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of a frantic race between the North and South to construct the first American ironclads. The Confederates won (by twenty-four hours) when they launched the Merrimac (renamed CSS Virginia) on March 8, 1862. The vessel was an old U.S. warship that had been burned by Union sailors when they abandoned the Norfolk Navy Yard in Virginia the previous summer. Since then, the Merrimac had been completely remodeled except for her engines, which the Confederates had not had time to repair. Engineers literally “clad” the Merrimac in iron plates and added a ram to the stem of the ship. Long and squat, she looked more like an iron champagne bottle than a ship. Her speed was terrible, but the armor plating made her invincible. When the Merrimac slowly steamed into Hampton Roads to confront the Federal blockading fleet, nothing like her had ever been seen before. Hampton Roads is a wide body of water where three large rivers converge before flowing into Chesapeake Bay and out into the Atlantic. The Union navy had been in control of the bay and Hampton Roads for almost a year. Stephen Mallory knew that it was vital for the Confederacy that he take them back, and as the wooden Union gunboats fired ineffectively at the Merrimac’s hull, it seemed as though he would.

There was cheering in Richmond and hysteria in Washington after the battle. Lincoln called a special cabinet meeting at which the new secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, made a spectacle of himself, ranting that every city on the Eastern Seaboard would now be laid waste. The secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, however, was unfazed. The newly clad and outfitted Monitor was already on its way to Hampton Roads, and he expected a more favorable outcome than the previous day’s rout. The secretary’s hopes were justified. The equally strange-looking Federal vessel, described by some as a “tin can on a shingle” (the tin can being a revolving turret that could fire in any direction), could not sink the Merrimac, but was powerful enough to pin her down. After four hours of point-blank firing, both ships withdrew, damaged but not inoperable. The possibility that the Merrimac might yet force its way to Washington had almost as powerful an effect on Edwin Stanton as the first Hampton Roads bombardment. To stop the Confederate monster, he wanted the main water channels to Washington blocked with sunken ships.

Lord Lyons was fascinated by reports of the encounter between the two ironclads. “This is, I suppose,” he wrote to Lord Russell, “the severest test to which the system of coating vessels in iron armour has yet been exposed.” The officers of Admiral Milne’s North Atlantic squadron were equally agog. The ironclad warships in the British and French navies had, for obvious reasons, never been tested in the same way. Milne’s entire fleet would gladly have assembled to watch another encounter, but the coveted task was awarded to Commander William N. W. Hewett of HMS Rinaldo, who was told to loiter near Fortress Monroe (at the entrance of Chesapeake Bay) “in order to obtain as much information as possible.”28 Newspapers in the North and South were hailing the battle as a revolution in naval warfare, not to mention proof that America would one day rule the oceans.29 Francis Dawson saw the Merrimac when he reported to Norfolk Navy Yard. He noticed something that Commander Hewett had been too far away to see: that the vessel’s armor plating was actually railroad ties rolled flat.

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Lyons was frustrated that he had no eyewitness reports of the battle to pass on to the Admiralty. None of the British journalists he relied upon for news had been present; increasingly of late, their applications for military passes were being turned down by the U.S. War Department. The worst affected was William Howard Russell. He had returned from a two-month sojourn in Canada on March 1, having failed to persuade The Times to release him from his contract. “I am writing to you, my dear Morris, as a friend,” he pleaded with the managing editor of the paper, Mowbray Morris. Russell listed all the reasons—family, finances,