THE BATTLE OF THE IRON CLADS
Dr. Andrew J. Lamb Wounded In One of the
World’s Greatest Naval Battles
Andrew Jackson Lamb was born near the exact middle of the State of Georgia. When the South went to War with the North in 1861, Lamb joined the infantry. Within nine months, he transferred to the Confederate Navy. One hundred and forty years ago this week, Andrew Lamb found himself in the midst of one of the greatest battles in the history of naval warfare. It was the battle of the Monitor versus the Virginia (fka Merrimac), the Battle of the Iron Clads. It was the first naval engagement between two ships, each with armor plating on their decks to protect them from cannon and artillery fire.
Andrew Jackson Lamb was born was born in Twiggs County, Georgia on May 10, 1835. His parents, Reuben Lamb, and Elizabeth Rause, were natives of North Carolina who came to Georgia in 1805. The elder Lamb served as a private in the Seminole Wars of 1818. Andrew lost his parents at a young age, his father in 1852 when he was seventeen and his mother in 1846 when he was only eleven years old. Andrew Lamb began the study of medicine in 1857 and graduated from Georgia Medical College in 1860. On April 14, 1861, two days after the first shot of the war was fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, Dr. Lamb enlisted in the Fourth Georgia Infantry, Co. C, Twiggs Volunteers. Because of his medical skills, Lamb was named as the company surgeon. The Volunteers arrived in Portsmouth, Virginia in early May 1861. For the next nine months, Dr. Lamb was sent on detail away from the regiment.
Confederate leaders, in anticipation of an attack up the Virginia Peninsula in the Spring of 1862, began to develop a bold new plan to impede the progress of Northern warships up the James River toward the capital of the Confederacy at Richmond. Confederate naval leaders knew that in order to assemble adequate crews for naval engagement, they would need to recruit volunteers from the infantry units in the area. Four members of the Volunteers, George Moore, P.T. Moore, Benjamin Southall, and Marcellas A. Tharp joined Dr. Lamb in transferring to the steamer, the C.S.S. Virginia, on February 10, 1862.
When the U.S. Navy abandoned its shipyards at Gosport in April 1861, Southern forces took the burned-out and scuttled hull of the U.S.S. Merrimac and began the process of rebuilding the ship with armor plating. The Merrimac was built in 1856 as a full-rigged sailing ship. The Confederate Navy christened the new ship the C.S.S. Virginia, a fact lost to many historians of the northern persuasion, who to this day continue to call her by her original name.
On the morning of March 8, 1862, the Virginia traveled down the Elizabeth River toward Hampton Roads. At the mouth of the James River stood the U.S.S. Cumberland and the U.S.S. Congress, blocking the entrance to the Atlantic Ocean. The warships were easily seen against the azure blue March sky. The Cumberland’s rigging was filled with the red, white, and blue clothing of her sailors who had left them hanging out to dry.
The Virginia kept steaming ahead toward the warships, which began an unrelenting hail of fire upon the Virginia. It was cannon fire that would have sunk any ship in either navy, but not the iron-clad Virginia. The shells hit the sloping sides of the ship, bounced up in the air, and exploded harmlessly. The Virginia pushed full steam ahead ramming and easily destroying the U.S.S. Cumberland, which had no chance against the superior ironclad. The Virginia, slightly damaged from its first battle, moved toward the hapless Congress, which surrendered to its inevitable fate.
During the night the Union ironclad, the U.S.S. Monitor, arrived in the area. The Virginia destroyed the U.S.S. Minnesota early on Sunday morning. Later the morning while the crew of the Virginia was still reeling in excitement from their third victory in as two days, lookouts spotted the Monitor coming up from Newport News.
The two ironclads pulled to within a hundred feet of each other and opened up against the other with all they had. Shot after shot bounced off the iron hulls of the two combatants for nearly two hours. The Virginia ran aground on a sand bar and took a pounding. The Virginia’s situation soon became critical. Her unprotected deck was awash due to the consumption of most of the ship’s coal in the last two days. The armor along the sides of the ship extended only three feet below the deck and put the ship in danger as it began to rise above the water line. The crew fired the engine to its maximum tolerance. More combustible materials were thrown into the boiler. All too slowly and just about when the boilers were about to explode, the propellers spinning at warp speed pushed the ship out of the mud and into the main channel of the river. Although the Virginia was able to get away under her own power, she was never able to attack Federal gunboats again.
Dr. Lamb suffered a minor wound in the battle with the Monitor and was detailed to the Naval Hospital until the first week of May. Lamb returned to his command at Drewry’s Bluff for a short time until he volunteered to serve in an expedition under the command of John Taylor Wood to capture two Federal boats, the Reliance and the Underwriter, which were stationed in the Rappahannock River in Virginia. Lamb volunteered in another expedition to Charleston Harbor to blow up the New Ironsides and Columbia, after which he served on picket duty around Charleston for the rest of 1863.
In 1864, Dr. Lamb volunteered for another mission, a three-hundred-man assault on Battery Pringle at Stony Point, which prevented the Union capture of Charleston. Lamb remained in Charleston until January 11, 1865. His last major engagement was the siege of Fort Fisher, which lasted ten days. Lamb and half of the three-hundred-man garrison waded in water up to their necks to escape to the safety of Fort Powell. From Fort Powell, the men took boats to Smithfield and to Battery Campbell, which they held until February 11, 1865. When the war came to an end, Lamb was in the port city of Wilmington, North Carolina.
After the war, Dr. Lamb returned home to Middle Georgia to practice medicine. Dr. Lamb practiced first in Laurens County, before moving to a highly successful and respected practice in Cochran in what was then Pulaski County, Georgia in 1877. Dr. Andrew Jackson Lamb was walking along a Cochran Street on June 25, 1898, when he was stricken by a paralyzing stroke. He died later that afternoon in his home. Dr. Lamb is buried in the Cedar Hill Cemetery near Cochran, Georgia. His grave marker, highly unbefitting his stature in life, simply reads: “A.J. Lamb, C.S.A. Surgeon, 1861-1865.” Dr. Lamb was described by his biographer as “a brave, patriotic, lionhearted soldier. No braver man than he ever faced shot and shell. He is a patriot, but never in an unseemly manner claimed credit for the performance of his gallant and soldierly duties.”
As for the other Twiggs Countians who served aboard the Virginia, P.T. Moore died during the war, George Moore died in the last decades of the 19th Century, and M.A. Tharp died in Worth County in 1898. B.F. Southall, the last survivor of the quintet, moved to Florida.
Comments