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bars of iron.
She bore four great guns, and was provided with a powerful beak.
She was named Atlanta, and her commander was Lieutenant W. A. Webb, formerly of the National Navy, who had a crew of one hundred and sixty men.1
Deserters from the Atlanta reported her ready for work, and Admiral Dupont sent the Weehawken, Captain Rodgers, and Nahant, Commander Downes, to Wassaw Sound, to watch her. She was considered by her commander a match for both, and on the morning of the 17th of June, she was seen moving rapidly down the Wilmington River to attack them, accompanied by two wooden gun-boats of Tattnall's Mosquito Fleet, which were intended to tow up to Savannah the captured monitors.
After the battle, the Atlanta was to proceed to sea, and destroy or disperse the blockading squadrons off Charleston and Wilmington.
She was provided with instruments, and with stores of every kind for a long cruise, especially of choice liquors.
No one among the Confederates doubted her invincibility.
The gun-boats that accompanied her were crowded with people from Savannah, many of them women, who went down to see the fight and enjoy the victory; and when the National vessels appeared in sight, Captain Webb assured the “audience” that the Yankee monitors would be in tow before breakfast.
Like many prophesies of the Confederates, Webb's was not fulfilled, and the spectators were grievously disappointed.
As the ram pushed swiftly toward the Weehawken, the latter held back its fire until its antagonist was within short range, when a gun, sighted by Rodgers himself, sent a fifteen-inch solid shot, which carried away the top of the Atlanta's pilot-house, wounded two of her pilots, and sent her aground.
Rodgers fired only four more shots.
The last one struck the ram point blank, fearfully bent her iron armor, and shivered twelve inches of live-oak planking and five of Georgia pine back of it. One man was killed and seventeen were wounded by the blow, when Webb ran up a white flag.
In the space of fifteen minutes after the first shot was fired, the Atlanta was prisoner to the Weehawken, and the astonished Webb said to his crew, “Providence, for some good reason, has interfered with our plans, and we have failed of success.
I would advise you to submit quietly to the fate that has overtaken you.”
2 In that brief space of fifteen minutes, the glowing visions of ruin to the National Navy, the raising of the blockade of Wilmington, Charleston, and Mobile, and the speedy recognition of the Confederacy as a nation by Great Britain and France, which the Conspirators and their friends had indulged when contemplating the Atlanta, faded away.
Instead of raiding up the Atlantic coast, spreading terror among the inhabitants of seaport towns, she was taken
1 The Atlanta was 190 feet in length, and 40 in width. Her main deck was only a few inches above the water. From this rose her gun-deck 8 feet, sloping at an angle of about 80 degrees, leaving a fiat surface on the top. She was heavily plated with strips of iron two and a half inches in thickness, covering thick oak and pine planking. She was armed with four of Brooke's (English) rifled cannon, whose projectiles were steel-pointed, and at her bow was an iron beak six feet in length, to which was suspended a submarine torpedo, charged with 50 pounds of gunpowder, for blowing up any vessel she might attack.
2 Captain Rodgers said his first shot took away from the Atlanta her desire to fight, and the last, her ability to get away. He captured 145 men, including officers, without losing a man himself. The Secretary of the Navy spoke of the affair as “the most marked and extraordinary in the service during the year.” The Atlanta made another of the list of Confederate iron-clads which the Nationals had recently captured or destroyed.
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