Status - John Baer - 40th Indiana Regiment
The 40th Indiana, with the 21st Brigade, remained at Lebanon.
USS Monitor
At Brooklyn, NY on January 30th, the USS Monitor was launched. This was one of the first iron warships; and that, combined with its novel and unique rotating gun turret (the only noticeable feature on its deck), and other innovations made it the most complex new machine of the age. It had been built in just 100 days, and would have little time for sea trials, as in just over a month it would do battle with a Confederate iron clad ship, the CSS Virginia (originally named the Merrimack).
The rotating turret would be the prototype for most gun turrets on future naval ships, and in many ways resembled the 5-inch gun turret on USS O'Brien, which was (at times) the battle station for John Skinner, John Baer's great grandson, some 80 years later.
In Kentucky and Tennessee
As General McClellan was discussing with President his plans to move the army by water to southwest Virginia, Halleck's army in the west was preparing to attack.
An army under General Grant, coming from Cairo, IL, through Paducah, KY would move down the eastern bank of the Tennessee River (many by steamboat rather than marching) toward Fort Henry, about 45 miles SSE. A fleet of gunboats under Commodore Foote would move down the river and meet the army there for the attack.
Due to weather and road conditions, this coordinated movement would take from the 1st to the 5th of February, with the attack commencing the next day.
More Information:
- Iron Dawn, the Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle that Changed History, Richard Snow, 2016, 367 pages.
- Link: War Operation, see Volume VII, Chapter 17, pp. 572-580
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