by Bruce Catton
The new warship was as big a riddle to her own people as to anyone else. She was completely untested. About all anyone could say of her, for sure, was that she would float if the water were calm enough, and that she was abominably uncomfortable. (Crowded quarters and lack of ventilation caused much sickness; during her two months of life her crew of three hundred always had been between fifty and sixty men in hospital ashore, besides the ordinary sicklist aboard ship.) She was as sluggish as a dismasted hulk on the verge of foundering, could steam at little more than five miles an hour, needed at least thirty minutes to turn around, and drew between 22 and 23 feet of water. On a 275-foot hull she had a central superstructure, or citadel, 160 feet long, with rounded ends and slanting sides; anyone who had ever looked upon a river in flood was instantly reminded of a barn drifting downstream, submerged to the eaves. Her citadel had wooden walls two feet thick covered with four inches of iron, and the decks before and after it were completely awash. She carried ten guns—four rifles, and six nine-inch Dahlgrens—and at her bow, under water, she wore a massive cast-iron beak. While she was being remodeled citizens who strolled up to watch told her constructor that she would either capsize as soon as she left the docks, suffocate all hands, or deafen everybody by the concussion of guns fired inside that cramped citadel. Now she was going to fight, and Confederates as well as Yankees would learn something.2
Her skipper was Franklin Buchanan, a stalwart in his early sixties, a man of distinction in the Old Navy. He had been an officer since 1815, had been made first superintendent of the new Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1854, and carried one of those odd tag-lines that sometimes cling to a man: he was said at one time to be the third-strongest man in the Navy. He came from Maryland, and in April of 1861 he resigned, believing that Maryland would quickly secede; he tried unsuccessfully to withdraw the resignation when he found that the state would not secede. If this indicated a lack of original fire for the Southern cause no sign of it remained. He had become a captain in the Confederate Navy in September and now was a flag officer commanding the James River Defenses, with his flag in Merrimack-Virginia.
He wanted to find out about his crew as well as his ship. Most of his men were out-and-out landsmen—he had told the Secretary of the Navy that two thirds of them had never even been seasick, and one gun crew was composed entirely of a draft from a Norfolk artillery company. As the ship came slowly out into the roads Buchanan called all hands for a traditional now-hear-this pep talk. The eyes of the nation were upon them; every man must do his full duty, and more; the Yankee warships must be taken, “and you shall not complain that I do not take you close enough. Go to your guns!”3 Virginia came out into Hampton Roads, made a ponderous left turn, and steamed up toward the two sailing ships, while flag hoists blossomed at the yardarms of every Federal warship within sight. The Indiana swimmers hurried back to camp to get their clothing and their muskets, and the gunners in the batteries on the mainland prepared to open fire.
Anchored close inshore, two or three miles to the east of Congress and Cumberland, were two of the most powerful warships in existence, U.S.S. Minnesota and Roanoke; huge steam frigates rated at 3500 tons, mounting 44 heavy guns, sister ships to the old Merrimack herself. Roanoke was helpless with a broken propeller shaft that had been under leisurely repair for weeks, and she signaled now for tugs to tow her into action, opening on Virginia at long range with such guns as would bear. Minnesota slipped her cable and prepared to steam into the fray, but ran ingloriously aground and could do no more than call for tugs and fire ineffectually at a distance of more than a mile.
Virginia came on, inexorably, in slow motion, ignoring this fire and the fire from the shore batteries; drew abreast of Cumberland, then turned and came in bows-on, tricing up one of her forward gunports, running out a seven-inch rifle, and opening fire. Her first shell smashed through Cumberland’s bulwarks, spraying jagged splinters all about, and exploded amidships, killing nine Marines. Virginia’s gunport blinked shut, and the big steamer came on; then the port-lid went up again, the black muzzle of the rifle reappeared, and a second shell was fired. This one knocked Cumberland’s forward pivot gun out of action, and killed or wounded the entire gun crew. (The gun captain, John Kirker, was carried below with both arms gone at the shoulder. As he was laid on the deck in the sick bay he begged a shipmate to draw his sheath knife and cut his throat.) Virginia came still nearer, firing with deadly regularity, proving the grim truth of a point long suspected by naval men: a wooden warship simply could not stand shell fire. Before long Cumberland’s gun deck was so littered with dead bodies that details worked frantically to stack the corpses somewhere out of the way of the gun carriages. But this helped very little; fighting bows-on, Cumberland could bring hardly any of her guns to bear no matter how she disposed of her dead.
