After the outbreak of the Civil War, the majority of the United States Navy remained loyal to the Union. While the British and the French naval arms race was intensifying, the United States was entering into its greatest crisis, the United States Civil War. By the time HMS Warrior was commissioned in 1861, the Royal Navy had decided that its entire battle fleet needed to be armored. This development quickly caused Great Britain to begin construction on HMS Warrior and HMS Black Prince. In 1857, France began construction on the first ocean going ironclad, La Gloire, which was launched in 1859. By 1856, Great Britain drafted a design for an armored corvette. For this reason, warships had to be armored. It was the explosive shell that could with great ease, cripple a standard wooden hulled warship, this truth was exposed at the Battle of Sinope in 1853. Yet, by the 1840’s, explosive shells were in use by the British, French, and Imperial Russian navies. Naval guns such as the increasingly popular 68 pounder could quickly damage the best wooden hulled ships of the line. As early as the 1820’s and 1830’s, ships of war were outfitted with increasingly heavy guns.
By the 1840’s the era of the wooden ship of the line was coming to a close.
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