The officers and men on the Monitor chafed at being thus tethered. Paymaster Keeler opined, “The fact is the Government is getting to regard the Monitor in pretty much the same light as an over careful housewife regards her ancient china Set—too valuable to lose, too useful to keep as a relic, yet anxious that all shall know what she owns and that she can use it when the occasion demands.”66 Somewhat defensively, Union veterans explained that the Monitor’s job was to protect the Minnesota, which it did. If the Virginia really wanted to renew the fight, why didn’t it come out into the roadstead to threaten the Union squadron? Eventually both sides grudgingly decided to call the battle a draw, and so it has been described in most history books ever since.
Such arguments illustrate both the continued partisanship between the sections and the importance of a warrior’s code among naval combatants. In reality, deciding which ship left the scene first, or even which vessel “won” the fight, is no more historically valuable than deciding whether North Carolinians or Virginians ascended further up the slope of Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. The more important question is how the action of March 9 affected the campaign. And in answering that question, it is clear that the little Monitor’s timely arrival effectively neutralized the offensive potential of the Virginia and preserved Union control of Hampton Roads. The Federal Navy remained in the roadstead after March 9, and McClellan’s long-planned peninsular campaign went ahead as scheduled. Moreover, the Union Navy remained in Hampton Roads for the duration of the war. When in the spring of 1864 Ulysses S. Grant sought to outflank Lee’s defenses in Virginia, he took advantage of the Union possession of Hampton Roads to send a force (the Army of the James) to Richmond’s back door. That winter, when the Confederacy sent delegates to talk with Lincoln to discuss a possible end to the war, they met on board a Federal vessel anchored safely and securely in Hampton Roads.
This photograph of the Monitor’s turret, taken after the battle, shows some of the battle scars from its fight with the Virginia, including large dents in the turret just left of the empty gun port. Note, too, that the pilothouse has now been protected by sloping sides. The two men at right are William Flye and Albert Campbell, two of the ship’s officers. (Mariners’ Museum)
By then, both the Virginia and the Monitor had departed the historical stage. When McClellan’s troops advanced up the Virginia peninsula in the summer of 1862, the Confederates were forced to evacuate Norfolk. Because the Virginia could neither ascend the James River nor survive without its base, Confederate leaders felt compelled to destroy it to prevent it from falling into the hands of their enemies. On May 12, two months and three days after its epic fight with the Monitor, the Virginia’s own crew did what Federal guns could not. Behind Craney Island on the west bank of the Elizabeth River, a massive explosion broke the mighty Virginia into pieces. Then the surviving pieces were destroyed in subsequent explosions. Eventually its anchor and a piece of its crankshaft were recovered and are now on display outside the Confederate Museum in Richmond. The rest of it lies buried, presumably forever, in the landfill west of the river’s mouth.
The Monitor lived only seven months more. En route to Charleston, South Carolina, under tow, it encountered a storm off Cape Hatteras, that graveyard of the Atlantic, and in a deadly reprise of its experience off the New Jersey coast, water worked its way through the seal between the turret and the deck, and sea spray inundated the blower pipes, putting out the engines and making the pumps unworkable. This time, however, the storm did not abate, and on the last day of the year, the Monitor sank in 240 feet of water seventeen miles off the coast, taking sixteen men down with her. The wreckage was discovered in 1973, and since then various parts of it have been recovered. In August 2002 a team of U.S. Navy divers and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists raised the 120-ton turret and its two Dahlgren guns, and these, along with the engine, crankshaft, and propeller, are on exhibit at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, only a few miles from the site of its 1862 battle with the Virginia.
Franklin Buchanan survived his wound. Promoted to the rank of full admiral (the only Confederate naval officer ever to bear that rank), he assumed command of the rebel squadron in Mobile Bay in 1863, where he oversaw the construction of the ironclad Tennessee, which he took as his flagship. On August 5, 1864, the day that Farragut “damned the torpedoes,” he fought a hopeless action at close range against Farragut’s entire Union squadron until his vessel was overwhelmed. Again wounded, this time he was compelled to surrender his ship and was taken prisoner.
