they had British goods on board, and if she found an American seaman on a British ship—even if impressed—she treated him as a pirate instead of as a prisoner of war. Protection was felt to be necessary, and preparations for war were made. The small navy of the Revolution had practically disappeared, and a new one was built. In July, 1798, the three famous frigates, the Constellation, the United States, and the Constitution—the renowned Old Ironsides—were completed and sent to sea, and others were ordered to be built. Actual hostilities soon began. French piratical cruisers were captured, and an American squadron sailed for the West Indies to deal with the French privateers that abounded there, in which work it was generally successful. In January, 1799, Congress voted a million dollars, for building six ships of the line and six sloops. The Naval War with France Soon after, on February 9, occurred the first engagement between vessels of the American and French navies. The Constellation, Captain Truxton, overhauled L’Insurgente at St. Kitts, in the West Indies, and after a fight of an hour and a quarter forced her to surrender. The Constellation had three men killed and one wounded; L’Insurgente twenty killed and forty-six wounded.
Again, on February 1, 1800, Truxton with the Constellation came up, at Guadeloupe, with the French Frigate La Vengeance. After chasing her two days he brought on an action. The two ships fought all night. In the morning, La Vengeance, completely silenced and greatly shattered, drew away and escaped to Curaçoa, where she was condemned as unfit for further service. The Constellation was little injured save in her rigging. For his gallantry, Truxton received a gold medal from Congress. Later in that year there were some minor engagements, in which the American vessels were successful.
By the spring of 1801, friendly relations with France were restored. The President was accordingly authorized to dispose of all the navy, save thirteen ships, six of which were to be kept constantly in commission, and to dismiss from the service all officers save nine captains, thirty-six lieutenants, and one hundred and fifty midshipmen. At about this time ground was purchased and navy-yards were established at Portsmouth, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Norfolk, and half a million dollars were appropriated for the completion of six seventy-four gun ships.
Nothing needs to be said here concerning our conflicts with the pirates of the Mediterranean or of the remarkable exploits of the small American navy in the second war with Great Britain. These have already been dealt with in chapters xxv. and xxvi. In the interval between that period and the Civil War there was little demand upon the American navy. The naval operations during the Mexican war were of no great importance. Some vessels were used in scientific exploration, and the dignity of America had to be asserted on some occasions, but the most important service rendered by the navy was the opening up of Japan to the commerce of the world. After some fruitless efforts at intercourse with the island realm, Commodore Perry was sent thither in 1852, and by a resolute show of force he succeeded in obtaining a treaty of commerce from Japan. That treaty opened Japan to the world, and was the first step in its remarkable recent career.
At the beginning of the Civil War the United States was very poorly provided with ships of war. There were only forty-two vessels in commission, nearly all of which were absent in distant parts of the world. Others were destroyed in southern ports, and for a time there was actually only one serviceable warship on the North Atlantic coast. This difficulty was soon overcome by buying and building, and by the end of 1861 there were 264 vessels in commission, and all the ports in the South were under blockade. These vessels were a motley set,—ferry boats, freight steamers, every sort of craft—but they served to tide over the emergency.
With all this we are not particularly concerned, but must turn our attention to the great naval events of the war, those conflicts which served as turning points in nineteenth century warfare. And first and greatest among these was the remarkable naval battle in Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862.
The use of iron for plating the hulls of ships was not first adopted in American war. This device was employed by England and France in the Crimean war in attacks on the Turkish forts. The idea, however, was American. As early as 1813 Colonel John Stevens, of New York, made plans for an ironclad ship somewhat resembling the Monitor in type. His son Edwin afterwards performed experiments with cannon balls against iron plate, and in 1844 Robert L. Stevens began the construction of a vessel to be plated with 4–½-inch iron for the government. It was never finished, though in all nearly $2,000,000 were spent upon it. New invention rendered it obsolete before it could be completed, yet to it belongs the credit of inaugurating the era of the ironclad navy. Early Ironclads of Great Britain and FranceAfter the Crimean war France and England both built ironclad ships, the French La Gloire being the first ironclad ever constructed. It was followed by the British Warrior, launched in January, 1861. Yet despite this enterprise, the fact remains that the first conception of an ironclad ship belongs to the United States, and the first hostile meeting of two ironclads took place in American waters.
