USS Roanoke - Steam Frigate to Triple Turret Ironclad

[00:00:00]USS Roanoke was built in the 1850s as a steam frigate for the United States Navy. In 1862, she was ordered to be converted into a three-turreted ironclad. Roanoke was one of the Merrimack class frigates. Heavily armed and built, she carried two decks of guns and auxiliary steam machinery and sails.

[00:00:19]She was built at the Norfolk Navy Yard, Gosport Navy Yard, and entered service in the late 1850s. As originally armed, USS Roanoke carried two 10-in Dahlgrens on the spar deck as pivot guns, as well as 14 8-in shell guns. On her gun deck, she originally carried 24 9-in Dahlgren guns. The 9-in Dahlgren was designed by John Dahlgren in the 1850s to fire a 90-lb shot or a 72-lb explosive shell.

[00:00:52]The spar deck 8-in shell guns could fire a 50-lb explosive shell, and the 10-in Dahlgrens, which were mounted as pivot guns, could fire a 125-lb shot or about a 100-lb explosive shell.

[00:01:07]This model of USS Minnesota at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum shows what Roanoke and her sisters looked like. You could be forgiven for thinking she looked like just an overgrown version of USS Constitution.

[00:01:19]However, with her steam machinery, her shell-firing guns, and her far larger hull enabled by developments in shipbuilding, including use of iron strapping, Roanoke, Minnesota, Merrimack, Wabash, and Colorado were far more powerful ships. They may have been meant to embody the same combination of speed, firepower, and strength that had made USS Constitution and her sisters such feared warships. They were powerful.

[00:01:49]They were strong. But, they were slow.

[00:01:51]Roanoke and her sisters could maybe reach 8 and 1/2 knots in a stretch. They couldn't maintain that. With sail, they could go faster, but they were slower than ships being built in other countries at the same time. There's no known photograph of USS Roanoke in her original configuration steam frigate.

[00:02:10]However, she was built right alongside USS Colorado, her sister ship, at Gosport, and the two ships were apparently near identical to each other.

[00:02:19]USS Colorado is seen here photographed after the Civil War. Roanoke saw service with the US Navy's Home Squadron in the late 1850s.

[00:02:28]With coming of Civil War in 1861, she was actually out of commission at New York. She was placed back in commission.

[00:02:35]She was given an additional four 9-in Dahlgrens on her gun deck and was sent to enforce the blockade, initially off of Charleston, South Carolina, alongside other ships of the US Navy such as USS Wabash, USS St. Lawrence, and USS Vandalia. This December 1861 illustration shows USS Roanoke, Vandalia, and their shared prize, a captured Confederate schooner. Fort Sumter guarding the mouth of Charleston Harbor can be seen in the background.

[00:03:05]With coming of 1862, USS Roanoke was needed at Hampton Roads to counter a growing Confederate naval threat. Her erstwhile sister, USS Merrimack, which of course had been scuttled and burnt when the Gosport Navy Yard was evacuated in April of 1861, was under conversion to an ironclad. And the US Navy started gathering a fleet at Hampton Roads to counter this emerging threat. Roanoke was part of a powerful squadron, including her sister ship USS Minnesota, the sailing frigates Congress and St. Lawrence, and the heavy sloop-of-war USS Cumberland. However, among all of these ships, only Minnesota had effective engines. Those of Roanoke were broken, in need of repair. For the coming battle, she would be little more than a sailing ship meeting steam and iron. On the morning of March 8th, 1862, Roanoke was anchored near Fort Monroe. Around 1:00 p.m., US Navy lookouts spotted CSS Virginia emerging from the Elizabeth River near Sewell's Point. Roanoke quickly signaled the two steam tugs that been assigned to her to take her under tow, and she slipped her anchor cables.

[00:04:14]As she was being towed toward the action, she grounded by the stern. The tugs were able to haul her bow around and pull her off, but by this point, Minnesota was hard aground, and Captain Marston ordered the two tugs to go render assistance to that ship. Virginia initially attacked Cumberland, ramming the heavily armed sloop of war and sending that gallant ship to the bottom.

[00:04:35]Cumberland's gunners kept up their fire even as their ship sank from beneath them. Virginia next turned her attention to USS Congress, eventually lighting Congress on fire with heated shot.

