Decision at Sea

by Symonds, Craig L.

  Both men, along with Chief Engineer Williamson, then headed back to Norfolk to see if the hull of the partially destroyed Merrimack, which had been raised from the bottom of the Elizabeth River and placed in the masonry dry dock, would suit as a platform on which to construct their ironclad. Williamson thought it would, though both Brooke and Porter were dubious. They had each envisioned a flat-bottomed vessel. With some justification they feared that using the Merrimack’s V-shaped hull would give the ship too great a draft for operations in coastal waters. Nevertheless, they allowed themselves to be convinced, since, as they put it in their letter to Mallory, “it would appear that this is our only chance to get a suitable vessel in a short time.”12

  By mid-July the work was under way. Porter supervised the refit as carpenters cut away the charred timbers on the Merrimack and began to erect a frame for the casemate. Williamson focused on repairing the cranky engines. Brooke designed the rifled guns that would make up the ship’s armament, and he took charge of procuring the iron plate that would constitute its armor shield.

  In the end, it was the iron armor that proved to be the bottleneck. Tests conducted in October proved that two-inch iron plate was dramatically more effective than one-inch plate, even several layers of it. But there was only one facility in all of the Confederacy capable of rolling two-inch plate (the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond), and covering the Virginia’s casemate with two layers of two-inch iron plate would require nearly eight hundred tons of iron. There was simply not that much iron available in all of Virginia. Brooke scavenged scrap iron, old smoothbore cannon, even tools, all of which was melted down into iron plate, but he still came up short. To make up the difference, the Confederacy began ripping up hundreds of miles of its own railroads, a measure of both its industrial weakness and its desperation.* Even with crews working around the clock, production was limited and frustratingly slow. By October only two tons of the two-inch iron armor had reached Gosport, and the last of it did not arrive until February 1862. The Confederacy had begun with a considerable head start in the arms race to construct an ironclad warship, but as delay followed delay, the window of opportunity was swiftly closing.13

  Mallory agonized over every delay, and he had to play referee when Brooke and Porter quarreled over proposed changes in the design. Weary of the squabbling, Mallory sent Lieutenant Catesby ap Roger Jones to Gosport in November to take charge of the project and eventually to become the ship’s executive officer. Jones had an impressive pedigree: he was the son of Roger Jones (the ap in his name was Welsh for “son of”), who had been the Army’s adjutant general, and he was the nephew of Thomas ap Catesby Jones, who had commanded the U.S. naval squadron in the Battle for New Orleans during the War of 1812. Moreover, Jones himself was a competent professional, and events would prove him to have been a good choice. But to command the ship, Mallory wanted a more senior officer, someone who would be aggressive enough to take full advantage of the vessel’s presumed capabilities. Such a disproportionate amount of the Confederacy’s naval resources was being committed to this project that it was crucial to have just the right man in command lest the vessel’s capabilities be squandered. Mallory wanted a sea warrior, and he chose sixty-one-year-old Captain Franklin Buchanan.

  After being raised from the bottom of the Elizabeth River, the USS Merrimack was placed in a stone dry dock at the Gosport Navy Yard and converted into the ironclad CSS Virginia. Note the iron ram positioned on the bow. (Ned Bradford, ed., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War)

  One hundred miles away in Washington, officials had known for some time what the Confederates were up to in Norfolk. The Union’s navy secretary, Gideon Welles, had even obtained a copy of Mallory’s May 8 letter to the Confederate Congress claiming that one rebel ironclad vessel could “encounter, with a fair prospect of success,” the entire U.S. Navy. At first Welles did not take this boast seriously, his skepticism fed by the reaction of most of his senior naval officers, who scoffed at the notion. But all through May and June, news of the rebel activity in Norfolk continued to reach him. In the middle of the nineteenth century there was no such thing as industrial secrecy, and Welles knew almost as soon as Mallory did when the Merrimack’s hull was raised, when it was placed in dry dock, and when workmen began to reconfigure its superstructure. Southern newspapers proved a particularly valuable source of information and kept Welles up to date on the ship’s progress, even publishing the results of the ordnance testing against one- and two-inch iron plate.14

