Shortly after the war began, the Union imposed a blockade on the ports of the Confederacy. The South responded by creating ironclad warships like the CSS Virginia and CSS Manassas in an attempt to break the blockade. The Union responded with its own ironclad vessels to protect the wooden Union blockade fleet and to penetrate deeply into the South along its many navigable rivers.
But the American ironclads that fought for the North and South were not the first ironclad warships ever created, or even the first to see combat. The first steps towards the creation of steam propelled armored warships were taken several years before the American Civil War during the Crimean War, and even these first steps were a response to weapons developments that stretched back to the early nineteenth century.
In 1822 and 1823 French General Henri-Joseph Paixhans developed a cannon and shell projectile with a reliable fuse that made it possible for the first time to fire an explosive shell safely from a gun with a relatively flat trajectory (as opposed to mortars, which lobbed projectiles high into the air and relied on a much cruder fusing system).
Paixhans pattern artillery
Previously, warships had relied upon cannons firing solid iron shot which could batter a target ship to pieces with repeated hits. The shells fired from Paixhan's guns had the ability to strike a wooden target, penetrate into the structure, and then detonate, blasting the wooden construction apart and causing fires--always dangerous aboard wooden vessels.Paixhans guns were adopted by various European years over the subsequent decades, but it was not until 1853 that the full destructive power of these guns was demonstrated. The first real test of the Paixhans pattern naval gun came at the Battle of Sinope (1853).
The Battle of Sinope on November 30, 1853 was one of the opening engagements of the Crimean War. At the northern Turkish port of Sinop, a Russian fleet armed with Paixhans guns found a smaller Turkish fleet at anchor and attacked. The Russian fleet consisted of six ships of the line, two frigates, and three steamships. The Turkish squadron consisted of seven frigates and five corvettes.
In one hour, the Russian ships of the line--armed with Paixhans guns--crushed the Turkish squadron utterly. Of the the twelve Turkish vessels present at Sinop, only one corvette managed to escape. The remaining Turkish vessels were blown apart or set on fire by the shells of the Russian Paixhans guns.
The Battle of Sinope
The Battle of Sinope had far reaching consequences, both geopolitical and technical. In the geopolitical sphere, Sinope gave Great Britain and France a reason to declare war on Russia in March of 1854, sparking what we now call the Crimean War. From a military and technological perspective, the Battle of Sinope served notice that unarmored wooden ships were extremely vulnerable to the shells fired by Paixhans-style artillery.As its name suggests, the Crimean War centered on a joint British-French-Allied campaign to seize Sevastapol and the rest of the Russian-held Crimean peninsula, as well as the Russian-held portions of the coast of the Black Sea. The Russians had heavily fortified the key coastal points in the Crimea and Black Sea coast generally. The British and French faced the daunting task of assaulting fortifications armed with Paixhans-style artillery with wooden warships--a suicidal task.
Lave
The British and French responded by creating a new class of armored floating batteries. These first crude ironclads were heavily armed with cannon and were armored with roughly four inches of wrought iron plates over their wooden hulls. These floating batteries had their own steam engines, but were terribly under-powered and frequently had to be towed into position. The French Devastation-class of floating batteries were only capable of four knots under ideal circumstances.
Devastation
While their tiny, under-powered engines made these early ironclads unwieldy, their armor rendered them largely immune to the effects of the Paixhans shell gun.This immunity was exploited to full effect at the Battle of Kinburn, where three French floating batteries (Lave, Tonnante and Dévastation) were able to approach the Russian fortifications with impunity and destroyed the Russian forts within four hours. The Crimean War produced two clear lessons for naval observers: 1) the Paixhans gun was deadly lethal to wooden ships; and 2) armor made of wrought iron plates could provide protection against the deadly Paixhans guns.
The French and British navies did not wait long to act upon these lessons. In April 1858, the French converted the Gloire, a wooden steam ship of the line, into an ironclad frigate by cutting it down one deck and providing the ship with 4-to-4.5 inch thick iron plating.
La Gloire
The British, so recently allies of the French, were not slow in responding to the threat posed by the Gloire. The British Royal Navy's response to Gloire was HMS Warrior, a far more advanced warship featuring an iron hull, higher speed, thicker armor, and heavier guns. Gloire was commissioned in August 1860 and Warrior was commissioned August 1, 1861. Between them, Gloire and Warrior rendered every other existing warship in the world obsolete.
HMS Warrior
At the beginning of the American Civil War, the Confederate Navy was hopelessly outnumbered by the Union Navy. When former U.S. Senator Stephan Mallory was called upon by Confederate President Jefferson Davis to become the Confederacy's first Navy Secretary, these recent European technological developments were very much on his mind. In the new technology of ironclads, Mallory saw a chance to start over and negate the Union advantage in numbers. Ultimately, the Union would also exploit the new technology to create ironclad warships of its own, and the North's massive advantage in industrialization meant that the Union Navy would always have more and better ironclads than its Southern rival.
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