USS Cumberland

The Vessel

USS Cumberland was an American sailing frigate of the United States Navy, built at the Boston Navy Yard between 1825 and 1842 and launched on 24 May 1842. She was 53 metres long, 1,726 tons displacement, and originally armed with 54 guns of mixed 32-pounder and 9-pounder calibre. Her design reflected the final generation of American sailing frigate construction; at her commissioning in 1843, she was among the most advanced purely-sailing warships in the United States Navy.

Her service history was substantial. She had been Commodore Matthew C. Perry's flagship during the Mexican-American War blockade of Veracruz (1846-1847); she had served as flagship of the US African Squadron conducting anti-slavery patrols off the West African coast (1850-1851); she had participated in the US Mediterranean Squadron operations of the 1850s. By 1856, she was substantially outdated by the Royal Navy's and French Navy's contemporary steam-powered ships; she was reduced from frigate to sloop-of-war rating in 1856 and re-armed with 22 of the heavier 9-inch Dahlgren smoothbore shell guns plus two pivot guns.

By early 1862, she was assigned to the Union blockade of the Confederate ports of the Chesapeake Bay region. Her master on 8 March 1862 was Lieutenant George Upham Morris, aged 32, commanding in the absence of her commanding officer Captain William Radford (who was ashore on the day of the engagement). Her complement was 376 officers and ratings.

The Voyage

By early March 1862, the American Civil War had been continuing for eleven months. The Union Navy's blockade of the Confederate coast was the most important naval operation of the war; Cumberland had been assigned to the blockade of the James River and the Chesapeake Bay approaches since May 1861. She was anchored, along with the sloop-of-war USS Congress and several smaller vessels, at Hampton Roads, the strategic harbour at the confluence of the James River and the Chesapeake Bay.

The Confederate Navy's response to the Union blockade had been the conversion of the captured Union frigate USS Merrimack into the ironclad CSS Virginia, which had been completed at the Gosport Navy Yard at Norfolk in early March 1862. The Virginia was the first operational ironclad warship of the Civil War, armoured with approximately 10 centimetres of iron plate over a reinforced wooden hull and armed with 10 heavy guns including two 7-inch Brooke rifled pivot guns.

On the morning of 8 March 1862, Virginia departed the Gosport Navy Yard under the command of Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan, with orders to attack and destroy the Union blockade force at Hampton Roads. The Confederate ironclad sailed down the Elizabeth River into Hampton Roads at approximately 12:30 on 8 March 1862, accompanied by two smaller Confederate gunboats Patrick Henry and Jamestown.

Lieutenant Morris aboard Cumberland, and Lieutenant Joseph B. Smith aboard USS Congress, observed the approaching Virginia and immediately cleared for action. The Union blockade force comprised five sailing ships with conventional wooden hulls; Virginia, as an ironclad, was expected to enjoy substantial protection against the Union ships' smoothbore and rifled cannon.

The Disaster

At approximately 14:00 on 8 March 1862, CSS Virginia closed with USS Cumberland to approximately 90 metres range and opened fire with her bow pivot gun. The 7-inch Brooke shell struck Cumberland's starboard side at approximately the waterline and penetrated her wooden hull; the shell detonated in the berth deck, killing approximately 30 men in a single burst.

Cumberland returned fire with her full starboard broadside of 11 heavy guns. The Union shells struck Virginia's iron armour at point-blank range; the armour held. The Confederate ironclad was impervious to the heaviest weapons that a conventional wooden warship could bring to bear.

Virginia then closed to ramming range. She had been equipped with a 680-kilogram cast-iron ram on her bow, specifically designed to destroy wooden ships at close quarters. At approximately 14:20 on 8 March 1862, Virginia struck Cumberland on her starboard bow and drove the iron ram into the wooden hull at approximately 4 knots impact speed. The ram punched a breach approximately 2 metres wide in Cumberland's starboard hull below the waterline.

The impact was so severe that Virginia's ram sheared off and remained embedded in Cumberland's hull; Virginia reversed engines and pulled away, leaving Cumberland to sink. Water poured into the breached starboard hull at a rate that the ship's pumps could not possibly address; Cumberland began to settle by the bow.

Lieutenant Morris's decision was not to abandon ship. The gun crews continued to fire the starboard broadside at Virginia (which had manoeuvred to attack USS Congress after disengaging from Cumberland) as the water rose progressively through the lower gun deck. The starboard battery fired continuously until the individual guns became submerged and the gun crews were forced to abandon them.

Cumberland sank at approximately 15:30 on 8 March 1862 in approximately 15 metres of water at Hampton Roads, still flying the United States flag from her mizzenmast. Of the 376 aboard, approximately 121 died: killed by the Brooke shell fire, drowned as the ship sank, or trapped below decks. Approximately 255 survived, rescued by small boats from the nearby Union ships and by the tugboat USS Whitehall.

The Legacy

The sinking of USS Cumberland on 8 March 1862 represented, in historical terms, the specific moment at which the era of wooden sailing warships came definitively to an end. The engagement demonstrated, beyond any further argument, that an ironclad warship could destroy a conventional wooden warship at close range with effective invulnerability. The subsequent appearance of the Union ironclad USS Monitor at Hampton Roads the following day (9 March 1862) produced the Battle of Hampton Roads, in which two ironclads fought each other to a draw.

The immediate naval consequences were profound. The Union Navy's immediate response was the acceleration of the ironclad construction programme: 58 additional ironclad warships were authorised by the US Congress between March 1862 and the end of 1862. The Royal Navy and French Navy, which had been already commissioning ironclads, accelerated their programmes; by 1866, the construction of new wooden-hulled warships had essentially ceased in every major naval power.

The specific cultural memory of USS Cumberland was established by Herman Melville's poem The Cumberland (in his 1866 volume Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War), which framed the ship's continuous firing of her starboard battery as the loss of a heroic past: "And what was done is over, and deep the Cumberland lies." Longfellow's poem The Cumberland (1862) was more widely read in its time and established the specific phrase "the Cumberland rode upon the water" in American popular memory.

The wreck of USS Cumberland lay for 100 years in the Hampton Roads shipping lane at approximately 15 metres depth, subject to progressive degradation by the heavy commercial traffic of the harbour. She was substantially damaged by dredging operations between the 1920s and the 1950s. The wreck site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994 and is now protected by the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary. The 121 dead are commemorated by a memorial at the Cumberland Monument, Hampton, Virginia, and by a separate monument at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis.

The 680-kilogram iron ram from CSS Virginia, which remained embedded in Cumberland's hull, was recovered in 1981 and is displayed at the Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Virginia. The ram is among the most significant physical artefacts of the transition from wooden to ironclad naval warfare.