[00:04:47]It appeared that USS Minnesota would be next. However, Virginia retired, intending to resume the action the next day. When Virginia came out again, the little USS Monitor appeared from behind Minnesota, and Virginia and Monitor fought the first battle between ironclad ships.

[00:05:06]Roanoke was an observer to this fight.

[00:05:08]Roanoke's only direct contribution to the battle was to fire her 10-in Dahlgren pivot guns at the Confederate batteries at Sewell's Point at extreme range. It's probably for the best that she grounded when she did. Had she been towed into action against CSS Virginia, nothing good would have happened. The Battle of Hampton Roads underlined the vulnerabilities and limitations of Roanoke in the present conflict, and many southern harbors were simply too shallow for big ships like Roanoke to operate in or near. All of this makes the subsequent conversion of USS Roanoke into an ironclad somewhat interesting.

[00:05:45]When the pressing need was for ironclads with as shallow a draft as possible, ideally under 10 ft, Roanoke was not converted to fight in southern harbors where she could not even float. Instead, Roanoke was converted to a triple-turreted ironclad because in 1862 it still appeared possible that a European power or Britain might be tempted to intervene in the conflict. In his report to Congress at the end of 1862, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles wrote that we might be prepared for extraordinary emergencies. It was deemed advisable to put armature on one of our steam frigates, and the Roanoke was selected for that purpose. Roanoke sailed to the New York Navy Yard where the first work of the conversion was done. There and at Novelty Iron Works, also of New York, the ship's structure was removed down to the level of the gun deck itself. Three Ericsson turrets, identical to those installed on the Passaic class monitors, were fitted aboard Roanoke. Roanoke's plans survive in the National Archives, and you see a top-down view of her decks. The top panel shows her gun deck, well, the old gun deck, now the weather deck of the ironclad. The panel below shows the berth deck. Note the cabins running alongside each side of the ship aft. The panel below that shows the orlop deck, and below that the hold. Um, the center section would be where the boilers and machinery are, presumably also the shell rooms and magazines. The rings in the picture looked very much like the barbettes in 20th century battleship plans. To my understanding, that's not quite what we're looking at. I believe on each deck was a ring of iron and wood designed to support the heavy weight of the turret. The weight was transferred between decks by iron stanchions.

[00:07:34]Ericsson turrets, as shown in this post-war illustration of US monitor Passaic, ordinarily rested upon the deck until they were ready to be turned, in which case they were lifted off the deck by the center spindle and then rotated.

[00:07:48]The weight of the turrets was transferred by the rings of iron stanchions down to the bottom of the hull. US Navy Bureau of Ordnance records show that the forward turret mounted a 15-in Dahlgren and 150-lb Parrott rifle, the center turret a 15-in Dahlgren and 11-in Dahlgren, and the rear turret an 11-in Dahlgren and a 150-lb Parrott rifle. The 15-in Dahlgren fired a 440-lb projectile with an up to 60-lb propellant charge. It was the most powerful gun used by the US Navy during the Civil War. The 150-lb Parrott rifle fired its 8-in projectile with a 16-lb propellant charge. And the 11-in Dahlgren, following successful tests in April and May of 1862, was authorized to use a 30-lb propellant charge to fire its 168-lb shot. Roanoke was also fitted with an iron ram at her bow. It may be visible in this post-war image of the ship if you look very carefully at the rectangular structure sticking out from the bow. It was described as like an ax head and seems to have been composed of two sheets of iron armor. The result was, by American Civil War era standards, a powerful, powerfully armed, and well-armored warship. She retained her original boilers and engines that she had had as a steam frigate. Although she did gain an additional boiler to provide steam to her turret machinery and other auxiliaries. On her maiden voyage from New York to Hampton Roads, she reached a speed of over eight knots, and she was able to maintain about seven. All things considered, that wasn't too bad for having retained her original machinery and put her in the same range as many Civil War ironclads.

[00:09:36]Unfortunately, no deck views of Roanoke survive, although you can get a sense of what her forward turret would have looked like in this view of Passaic in 1863.

[00:09:46]The 15-in Dahlgren on the left must be fired from within the turret as it's too wide at the muzzle to be run out all the way. It necessitated the use of a smoke box inside the turret wrapped around the muzzle. The description of Roanoke's turrets in Scientific American seemed to indicate that she also had this sort of arrangement. On the right side is a 8-in or 150-pounder Parrott rifle. You can see the smaller bore, the rifle bore of the Parrott.

