en, was the control of the best entrance
to North Carolina waters, which entailed the stoppage of many oversea
supplies for the Confederate army. The ulterior result was the
securing of a base from which a further invasion could be made with
great advantage.

The naval campaign of the following year was truly epoch-making;
for the duel between the _Monitor_ and _Merrimac_ in Hampton Roads
on March 9, 1862, was the first action ever fought between ironclad
steam men-of-war.

Eleven months earlier the Federal Government had suddenly abandoned
the Norfolk Navy Yard; though their strongest garrison was at Fortress
Monroe, only twelve miles north along a waterway which was under
the absolute control of their navy, and though the Confederates'
had nothing but an inadequate little untrained force on the spot.
Among the spoils of war falling into Confederate hands were twelve
hundred guns and the _Merrimac_, a forty-gun steam frigate. The
_Merrimac_, though fired and scuttled by the Federals, was hove
up, cut down, plated over, and renamed the _Virginia_. (History,
however, knows her only as the _Merrimac_.) John L. Porter, Naval
Constructor to the Confederate States, had made a model of an ironclad
at Pittsburgh fifteen years before; and he now applied this model
to the rebuilding of the _Merrimac_. He first cut down everything
above the water line, except the gun deck, which he converted into a
regular citadel with flat top, sides sloping at thirty-five degrees,
and ends stopping short of the ship's own ends by seventy feet fore
and aft. The effect, therefore, was that of an ironclad citadel
built on the midships of a submerged frigate's hull. The four-inch
iron plating of the citadel knuckled over the wooden sides two
feet under water. The engines, which the South had no means of
replacing, were the old ones which had been condemned before being
sunk. A four-foot castiron ram was clamped on to the bow. Ten guns
were mounted: six nine-inch smooth-bores, with two six-inch and
two seven-inch rifles. Commodore Franklin Buchanan took command
and had magnificent professional officers under him. But the crew,
three hundred strong, were mostly landsmen; for, as in the case
of the Army, the men of the Navy nearly all took sides with the
North, and the South had very few seamen of any other kind.

To oppose the _Merrimac_ the dilatory North contracted with John
Ericsson the Swede, who had to build the _Monitor_ much smaller
tha