Two Miserable Presidents by Steve Sheinkin Page B

soldier.”
    Velazquez was living with her husband in Tennessee when the
war started. He quickly set off for Richmond to join the army. “My husband’s farewell kisses were scarcely dry upon my lips,” she said, “when I made haste to attire myself in one of his suits, and to otherwise disguise myself as a man.”
    She entered the Confederate army as Harry T. Buford. “This is the kind of fellow we want,” said an officer, shaking her hand. “And with a few more of the same sort, we will whip the Yankees inside of ninety days.”
    Everything went fine for “Lieutenant Buford” until one scary moment at a crowded dinner table. She took a big gulp of buttermilk, soaking her fake mustache. When she tried to wipe the mustache, it started to come off. “To say that I was frightened, scarcely gives an idea of the cold chills that ran down my back,” she later said. She described eating the rest of the meal with “my hand up to my mouth all the time … doing my best to hold the mustache on.”
    Velazquez made it through the meal. And a little while later she marched off to war.
    Loreta Janeta Velazquez
    Attack of the Floating Barn
    M eanwhile, Abraham Lincoln was having a rough winter. McClellan was still camped in Washington, still claiming he needed more time to get ready.
    In February 1862, Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son Willie became ill with typhoid fever. Abraham and Mary watched their son get weaker and weaker and finally die.
    â€œIt is hard, hard, hard to have him die!” Lincoln cried at Willie’s bedside.
    Then, in early March, an alarming report sent Lincoln and his advisors into a panic. A strange new Confederate ship was cruising around Virginia. The ship, Lincoln learned, was once a wooden warship called the Merrimac . But the Confederate navy had attached thick sheets of iron to its sides and a long iron beak to its front. They renamed it the Virginia . The Virginia was so heavy that it had a top speed of just five miles per hour—and it took a half an hour to turn around. Still, it had a huge advantage over the Union’s wooden warships.
    On the morning of March 8, 1862, several of those Union ships were guarding the mouth of the James River in Virginia, blocking Confederate ships from getting out to sea. It was a warm morning and Union sailors were splashing and swimming in the river. They looked up and saw what appeared to be a giant barn, with just its slanted roof sticking out above the water. This was the Virginia , steaming toward the Union ships in a slow-motion charge.
    Union sailors scrambled onto their ships and opened fire on the Virginia . The men were amazed to see their eighty-pound cannonballs bouncing off their target like “peas from a pop-gun,” one sailor said. The Virginia’s chief engineer, H. Ashton Ramsey, described the scene. “We were met by a … storm of shells … . They struck our
sloping sides, were deflected upward to burst harmlessly in the air, or rolled down and fell hissing into the water.”

    The Virginia cruised straight at the Union ship Cumberland .
    â€œDo you surrender?” shouted the captain of the Virginia .
    â€œNever!” the captain of the Cumberland replied.
    Moments later the Virginia’s iron beak slammed into the Cumberland , cracking a huge hole in the side of the wooden ship. Union sailors jumped off the Cumberland as it sank to the bottom of the river. The Virginia’s iron beak snapped off and sank too.
    Even without its beak, the Virginia destroyed another Union warship. And before nightfall, three more Union ships got stuck on sandbars while trying to escape the Virginia’s guns.
    The Virginia would be back tomorrow to finish the job.
    Clash of the Ironclads
    W hen Lincoln heard about all this, he ran to the White House window to see if the Virginia was cruising up the Potomac River to destroy Washington.
    It wasn’t. In fact, the