THE FIRST FIGHT OF IRON-CLADS.

BY JOHN TAYLOR WOOD , COLONEL, C. S. A.

rriHE engagement in Hampton Roads on the 8th of March, 1862, betweenJ- the Confederate iron-clad Virginia , or the Merrimac (as she is known atthe North), and the United States wooden fleet, and that on the 9th betweenthe Virginia and the Monitor, was, in its results, in some respects the mostmomentous naval conflict ever witnessed. No battle was ever more widelydiscussed or produced a greater sensation. It revolutionized the navies of theworld. Line-of-battle ships, those huge, overgrown craft, carrying from eightyto one hundred and twenty guns and from five hundred to twelve hundredmen, which, from the destruction of the Spanish Armada to our time, haddone most of the fighting, deciding the fate of empires, were at once univer-sally condemned as out of date. Rains and iron-clads were in future to decideall naval warfare. In this battle old things passed away, and the experienceof a thousand years of battle and breeze was forgotten. The naval supremacyof England vanished in the smoke of this fight, it is true, only to reappearsome years later more commanding than ever. The effect of the news wasbest described by the London “ Times,” which said: “ Whereas we had avail-able for immediate purposes one hundred and forty-nine first-class war-ships,we have now two, these two being the Warrior and her sister Ironside. Thereis not now a ship in the English navy apart from these two that it wouldnot be madness to trust to an engagement with that little Monitor.' 1 '’ TheAdmiralty at once proceeded to reconstruct the navy, cutting down a num-ber of their largest ships and converting them into turret or broadsideiron-clads.

The same results were produced in France , which had but one sea-going iron-clad, La Gloire, and this one, like the Warrior, was only protected amidships.The Emperor Napoleon promptly appointed a commission to devise plans forrebuilding his navy. And so with all the maritime powers. In this race theUnited States took the lead, and at the close of the war led all the others inthe numbers and efficiency of its iron-clad fleet. It is true that all the greatpowers had already experimented with vessels partly armored, but very fewwere convinced of their utility, and none had been tried by the test of battle,if we except a few floating batteries, thinly clad, used in the Crimean War .

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