Qualla: USS Cumberland (1842)

USS Cumberland (1842): Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexander Charles Stuart, Public domain. The chaplain went down with the ship. John L. Lenhart, a Methodist minister from New York who had volunteered to serve aboard USS Cumberland, was the first United States Navy chaplain to lose his life in battle. He was below decks when CSS Virginia drove her cast-iron ram into Cumberland's starboard side around 3:30 p.m. on March 8, 1862, and the wooden frigate went down so fast that the men trapped below could not climb out. One hundred and twenty-one of Cumberland's crew died with her, off Newport News Point in Hampton Roads, Virginia, on a sunlit afternoon in early spring. The water at the wreck site is only about 70 feet deep. By sundown the wooden warship was finished as a category of weapon.

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Image: Alexander Charles Stuart | Public domain

USS Cumberland (1842): An Act of Congress, 1816

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alfred Waud, Public domain. Cumberland began as a line in a bill. In 1816 Congress passed "An act for the gradual increase of the Navy of the United States," providing for new ships-of-the-line and new frigates. She was designed by William Doughty, who drew on older successful American frigates - Constituti...

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Image: Alfred Waud | Public domain

USS Cumberland (1842): Mediterranean, Mexico, and the African Coast

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexander C. Stuart, Public domain. Her first commission was the prestigious one - flagship of the Mediterranean Squadron from 1843 to 1845, with port calls at Naples, Genoa, Alexandria, and Toulon. In 1846 the Secretary of the Navy ordered her south to the Gulf of Mexico for the Mexican-American War. She blockaded...

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Image: Alexander C. Stuart | Public domain

USS Cumberland (1842): The Day Before the Battle

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alfred R. Waud (Life time: Alfred Rudolph Waud Born October 2, 1828, London, England—died April 6, 1891, Marietta, Georgia.), Public domain. By the outbreak of the Civil War, Cumberland had been razeed - the spar deck guns removed, the bulwarks lowered, the ship converted from a frigate to a heavier, faster sloop-of-war with twenty-two new Dahlgren smoothbores. She was at Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia in A...

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Image: Alfred R. Waud (Life time: Alfred Rudolph Waud Born October 2, 1828, London, England—died April 6, 1891, Marietta, Georgia.) | Public domain

USS Cumberland (1842): The Virginia

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexander Charles Stuart, Public domain. What came out of the channel was unprecedented. The Confederates had raised the burned hull of the USS Merrimack at Gosport, cut down her upper works, and built atop them a casemate sheathed in two layers of two-inch iron plate over two feet of oak and pine. They had fitted her w...

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Image: Alexander Charles Stuart | Public domain

USS Cumberland (1842): The Hour That Changed Naval Warfare

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Cumberland's masts stuck out of the water for years afterward, marking the grave of her crew. Congress was burned by Virginia's hot shot a short time later. The next morning USS Monitor arrived, and the famous four-hour duel of the ironclads ended in a tactical draw - but the woo...

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Image: Public domain