JOSIAH TATTNALL WAS furious. The flag-officer’s first lieutenant had just told him the CSS Virginia could not sail up the James River to safety as the ship’s pilots had promised.
The Virginia’s crew had worked more than five hours to lighten the ship to get past the shoal water of the Jamestown Flats. Now she rode too high in the water to fight the Union fleet at Hampton Roads but was still too low to escape.
Tattnall had to give the most difficult order a ship’s captain ever makes: Abandon ship. It was compounded by his second order in the early hours of May 11, 1862: Set his ship on fire.[1]
Those were the latest of the hard decisions Tattnall had to make in the final hours of the CSS Virginia’s service to the confederacy. The ironclad, upon which rested the hope of ending the northern blockade of the southern coast, had been left on her own. Her home port at the Gosport Navy Yard near Portsmouth, Va., was in enemy hands. The ship and crew could not receive supplies. The Union Navy was determined to capture or destroy the Virginia.