[00:10:15]On top of the turret sits a pilot house.

[00:10:17]Roanoke had fixed pilot houses on her forward and middle turrets. The three turrets of Roanoke essentially gave her an armament equivalent to three monitors. USS Lehigh can be seen here on the James River. Roanoke was a powerful ship.

[00:10:35]Unfortunately, her maiden voyage put rest the idea that she might be capable of fighting other ships on the high seas. Her captain on that voyage wrote that her rolling motion, however, is so great as to preclude the possibility of fighting her guns at sea, and I was obliged to screw them by bracing them with pieces of timber to prevent their fetching away in the rolling motion to which the ship is subjected in even the swell we encountered. She was, however, able to complete the voyage under her own power, not needing the assistance of the tug which accompanied her. She made the trip in about 48 hours, averaging 5 to 6 knots.

[00:11:14]Completed in June of 1863, Roanoke spent most of the rest of the war at Hampton Roads and in the surrounding area.

[00:11:21]Although she was not called upon to fight, she was an effective backstop had the Confederate ironclad squadron in Richmond ever managed to sortie down the James River, say when other ironclads had been moved from the James, they would not make it past Roanoke. Roanoke was more than capable of taking on that entire squadron by herself. Her guns were exercised. Her initial firings actually damaged the carriages upon which they were mounted. Those were repaired. However, her turrets were slow to rotate, and that was not her biggest problem. Her biggest problem was that she leaked. And by 1864 was finding feet of water each day in the well.

[00:12:07]Pumping is a exercise that is regularly noted in her logbook. I have not seen anything like this looking at deck logs of Civil War era wooden ships. She leaked a lot, and it seems like the weight of the turret and armor on the old wooden hull was perhaps just too much.

[00:12:31]Roanoke was kept at home even when her ex-sisters, the steam frigates Minnesota, Wabash, and Colorado were deployed against Fort Fisher, Roanoke, with a similar draft, was kept at Hampton Roads.

[00:12:44]That doesn't mean that her mission to guard Hampton Roads wasn't important. It absolutely was. Hampton Roads was a tremendously important logistical center for both the US Army and US Navy operations in Eastern Virginia, indeed in the entire East Coast.

[00:13:02]There were ammunition ships, there were troop ships, supply ships that had to be guarded.

[00:13:08]However, Roanoke had one more mission. This was when CSS Stonewall, and CSS Stonewall always seems to appear at this point in my videos, but Stonewall was on the loose, and Gideon Welles, perhaps in a bit of a panic, ordered Roanoke to make her way to New York to guard New York Harbor. Roanoke did, still leaking like a sieve, and in this case, she was under tow of USS Alabama, but she took her place at New York Harbor to guard against CSS Stonewall. Of course, Stonewall would surrender at Havana.

[00:13:45]Roanoke was kept after the war. She must have seen some sort of repairs because I can't imagine the Navy detailing a crew to pump her out all the time.

[00:13:57]She was recommissioned briefly in around 1874. At that point, she was given a little bit different armament. She had four 15-in Dahlgrens and two 11-in Dahlgrens. The 150-pounder Parrot seemingly having been taken out of service by this point.

[00:14:15]By the mid-1870s, time and well wrought caught up with Roanoke. The Secretary of the Navy's report noted that she would need a new iron frame to see service again.

[00:14:28]By the early 1880s, that was of course not worthwhile, and the ship was sold for scrap in 1883.

[00:14:35]The Royal Navy had a similar conversion to Roanoke in HMS Royal Sovereign. Royal Sovereign had been laid down as a sailing first rate. She was converted to steam on the ways, and in 1864, she was recommissioned as a turret ship. Cut down to her lower gun deck, she was given four Coles turrets. To me, Roanoke is a fascinating ship. She may not have the war record of her sisters, which remained as steam frigates. However, she combined armor and firepower in a fascinating revolutionary way. In In a way, she points towards the multi-turret ships of the 20th century.

[00:15:15]Thank you for taking this look at Roanoke with me. If you're interested in the US Navy in the 19th century, please follow um my YouTube channel, my Facebook page, my website for more.

[00:15:29]I'm Sandy 1821. Thank you so much.