ORIGINAL: Lovejoy
A lot of times, the old name for the CSS Virginia (Merrimack) gets used when referring to it. I think this is because most of the official records of the U.S Navy Department (I don't know if the South's Navy Department records survived the war) refer to it as the "Merrimack" as the US Navy didn't really care what the Southerners wanted to call it. To be honest, I'm not even sure if they knew what it had been renamed. Likely as not, the author decided to stick to using the name that the U.S Navy used when referring to it simply for the ease of fitting his primary research into place. A lot of the books I've read have referenced the CSS Virginia as the "Merrimack".
Not to get too far into the legal niceties of 19th Century international law, but as the U.S refused to recognize the South as a independent nation, official recognition of its warships might have constituted recognition, and as such, the US Navy Department may have felt compelled to do as much as they could to avoid according Southern warships the distinction as warships of a nation-state, in this case by refusing to recognize the right of the South to renamed a ship lawfully belonging to the US Navy.
Of course, I could be reading way too much into it! Sorry for the thread hijack, Civil War Naval History is a passion of mine.
Having gone to Virginia public schools in an era where answering "the Civil War" on a history test was marked wrong, and having said public school being a few miles from Hampton Roads where the battle took place, we were steeped in this issue. The retreating USN burned USS Merrimack to the waterline (the dock was flooded to put out the fire by the shipyard-capturing Confederates), and an argument can be made that the ship was abandoned as salvage at that point. But to my knowledge she was never struck from the list either. To your point, and one that drives many Virginians mad, especially recently in the "monument crisis", the Confederacy was never recognized as a nation state by the USA, so having national ships in commission was a non-sequitur. To the victors she always was a United States ship under rebel control, with a lot of unauthorized hoo-haw hung on her main deck.
Me? I always figured it was just newspaper editors' love of alliteration in headlines.
