Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

raft had been brought alongside the Minnesota to take off the steam frigate’s crew. Then the raft began to move, and as it did, the Confederate sailors and gunners got their first good look at what they could only describe as “a tin can on a shingle.” It was, said one of the Virginia’s officers, “the queerest-looking craft afloat” and reminded him of “a cheese box on a raft.” It was in fact a Federal warship, an ironclad that floated almost flush on the surface of the water except for a single round gun turret in the middle. Its name was Monitor.51

The Federal navy had actually found out about the Confederate plans to rebuild the Merrimack as early as August 1861, and in February 1862 “a negro woman, who … had closely watched the work upon the ‘Merrimac’… passed through the lines at great risk to herself” and brought Navy Secretary Welles word “that the ship was nearly finished.” Although Welles himself was skeptical of the usefulness of ironclads on the high seas, the threat of what the Merrimack might be turned into forced him to ask Congress for an appropriation of $1.5 million to experiment with three ironclad prototypes. Two of the designs Welles commissioned were little more than conventional steam frigates with various kinds of iron plating; the third prototype came from a Swedish inventor named John Ericsson, and it was so bafflingly different that one officer advised taking the model of the ship home and worshipping it. “It will not be idolatry,” the officer quipped. “It is the image of nothing in the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth.”52

Certainly it was peculiar. Ericsson’s plans called for an iron-plated raft 173 feet long and 41 feet 6 inches wide, with a small armored pilot house at the bow, two portable smokestacks that could be taken down for combat purposes, and, in the center, a revolving gun turret (with two 11-inch smoothbore guns) that could be turned to face in any direction. The 9-foot-high steam-powered turret, protected by eight layers of inch-thick iron plate, was the greatest marvel in this little ship of marvels (although in truth, the original plan for an armored cupola on a turntable belonged to the British gunnery expert Captain Cowper Coles, who had patented a design in 1859 and conducted trials on a prototype in September 1861), and it took the fancy of both Welles and Lincoln. On October 4, 1861, Welles and Ericsson signed the contract for the weird little ironclad, and less than four months later Ericsson launched the vessel from a private shipyard at Greenpoint, Brooklyn. At the invitation of assistant navy secretary Gustavus Fox, Ericsson named the ship USS Monitor. Formally commissioned on February 25, 1862, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the Monitor steamed down the East River on March 4, bound for Hampton Roads to search out and destroy the rebuilt Merrimack before the Confederates could turn their ironclad loose.53

The Monitor arrived one day too late. But for the Minnesota, and the rest of the Federal blockade, her timing could not have been more exquisite. For the next three hours the two strangest ships in the world battered each other with their guns, each unable to hurt the other. The captain of the Minnesota watched in a mixture of delight and disbelief as the little Monitor, “completely covering my ship as far as was possible with her dimensions… laid herself right alongside of the Merrimack, and the contrast was that of a pigmy to a giant.”

Gun after gun was fired by the Monitor, which was returned with whole broadsides from the rebels with no more effect, apparently, than so many pebblestones thrown by a child. After a while they commenced maneuvering, and we could see the [Monitor] point her bow for the rebels, with the intention… of sending a shot through her bow porthole; then she would shoot by her and rake her through her stern. In the meantime the rebel was pouring broadside after broadside, but… when they struck the bombproof tower [the Monitor’s turret] the shot glanced off without producing any effect, clearly establishing the fact the wooden vessels can not contend successfully with ironclad ones; for never before was anything like it dreamed of by the greatest enthusiast in maritime warfare.

The Virginia tried to ram the Monitor, but the nimble little turret ship dodged aside. The Virginia’s replacement captain, Catesby Jones, assembled a boarding party and tried to lay his unwieldy ship alongside the Monitor to board her, throw a coat over the Monitor’s pilothouse to blind her, and then toss grenades down her vents, but the Monitor dodged away again. Then each ship, baffled at the other’s invincibility, drew off. The tide was running out, and the Virginia could not afford to be stranded on the shoals with this shallow-drafted terrier nipping at her. The Virginia’s plans to burn Washington and New York would have to be shelved. The Minnesota had been saved, and so had every other wooden warship in the Federal fleet.54

The two ironclads never fought again; in fact, neither of them survived the year. When McClellan began his movement up the James River peninsula later in April, the Confederates were forced to evacuate Norfolk. The Virginia, drawing too much water to retreat up the James River, was blown up on May 10 to keep it from capture. The Monitor remained on station in Hampton Roads until November 1862, when it was ordered to join the blockading squadron off North Carolina, where it was rumored that the Confederates were constructing another blockade-breaking ironclad. On December 30, in treacherous water off Cape Hatteras, the Monitor was caught in a severe storm and sank with the loss of four officers and twelve men.

Despite their short lives, the Monitor and the Virginia had written their own chapter in naval history: their combat was the first occasion in which ironclad warships fought each other. Both ships also became the model for