Closer and closer came Virginia, ugly and black and irresistible, coming in for collision; and at last, with a jarring, splintering crash she struck Cumberland in the starboard bow, breaking a huge hole below the waterline. For a moment the two ships hung together; then they broke apart, Virginia’s iron beak was wrenched off, and water came surging into Cumberland’s orlop deck in a torrent. Wounded men on the berth deck gaped at a sudden rush of odd-looking fugitives, men in red smocks, swarming up the ladders from below, hurrying aft; powder-handlers, driven from the forward magazine by the rising water. Cumberland’s bow dipped lower; the two ships lay side by side, a hundred yards apart, and a sudden cheer went up from Cumberland’s gun deck—at last the guns could be trained on their target.
Cumberland fired three broadsides, breaking the muzzles of two of Virginia’s guns, exploding one shell in her smokestack with an ear-splitting clang that made the Confederates think a boiler had blown up; yet doing no really serious damage. The exasperated Federal gunners could see the 80-pound shot they were firing bouncing high off the ironclad’s sides and arching off to the west to drop in the oyster beds on the far side of the James River, a mile away. Even with her entire broadside in action at point-blank range, Cumberland could not seriously harm her opponent.4
The Federal warship sagged lower and lower, with water knee-deep on the berth deck, wounded men calling for someone to help them; and from Virginia’s upper deck Buchanan shouted a demand for surrender—getting a defiant “No!” for answer, followed by a shot from one of Cumberland’s guns. But if this defiance was gallant it was also useless. Cumberland was sinking fast by now, and at last one of her officers bawled an order down a hatchway—“Every man for himself!” The most anyone could do was carry a few of the wounded men up to the gun deck; Cumberland’s boats were all adrift, far astern, and men too badly hurt to swim had no hope. The ship lurched heavily to starboard, hung briefly with her stern in the air, and then went to the bottom like a stone, most of the wounded going down with her. The tip of one mast remained above water, flag still flying.5
Virginia moved up the James, and men on Congress cheered, thinking the iron monster was out of the fight. But Buchanan was simply getting room to make an ungainly turn, and presently the ironclad came back, heading straight for Congress. This ship spread her sails to get into shallow water where Virginia could not follow and ran hard aground, and Virginia took station astern and opened a pitiless fire that wrecked the big frigate and set it ablaze. Federal shore batteries hammered at the ironclad, and even the infantry opened fire; Buchanan, going out on the open deck for a better view, was wounded by a minié ball and had to be carried below. But Congress was helpless, and the ironclad kept on pounding. The captain of the Federal ship was killed, the flames were out of control, and at last Congress struck her flag in surrender. The Confederate James River flotilla—wooden gunboats Yorktown, Jamestown, and Teaser—had come down to join Buchanan’s flag, and now they steamed up to seize Congress and remove her crew, but the Federal batteries ashore opened a heavy fire on them, happy to find targets that could be hurt. An officer in one of these batteries, a lawyer in civil life, raised a point: Congress had surrende
red, and therefore were not the Confederates legally entitled to board her? This meant nothing to old Brigadier General Joseph K. F. Mansfield, who growled: “I know the damned ship has surrendered, but we haven’t,” and the fire was continued; the Confederate ships drew away, Yorktown under tow with a disabled boiler and four men dead; and Virginia, now commanded by her executive officer, Lieutenant Catesby ap R. Jones, steamed out of range, accompanied by her consorts, and drifted with the tide, surveying the situation.
