The Brief, World-Changing Life of the Monitor

The Monitor sinks off Cape Hatteras in an illustration from the time.

(Harper’s Weekly)

“Now comes the reign of iron,” predicted Rear Adm. John Dahlgren after the ironclads the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (commonly called the Merrimack) clashed in Hampton Roads, Virginia. In the 11 months she was afloat, the Monitor revolutionized naval warfare. When she was launched, at the beginning of 1862, she was like no other ship ever built; by the time she sank, 144 years ago this weekend, she had converted the world to the age of iron.

In the first weeks of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and his generals resolved to strangle the south with a naval blockade: Union ships from Virginia to Mexico would block incoming supplies. While Lincoln mulled over the plan, evacuating Union forces torched the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk, Virginia, to keep its stockpiles out of Confederate hands. The steam frigate USS Merrimack, languishing in the shipyard for extensive repairs, sank into the mud. Thus did the life of one ship end and a new era of naval warfare begin. The Merrimack was about to be reborn to make its brethren obsolete.

The Confederates resurrected the Merrimack and began to rebuild her—as an ironclad ram. The Korean Navy had been one of the first to jacket a ship with metal, back in 1592. Two and a half centuries later, the damage inflicted on wooden craft by new explosive shells persuaded European navies to armor their own fleets. Although the British and French had both launched ironclads by 1861, none had yet seen battle.

Soon enough, news filtered to Washington about what the Rebels were working on in Norfolk. The Union Navy—with only 82 ships, most of them outdated—was having enough trouble blockading the Southern ports. A Confederate ironclad would make kindling of the Federal fleet. No Union shot could pierce her armor; no Union ship could stand up to her. The new Merrimack could break the Union blockade and, with it, the Union’s chances for victory.

The U.S. Navy Department decided to counter the threat in kind. The secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, appointed a three-man “Ironclad Board” in early August and issued a public appeal for proposals. Given the Rebels’ head start, designers had a month to submit detailed plans. Sixteen shipbuilders responded, including a Connecticut railroad man, Cornelius Bushnell. New to naval architecture, Bushnell decided to seek some help with his design. He called on the renowned Swedish-American engineer John Ericsson in New York. After commenting on Bushnell’s plans, Ericsson “produced a small, dust-covered box, and placed before me the model and plan of the Monitor, explaining how quickly and powerfully she could be built.” Ericsson had already offered his revolutionary design-an ironclad with a revolving turret, which would allow its guns to shoot in any direction—to Napoleon III, who had turned it down. Bushnell now borrowed the model to show to Welles.

“The country is safe!” Bushnell proclaimed to Welles a day later. “I have found a battery which will make us masters of the situation.” Welles, too, appreciated what he called the design’s “extraordinary and valuable features.” Lincoln himself, after examining Ericsson’s work, agreed: “All I can say is what the fat girl said when she put her foot into the stocking. It strikes me there’s something in it.”

But the plan still had to pass the Ironclad Board. Ericsson had been unpopular in Washington since 1844, when a gun had exploded on the USS Princeton during a demonstration of one of his experimental propellers, killing six people, including the secretary of state and the secretary of the Navy. Now some of the Navy brass called his design a “cheesebox on a raft,” or a “tin can on a shingle.” The Board, for its part, rejected it as too unconventional. Bushnell realized that only Ericsson could change the board members’ minds. But the inventor, temperamental and stubborn, at first refused to meet with the Navy. Bushnell finally convinced him. After a two-hour presentation in which Ericsson expertly explained his ship’s features, the board approved.

The Confederates had already installed a new hull, boilers, and engines on the Merrimack, however; to catch up, Ericsson’s vessel would have to be delivered in 100 days. For the next three months, Ericsson toiled past midnight supervising eight subcontractors. The USS Monitor was launched in Greenpoint, New York, on January 30, just 18 days past the deadline. On a trial run in the East River on February 28, the sailors discovered that she steered “like a drunken man on a side walk.” The Navy decided to put her in dry dock for a new rudder. “The Monitor is mine!” Ericsson cried in response, “and I say it shall not be done. . . . I will make her steer in three days.” Indeed, after Ericsson’s repairs, by March 3 the ship was “in all respects satisfactory.”

