By the night of May 10, Virginia was a warship without a port, and Tattnall decided to try to escape up the James to Richmond. Blocking his way, however, was Harrison’s Bar, a stretch of riverbottom where the water was only 18 feet deep. In order to clear that obstacle, Virginia’s 20-foot draft would have to be reduced. Her crew spent five desperate hours throwing coal and ballast overboard, exposing the ironclad’s thinly armored lower quarters but reducing her draft by 3 feet.

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Even those measures did not seem to be enough, however, because the local river pilots informed Tattnall that heavy winds were sweeping so much water off the bar that the lightened Virginia would still not be able to clear it. Tattnall distrusted the pilots’ claims, but he was also unwilling to risk the lives of his crew in the event Virginia did run aground, leaving her immobilized and vulnerable to Union gunfire.

Late that night, Tattnall intentionally ran Virginia aground beside Craney Island, near the mouth of the Elizabeth River, then ordered her abandoned and set afire. At 4:58 a.m., the flames reached Virginia’s 16-ton powder magazine, and the pride of the Confederate Navy exploded into fragments in a bright flash that could be seen from as far away as Fort Monroe.

The situation now looked completely hopeless for the Confederate cause. Outnumbered by McClellan’s 118,000-man Army of the Potomac, General Joseph E. Johnston’s 56,000 Confederate troops were already slowly retreating up the peninsula. With Virginia gone, nothing stood in the way of the Union Navy, either. On May 13, a pessimistic Jefferson Davis wrote to his wife: ‘The hasty evacuation of the defenses below and the destruction of the Virginia hastens the coming of the enemy’s gun-boats. I do not know what to expect when so many failures are to be remembered, yet will try to make a successful resistance.’

As Lincoln returned to Washington on May 11, word of Virginia’s demise reached McClellan at his camp near West Point at the head of the York River. Seeing an opportunity to intimidate Richmond into surrender without having to fight his way through the Confederate Army, McClellan urged Goldsborough to dispatch a flotilla of Federal warships, including Monitor, up the James toward the Rebel capital, some 70 miles away.

Unfortunately for Goldsborough, the manner in which his force would proceed was typically McClellanesque. The Rebels had evacuated the east bank of the James, but they still had several forts on the west bank. Although those positions were too weakly defended to stop the Federal ships, McClellan’s orders were for Goldsborough’s men ‘to reduce all the works of the enemy as they go along, spike all their guns, blow up all their magazines,’ and only then move on Richmond and shell the city into surrender. Because Goldsborough dutifully adhered to those orders, minor strongpoints that might have been bypassed were dealt with in turn and generally given more attention than was really necessary. Each delay in the flotilla’s progress bought that much more time for Richmond’s mixed bag of troops and tars to shore up her defenses.

On the morning of May 14, a Confederate soldier stationed at Battery Park, an outpost at the mouth of the Pagan River guarding Smithfield, spotted three Union vessels steaming up the James. In the van was Galena, one of three experimental armored vessels laid down for the U.S. Navy in 1861. Designed by Samuel H. Pook for C.H. Bushnell & Co. and commissioned on April 21, Galena was an ironclad corvette with unusual round sides and armor made of interlocking iron bars, 31ž4 inches thick at the sides, which made her look, one witness said, ‘like a great fish with iron scales.’ Galena had a two-mast schooner rig, two Ericsson vibrating-lever steam engines and two boilers, generating 800 horsepower and driving a single screw to give her a maximum speed of 8 knots. Armament consisted of two 100-pounder rifles and four 9-inch Dahlgren rifles.

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