The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

by Shelby Foote

  Welles, who recorded with pride that his own “composure was not disturbed,” replied that Stanton’s fear for his personal safety was unfounded, since the heavily armored vessel would surely draw too much water to permit her passage of Kettle Bottom Shoals; he doubted, in fact, that she would venture outside the Capes. This afforded at least a measure of relief for the assembly. Besides, Welles said, the navy already had an answer to the rebel threat: a seagoing ironclad of its own. Monitor was her name. She had left New York on Thursday, and should have reached Hampton Roads last night. “How many guns does she carry?” Stanton asked. Two, the Naval Secretary told him, and Stanton responded with a look which, according to Welles, combined “amazement, contempt, and distress.”

  The gray-bearded brown-wigged Welles spoke truly. The Monitor had arrived the night before. She had not only arrived; she was engaged this Sunday morning, before the cabinet adjourned to pray in church for the miracle which Stanton said was all that could save the eastern seaboard. And in truth it was something like a miracle that she was there at all. Coming south she had run into a storm that broke waves over her, down her blower-pipes and stacks, flooding her hold; pumps were rigged to fight a losing battle—and the wind went down, just as the ship was about to do the same. The fact was, she had not been built to stand much weather. She was built almost exclusively for what she was about to do: engage the former Merrimac, rumors of which had been coming north ever since work on the rebel craft began in mid-July.

  There was a New York Swede, John Ericsson, who thought he had the answer, but when he went before the naval board with his plan for “an impregnable steam-battery of light draft,” the members told him that calculations of her displacement proved the proposed Monitor would not float. He persisted, however; “The sea shall ride over her, and she will live in it like a duck,” he said; until at last they offered him a contract with a clause providing for refund of all the money if she was not as invulnerable as he claimed. Ericsson took them up on that and got to work. Her keel was laid in October, three months behind the beginning of work on her rival, and she was launched within one hundred days.

  As Welles had said, she had only two guns; but they were hard-hitting 11-inch rifles, housed in a revolving turret (another Ericsson invention) which gave them the utility of many times that number, though it caused the vessel to be sneered at as “a tin can on a shingle” or “a cheese-box on a raft.” Her armor was nine inches thick in critical locations, and nowhere less than five, which would give her an advantage over her thinner-skinned opponent. The factors that made her truly the David to meet Goliath, however, were her 12-foot draft and her high maneuverability, which would combine her heavy punch with light fast footwork. Her sixty-man crew, men-of-war’s men all, had volunteered directly from the fleet, and “a better one no naval commander ever had the honor to command,” her captain said. His name was John L. Worden, a forty-four-year-old lieutenant with twenty-eight years in the service. He had been given the assignment—admittedly no plum—after seven months in a rebel prison, the result of having been captured back in April while trying to return from delivering secret messages to the Pensacola squadron. Obviously he was a man for desperate ventures, and perhaps the Department heads believed his months in durance would make him extra-anxious to hit back at the people who had held him. If they thought so, they were right. Nine days after the Monitor was commissioned he took her south for Hampton Roads.

  Having weathered the storm, Worden rounded Cape Henry near sundown Saturday and heard guns booming twenty miles away. He guessed the cause and cleared for battle. But when he passed the Rip Raps, just before moonrise, and proceeded up the brightly lighted roadstead—each wave-crest a-sparkle with reflections of the flame-wrapped Congress—all he saw of the Virginia was the damage she had done: one ship sunk, another burning, and three more run ingloriously aground. An account of what had happened quickly told him what to do. Believing the Virginia would head first for her next morning, he put the Monitor alongside the Minnesota, kept his steam up, and waited.

  Dawn came and at 7.30 he saw the big rebel ironclad coming straight for his stranded charge: whereupon he lifted anchor, darted out from behind the screening bulk of the frigate, and steamed forward to the attack. The Monitor’s sudden appearance was as unexpected as if she had dropped from the sky or floated up from the harbor bottom, squarely between the Virginia and her intended prize. “I guess she took us for some kind of a water tank,” one of the Monitor crewmen later said. “You can see surprise in a ship just as you can see it in a man, and there was surprise all over the Merrimac.”