At the opening of the American Civil War this idea was in the air, and it was soon made evident that the era of wooden warships was near its end. It is interesting to learn that the Confederates were the first to adopt the new idea, the earliest ironclad of the war being produced by them on the lower Mississippi. A large double-screw tugboat was employed, whose deck was covered with a rounded roof, plated with bar iron one and a half inches thick. This craft—named the Manassas after the first Confederate victory—made its appearance at the mouth of the Mississippi on the night of October 31, 1861, and created a complete panic in the blockading fleet at that point. The Manassas wrecked one of her engines in attempting to ram the flagship Richmond, and crept slowly back, at the same time as the alarmed fleet was hastening away with all speed over the waters of the gulf.
While this event was taking place, two ironclads of more formidable description were being built elsewhere, the meeting of which subsequently was the most startling revelation to the nations of the earth ever shown in naval warfare. The United States steam frigate Merrimac had been set on fire at the Gosport Navy Yard, when hastily abandoned by the Federal navy officers at the outbreak of the war. It was burned to the water’s edge and sunk, but soon after the Confederates raised the hull, which was seriously damaged—its engines being in reasonably good condition—and they hurriedly undertook the work of converting it into an ironclad. A powerful prow of cast iron was attached to its stem, a few feet under water and projecting sufficiently to enable it to break in the side of any wooden vessel. A low wooden roof two feet thick was built at an incline of about 36 degrees, and this was plated with double iron armor, making a four-inch iron plating. Under this protection were mounted two broadside batteries of four guns each, and a gun at the stem and stern. The government was soon advised of the raising of the hull of the Merrimac, and without having detailed information on the subject, knew that a powerful ironclad was being constructed. A board of naval officers had been selected by the government to consider the various suggestions for the construction of ironclad vessels, and although, as a rule, naval officers had little faith in the experiment, Congress coerced them into action by the appropriation of half a million dollars for the work. The Naval Board recommended a trial of three of the most acceptable plans presented, and ships on these plans were put under contract.
Among those who pressed the adoption of light ironclads, capable of penetrating our shallow harbors, rivers, and bayous, was John Ericsson. He was a Swede by birth, but had long been an American citizen, and exhibited uncommon genius and scientific attainments in engineering. The vessel he proposed to build was to be only 127 feet in length, 27 feet in width, and 12 feet deep, to be covered by a flat deck rising only one or two feet above water. The only armament of the vessel was to be a revolving turret, about 20 feet in diameter and nine feet high, made of plated wrought iron aggregating eight inches in thickness, with two eleven-inch Dahlgren guns. The guns were so constructed that they could be fired as the turret revolved, and the port-hole would be closed immediately after firing. The size of the Merrimac was well known to the government to be quite double the length and breadth of the Monitor, but it had the disadvantage of requiring nearly double the depth of water in which to manœuvre it. Various sensational reports were received from time to time of the progress made on the Merrimac, the name of which was changed by the Confederates to Virginia, and as there were only wooden hulls at Fortress Monroe to resist it, great solicitude was felt for the safety of the fleet and the maintenance of the blockade. While the government hurried the construction of the new ironclads to the utmost, little faith was felt that so fragile a vessel as the Monitor could cope with so powerful an engine of war as the Merrimac. The most formidable vessels of the navy, including the Minnesota, the twin ship of the original Merrimac, the St. Lawrence, the Roanoke, the Congress and the Cumberland, were all in Hampton Roads waiting the advent of the Merrimac.
