The evening before, Tattnall rejected the option of attacking the Union fleet and sailing past the heavy guns of forts Monroe and Wool blocking the exit from Hampton Roads. The Rebels salvaged the vessel in 1861 after Union forces abandoned it and converted the hull into an ironclad. The CSS Virginia was laid down before the war as the U.S. ![]() The Union Navy was determined to capture or destroy the Virginia. The ship and crew could not receive supplies. Her home port at the Gosport Navy Yard near Portsmouth, Va., was in enemy hands. The ironclad, upon which rested the hope of ending the northern blockade of the southern coast, had been left on her own. ![]() Those were the latest of the hard decisions Tattnall had to make in the final hours of the CSS Virginia’s service to the confederacy. It was compounded by his second order in the early hours of May 11, 1862: Set his ship on fire. Tattnall had to give the most difficult order a ship’s captain ever makes: Abandon ship. Now she rode too high in the water to fight the Union fleet at Hampton Roads but was still too low to escape. The Virginia’s crew had worked more than five hours to lighten the ship to get past the shoal water of the Jamestown Flats. The flag-officer’s first lieutenant had just told him the CSS Virginia could not sail up the James River to safety as the ship’s pilots had promised. (Image source: WikiMedia Commons) “The finest fighting ship that ever floated on American waters at that time came to an untimely end.” It was considered a tragedy by many in the Rebellion. But not long after its combat debut in March of 1862 at the Battle of Hampton Roads, the state-of-the-art warship had to be scuttled by her own crew. The Confederacy hoped its first ironclad, the CSS Virginia, would smash the Union naval blockade of the Southern states.
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