I've never written a timeline before but I got an intereresting idea in my head that I want to explore the possibilities of. Civil War timelines, especially Southern victory ones, are done to death and everyone's probably sick of them on here, but I tried thinking of a new PoD that wasn't Antietam or Gettysburg or First Manassas. The idea is McClellan surrendering the Army of the Potomoc in the Peninsula Campaign. I made a brief mention of it somewhere else and was told it would be impossible because of Union navy dominance.
So of course I thought about the CSS Virginia. Not knowing much about the Peninsular Campaign, I started trying to think of how the ship could have been built earlier. Looked it up and of course, I'm wrong, the problem is actually that it came out too early. However, coming up with a reason for it to be delayed is a lot more plausible than making it get finished earlier.
Part two of the scenario is getting Monitor delayed. Ericsson could be cheap-shotted out of existence somehow, but I think it'd be more interesting if the Union didn't know the Merrimack was rebuilt and the Monitor, which had been rushed into service because they knew about the Confederate ironclad, would be delayed and still under construction.
I haven't done any really heavy reading on this, but my looks at Wikipedia didn't tell me exactly when or how the Merrimack reconstruction was discovered. Is there any possible way the Confederates would have been able to keep it a secret or at least deceive the North as to what exactly they were doing?
So Virginia is delayed somehow, Monitor is still under construction, Virginia comes out during the week of the Seven Days battles. Union rushes in USS Galena instead and the first ironclad duel is the Galena and the Virginia (better ring to it than Galena and Merrimack). Galena, outgunned and badly armored, gets destroyed.
I understand Virginia wasn't invincible and it took quite a pounding just from fighting Cumberland and Congress. I know the Confederates have the James River Squadron to back it up. Is that enough to win control of the river in the scenario that Galena and a few other vessels have been lost to it, the Union navy is in a panic, and they (mistakenly) think Virginia is invulernable?
If the Confederates win the river, can McClellan's army be forced into surrender? They lose their line of supply and gunboat support. Might McClellan panic and surrender even when his position would have been viable? It seems within his character. If he does hold out, it'll become a siege scenario, but disease will be the greatest weapon against McClellan, not Confederate guns. But a long siege also gives time for the Union navy to regroup. It'll certainly be rushing the Monitor and any other ironclad projects into action as soon as possible. And I'm guessing the North might just have enough vessels to overwhelm the Virginia and its little backup fleet regardless of losses, so the Confederates can't hold the river for too long. I also understand that the Confederate army was just as worn as the Union from this campaign and it might just have been beyond them. Perhaps that requires PoDs that make the Rebels commit fewer mistakes during the preceding battles.
So, in the best possible case where the dice all roll in favor of the Confederates, the Virginia is a complete surprise, wins a total victory, and both the navy and McClellan panic and make stupid decisions because of that, that the Army of the Potomoc might be completely lost at the end of the Peninsula Campaign? I'd like to hear everyone's information about this before I even stat talking about the aftermath, as I'm sure I'm about to get major corrections on several points. All I'm gonna say is, McClellan would become the most hated man in American history, Lincoln would be forever known as the man stupid enough to put him in charge of anything, and the Galena would become a national embarrassment