federal government with these different suggestions that they have. as another correspondent put it, the whole yankee world is studying and contriving some method of destroying the merrimac. and certainly the panic that was felt in washington and especially in the eastern seaboard cities after the events of march 8th, 1862, was almost palpable. gideon wells, although he s certainly no fan of stanton, wells says in his diary and elsewhere, he describes how stanton is panicked, that he s afraid that the merrimac is going to sail up the potomac and shell the white house, that it s basically a game changer, that the entire war is going to be changed because of this invention. and indeed, the northern public were very fearful of this exact thing happening. another correspondent writes to lincoln saying that if the rebels by cunning or superior skill achieve in getting her to sea, the navy department will never be acquitted or forgiven and that the whole current of the war will
cannons to zero in on one exact point on an enemy. again, sounds wonderful in theory. several people write in with the same idea. none have really a guaranteed way of how they can make this actually happen. and of course also very popular are underwater cannons. these are very big. and i apologize in advance for some of my illustrations here. some were taken with my iphone camera. so they re not terribly great quality. others are taken from the microfilm. we haven t gotten the actual color copies yet. but in this case you do have color. and some of these illustrations are beautifully rendered. but 19th century northerners seem to be obsessed with this idea of the underwater cannon. basically, the modern equivalent, i suppose, of the torpedo tube. and there are, again, a wide variety of selections of how you can make this a reality. that you have r.a. wilder writing in saying, what we need to do are sling two cannons again to the bow of the monitor and then get up close to the
thrust out of the prow of the vessel into the enemy. and my personal favorite among the ramming options was sent in by an individual who said that, well, what we need is a ram that has an attachment that once you make contact with the enemy the ram squirts out a flammable liquid. sort of like a venomous spider. you would ram the enemy and then set them aflame from within. the shells. the question also is why can t we just break through the merrimac s iron skin? now, of course, no one in the public knew that the navy had decided not to use the full powder charges for the monitor s guns. ericsson was furious about that when he found out and later was proven correct that had the navy used the full amount of powder that he recommended the shells would have gone through the merrimac s skin. but you have all sorts of northerners proposing different styles of shell, that bolts, steel-tipped shells. you have jay byers write in saying the way to break the hull or the plating is