Catesby Jones did not get to keep command of the Virginia. Supplanted by the more senior Josiah Tattnall, he escaped the painful humiliation of ordering the ship’s destruction. Jones subsequently commanded the Confederate naval facility at Columbus, Georgia, where his principal duty was to supervise the manufacture of naval guns, including the guns that made up the battery on Buchanan’s doomed Tennessee.
John Worden, too, survived the battle. Eventually he recovered his sight and was restored to active duty. He commanded the monitor Montauk in operations against Charleston in 1863 and finished the war as a captain. After the war, he was promoted to rear admiral and served for five years (1869–74) as superintendent of the Naval Academy, where the drill field is named for him. On Friday afternoons in good weather, midshipmen to this day march past Buchanan House en route to Worden Field.
As for the young Samuel Dana Greene, who commanded the Monitor during the brief period of fighting after Worden was injured, he spent the rest of his life defending himself from the charge that instead of continuing the fight, he initially fled the scene before bringing the Monitor back to renew the duel. Although Worden supported Greene without reservation, Greene suffered—almost physically—from the whispered imputations of others. In 1884, when he was asked to write a short article for Century magazine’s “Battles and Leaders” series, Greene described his role in the battle in some detail, providing the best view we now have of what happened inside the Monitor’s turret during the fight with the Virginia. He wrote the article out in longhand, addressed and mailed it, then returned to his office in the Portsmouth Navy Yard, put a gun to his head, and took his own life. As one authority notes: “His death is perhaps the only fatality directly attributable to the battle of March 9, 1862.”67
Neither the Virginia nor the Monitor survived the year. The Virginia was destroyed by her own crew in May when the Confederates had to evacuate Norfolk, and the Monitor, depicted here in a contemporary drawing, went down in a storm off Cape Hatteras in December. (U.S. Naval Institute)
The Monitor’s success against the Virginia led to a severe case of “monitor fever” in the Union states. Gideon Welles in particular decided that the Monitor was a kind of “magic bullet” and ordered the construction of ten more. Eventually the United States constructed scores of monitors of various sizes and design, including the Montauk, which Worden commanded off Charleston. The Confederacy, too, tried to replicate the success of the Virginia, but the lack of the needed industrial support system made this largely an exercise in frustration. Confederate authorities began construction on a total of fifty-two ironclads, and they succeeded in completing, or nearly completing, thirty-one of them. But most of these had to be destroyed by their builders before they ever fired a shot when Yankee armies captured their bases. Only a half dozen Confederate ironclads ever saw combat.
After the Battle of Hampton Roads, writers and pundits fell over one another in predicting that the advent of ironclad warships in Hampton Roads marked not merely a milestone but the passing of one era and the beginning of another. And more than a few mourned the transition. The writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who visited Hampton Roads a few weeks after the battle and went on board the Monitor, was one such. Describing the Monitor as looking like a “giant rat trap,” he predicted that its very existence proved that “all the pomp and splendor of naval warfare are gone by.” Men would no longer be warriors of the sea, he wrote, but rather servants of insenti
ent machines. No more would personal bravery and calculated audacity decide the outcome of battles.
“Human strife is to be transferred from the heart and personality of man into cunning contrivances of machinery, which by-the-by, will fight out our wars with only the clank and smash of iron, strewing the field with broken engines but damaging nobody’s little finger except by accident.”68
Such predictions were premature. Warfare remained very much a human activity, and death and dismemberment would remain its cost and consequence. Nor did armored ships mark so clearly the end of one era or the beginning of another. Iron plate, after all, is not the same thing as a steel hull, and it would be twenty-one years before the U.S. Navy commissioned its first steel-hulled warship. After an initial enthusiasm for armored ships in the years following the Civil War, by the turn of the century it became evident that no amount of armor, even several feet of it, could fully protect a vessel from the larger and heavier naval guns that were being built at the same time. Then, too, heavy armor made ships not only slow but also prodigious consumers of fuel. To save weight, warship designers began placing armor around only the most vulnerable parts of warships, such as the engine and the magazine. Eventually even this became superfluous, and armor plating was scaled back further until by the end of the twentieth century it had all but disappeared. Iron-armored they may have been, but the Confederate ram Virginia and the Union Monitor were not the lineal grandparents of modern steel warships.
