The first USS Miantonomoh was the lead ship of her class of four ironclad monitors built for the United States Navy during the American Civil War. Completed after the war ended in May 1865, the ship made one cruise off the East Coast before she began a voyage across the North Atlantic in May 1866 to conduct a lengthy showing the flag mission in Europe. Miantonomoh was decommissioned upon her return in 1867, but was reactivated two years later and assigned to the North Atlantic Squadron before decommissioning again in 1870. The monitor was sold for scrap three years later as part of a scheme where 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. Miantonomoh was long overall, had a beam of and had a draft of . The ship had a depth of hold of , a tonnage of 1,564 tons burthen and displaced . Her crew consisted of 150 officers and enlisted men. Miantonomoh was powered by a pair of horizontal horizontal-return connecting-rod steam engines designed by the Engineer-in-Chief of the Navy, Benjamin F. Isherwood. Each engine drove a propeller shaft using steam generated by four Martin vertical water-tube boilers. 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. Each gun weighed approximately . They could fire a shell up to a range of at an elevation of +7°. 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. The bases of the funnel and the ventilator were also protected by unknown thicknesses of armor. A soft iron band was fitted around the base of the turrets to prevent shells and fragments