American Civil War Service
On 9 September 1861, she was ordered to duty under command of Capt. Louis M. Goldsborough in the Atlantic Blockading Squadron, later to serve under commanding officer W. Smith, and executive officer Lieutenant Joseph B. Smith.
Congress was anchored off Newport News, Virginia, as part of the blockade of that port on 8 March 1862, when she fell under attack by the Confederate ironclad, CSS Virginia (ex-USS Merrimack) and five other small ships. After exchanging broadsides with Virginia, Congress slipped her moorings and ran aground in shallow water.
The ironclad and her consorts attacked from a distance and inflicted great damage on the ship, killing 120, including the commanding officer, Joseph B. Smith. Ablaze in several places and unable to bring guns to bear on the enemy, Congress was forced to strike her colors and raise a white flag. Heavy shore batteries prevented Virginia from taking possession. Instead she fired several rounds of hot shot (red-hot cannon balls) and incendiary causing Congress to burn to the water's edge, and her magazine to explode. Lt. Smith — having been in command at the time — died in the action. Eventually, during the battle, the Congress sank by the stern to her watery grave.
Read more about this topic: USS Congress (1841)
Famous quotes containing the words american, civil, war and/or service:
“The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
“They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience. It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“We too are ashes as we watch and hear
The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise
Of one whose promised thoughts of other days
Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed,
The service record of his youth wiped out,
His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)