ssissippi, should be
seized and held by a mixed naval and military force. For these last
operations troops on the banks and gunboats on the river had to combine. It
was said at the time, that on the Mississippi army and navy were like the
two blades of a pair of shears, useless apart, but very effective when
working together.

Strange to say, it was not the industrial North, but the agricultural
South, that put the first ironclad into commission as a weapon against the
coast blockade. When the Secessionist forces seized the Navy Yard at
Norfolk, in Virginia, a fine steam frigate, the "Merrimac" (built in 1855),
was under repair there. The guard of the dockyard set her on fire before
surrendering, but the flames were extinguished, and the "Merrimac," with
her upper works badly damaged, was in possession of the Southerners. A
Northern squadron of frigates and gunboats, steam and sailing ships,
anchored in Hampton Roads, the landlocked sheet of water into which runs
not only the Elizabeth River, which gives access to Norfolk, but also the
James River, the waterway to Richmond, then the Confederate capital. The
northern shores of Hampton Roads were held by Federal troops, the southern
by the Confederates. Presently spies brought to Washington the news that
the "Rebels" were preparing a terrible new kind of warship at Norfolk to
destroy the squadron in Hampton Roads and raise the blockade.

The news was true. The Confederates had cut down the "Merrimac" nearly to
the water's edge and built a solid deck over her at this level. Then on the
deck they erected a huge deck-house, with sloping sides pierced with
port-holes for ten heavy smooth-bore guns. The funnel passed up through the
roof of the deck-house. There were no masts, only a flagstaff. The flat
deck space, fore and aft, and the sloping sides of the deck-house were to
be armoured with four inches of iron, but there were no armour plates
available. Railway iron was collected and rolled into long narrow strips,
and these were bolted on the structure in two layers, laid crosswise in
different directions. An armoured conning-tower, low and three-sided, was
built on the front of the deck-house roof. The bow was armed with a mass of
iron, in order to revive the ancient method of attack by ramming. Thus
equipped the "Merrimac" was commissioned, under the command of Commodore
Buchanan, and renamed the "Confederate States' ironclad steam-ram
'Virginia,'" but the ship was always