After all, the seven boats had been launched and were ready to be put into commission by Flag-Officer Foote, before he had more than one third of the necessary crews ready for them.
These seven, the Saint Louis (afterwards De Kalb), the Cairo, Carondelet, Cincinnati, Louisville, Mound City, and Pittsburg, were all alike. The Saint Louis, as Eads wrote to Lincoln, when he sent him a photograph of her, "was the first ironclad built in America.... She was the first armored vessel against which the _fire of a hostile battery_ was directed on this continent; and, so far as I can ascertain, she was the first ironclad that ever _engaged a naval force_ in the world." In reading the descriptions of them, and in reading in the naval histories of their undeniable faults, it must be remembered that Eads "had no part in the modeling of these boats, and is therefore relieved of all responsibility as to their imperfections." They were 175 feet long, 51-1/2 feet beam. Their flat sides sloped upward and inward at an angle of about 35°, and the front and rear casemates corresponded with the sides, the stern-wheel being entirely covered by the rear casemate. It was a large paddle-wheel, placed forward of the stern so as to be protected. The whole thing was like a tremendous uncovered box, with its sides sloping up and in, and containing the battery, the machinery, and the paddle-wheel, while the smoke-stacks and the conical pilot-house stuck up out of the top. Captain Mahan says that they looked like gigantic turtles. Underneath the water, they were simply like flat-bottomed scows. As they were intended always to fight bows on, they were built with that in view. In front they were accordingly armored two and a half inches over two feet of solid oak. The only other armor they carried was abreast of the boiler and engines. The stern, therefore, and the greater part of the sides were decidedly vulnerable. Their armament consisted of three guns forward, four on each broadside, and two at the stern.
When Eads was given a chance to alter a boat from his own designs, he made it a much better one than these. It was a boat ordered by General Fremont in September, 1861, in excess of the government appropriation for the river fleet. This was the same snag-boat which three months before had been suggested for alteration by Eads, and refused by the army's agent. In this case, as in so many afterwards when Eads knew himself to be right, he stuck persistently to his own opinion; and out of the heavy old boat, despised and objected to by so many persons, he fashioned the "old war-horse," the Benton, which, slow as she was, Spears, the naval historian, calls the most powerful warship afloat at that date. As a snag-boat, formerly used by Eads, she had "had two hulls so joined and strengthened that she could get the largest kind of a cottonwood tree between them, hoist it out of the mud, and drag it clear of the channel." These hulls were now joined together; and while the boat was armored on the same general plan as the seven contract gunboats, she was so much more completely iron clad as to avoid the danger that they were exposed to of having their boilers burst and great damage and death caused thereby. Her tonnage was twice that of the others; her size about 200 by 75 feet. She was entirely iron clad. In her gun-deck casemate the twenty inches of timber under the plating had "its grain running up from the water instead of horizontally, by which means [wrote Eads] a ball will strike, as it were, _with the_ grain, and then be more readily deflected. On the same principle that a minie ball will penetrate five inches of oak, crossing the grain, while it will not enter one inch if fired at the end of the timber." This detail illustrates the care and interest with which Eads built his boats.