HAMPTON ROADS

The naval battles of the Civil War possess an immense importance,
because they mark the line of cleavage between naval warfare
under the old, and naval warfare under the new, conditions. The
ships with which Hull and Decatur and McDonough won glory in the
war of 1812 were essentially like those with which Drake and
Hawkins and Frobisher had harried the Spanish armadas two
centuries and a half earlier. They were wooden sailing-vessels,
carrying many guns mounted in broadside, like those of De Ruyter
and Tromp, of Blake and Nelson. Throughout this period all the
great admirals, all the famous single-ship fighters,--whose skill
reached its highest expression in our own navy during the war of
1812,--commanded craft built and armed in a substantially similar
manner, and fought with the same weapons and under much the same
conditions. But in the Civil War weapons and methods were
introduced which caused a revolution greater even than that which
divided the sailingship from the galley. The use of steam, the
casing of ships in iron armor, and the employment of the torpedo,
the ram, and the gun of high power, produced such radically new
types that the old ships of the line became at one stroke as
antiquated as the galleys of Hamilcar or Alcibiades. Some of
these new engines of destruction were invented, and all were for
the first time tried in actual combat, during our own Civil War.
The first occasion on which any of the new methods were
thoroughly tested was attended by incidents which made it one of
the most striking of naval battles.