  By the end of June Welles decided that the Union Navy needed to develop a counterweapon, and on July 4 he asked Congress for an appropriation of $1.5 million to construct three experimental ironclad warships. To determine appropriate designs for these craft, that same legislation authorized the creation of an Ironclad Board consisting of three serving naval officers, all of them captains. The bill worked its way through Congress with unusual speed, and President Lincoln signed it on August 4. Three days later Welles issued a public solicitation of designs for an American ironclad warship. Like Perry and Barclay on Lake Erie, Welles and Mallory were engaged in a naval arms race for the control of a strategically critical body of water.15

  Despite that, events continued with measured progress in Washington. Fifteen proposals were submitted to the Ironclad Board, though only two of them received serious attention. One was a gunboat designed by Samuel Pook that was submitted by an enthusiastic entrepreneur named Cornelius Bushnell; the other was for a more or less conventional frigate with iron plating. The Navy captains on the Ironclad Board, all veterans of the sailing era, were skeptical. Both designs called for the proposed vessels to carry a huge amount of iron plate above the waterline, and some board members openly expressed doubts that either ship would float. This is when Bushnell began to play a crucial if curious role. Bushnell had a lot invested (both financially as well as personally) in getting a contract, so he decided to verify his design with the man who he had been told was the nation’s most gifted expert on maritime engineering: the Swedish-born immigrant John Ericsson. Visiting Ericsson at his New York residence, Bushnell asked him to calculate the buoyancy of the two vessels under consideration. Ericsson did so, assuring Bushnell rather quickly that both ships would indeed float. But then Ericsson asked Bushnell if, as long as he was there, he would like to see a “floating battery” that Ericsson himself had designed, and the inventor brought out a model of a flat-bottomed vessel whose salient feature was a rotating cylinder in the middle of its flat deck. Bushnell saw at once the potential of such a vessel, and he asked if he could show it to Welles. Ericsson agreed.16

  Bushnell went straight to Welles’s home in Hartford, Connecticut, where he declared somewhat melodramatically that “the country was safe because I had found a battery which would make us master of the situation as far as the ocean was concerned.” Welles urged him to present the model to the Ironclad Board, but Bushnell did more than that. He got William H. Seward to write him a letter of introduction to Abraham Lincoln, and he took Ericsson’s model straight to the White House. Among his many other interests, Lincoln was fond of gadgets. Years earlier, when he had still been a prairie lawyer, he had obtained a patent for a device to float river steamers over sand bars, and during the war he was a frequent visitor to the Washington Navy Yard, where he liked to observe ordnance tests. Intrigued by Ericsson’s model, he agreed to accompany Bushnell to the next meeting of the Ironclad Board. At that meeting (on September 13), the members of the board remained skeptical, but Lincoln made his feelings known in a characteristic way, remarking: “All I have to say is what the girl said when she put her foot into stocking: ‘It strikes me there’s something in it.’”17

  Even with that encouragement, the members of the board hesitated. They recalled that Ericsson had designed the screw sloop Princeton back in 1844, and rather unfairly they connected him with the explosion of one of the Princeton’s big guns during a cruise on the Potomac, an accident that had killed the secretaries of state and war, among ot
hers. Bushnell protested that the gun that had exploded was Robert F. Stockton’s Peacemaker, not Ericsson’s Oregon Gun, but the captains remained unmoved.* Charles Henry Davis was weary of Bushnell’s impassioned advocacy; he suggested that Bushnell “take the little thing [the model] home and worship it.”18

  Bushnell decided that the only man who could convince these skeptics of the little ship’s technical feasibility was Ericsson himself. But Bushnell also knew that Ericsson would be less than eager to appear before the Navy captains as a supplicant. With some justification, the Swedish inventor believed that he had been ill treated by the Navy ever since the 1844 incident on the Princeton, and he had resolved long ago never again to set foot in Washington. Aware of this, Bushnell was not completely honest about the reception the model had received in Washington. He told Ericsson that the board members had been impressed by the “genius” of the design but that one member had asked a few technical questions that Bushnell had not been able to answer. “Well,” Ericsson replied, “I’ll go—I’ll go tonight.” “From that moment,” Bushnell wrote later, “I knew that the success of the affair was assured.”19

