civilwarprojectkarides

__**The Changes In Warfare**__



New and improved weapons and boats really helped the military plan for what they can do best during the Civil War. The ironclad ships were very powerful that it could even break wooden ships, take cannon fires, and be kept from burning. Also armed with guns and weapons, they had the rifle and soft lead bullet called minie' balls. Soldiers could load up these type of guns faster which meant they could shoot more in this war. The minie' ball was more functional because of the outcome it had. These bullets were even more stronger than the ones that were used before. What they used as well were one of the first hand grenades and land mines which were explosives under the ground. This new civil war technology helped a lot because it got the job done much quicker rather than the times before. It was a huge step because the process was very slow before. General Grant had used four ironclad ships to when he caught and took over Forts Henry and Donelson. //Monitor,// which was the North's ship and //Merrimack// which was the South's, had fought with each other on March 9, 1862. Now, both of these ships were plated with iron so they were alike. There were alike because when the //Merrimack// had sunk in 1861 off the coast of Virginia, Confederates took the ship in and was told by Stephen R. Mallory, the Confederate Secretary of the navy, to get the engineers to plate the ship with iron. After this, Gideon Welles who was the Union secretary of the navy thought to duplicate this idea. That is when the //Monitor// was designed by John Ericsson. March 8, 1862, the //Merrimack// attacked three wooden Union warships which sunk the first, burned the second one, and shipwrecked the third, and that goes to show how powerful that ship really was.

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Picture 1 - "Steamboat Times - Civil War Ironclads." //Steamboat Times - Civil War Ironclads//. Steamboat Times, 2007. Web. 17 Sept. 2015 (http://steamboattimes.com/civil_war_ironclads.html) Picture 2 - "Steamboat Times - Civil War Ironclads." //Steamboat Times - Civil War Ironclads//. Steamboat Times, 2007. Web. 17 Sept. 2015. (http://steamboattimes.com/civil_war_ironclads.html) Picture 3 - "Breech-Loading Rifles." //Civil War Weapons Technology//. Weebly. Web. 17 Sept. 2015. (http://civilwarweaponstech.weebly.com/breech-loading-rifles.html) Picture 4 - "Minié Ball." //Wikipedia//. Wikimedia Foundation, 28 July 2015. Web. 17 Sept. 2015. .
 * __Citations:__**

**Information** - McDougal, Holt. The Americans 2012. 1 of 1 ed. EPub: n.p., 2012. Print.