USS Agamenticus was one of four s built for the United States Navy during the American Civil War. Commissioned as the war was ending in May 1865, the ironclad saw no combat and was decommissioned in September and placed in reserve. The ship was reactivated in 1870, having been renamed Terror the previous year, and was assigned to the North Atlantic Fleet where she served in the Caribbean Sea. The monitor was decommissioned again in 1872 and was sold for scrap two years later. The Navy Department evaded the Congressional refusal to order new ships by claiming that the Civil War-era ship was being repaired while building a new monitor of the same name.
Description
The Miantonomoh class was designed by John Lenthall, Chief of the Bureau of Construction and Repair, although the ships varied somewhat in their details. Agamenticus was long overall, had a beam of and had a draft of . She was fitted with a breakwater to protect the forward gun turret from flooding in high seas. The engines were rated at and gave the ship a top speed of . She was designed to carry of coal.
Armament and armor
Her main battery consisted of four smoothbore, muzzle-loading, Dahlgren guns mounted in two twin-gun turrets, one each fore and aft of the single funnel.
The sides of the hull of the Miantonomoh-class ships were protected by five layers of wrought-iron plates that tapered at their bottom edge down to total of , backed by of wood. The armor of the gun turret consisted of ten layers of one-inch plates and the pilot house had eight layers. The ship's deck was protected by armor thick. While still building in early 1864, she was modified with the addition of a turret-roof-height "hurricane deck" that stretched between the two turrets and around the funnel and main ventilator to improve her navigational facilities. Agamenticus was commissioned on 5 May 1865 and was prepared to fight the Confederate ironclad CSS Stonewall that was at sea somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean at that time. Stonewall went elsewhere