By Burt Kallman
On Sunday morning, March 9, 1862, an officer
on CSS Patrick Henry named James Rochelle observed a strange
craft guarding USS Minnesota, which had run aground in
Hampton Roads, Virginia. Rochelle later wrote it was "…a
craft such as the eyes of a seaman never looked upon before,
an immense shingle floating on the water, with a gigantic cheesebox
rising from its center; no sails, no wheels, no smokestack, no
guns. What could it be?" It was, of course, USS Monitor;
it did have guns and a smokestack and its arrival would save
a Union fleet and revolutionize naval warfare.
On the day before Rochelle’s sighting,
the Confederate ironclad Virginia (formerly known as the
"USS Merrimack") had made a significant start
at breaking the Union blockade at Hampton Roads. USS Cumberland
had been rammed and sunk; USS Congress had been crippled
by gunfire and set afire and Minnesota had been run aground.
Union guns had been unable to seriously harm the Confederate
ship. Federal losses totaled about 380 killed and many wounded;
Confederate losses were two killed, five wounded. This action
set the stage for the epic first battle between two ironclads.
The design of naval vessels had been markedly
advanced in the two decades before the Civil War. USS Princeton,
the first screw-driven warship, was designed by Robert Stockton
and John Ericsson and launched in 1843. By the mid-‘40s
improvements had been made in boilers, engines and other machinery,
and effective breech-loading rifled guns had been developed.
Floating batteries on armored barges were used in the Crimean
War and in the late ‘50s the French Gloire went to
sea as the first armor-plated warship.
In the Spring of 1861 Union forces abandoned
the navy yard at Portsmouth, Virginia, scuttling the steam frigate
Merrimack. Stephen Mallory, secretary of the navy in the
Confederate government and former chairman of the U.S. Senate
Naval Affairs Committee, recognized the value of ironclads and
had the ship raised and refitted as an ironclad. When finished
the ship was 270’ long, with a raised central artillery
section of 180’ reaching 24’ above the waterline. The
superstructure was covered with 4" of armor plating and
presented a 30 degree angle to incoming fire. The new Merrimack
carried 10 guns (2-7" rifles, 2-6" rifles and 6-9"
smoothbores) and a crew of 320 officers and men. Her engines
were underpowered, however, and speed and maneuverability were
poor. Performance during the fight with Monitor was further
degraded by damage from three broadsides at close range from
Cumberland which riddled her smokestack.
Meanwhile, the ship’s conversion did
not go unnoticed by Union spies. Not trusting the notoriously
conservative navy bureaucracy to take speedy action, U. S. navy
secretary Gideon Welles pushed Congress for a review board to
develop plans for ironclads. Two conventional designs were approved;
a third design was Ericsson’s radical plan for the Monitor,
which had actually been drawn up before word of the Merrimack
conversion had reached Washington. Swedish-born John Ericsson’s
creation had a flat deck 172’ long with only two feet of
freeboard. It was covered with 4.5" of iron plating and
featured a rotating, round armored turret, 9’ high and 20’
inside diameter. The turret was powered by its own steam engine,
had 360 degrees rotation and was armed with 2-11" Dahlgren
smoothbores capable of firing 180 pound round shot. Ericsson
had not invented the turret, but was the first to actually put
one on a warship and see it go off into action. His creation
was officially called an "Ironclad Floating Battery."
Life for the 59 officers and men on the
Monitor was essentially life on a submarine; all living
quarters, store rooms, galley and mess, machinery and even a
primitive flush toilet were located below the waterline. Lighting
during daylight hours depended on 6" glass plugs screwed
into the overhead; these could be opened for ventilation when
the deck wasn’t awash and were removed at night or during
action and replaced with iron plugs. Candles and lamps were used
at night or on cloudy days. Ventilation, such as it was, consisted
of air blown in from the engine room by the same system that
served the boilers.
The epic battle was a draw. The two ships
traded fire for over three hours without doing significant damage.
Monitor fired 41 rounds, with 20 hits recorded; her gunners
could load and fire one gun at a time in 7-8 minutes. Merrimack’s
could be loaded and fired in about five minutes but were short
of solid shot and were firing cannister at times. Monitor
was hit 23 times, five on the turret and once in the pilot house.
The latter hit blinded Lt. John Worden, the ship’s captain,
who permanently lost vision in one eye. Lt. Samuel Greene took
command and soon Merrimack retired from the contest. During
the battle Monitor was struck twice by fire from Minnesota.
In those days of line-of-sight aiming, much of a ship’s
fire was ricochet, the round shot skipping over the water towards
its target. Monitor was hit when it was between Minnesota
and Merrimack. Since its guns were difficult to elevate,
most of Monitor’s fire was ricochet. And a further
note about those guns: they had never been test-fired and Worden
was ordered by the Bureau of Ordnance to limit the charge of
powder to 15 pounds. Later testing showed the guns were safe
with a 25 pound charge, sufficient in the view of experts of
that era to break Merrimack’s armor.
Merrimack soon
went into drydock for repairs, more required for damage from
Cumberland than Monitor. But neither ship had much
of a future- in two months the Confederates blew up their ironclad
to prevent its capture, and on December 31, 1862 Monitor
was lost with 16 hands during a storm off Cape Hatteras while
being towed south for blockade duty.
A few months after the battle Lt. William
Jeffers, then in command of Monitor, listed some of her
defects that had come to light in the fight. They included the
inability of the captain to control the guns from the pilothouse,
difficulty in sighting the guns through narrow slits, inabilty
to fire both guns at a time, intolerable ventilation- turret
temperature reached 140 degrees during the action and galley
temperatures were later recorded at 160 degrees, and smokestack
too low.
This first engagement of two ironclads
was watched anxiously by many observers on shore and on other
ships. After the Confederate vessel’s withdrawal, the Monitor’s
crew was lionized throughout the Union (as Merrimack’s
had been throughout the South on the previous day). A few days
after the battle Maj. Gen. John Wool, commander of nearby Fort
Monroe, came aboard and told them, "Gentlemen, you have
made heroes of yourselves." Assistant Secretary of the Navy
Gustavus Fox provided bureaucratic balance when he came aboard
and said, "Gentlemen, I want you to remember that millions
of property is entrusted to your care."
SOURCES:
David D. Porter, Naval History
of the Civil War, Castle, Secaucus, NJ, 1984
Gerald S. Henig & Eric Niderost, Civil War Firsts, Stackpole
Books, Mechanicsburg, PA, 2001
William F. Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor: 1862, Naval Letters
Series, Vol. 1, United States Naval Institute, Annapolis,MD,1964.
Text of letter from Paymaster Wm. F. Keeler:
U.S. Steamer Monitor
Hampton Roads
March 9th, 1862
2 o’clock P.M.
My Dear Wife & Children,
I have but a
few minutes to spare just to say that I am safe. We have had
an engagement with the Merrimac continuing for three hours &
have driven her off, we think in a sinking condition. We have
three men disabled, among them & the worst is our noble Captain
who has lost his sight, I hope only temporarily. The first opportunity
I get you shall have full details & my own experience.
With my best & kindest love to you
all.
William
We fought her at 20 feet distance a
part of the time, the two vessels were touching. My hands are
all dirt and powder smoke as you will discover by the paper-