  Not quite. Both Bushnell and Welles knew that if the captains on the Ironclad Board greeted Ericsson coolly, the touchy inventor was likely to withdraw in a huff. Aware that time was running out, Welles urged Commodore Joseph Smith, the board’s chairman, to give the inventor a fair and cordial hearing. Even then, the meeting was nearly disastrous. Ericsson was prepared for compliments, not criticism. He bristled from the start, but the mood in the room turned when, in responding to a question about the vessel’s likely stability in a seaway, Ericsson became so involved in the answer that he delivered a lengthy and technically detailed dissertation that left the board members both silenced and impressed.

  Impressed, but not yet convinced. It required another presentation in Welles’s office to satisfy the board members. At the end of that meeting, Ericsson declared that his ship could be built in ninety days. Welles asked him how much it would cost. “Two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars,” Ericsson answered at once—only a fraction of the appropriation Welles had available. Welles then turned to face the board members and asked them one by one if a contract should be granted. Receiving an affirmative from each, Welles told Ericsson to get started; a contract would be forthcoming.20 It was the fifteenth of September. Down in Norfolk, Confederates had already raised the Merrimack, cut away its charred scantlings, and redesigned and reconfigured it as an ironclad. On the other hand, the Tredegar Iron Works had only that month begun to produce the first sections of two-inch iron plate for the vessel’s armor shield. The arms race was still winnable, but only if Ericsson could make good on his promise to build the ship in ninety days.*

  Ericsson subcontracted various parts of the ship to other companies (something his Confederate counterparts could not do), but he personally supervised the critical components: the engines, the assembly of the hull, and in particular the novel revolving turret. This, indeed, was the key design feature of Ericsson’s battery: twenty-one feet across and eight feet high, the turret was constructed of eight layers of overlapping one-inch iron plate, and it revolved on a spindle driven by a small steam engine. Inside that turret were only two guns—the ship’s entire armament—but they were large-caliber guns, and because the turret could revolve, they could be pointed in any direction independent of the ship’s heading. Workers began construction on October 25, and the vessel was launched ninety-three days later. At the launching, Ericsson was vindicated, and his critics silenced, when it floated with exactly the draft that he had calculated.

  For the command of this unusual vessel, Welles chose forty-three-year-old Lieutenant John L. Worden of New York, a twenty-seven-year Navy veteran. Unlike Buchanan, Worden did not have a reputation as an aggressive sea warrior—most of his active-duty service had been spent ashore in the Naval Observatory. But perhaps Welles felt that he owed Worden something. During the Fort Sumter crisis, Welles had sent him to carry secret orders to the commander of Fort Pickens near Pensacola. Worden had completed the assignment, successfully delivering the orders to the post’s commanding officer, but by the time he was ready to return to Washington, the first shots of the war had been fired at Fort Sumter. Trusting to fate, Worden nevertheless bought a rail ticket north. He was arrested almost at once by Confederate authorities in Alabama and held as a prisoner for seven months before he was released on November 1 due to his failing health. After a month’s sick leave, Worden received orders on January 12 to report to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to take command of the Monitor. In an unconscious echo of the orders Mallory prepared for Buchanan, Commodore Smith, who headed Welles’s Ironclad Board, wrote Worden, “This vessel is an experiment. I believe you are the right sort of officer to put in command of her.”21

  This schematic drawing of the USS Monitor is based on John Ericsson’s original plan. Note the four-bladed propeller in the top (rear) section, the horizontal gear that turned the turret in the center drawing, and at bottom, the ladder to the pilothouse and the anchor well. (Ned Bradford, ed., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War)

