The relatively unknown 'Cold War' of the American Civil War was a nevertheless crucial aspect of the survival, or not, of the United States in the mid 19th-century. Foreign intervention, explicitly in the form of British naval power, represented a far more serious threat to the success of the Union blockade, the safety of Yankee merchant shipping world wide, and Union combined operations against the South than the Confederate States Navy. Whether or not the North or South would be 'clad in iron' thus depended on the ability of superior Union ironclads to deter mid-Victorian British leaders from intervening.

The most famous warship of the American Civil War, the USS Monitor, was the front-line weapon in a grand strategic initiative established by the U.S. Government as a means of insuring the ultimate defeat of the Southern Confederacy through not only the blockade but isolation from possible foreign aid. Union ironclads were designed for the specific purpose, of deterring the great European powers-especially Great Britain.

As such, Fuller addresses many persistent misconceptions of what the monitors were for, and why they failed in other roles associated with naval operations of the Civil War. Monitors were ironclad, not fort, killers. Combining extensive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, this book offers an in-depth look at how the Union Navy achieved its greatest grand-strategic victory in the American Civil War, becoming a sobering challenge to British naval power.

About the Author
Howard Fuller is Senior Lecturer of War Studies in the Department of History at the University of Wolverhampton. He specialises in Anglo-American 19th century history, particularly the American Civil War and the British Empire. He lives in the U.K.