“The finest fighting ship that ever floated on American waters at that time came to an untimely end.”
By Steve Norder
JOSIAH TATTNALL WAS furious. The flag-officer’s first lieutenant had just told him the CSS Virginia could not sail up the James River to safety as the ship’s pilots had promised.
The Virginia’s crew had worked more than five hours to lighten the ship to get past the shoal water of the Jamestown Flats. Now she rode too high in the water to fight the Union fleet at Hampton Roads but was still too low to escape.
Tattnall had to give the most difficult order a ship’s captain ever makes: Abandon ship. It was compounded by his second order in the early hours of May 11, 1862: Set his ship on fire.[1]
Those were the latest of the hard decisions Tattnall had to make in the final hours of the CSS Virginia’s service to the confederacy. The ironclad, upon which rested the hope of ending the northern blockade of the southern coast, had been left on her own. Her home port at the Gosport Navy Yard near Portsmouth, Va., was in enemy hands. The ship and crew could not receive supplies. The Union Navy was determined to capture or destroy the Virginia.
The evening before, Tattnall rejected the option of attacking the Union fleet and sailing past the heavy guns of forts Monroe and Wool blocking the exit from Hampton Roads. His officers supported that view.
“We might have run the blockade of the forts and done some damage to the shipping there …,” Lt. John Taylor Wood later said. But the Virginia’s “great weight and low rate of speed” rendered the ironclad vulnerable. “The Monitor and other iron-clads would have engaged us with every advantage, playing around us as rabbits around a sloth, and the end would have been the certain loss of the vessel.”[2]
Tattnall was aggressive by nature. He served in the U.S. Navy participating in the fight against the British in 1812. Later he fought West Indies pirates, escorted General Santa Anna back to Mexico after Texas won her independence, protected that defeated general from his own people, commanded the Mosquito division covering Gen. Winfield Scott’s landing during the Mexican war and violated U.S. neutrality by helping the British and French attack a Chinese fort during the Second Opium War.
When his native Georgia seceded in 1861, Tattnall resigned his U.S. commission to take command of Confederate naval forces in defense of that state and South Carolina. Given command of the CSS Virginia in late March 1862, Tattnall twice took her down to Hampton Roads in hopes of inducing another fight with the Monitor. However, the Union fleet was under orders to draw the Virginia out into deeper waters so designated ram ships could sink her. Tattnall never accepted those odds.
Nevertheless, he was not afraid to take the Virginia out for a final battle with the Union Navy. But he had to think about his crew of around 320 sailors.
His only other option was to take the Virginia up the James River.
“The pilots assured me that they could take the ship with a draft of 18 feet, to within 40 miles of Richmond,” Tattnall explained in his later report. With the agreement of his officers, Tattnall “determined to lighten the ship at once and run up the river for the protection of Richmond.”
The ship only needed to be raised five feet to pass over the shoal water at the river flats. The crew worked hard throwing overboard some 300 tons of ballast, emptying the crew’s water tanks and removing everything of weight except cannon, shot and powder. That raised the ship from a depth of 23 feet to about 20 feet, with more that could be done. But then the pilots changed their minds.
Tattnall demanded an explanation for the pilots’ “palpable deception.”
The wind, they said, was blowing in the wrong direction, lowering the river’s water level more than anticipated. They could not take the Virginia over the flats at 18 feet, and they would not even try.
“I had no time to lose,” Tattnall said. The Virginia now floated too high. Part of her wooden hull as well as a portion of her propeller and rudder were exposed near the water line. She could fight. She could not run up the James.
“The ship was not in a condition for battle even with an enemy of equal force, and their force was overwhelming,” Tattnall said. “I therefore determined, with the concurrence of the first and flag lieutenants, to save the crew for future service by landing them near Craney Island, the only road for retreat open to us, and to destroy the ship to prevent her falling into the hands of the enemy.”[3]
With the decision made, Tattnall gave the crew a short break calling “all hands splice the main brace,” according to a ship’s gunner, Richard Curtis. “This meant two grog tubs, one forward and one aft, the men quickly responded to this call.” Normally, the serving of grog – watered down rum or whisky – came after an important shipboard event, such as a victory in battle. Here the grog was to lift the men’s spirits as they prepared to abandon ship.