Those two vessels did, however, significantly redefine the character of naval combat. The officers and sailors in either vessel would not have felt terribly out of place in a World War I submarine, and even if they would not know what to make of the vast array of electronics in a modern combat information center, at least they could intuit the feeling of being a part of a complex machine of war. For it was not in the technology of armor plate or solid shot that the duel in Hampton Roads showed the path to the future, but in the roles played by the officers and men who fed the fires, manned the guns, and fought one another in the world’s first battle between floating, self-propelled machines of war.
[PART THREE]
ARMORED CRUISERS AND EMPIRE
The Battle of Manila Bay May 1, 1898
IN THE THIRD OF A CENTURY BETWEEN THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR in 1865 and the American declaration of war against Spain in 1898, the United States was transformed. Even as the nation struggled painfully through the period of broken pledges and sectional resentment that history has labeled Reconstruction, it also strengthened its hold on the North American continent, strapping it together with railroads and telegraph wires and stamping out the last resistance from the native tribes. At the same time, American industry became a force of historic proportions. Triggered in part by the mass production of war matériel from 1861 to 1865, fueled by new developments in engineering and metallurgy, and fed by a cheap labor pool of immigrants, the United States became an economic and industrial powerhouse by the 1890s, establishing the foundation that would eventually make it the most powerful nation on earth. If the rest of the world failed to take sufficient note of this historic phenomenon, it was in part because until the very end of the century the transformative significance of these developments was not immediately evident beyond America’s insulating and protecting oceans.
The U.S. Navy did not keep pace with the economic and industrial explosion. The fleet of ironclad monitors was placed in ordinary (what later generations would call “mothballs”); the blockade fleet, composed of mostly converted merchantmen, was sold off; the fast cruisers, designed to hunt down rebel raiders such as the Shenandoah and the Alabama, were scrapped. By the 1880s the United States Navy consisted of little more than a handful of antique steamers—museum pieces by the standard of most European navies—all of them fully equipped with masts and sails for their day-to-day work of “showing the flag” on distant station patrols. In his 1880s short story “The Canterville Ghost,” Oscar Wilde provoked a knowing chuckle from his British audience when his central character contradicted an American who declared that her country had no ruins or curiosities. “No ruins! No curiosities!” the ghost exclaimed. “You have your Navy and your manners.”1
For Americans, however, there seemed to be little reason to pour public money into a revitalized Navy, for unlike Oscar Wilde’s England, the United States had no proximate enemies unless one counted the western Indians (who would not have been impressed by American battleships in any case), nor did it have overseas colonies to protect. To most Americans, the small, antiquated U.S. Navy of the 1870s and ’80s seemed perfectly adequate to the limited task assigned to it. Indeed, it is possible to argue that there was little reason for the Navy to abandon its low profile even at the end of the century, for in the 1890s there were still no perceivable threats on, or even over, the horizon.
