Clad In Iron : The American Civil War and the challenge of British naval power / Howard J. Fuller

United States : Praeger Publishers, 2008

Hardback

The work addresses mny persistent misconceptions of what the monitors were for, and why they failed in other roles associated with naval operations of the Civil War (such as the repulse at Charleston, April 7 1863). Monitors were @ironclads@ not fort-killers. Their ultimate success is to be measured not in terms of spearheading attacks on fortified Southern ports, but in the quieter, much more profound, strategic deterrence of Lord Palmerston's ministry in London and the British Royal Navy's potential intervention.
The relatively unknown @Cold War@ of the American Civil War was, nevertheless, a crucial aspect of the survival or not, of the United States in the mid 19th-century. Foreign intervention - explicitly in the form of of British naval power- represented a far more serious threat to the success of the Union blockade, the safety of Yankee merchant shipping worldwide, and Union combined operations against the South than the Confederate States Navy. Whether or not the North would be @clad in iron@ thus depended on the ability of superior Union ironclads to deter the majority of mid-Victorian British leaders, otherwise tempted by their desire to see the American experiment in democratic class-structures and popular government finally fail. Discussions of open European involvement in the Civil War were poitless as long as the coastline of the United States was virtually impregnable.

9780313345906

940.2536

English

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