As naval historian Donald Canney has argued, in the wider context of the Industrial Revolution as well as the turbulent scene in America, “the reflection of these world technological developments was distorted: capital ships such as the revolutionary British Warrior of 1860 did not play a significant part.” 2 The ‘War Between the States’ was predominantly a brown-water affair whose chief strategic lines of communication, supply and invasion were along a generally shallow, treacherous coastline, and up and down winding riverways.

And while President Abraham Lincoln mourned the loss, neither he nor the Department of the Navy pined for an equally gigantic, American Warrior to replace her. Monitor, was little more than a gunboat and was herself finally mastered by the sea, on 31 December, 1862, taking down a quarter of her crew.

Nor did the Union Navy even attempt to challenge Britain’s mastery of the seas which the Warrior represented instead, its own frontrunner, the U.S.S. The Royal Navy did not unleash its mighty ironclad champion upon the (presumably) Northern States. Great Britain never openly intervened in the American conflict-despite many close calls and temptations. Yet the assertion above is understandably obscure because, on the surface at least, it’s entirely counterfactual. There is American history, or there is British history Civil War or Imperial history diplomatic or naval history. 1 For while the Warrior is still stately and afloat after 150 years, and many across the Atlantic now commemorate the Civil War’s own sesquicentennial, the stories of both, together, have been kept rigidly compartmentalized. This isn’t something that’s made its way into the history books-literally thousands of them, more and more, when it comes to the great ‘turning point’ in American (and possibly world) history, as it’s often described. HMS Warrior in drydock during her 1872-1875 refit.

Us navy mortar vessel civil war