The events in our history that directed major changes in the evolution of our world are often thought of as far away and detached from local history. But, several people who changed our history lay at rest today in this county. One of the most notable was a man who by his vision and actions helped change the concept of military sea power; his story is well worth revisiting. Now buried in St. Michael’s at Pensacola, his name was Stephen Mallory.
The months of 1860 were the beginning of our nation’s largest failure, the Civil War. During this time, one southern state after another were announcing their withdrawal from the Union. On April 17, Virginia joined them. This was a disaster to the U.S. Navy; at the country’s main naval yard in Norfolk were a dozen unmanned warships. Panicked by a perceived attack, the yard’s ineffective commander made a last minute order before leaving to scuttle the ships and destroy the yard. Among the ships scuttled was the navy’s newest and most advanced forty-gun steam frigate, Merrimack.
When Florida declared its independence from the Union in the early months of 1860, U.S. Senator Stephen Mallory returned to Florida. In February 1861 former Senator Jefferson Davis was appointed president of the Confederacy. Two weeks later he asked his former colleague to create a navy for the new country. Mallory accepted. As former chair of the Naval Affairs Committee, sailor during the Seminole Wars, and child of Key West, Mallory was well versed in naval matters. With only six ships in his new navy, he believed that the only way to survive the war was through the development of a new type of ship, the ironclad.
Iron batteries were not a new idea, early Greeks and Koreans utilized metal shields on ships in the 1500s. In 1855 floating armored batteries were used by the French against Russian forts and by the late 1850s both England and France had untried armored warships. At the beginning of the War Between the States, almost 100 traditionally styled ships with iron sides were afloat in Europe. Even the United States in the 1840s had contracted construction of an armored floating battery to the Stephens brothers of New Jersey before canceling the project after ten years of delays. But, it was the success of the hastily built floating iron battery used by the south against Fort Sumter at Charleston that encouraged Mallory to use iron. But, his idea was plates fitted to a ship that would move under its own power.
Mallory began his quest of a new armored navy with an effort to buy ships from Europe, but failed. He would have to build his own. As his ambitious ideas of a new type of ship grew, word arrived from the newly rebuilt Southern navy yard at Norfolk, “We have the Merrimack up and are just pulling her into dry dock.” Mallory had realized very early that Europe would be of little help and had made inquiries to ironworks across the south looking for a facility to make the great iron plates needed for his ship. Only the large works in Richmond was ready for such orders, anluckily near Norfolk.
Mallory now needed a designer. Lieutenant John Mercer Brook was his man. Together these men would design a warship like nothing seen before. The finished ship was built on a hull measuring 275 ft. which lay almost completely at the waterline. The strange ship appeared as a long house roof floating on the water with a large stack near the center of the roof that belched thick black smoke. The ship carried 800 tons of metal on her decks; below the waterline on her bow was a huge iron-covered ram and along the roof sides were 10 ports hiding massive cannon.
In August 1861, the Mobile Register reported on the secret ship. This report, and those of escaping slaves assigned to work on the ship created panic in the North. Part of the Register’s report stated, “She will be a floating fortress that will be able to defeat the whole Navy of the U.S. and bombard its cities.”
In the North only one man succeeded in convincing the government that he could build a ship to halt the Merrimack; he was inventor John Ericsson. Held with suspicion that his ship would fail, he agreed to be paid only after it proved itself in battle. This doubt was largely due to the fact that Ericsson’s all-iron design would be the most complicated machine ever built, incorporating more than forty of his own inventions into its mechanisms. Constructed in a remarkably short time, the ship was half the size of its adversary, most of the ship lay below the waterline, its decks usually awash while underway. The only structures of the ship to be seen above the water was a small rectangular control booth at her bow and a round rotating turret at the center of the ship which housed two large cannon.
Ericsson’s Monitor and Mallory’s Merrimack (CSS Virginia) met at a large bay near Norfolk, Virginia in March 1862, a day after the southern behemoth ripped through wooden ships of the U.S. Navy stationed near Fort Monroe. The iron foes circled and fired upon each other for hours until late in the day when a shell hit the control tower of the Monitor, injuring the captain and causing it to lay away. The ships never met again, but news of their engagement shocked the world, the wooden warships of the world’s great fleets were now obsolete and soon the era of the great battleships would begin.
During the rest of the war Mallory would dedicate the South’s resources to a series of armored ships built to protect its rivers, while another sixty four of Ericsson’s odd but effective little ships would ensure the North’s overwhelming naval power.