  He was right, or almost right. Instead of a water tank, however, “We thought at first it was a raft on which one of the Minnesota’s boilers was being taken to shore for repairs,” a Virginia midshipman testified, “and when suddenly a shot was fired from her turret we imagined an accidental explosion of some kind had taken place on the raft.”

  This mistake was not for long. Rumors of work-in-progress had been trickling south as well as north, and the Monitor was recognized and saluted in her own right with a salvo which broke against her turret with as little effect as the ones that had shattered against the armored flanks of the Virginia yesterday, when the superiority of iron over wood was first established. Now it was iron against iron. The Monitor promptly returned the fire, swinging her two guns to bear in rapid succession. The fight was on.

  It lasted four hours, not including a half-hour midway intermission, and what it mainly showed—in addition to its reinforcement of what one of them had proved the day before: that wooden navies were obsolete—was that neither could sink the other. The Monitor took full advantage of her higher speed and maneuverability, of her heavier, more flexible guns, and particularly of her lighter draft, which enabled her to draw off into the shallows for a breather where the other could not pursue. The Virginia’s supposed advantages, so impressive to the eye, were in fact highly doubtful. Her bigness, for example—the “Colossus of Roads,” one northern correspondent dubbed her—only made her more sluggish and easier to hit, and her eight guns were limited in traverse. The effectiveness of her knockout punch, demonstrated yesterday when she rammed the Cumberland, was considerably reduced by the loss of her iron beak. Also, she had come out armed for the destruction of the frigates; her explosive shell shattered easily against an armored target, and she had brought only a few solid rounds to be used as hot shot. Worden’s task, on the other hand, was complicated by the need for protecting the grounded Minnesota, which the Virginia would take under fire if he allowed her to get within range. Then too, his gun crews were disconcerted by whizzing screwheads that flew off the inner ends of the armor bolts and rattled about inside the turret whenever the enemy scored a direct hit.

  Buchanan gone, command of the Virginia had passed to her executive, Lieutenant Catesby ap R. Jones. He gave the Monitor everything he had given the wooden warships yesterday, and more: to no avail. When he tried to ram her, she drew aside like a skillful boxer and pounded him hard as he passed. After a few such exchanges, the crews of his after-guns, deafened by the concussion of 180-pound balls against the cracking railroad iron, were bleeding from their noses and ears. Descending once to the gundeck and observing that some of the pieces were not engaged, Jones shouted: “Why are you not firing, Mr Eggleston?” The gun captain shrugged. “Why, our powder is very precious,” he replied, “and after two hours’ incessant firing I find that I can do her about as much damage by snapping my thumb at her every two minutes and a half.”

  At this point the Monitor hauled off into shallow water, where she spent fifteen minutes hoisting a new supply of shot and powder to her turret. Left alone, the Virginia made one of her drawn-out turns to come as near as possible to the grounded Minnesota, whose captain received her with what he called “a broadside which would have blown out of the water any timber-built ship in the world.” Unwincing, the ironclad put a rifled bow-gun shell into her and was about to swing broadside, bringing all her guns t
o bear, when the Monitor came steaming out of the shallows and intervened again, Worden having refreshed himself with a stroll on the deck and a general look-round while the fresh supply of ammunition was being made handy for his guns. The two ironclads reëngaged.

  Jones by now had decided that if he was going to destroy his foe, it would have to be with something other than his guns. First he tried ramming, despite the absence of his iron beak. But the Monitor was too spry for him. The best he could manage was a blunt-prowed, glancing blow that shivered her timbers—“a tremendous thump,” one of her officers called it—but did her no real damage. The smaller ship kept circling her opponent, pounding away, one crewman said, “like a cooper with his hammer going round a cask.” Doubly frustrated, Jones then determined to try an even more desperate venture, one that would bring his crew’s five-to-one numerical advantage to bear. Having taken naval warfare a long stride forward yesterday, today he would take it an even longer one—back to the pistol-and-cutlass days of John Paul Jones. He would board his adversary. Equipping his men with tarpaulins for blinding the Monitor’s gun-slits and iron crows for jamming her turret and prying open her hatch, he had them stand by the sally ports while he maneuvered to get within grappling distance. It was a risky plan at best (far riskier than he knew; the Federal gunners were supplied with hand grenades for just such an emergency) yet it might have worked, if he could only have managed to bring the Virginia alongside. He could not. Nimble as a skittish horse, the smaller vessel danced away from contact every time.