On Saturday, the 8th of March, the Merrimac appeared at the mouth of the Elizabeth River and steamed directly for the Federal fleet. All the vessels slipped cable and started to enter the conflict, but the heavier ships soon ran aground and became helpless. The Merrimac hurried on, and, after firing a broadside at the Congress, crashed into the sides of the Cumberland, whose brave men fired broadside after broadside at their assailant only to see their balls glance from its mailed roof. An immense hole had been broken into the hull by the prow of the Merrimac, and in a very few minutes the Cumberland sank in fifty feet of water, her last gun being fired when the water had reached its muzzle, while the whole gallant crew went to the bottom with their flag still flying from the masthead. The Fate of the “Congress” and the “Cumberland”The Merrimac then turned upon the Congress, which was compelled to flee from such a hopeless struggle, and was finally grounded near the shore; but the Merrimac selected a position where her guns could rake her antagonist, and, after a bloody fight of more than an hour, with the commander killed and the ship on fire, the Congress struck her flag, and was soon blown up by the explosion of her magazine. Most fortunately for the Federal fleet, the Merrimac had not started out on its work of destruction until after midday. Its iron prow was broken in breaching the Cumberland, and, after the fierce broadsides it had received from the Congress and the Cumberland, with the other vessels firing repeatedly during the hand-to-hand conflict, the Merrimac’s captain was content to withdraw for the day, and anchor for the night under the Confederate shore batteries on Sewall’s Point.
The night of March 8th was one of the gloomiest periods of the war. The Merrimac was sure to resume its work on the following day, and, with the fleet destroyed and the blockade raised, Washington, and even New York, might be at the mercy of this terrible engine of war. But deliverance was at hand. The building of the Monitor had been hurried with all speed, and this little vessel,—“a cheese box on a raft,” as it was contemptuously termed—was afloat and steaming in all haste to Hampton Roads. It entered there that night, and took up a position near the helpless Minnesota in bold challenge to the Merrimac. On Sunday morning, March 9th, the Confederate ironclad came out to finish its work of destruction, preparatory to a cruise against the northern ports.
The little Monitor steamed boldly out to meet it. The history of that conflict need not be repeated. To the amazement of the commander of the Merrimac, the Monitor was impervious to its terrible broadsides, while its lightness and shallow draft enabled it to out-manœuvre its antagonist at every turn; and while it did not fire one gun to ten from its adversary, its aim was precise and the Merrimac was materially worsted in the conflict. After three hours of desperate battle the defiant and invincible conqueror of the day before found it advisable to give up the contest and retreat to Norfolk.
It was this naval conflict, and the signal triumph of the little Monitor, that revolutionized the whole naval warfare of the world in a single day, and from that time until the present the study of all nations in aggressive or defensive warfare has looked to the perfection of the ironclad. To the people of the present time the ironclad is so familiar, and its discussion so common, that few recall the fact that less than fifty years ago it was almost undreamed of as an important implement of war. It is notable that neither of those vessels which inaugurated ironclad warfare, and made it at once the accepted method for naval combat for the world, ever afterward engaged in battle during the three years of war which continued. The Merrimac was feared as likely to make a new incursion against our fleet, but her commander did not again venture to lock horns with the Monitor. Early in May the capture of Norfolk by General Wool placed the Merrimac in a position of such peril that on the 11th of that month she was fired by her commander and crew and abandoned, and soon after was made a hopeless wreck by the explosion of her magazine. The fate of the Monitor was even more tragic. The following December, when being towed off Cape Hatteras, she foundered in a gale and went to the bottom with part of her officers and men; but she had taught the practicability of ironclads in naval warfare, and when she went down a whole fleet was under construction after her own model, and some vessels already in active service.
While these events were taking place in the waters of the coast, a fleet of ironclad boats was being built for service on the rivers of the West, seven of these being begun in August, 1861, by James B. Eads, the famous engineer of later times. These were light-draught, stern paddle-wheel river steamers, plated with 2–1/2-inch iron on their sloping sides and ends. These, and those that followed them, saw much service in the western rivers, bombarding Forts Henry and Donelson, running through the fire of the forts on Island No. 10, and daring the terrible bombardment from the Vicksburg batteries.