From Lieutenant Jones’s point of view the situation could hardly have been better. The Union fleet was out of action, two ships gone, Minnesota stranded, Roanoke immobile; the frigate St. Lawrence, which had tried to come up and join the fight, had followed the strange Federal habit of that disastrous afternoon and gone aground. Virginia, to be sure, had taken a hammering. Two men had been killed and eight had been wounded, everything above decks had been riddled, the flagstaff had been shot away and the colors were fastened to the perforated smokestack, there was a leak forward where the iron beak had been wrenched off, and the vessel looked more like a homemade derelict than ever. But her armor was still intact, her wheezy engines were working about as well as they ever did, and she was fully operational; and as the sun went down she was unchallenged mistress of the waters.6
Far to the north, President Lincoln’s cabinet got the news and met in a mood close to despair. Secretary Stanton believed that Virginia would immediately steam up the Potomac and bombard the capital, and wanted to sink barges in the channel to block the way; was dissuaded, at last, when Secretary Welles convinced him that Virginia drew too much water to make the trip, but feared that the ship might instead head for New York and bring catastrophe to New York Harbor. (This too was a needless worry; Buchanan could have told him that the last thing Virginia would dare try was a voyage in the open sea.) What seemed indisputable was that Virginia might proceed at leisure to destroy every Federal warship in the lower Chesapeake, and if that happened General McClellan’s plan for an advance up the peninsula between the James and York Rivers would need immediate revision. No Yankee transport would dare visit Hampton Roads as long as this ironclad was unchecked.
Nothing more could be done tonight. The tide was ebbing, and there was danger that Virginia would go aground along with everybody else, so at dusk the ironclad and her gunboats drew off to a safe anchorage at the mouth of the Elizabeth River, under protection of Confederate batteries, to send dead and wounded ashore and make emergency repairs. After dark the flames from burning Congress made a red glow in the night by Newport News Point. Toward midnight the flames reached the frigate’s magazines and she blew up with a great burst of fire and sparks and a heavy concussion that went echoing off across the still water. With morning, Virginia would come out again to finish the job.
Then, at the last possible moment, hope for salvation returned to the Federal Navy; U.S.S. Monitor came steaming in past the Virginia capes after sunset, moved up into Hampton Roads, and anchored near Minnesota, which was still struggling to get afloat like a man trying to wriggle out of a straitjacket. Now the Federals had an ironclad of their own. With it they could turn overwhelming disaster into a face-saving, life-saving stalemate. When morning came, ironclad would fight ironclad … and every navy in the world would have to rebuild.
As a matter of fact the rebuilding had already begun. Both the British and the French navies already had ironclads in commission, with more under construction and still others under design; and Foote’s gunboats on the western rivers were armored, even though they were armored too lightly. Virginia had simply dramatized the fact that an unarmored ship could not possibly fight an armored ship, and when the smoke from the burning frigate fogged the sunset on the evening of March 8 that lesson had been driven home once and forever. The next day’s fight between Monitor and Virginia would supplement it; putting on display not the world’s first ironclads, but just the world’s first fight between ironclads.
In all of this there was acute embarrassment for the United States Navy, if the Navy had had time to reflect. Its professionals had been completely outthought and outmaneuvered by the underrated civilian who served as Jefferson Davis’s Secretary of the Navy, Stephen R. Mallory of Florida. Mallory had seen what the experts failed to see and he had acted on what he saw, and the United States Navy was extremely lucky to be getting out of this fix at all.
Less than a month after Fort Sumter, Mallory had seen the need for ironclads. Sadly deficient in shipyards, shipwrights, and naval architects, the South could not hope to build a seagoing fleet that would match the Federal fleet, and Mallory knew it. He knew, too, that wooden warships were obsolete anyway. Firing shell, he said, wooden ships would destroy one another so quickly that a sea fight would be nothing more than a contest to see which ship would sink first; and early in May he had urged the Congress to meditate on “the wisdom and expediency of fighting with iron against wood.” When Merrimack was raised and rebuilt he saw to it that she was heavily armored, and the job was well under way before Secretary Welles’s people got around to consider the question of using armor at all. Not until October did the Federal government contract for the building of Monitor, and the only thing that saved the day for the United States Navy was the fact that the North had an industrial plant that could handle a job like this with impressive speed.