  For two more hours this second act of the long fight continued, and all this time the Monitor was pounding her opponent like an anvil, cracking and breaking her armor plate, though not enough to penetrate its two-foot oak and pitch-pine backing. Soon after noon, in a last attempt at boarding—though by now the Virginia’s stack was so riddled that her fires could get almost no draft and her speed, already slow, was cut in half—Jones brought his ship within ten yards of the enemy and delivered at that point-blank range a 9-inch shell which exploded against the pilot house, squarely in front of the sight-slit where Worden had taken station to direct the helm and relay fire commands. The concussion cracked the crossbeam and partly lifted the iron lid, exposing the dark interior. Worden was stunned and blinded, ears ringing, beard singed, eyes filled with burning powder; but not too stunned to feel dismay, and not so blind that he did not see the sudden glare of the noonday sky through the break in the overhead armor. “Sheer off!” he cried, and the helmsman put her hard to starboard, running for the shallows.

  While the Monitor retired to shoal water, and remained there to assess the damage she and her captain had suffered, the Virginia steamed ponderously across the deep-water battle scene with the proud air of a wrestler who has just thrown his opponent out of the ring. Presently, however—the ebb tide was running, keeping her out of range of the Minnesota, and she had settled considerably as a result of taking water through her seams—she drew off south across the Roads for Norfolk, claiming victory. As she withdrew, the Monitor came forward and took her turn at dominating the scene, basing her victory counterclaim on the fact that the Virginia did not turn back to continue the fight. This would result in much argument all around, though privately both antagonists admitted the obvious truth: that, tactically, the fight had been a draw. In a stricter sense, the laurels went to the Monitor for preventing the Virginia from completing her mission of destruction. Yet in the largest sense of all, and equally obvious, both had been victorious—over the wooden navies of the world.

  Stretched out on the sofa in his cabin, Worden was “a ghastly sight,” according to the executive who went to receive instructions from him upon assuming command. When the captain could speak, lying there with his beard singed, his face bloody, and his eyes tight shut as if to hold the pain in, his first words were a question: “Have I saved the Minnesota?”

  “Yes,” he was told, “and whipped the Merrimac.”

  “Then I don’t care what happens to me,” he said.

  As it had a perverse tendency to do in times of crisis, the telegraph line to Washington from Fort Monroe had gone out that Sabbath morning, and it stayed dead till just past 4 that afternoon. During all this long, exasperating time, among all the officials waiting fidgety behind the sound-proof curtain which sealed them off from news of the fight at Hampton Roads, none awaited the outcome with a deeper concern than George McClellan. The campaign he was about to launch depended on the Federal navy’s maintaining domination of the bays and coastal rivers north of the James. It required very little imagination—far less, at any rate, than McClellan was blessed or cursed with—to picture what would happen if enemy gunboats—even wooden ones, let alone the frigate-killing Merrimac-Virginia—got among his loaded transports on their way down Chesapeake Bay or up the Rappahannock River.

  Before news of the ironclad duel reached Washington, however, he received outpost dispatches which shipwrecked the Urbanna plan as completely as the sinking of the Monitor would have done: Joe Johnston was gone from the Manassas line. Most of his army was already back on the banks of the Rappahannock, intrenching itself near the very spot McClellan had picked for a beachhead. To land at Urbanna now, he saw, would be to land not in Johnston’s rear, but with Johnston in his own.

