Launched 13 years earlier, _Cumberland_ had served as flagship of the African Squadron, whose mission was to suppress slave running. Now back home, _Cumberland_ moved into the dry dock soon after _Merrimack_ was towed out. It was cut down to a fast sloop-of-war with one gun deck of 28 guns and a crew of 376.
_Cumberland’s_ worth as a leaner warship was proven in the first months of the Civil War. Assigned to the Atlantic Blockading Squadron, the vessel took eight Confederate prizes in three weeks. But the next year _Cumberland_, among the last sailing ships launched by the Navy, came up hard against the future.
On March 8, 1862, _Cumberland_ and other vessels were on blockade duty in Hampton Roads, Virginia, when the men on deck sighted a bizarre new war machine steaming out of Norfolk. Approaching them was a dark, monolithic vessel—decks awash, no masts, no sails, no sailors. C.S.S. (Confederate States Ship) _Virginia_, the much-rumored ironclad blockade-breaker, had finally taken the stage.
[Illustration: _Architect’s rendering of the Charlestown machine shop’s “Great Chimney,” 1858._]
It was a slow, clumsy vessel, but menacing nevertheless. Using a full mile to gather momentum, _Virginia_ steamed steadily towards the Union vessels. It passed the frigate _Congress_ and headed straight for _Cumberland_, its sloping iron casement shedding the Union ships’ barrage of heavy shot and explosive shell as if they were “peas from a pop-gun,” in the words of a _Cumberland_ sailor. But _Cumberland_, though clearly outmatched, could not avoid engagement. It was at anchor in a dead calm, the crew’s wash drying in the rigging. The Union sailors could only take the punishing return fire, clear the decks for battle, and wait for the inevitable.
Longer than _Cumberland_ by half, with a submerged iron ram projecting from its bow, the approaching vessel looked to the Union ship’s pilot like a “huge, half-submerged crocodile.” _Virginia_ tore into _Cumberland’s_ bow below the waterline (_see pages 28-29_), then backed off, leaving its ram imbedded in a seven-foot hole. Both vessels now loosed volleys at point-blank range; dozens of _Cumberland’s_ crew were maimed or killed.
As the vessel listed and began to sink, the crew abandoned ship, but 121 men—already dead, too hurt to save themselves, or firing guns to the end—went down with _Cumberland_. (As water flooded the gun deck, a young gun crew officer barely saved himself by squeezing through a gun-port. He was Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, who in 1890 became commandant of the Charlestown Navy Yard.) Before darkness ended the fighting, the ironclad also riddled _Congress_, killing more than a hundred men and setting the vessel on fire. _Congress_ burned on into the night and finally exploded.