The US Navy prior to the Civil War, however, was every bit as stagnant technologically as it was socially. While Britain's Royal Navy had pushed technological, political and economic change throughout the Empire since the 1600s, the United States Navy did little in these areas. Aside from a few exploratory expeditions between 1840 and 1860, most of the Navy never traveled outside American waters. America's imperial ambitions were directed westward across the Great Plains and the Rockies rather than across the oceans. US Naval tradition and strategy at the time dictated a defensive stance for the Navy rather than any offensive mindset.
The Civil War was to prove a valuable testing ground for new technologies. While European powers has been building ironclad vessels since the Crimean War between England and Russia in the early 1850s, the United States still had none by the beginning of the Civil War, and neither the North nor the South would have one until nearly a year into the conflict. Necessity being the mother of invention and desperation being a better motivation than money, though, what one side had (the South had the Merrimac), the other had to have as well, and so the North built the Monitor.
Despite the Monitor's first of its kind revolving gun turret, it and the Merrimac were not the true precursors to our modern Navy. The enterprising spirit of the river gunboats led first by Admiral Andrew Foote and then by Admiral David Dixon Porter, and more importantly ocean-going steamships like Captain Raphael Semmes's commerce raider CSS Alabama and Admiral David Glasgow Farragut's flagship USS Hartford would be the forerunners of Roosevelt's Great White Fleet and the world power that the US Navy would become in the Twentieth Century. In four years, the Navy would be transformed from a third-rate sailing club into the beginnings of a modern military force capable of true overseas action and diplomacy.
The navy began this transformation of its traditions and systems without changing its basic character of leading by action, while at the same time embracing the scientific change happening all around it. If anything, the heritage of the founders of the Navy like Jones, Lawrence and the Perrys in courage and leadership were strengthened during the War Between the States. The social change that would mostly come in the next century was set up by the events and progress made by sailors and bureaucrats during the Civil War, although it would take over 100 years before American society at large had changed enough for the Navy to realize its vast store of untapped enlisted potential.
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