  Despite this abrupt and, so to speak, ill-mannered joggling of the military chessboard after all the pains he had taken to dispose the pieces to his liking, he was none the less relieved when, immediately following the news of Johnston’s retrograde maneuver, the wire from Fort Monroe came suddenly alive with jubilant chatter of a victory by stalemate. The rebel ironclad had gone limping back to Norfolk, neutralized. He could breathe. What was more, he saw in this new turn of events an opportunity to put the finishing touch to his army’s rigorous eight-month course of training: a practice march, deep into enemy territory—under combat conditions, with full field equipment and carefully worked-out logistics—and then another march right back again, since there was nothing there that he would not gain, automatically and bloodlessly, by going ahead with his roundabout plan for a landing down the coast. Warning orders went out that night, alerting the commanders. Next day the troops were slogging south, well-ordered dark-blue columns probing the muddy North Virginia landscape.

  Excellent as this was as a graduation exercise to cap the army’s basic training program, it had a bad effect on the public’s opinion of Little Mac as the man to whip the rebels. Armchair strategists found in it the answer to the taunting refrain of a current popular song, “What are you waiting for, tardy George?” What he had been waiting for, apparently, was the departure of Johnston’s army, which he had not ventured to risk encountering face-to-face. There was truth in this, though it omitted the balancing truth that, however frightened he might have been of Johnston, the thing he had least wanted was for Johnston to be frightened of him—frightened, that was, into pulling back and thus eluding the trap McClellan had spent all these months contriving. Lacking this restricted information, all the public could see was that Tardy George had delayed going forward until he knew there was nothing out there on the southern horizon for him to fear.

  The outrage was screwed to a higher pitch when reports came back from newspapermen who had marched with the army through the supposedly impregnable fortifications along the Centerville ridge, where Quaker guns had been left in the embrasures to mock the Yankees. It was Munson’s Hill all over again, the correspondents cried; “Our enemies, like the Chinese, have frightened us by the sound of gongs and the wearing of devils’ masks.” What was more, the smoldering wreckage of the Confederate camps showed conclusively that Johnston’s army had been no more than half the size McClellan estimated. “Utterly dispirited, ashamed and humiliated,” one reporter wrote, “I return from this visit to the rebel stronghold, feeling that their retreat is our defeat.” The feeling was general. “It was a contest of inertia,” another declared; “our side outsat the other.”

  These were nonprofessional opinions, which in general
the army did not share. Civilians liked their victories bloody: the bloodier the better, so long as the casualty lists did not touch home. Soldiers—except perhaps in retrospect, when they had become civilians, too—preferred them bloodless, as in this case. The Centerville fortifications looked formidable enough to the men who would have had to assault them, peeled log guns or no. Besides, some of them—old-timers now—could contrast this march with the berry-picking jaunt which had ended so disastrously in July.

  It went smoothly, with a minimum of stop-and-go. There was no need to fall out of column when everything a man could want was right there in the supply train. They were an army now, and they looked it, in their manner and their dress. There were still a few outlandish Zouave outfits to lend the column sudden garish bursts of color, like mismatched beads on a string, but for the most part they wore the uniform which had lately become standard: light-blue trousers and a tunic of dark blue, with a crisp white edge of collar showing just under the jowls of the men in regiments whose colonels, being dudes or incurable old-army martinets, preferred it so.

  Whatever truth there might once have been in the Confederate claim that Southerners made better soldiers, or anyhow started from a better scratch because they came directly from life in the open and were familiar with the use of firearms, applied no longer. After six months of army drill, a factory hand was indistinguishable from a farmer. Individually, the Northerners knew, they were at least as tough as any men the South could bring against them, and probably as a whole they were better drilled—except of course the cavalry, since admittedly it took longer to learn to fork a horse in style. McClellan’s men were aware of the changes he had wrought and they were proud of them; but the thing that made them proudest of all was the sight of Little Mac himself. He was up and down the column all that day, glad to be out from under the shadow of the Capitol dome and the sneers of the politicians, not answering ignorant questions or countering even more ignorant proposals, but returning the cheers of his marching men with a jaunty horseback salute.