Curtis said Tattnall gave a short speech during the break.
“Boys, Norfolk has been taken by the Yankees, and our supplies are cut off. Although the vessel has been lightened, the pilot says he cannot get her up the James River, as we had intended to do; therefore, we have concluded to blow her up. You can make your escape the best way possible.”[4]
The Virginia started forward to be as close to shore as possible, then ran aground.
Tattnall put his first officer, Catesby ap Roger Jones (the ap is Welsh for “son of”), in charge of “firing the ship and landing the crew.” He added, “everything was conducted with the most perfect order.” However, Curtis said there was “great confusion” on the gun deck; “there was no discipline, no one seemed to have any control.”[5]
In the engine room, Lt. Jones approached assistant engineer Eugenius A. Jack. With his voice “tremoring,” Jones assigned Jack “command of a detail of firemen. Go muster your men and prepare them to abandon ship. No baggage must be taken into the boats.”
Jack gathered his new command “with a sad heart and tearful eyes, at the approaching fate of this good ship that had to be ignominiously deserted.” Jack felt he would rather go down fighting, but knew “older and wiser heads” prevailed. He added, “I felt like a coward skulking from the foe.”[6]
The Virginia only had two small rowboats to transfer the men to the shore. Some of those, like Jack, took no personal items. Others, like Curtis, grabbed their clothes, small arms and a couple days’ provisions. It took about three hours to ferry the men off the ship.
Tattnall was the first to leave, according to Landsman John F. Higgins. A newspaper later gave an unconfirmed report Tattnall was so sick he had to be carried off. The rest of the crew waited for their turn to step off the ship into a rowboat. Someone took down the Virginia’s flags leaving them on the deck. Hardin B. Littlepage, a midshipman, “carefully folding the old flags,” put them into his pack, replacing his clothes.[7]
Meanwhile, lieutenants Jones and Wood, along with eight sailors, prepared the Virginia for destruction. Elsberry White later said he held a candle for another sailor to “uncap the powder in the magazine (as much at 36,000 pounds of it) to insure a quick explosion.” Others spread powder and flammable materials – tar, oil, fat, grease and wood – around on all the ship’s decks. Powder trails were laid to the open hatches. The ship’s guns were loaded.[8]
With that work completed, Jones and Wood lit the powder trains and stepped off the Virginia one final time, joining the remaining sailors in the last rowboat. “Setting her on fire fore and aft, she was soon in a blaze and by the light of our burning ship we pulled for the shore,” Wood said.[9]
Those already on shore prepared for their 22-mile march to Suffolk, where they hoped to catch the last train to Richmond. Engineer Jack organized his men to defend against a possible attack.
“Our sailors made but sorry soldiers,” Jack admitted, “and were altogether out of our element ashore.”
By the time the last 10 sailors landed, the fire aboard the Virginia was rising “from the portholes and hatches.” The loaded “guns began to discharge their charges, some towards us and others towards the Roads; we heard several of the shot whistle past,” Jack said.[10]
The Virginia’s crew stepped off their march to Suffolk. After an hour and a half tramping in the early morning darkness, the men heard a tremendous explosion behind them: the “awful report [of] the magazines of the burning ship” exploding.[11]
“Thus, the finest fighting ship that ever floated on American waters at that time came to an untimely end at the hands of her friends,” lamented Curtis, “with no enemy within 8 or 10 miles of her – a sad finish for such a bright beginning.”[12]
Tattnall noted the time as “ little before 5 on the morning of the 11th.”[13]
The burning Virginia did not go unnoticed. Alfred L. B. Zerega, on watch on the USS Susquehanna noted the fire a little after 3 a.m. He concluded it was the Virginia and hailed the deck to “call all hands.”[14]
The first lieutenant on the USS Dacotah, Samuel R. Franklin, watched as well. “Gradually the casemate grew hotter and hotter, until finally it became red-hot, so that we could distinctly mark its outlines.”[15]
The shock of the Virginia’s explosion roused almost everyone in the Hampton Roads area. The New York Times reported it “made the earth and water tremble for miles around.” Chaplain Thomas G. Murphey of the 1st Delaware Infantry Regiment said the explosion lifted the ironclad out of the water: “As it rose the sea trembled and the earth and houses on shore shook as if by some violent convulsion of nature.”[16]
On board the USS Monitor, the Virginia’s end was not all good news, according to William F. Keeler, the ship’s paymaster.