Change was coming nonetheless. It was evidenced in 1883 when Congress authorized the first three vessels of what would eventually become a new generation of steam-and-steel warships: the “New Navy.” The very next year, Stephen B. Luce founded the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, and hired an otherwise undistinguished naval officer named Alfred Thayer Mahan to lecture there. At the end of the decade, Mahan published his collected lectures in book form as The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. Citing Britain’s domination of the Age of Sail as his case study, Mahan declared that naval power was the principal instrument of national greatness and, by implication at least, suggested how the United States, too, could achieve the status of great power. It was the existence of a dominant battleship fleet, Mahan declared, that had allowed Britain to secure control of the sea and thereby control not merely three-quarters of the globe but also the trade routes and the colonial empire that brought her wealth, power, and influence.2
The astonishing success of Mahan’s book was more a matter of good timing than keen insight. The same year that it was published, the U.S. Census Bureau noted that there was no longer an area in the western United States that could properly be designated as “the frontier.” Not only did this prompt young Frederick Turner to offer his interpretive essay about the wellsprings of the American character at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, it also foreshadowed a turning point in America’s role in the world by implying, at least, that the United States might now begin to look outward, beyond its protecting oceans, to find a broader outlet and a bigger stage for its national energy. Mahan’s essay thus provided a credible rationale for the program of U.S. naval expansion that was already under way. At the same time, it provided a justification for Europeans to compete in what amounted to a naval arms race—a competition that would last into the next century and play a role in the catastrophe that engulfed Europe in 1914.
It is entirely possible that the United States would have built its “New Navy” even without the influence of Mahan’s book, for at the end of the nineteenth century, the United States was a nation emerging from its awkward teenage years: a bit gawky still—its clothes a bit too short at the wrists and ankles—but bursting with the strength and power of imminent adulthood. At the end of the decade, the United States found employment for its new steam-and-steel warships by fighting what Secretary of State John Hay famously called a “splendid little war” against the fading Spanish Empire. It was a war with broad implications and historic significance, for it thrust the United States into the ranks of great powers and thereby signaled a dramatic sea change for both the United States, and for the world. Though the conflict was ostensibly rooted in American concern about Spanish misrule in Cuba, the milestone naval engagement of this war in the age of the battleship was one that involved no battleships at all and which took place almost exactly halfway around the world from Cuba, in a remote bay that most Americans had never even heard of.
ON THE NIGHT of April 30, 1898, a column of six American warships, trailed by three small support vessels, steamed purposefully toward the three-mile-wide gap of water that marked the entrance to Manila Bay in the S
panish Philippines. The U.S. ships were all but invisible from the shore. They had recently been repainted, their peacetime white covered by a wartime gray-green so that they would blend with the sea, and they were running blacked out, each vessel burning only a single fantail light that was carefully screened by baffles to ensure that it showed only from directly astern, thus allowing the ships to follow one another single file through the unfamiliar waters of the channel. The lead vessel was the 5,870-ton protected (that is, partially armored) cruiser USS Olympia, and on its open bridge wing Commodore George Dewey peered into the dark waters ahead. At age sixty, Dewey was of medium stature with a compact but no longer trim figure, looking much like a man who was entirely comfortable with himself. His pale brown hair was graying at the temples, and except for a rather spectacular walrus mustache, he was clean-shaven above the constricting stock of his white uniform. His face was dominated by a slightly hooked nose and a high forehead on which rested a pillbox-shaped officer’s cap, its brim decorated with the gold “scrambled eggs” of his rank. As usual, however, his expression was unreadable; like the surface of the water around him, he projected placidity and calmness.
Indeed, there was little that appeared warlike in this tableau. When the new moon broke through the patchy clouds overhead, it left a bright sheen on the calm water, though Lieutenant C. G. Culkins recalled that in the distance, “dancing pillars of cloud, pulsating with tropical lightning,” provided dramatic backlighting. As the Olympia turned into the channel between the dark headlands, high “volcanic peaks densely covered with tropical foliage” jutted out from the water on both sides. Late as it was, there were a large number of sailors topside. At 10:40 the word had quietly been passed for the men to stand to the guns, and they stood now at their battle stations, happy to be there not only because of the excitement of impending action but because it was “oppressively hot” below decks; “the ship,” one officer recalled, “was like a furnace.” Or at least it was until around eleven, when a light shower passed over the column of warships, cooling the air but also dampening the white duck uniforms of the men, though, as one recalled, “nobody noticed such trifles.”3
Decision at Sea Page 16