battle of hampton roads significance

There was an estimated 188 Confederate soldiers engaged in the Battle of Hampton Roads. On March 9, 1862, one of the most famous naval battles in American history occurred as two ironclads, the U.S.S.Monitor and the C.S.S. A small community in Montgomery County, Virginia, near the location where the iron for the Confederate ironclad was forged is now known as Merrimac. Shiloh Winner. Despite the late start and the novelty of construction, Monitor was actually completed a few days before her counterpart Virginia, but the Confederates activated Virginia first. The Confederates covered the ship in heavy armor plating above the waterline and outfitted it with powerful guns. More than 13,000 of Grant’s and Buell’s approximately 62,000 troops were killed, wounded, captured or missing. There, they were under the shelter of the shore-based guns of Fort Monroe and the batteries at Hampton and Newport News and out of the range of the guns at Sewell's Point and Craney Island. Convinced that his ship had won the day, Jones ordered her back to Norfolk. These were the Virginia, on the Confederate side, and the Monitor, on the Union side. Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the U.S. Confederate States presidential election of 1861, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Battle_of_Hampton_Roads&oldid=992804170, Battles of the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War, Battles of the American Civil War in Virginia, Inconclusive battles of the American Civil War, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2019, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Sleater-Kinney recorded an indie rock song referencing the battle, "Ironclad," on the album, This page was last edited on 7 December 2020, at 05:01. [84] When her conversion was almost complete, her name was officially changed to Virginia. On February 3, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) and Secretary of State William H. Seward (1801-72) met with three Confederate officials, including Vice President Alexander H. Stephens (1812-83), to discuss the possibility of negotiating an end to the American Civil War, ...read more, Wade Hampton III (1818-1902) was a South Carolina plantation owner and politician who served as a Confederate general during the Civil War (1861-65). It was commissioned on February 25, 1862, and arrived at Chesapeake Bay just in time to engage the Virginia. [29], Intelligence that the Confederates were working to develop an ironclad caused consternation for the Union, but Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles waited for Congress to meet to request permission to consider building armored vessels; Congress gave this permission on August 3, 1861. Because the blockade was unbroken, Norfolk was of little strategic use to the Confederacy, and preliminary plans were laid to move the ship up the James River to the vicinity of Norfolk. However, the cannon balls simply deflected off the iron ships. Confederate Name. The Battle of Hampton Roads was a significant event in both Naval and Civil War history that has been detailed in many books, televised Civil War documentaries, and in film, to include TNT's 1991 Ironclads. USS Monitor became the prototype for the monitor warship type. In 1973, the wreck of the Monitor was discovered at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. [6] A new type of warship, monitor, was produced on the principle of the original. She was trapped and could only be captured or sunk by the Union Navy. A showdown between the ironclad ships, the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, it was the first of its kind.Because of this, the battle is of important significance as it brought about a new type of naval warfare. In place the plating on the other roles in Civil War battles on the Union,! 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