  In receipt of these orders, Worden immediately went down to the Navy Yard to view the famous Ericsson Battery, which Ericsson now decided should be called Monitor. Worden was less than overwhelmed by his first glimpse of the strange little craft, and he acknowledged his orders by cautiously expressing the hope that “she may prove a success.” “At all events,” he added gamely, “I am quite willing to be an agent in testing her capabilities.” If Worden withheld judgment about the Monitor, the crew of that little vessel was equally uncertain about their new commander. Worden’s health was still precarious when he reported aboard his new command on January 16, and he did not make much of an impression on the crew. He was thin, pale, and (in the opinion of at least one member of the wardroom) “effeminate looking.” But Worden’s appearance belied a fierce determination. For the next month, “everything was hurry and confusion” on the Monitor as Worden oversaw all the thousands of tiny details necessary to a ship’s commissioning. The vessel was afloat, but it was not yet finished. As the final touches were added to the berthing spaces and officer’s cabins, supplies of all kinds, from dishware to chamber pots, were loaded on board, including powder and shot for the vessel’s two eleven-inch Dahlgren guns.22

  Since the ship had only two guns, both Ericsson and Worden wanted the biggest-caliber guns they could get. Indeed, Ericsson had specifically requested that the Monitor be armed with new twelve-inch guns, but none were available. He therefore had to settle for two eleven-inch guns “borrowed” from other vessels in New York Harbor. Those guns came with a stipulation that no more than fifteen pounds of powder could be used for any single charge, a legacy of the explosion of Stockton’s Peacemaker on the Princeton nearly twenty years before. If time had allowed, Worden might have been allowed to proof the guns by firing successive rounds from each one using progressively larger charges until it was clear that the weapon could bear the strain of larger loads without fracturing. But there was no time for such niceties in the current crisis.

  On February 27 (the same day that the Merrimack was put into commission as the Virginia in Gosport), the Monitor embarked on its first sea trial. It was nearly disastrous. The engines worked well enough, driving the ironclad through the water at a respectable seven or eight knots, but the helmsman called out that the ship would not answer the rudder. The ship’s great weight created such a powerful forward momentum that the tiller ropes connecting the wheel to the rudder had no effect. The Monitor ran back and forth across New York Harbor “like a drunken man on a side walk,” as one crewman recalled, finally slamming into the Brooklyn dock near the city gas works with a jarring collision. Ignominiously, it had to be towed back to its berth in the Navy Yard. Notified of the problem, Ericsson came on board, went below, and began to tinker with the lines and pulleys that transferred orders from the wheel to the rudder. By multiplying the ratio, he soon fixed the problem. B
ut this incident reminded Worden that, as Smith had warned him, “this vessel is an experiment.”23

  Departure was postponed for a day due to the weather, but on March 6 the Monitor left the Brooklyn Navy Yard bound for Hampton Roads. The journey itself was an adventure. In addition to relying on its own engines, the Monitor was also under tow, and it had an escort of two gunboats. Despite the predictions of the skeptics, the Monitor rode the water well, and the first day out, no new problems were identified. The engines clanked along satisfactorily, and from the top of the Monitor’s turret (the only part of the vessel where a man might stand while the ship was under way) Worden watched the tow line dipping in and out of the water between his vessel and the tug four hundred feet dead ahead. Off to each side were the escorting gunboats; more distantly, he could see sailing vessels running in and out of New York. So far, the ironclad was performing magnificently.24

  This was certainly good news to the fifty-seven men who made up the Monitor’s crew, all of whom were volunteers. Rather than accept men arbitrarily assigned to him from the receiving ships in the harbor, Worden had asked for volunteers, and he was gratified when more men volunteered than he needed. But if the men were enthusiastic and patriotic, they were also mostly inexperienced. The ship’s executive officer, Samuel Dana Greene, was only twenty-one and just three years out of the Academy. Its paymaster was so innocent that he asked Worden if it was really necessary for him to buy a uniform: couldn’t he just continue to wear his civilian clothes on board? Besides Worden himself, only the ship’s chief engineer, thirty-four-year-old Alban Stimers, was a veteran of long experience, and he was on board mainly to observe and report on how the Monitor functioned at sea. Of the ship’s crew of fifty-seven, only nine had sufficient experience to be rated as ordinary seamen.25