In her own way Monitor was just as odd as Virginia. A heavily armored turret carrying two 11-inch guns stood amidships on a long, armored hull that had no more than a foot or two of freeboard; there was a little knob of a pilothouse forward and a smokestack aft, and nothing more. If the Confederate ship looked like a half-submerged barn, the Federal looked (as men said) like a tin can on a shingle. Built after the designs of the irascible genius John Ericsson, Monitor was as hard to live in as Virginia, and very little more seaworthy—she had come close to foundering, on her trip down from New York—but she drew much less water and answered her helm better; and, all in all, here she was in Hampton Roads on the morning of March 9, and Ericsson’s idea would quickly be put to the test.7
Skipper of Monitor was Lieutenant John Worden. He reported to the senior naval officer present, Captain John Marston of Roanoke, who sensibly ignored Washington’s orders to send the ironclad up the Potomac and told Worden to stand by Minnesota. Worden cleared for action and his crew turned in for the night, while tugboats continued their unavailing efforts to get Minnesota afloat. Dawn brought a fog, which thinned out toward eight o’clock to reveal once more that moving pillar of smoke down by the mouth of the Elizabeth; here was Virginia, ready for another battle. Monitor’s men were called to battle stations, and Worden steered down to meet his opponent. The two vessels got to close range and opened fire, and for the next two hours the world’s first fight between armored ships was on, the two ships so wreathed with clouds of coal smoke and powder smoke that they could hardly see each other.
It was a strange fight. Neither ship could really hurt the other. Solid shot clanged against the iron plates and ricocheted far across the bay; shell burst with spectacular but ineffective explosions against iron turret and slanting citadel; Virginia tried to ram, but was far too sluggish, and gave Monitor no more than a nudge. In each ship the seamen quickly learned to refrain from leaning against the bulkheads; if a shot struck the armor while a man was touching the wall just inside the man could be killed or stunned. One of Monitor’s men was knocked unconscious for ten minutes because his knee touched the turret wall when shot hit the armor outside.
Once Virginia hit a corner of Monitor’s pilothouse with a heavy shell, breaking ironwork and leaving the structure somewhat insecure; and a moment later a shell exploded against the face of the pilothouse, driving flecks of paint, iron and powder in through the sighting slit, stunning and blinding Lieutenant Worden and putting him out of action. Until the youthful executive officer, Lieutenant Samuel Dana Greene, could be called from the turret Monitor was without a commander, and she drifted off into the shallows, temporarily out of the fight.
Virginia promptly turned on Minnesota and opened a fire which set that luckless frigate ablaze and sank one of the tugs that had been trying so unsuccessfully to get the ship afloat.
Captain G. J. Van Brunt, Minnesota’s commanding officer, suddenly found that he had the ironclad where every gun would bear, at easy range, and he fired an enormous broadside—two 10-inch guns, fourteen 9-inch and seven 8-inch: a weight of shot and shell which, as he said, would have blown any wooden ship clear out of the water. The missiles struck Virginia and bounced away, and Captain Van Brunt suddenly realized that the day of ships like his was over forever. When he came to make his report on the fight he wrote, as if bemused: “Never before was anything like it dreamed of by the greatest enthusiast in maritime warfare.” It seemed to him that Minnesota was not merely out of date but immediately doomed, and he made preparations to destroy the ship and abandon it; but then Monitor got back into action, and it was ironclad against ironclad once more. Once Virginia ran aground, but her engine room crew tied down the safety valves, piled oil-soaked rags into the furnaces, raised a perilous head of steam, and the ungainly fighting machine floundered off into deeper water.8
Somewhere around noon the fight died down as if by mutual consent. Because she had lost her ram and had consumed so much fuel, Virginia was riding higher at the bow than she normally would, and Lieutenant Jones was well aware that if the Yankees fired at her unarmored waterline, forward, they could riddle her. Her leak was troublesome, and the channel where she fought was narrow, and there was always the danger that she would become stranded again and hang there helpless. Monitor, in her turn, was in no mood to insist on a finish fight. She was under command of a junior officer, and orders were to play it safe and take no chances; Monitor’s assignment today was strictly to save Minnesota from destruction, and this had been done, by the narrowest margin. In addition, Greene feared that if another shot hit the pilothouse where the first one had struck, the ship’s steering gear would be disabled—Worden had always believed the pilothouse was Monitor’s most vulnerable spot. So when at last Virginia steamed back to her base, Monitor stayed close to Minnesota and made no attempt to pursue.