At 172 feet long and 41 feet wide, the Monitor was smaller than most warships of her time and mounted only two guns to the Merrimack’s ten. But several design innovations made up for her size. Her low profile offered only 18 inches of deck above the waterline as target, and her shallow, ten-and-a-half foot draft would allow her to maneuver in Southern rivers. Best of all, from her revolving turret, armored in 8 inches of metal, gunners could fire in any direction without the ship’s having to turn broadside to the enemy.

On March 6 the Monitor left on her maiden voyage to join the Union fleet at Hampton Roads, Virginia. Formed where the James and Elizabeth Rivers empty into the Chesapeake, the harbor guards the waterway to Richmond from invaders and suppliers. But before the Monitor could get there, the ocean put her through her first test. Choppy, storm-driven waves broke over her short smokestacks beginning at dawn on March 7, choking the engine rooms with toxic fumes. By the time the Monitor limped into the Chesapeake on the afternoon of March 8, the crew, many of them seasick, had been awake for 48 hours.

They got no time to rest. The distant sound of cannon fire greeted the Monitor as she entered the mouth of the bay. Looking “like the roof of a very big barn belching forth smoke as from a chimney on fire,” according to one witness, the newly launched Merrimack—rechristened the CSS Virginia—had emerged from Norfolk for the first time that very day and immediately gone on a rampage. Firing her cannon and jabbing with her 1,500-pound iron ram at the five wooden Union ships stationed in Hampton Roads, the Merrimack had single-handed sunk two and damaged a third, sustaining minimal damage herself. Union leaders trembled. Given the Merrimack’s superiority over their ships, would she barrel up the Potomac and attack Washington?

At about 1 a.m., the Monitor anchored alongside the shaken Union fleet. The crew spent the rest of the night preparing for the first-ever battle between two ironclads. At 8 a.m. March 9, the Merrimack returned to finish off the Federal ships; the Monitor, one-quarter its tonnage, was waiting.

“A few straggling rays of light found their way from the top of the tower to the depths below which was dimly lighted by lanterns,” wrote William F. Keeler, the Monitor’s acting Paymaster. “Every one was at his post, fixed like a Statue, the most profound silence reigned—if there had been a coward heart there its throb would have been audible, so intense was the stillness. Soon came the report of a gun, then another & another at short intervals, then a rapid discharge. Then a thundering broadside & the infernal howl (I can’t give it a more appropriate name) of the shells as they flew over our vessel was all that broke the silence & made it seem still more terrible. . . . O, what a relief it was, when at the word, the gun over my head thundered out its challenge with a report which jarred our vessel, but it was music to us all.”

The fight was on. “The men at the guns had stripped themselves to their waists & were covered with powder & smoke, the perspiration falling from them like rain,” Keeler continued. “The rapid firing of our own guns amid the clouds of smoke . . . mingled with the crash of solid shot against our sides & the bursting of shells all around us. Two men had been sent down from the turret, who were knocked senseless by balls striking the outside of the turret while they happened to be in contact with the inside.”

The ships bombarded each other for four hours, until a shot blinded the Monitor’s commander, Capt. John Worden. The crew steered the gunboat into the shallows to check for damage, and the Merrimack turned away to head back to Norfolk.

The ships had fought to a draw, although the Merrimack retreated first and sustained the most damage. The Monitor’s guns crumpled the Merrimack’s armor, whereas Confederate gunners complained that “it did not appear to us that our shell had any effect.” More important, the Union held Hampton Roads. The blockade would continue.

Both vessels survived, but their battle doomed the world’s wooden armadas. After March 9, 1862, no navy ever built another major warship out of wood. The two trailblazing ironclads never met again, and neither would outlast the year. Evacuating Norfolk in May, the Confederates deemed the Merrimack unseaworthy and destroyed her. The Monitor continued to operate along the James until December, when the Navy ordered her south. En route to Beaufort, North Carolina, for blockade duty, she sank on New Year’s Eve during a severe storm off Cape Hatteras, taking 16 crewmen to their graves.

In 1973 a team of Duke University oceanographers found the wreck site under more than 220 feet of ocean. Just as her erstwhile rival had risen from a watery tomb 138 years earlier to help usher in a new naval age, now the Monitor would get a new life. Navy divers began to exhume the Union ironclad in 1998, hauling piece by deteriorating piece from the murky depths. The turret now lies in a tank at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, where conservators are working to erase the effects of a century and a half of brine.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.