“[W]e had ever since the fight [on March 9] looked up the ‘Big Thing’ as our exclusive game & were hoping in a short time to be able to gratify our curiosity by an inspection of her construction & internal arrangements,” he said.
Now that possibility was gone, and for the South, their champion was no more.[17]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Steve Norder is the author of Lincoln Takes Command: The Campaign to Seize Norfolk and the Destruction of the CSS Virginia, published by Savas Beatie. He has worked as a genealogist, teacher, author, newspaper reporter and book editor and has a strong interest in researching and writing about the tragic Civil War years. His work has appeared in many places, including Civil War Times, Illustrated. Steve is originally from Iowa but currently resides in Georgia, where he is a member of the Civil War Round Table of Atlanta.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Josiah Tattnall, “Report of Flag-Officer Tattnall, C. S. Navy,” May 14, 1862, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, 30 vols. (Government Printing Office,1898), 7:337.
[2] John Taylor Wood, “First Fight of Iron-Clads,” in Robert U. Johnson & Clarence C. Buel, eds., Battles & Leaders of the Civil War, 4 vols. (New York, 1956), 1:709.
[3] Tattnall, “Report,” May 14, 1862, ORN 7:337.
[4] Richard Curtis, History of the Famous Battle Between the Iron-Clad Merrimac, C.S.N., and the Iron-Clad Monitor and the Cumberland and Congress, of the U.S. Navy, 1907, accessed May 5, 2019, catalogs.marinersmuseum.org/search?query=”Richard Curtis,” 17.
[5] Ibid.; Tattnall, “Report,” May 14, 1862, ORN 7:337.
[6] Eugenius A. Jack, Memoirs of E. A. Jack, Steam Engineer, CSS Virginia, in Alan B. Flanders & Neale O. Westfall, eds. (White Stone, Va.), 20.
[7] John F. Higgins, “Brilliant Career of the Merrimac,” Confederate Veteran, August 1900, vol. 8, 357; “The Finale of the Merrimac,” Richmond Daily Dispatch, May 22, 1862, 2; Hardin B. Littlepage, “A Midshipman Aboard the Virginia,” Part 1, Civil War Times Illustrated (April 1974), 11.
[8] Elsberry V. White, The First Iron-Clad Naval Engagement in the World: History of Facts of the Great Naval Battle Between the Merrimac-Virginia, C.S.N., and the Ericsson Monitor, U.S.N., Hampton Roads, March 8 and 9, 1862 (New York, 1906), n.p.
[9] Wood, “First Fight,” B&L, 1:710.
[10] Jack, Memoirs, 20-21.
[11] Ibid., 21.
[12] Curtis, Famous Battle, 17.
[13] Tattnall, “Report,” May 14, 1862, ORN 7:337.
[14] Alfred L. B. Zerega, “The Last Days of the Rebel Iron-Clad Merrimac and Occupation of Norfolk, as Seen from the U.S.S. Susquehanna,” Feb. 1897, in War Papers, MOLLUS, 70 vols. (Wilmington, NC), 1:454.
[15] Samuel R. Franklin, Memoirs of a Rear Admiral: Who Has Served for More than Half a Century in the Navy of the United States (New York, 1898), 182.
[16] “News from Fortress Monroe,” New York Times, May 13, 1862, 8; Thomas G. Murphey, Four Years in the War: The History of the First Regiment of Delaware Veteran Volunteers (Philadelphia, 1866), 54.
[17] William F. Keeler to his wife, “Anna,” May 12, 1862, in Robert W. Daly, ed. Aboard the USS Monitor: 1862, The Letters of Acting Paymaster William Frederick Keeler, U.S. Navy to His Wife, Anna (Annapolis, MD, 1964), 119.
