The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (53 page)

Her 21 killed and wounded, including Buchanan, were removed, after which the officers surveyed the effects of the fight on the ship herself. The damage, though considerable, was not vital. In spite of having been exposed to the concentrated fire of at least one hundred guns, her armor showed only dents, no cracks, and nothing inside the shell was hurt. Outside was another matter. She had lost her iron beak, and two of her guns had had their muzzles blown off; besides which, one of her crew later wrote, “one anchor, the smoke-stack, and the steam pipes were shot away. Railings, stanchions, boat-davits, everything was swept clean.”

All this seemed a small enough price to pay for the victory they
had won that afternoon and the one they had prepared for completion tomorrow. Officers and men stayed up on deck, too elated to sleep, and watched the
Congress
burn. She lit up the Roads from across the way and paled the second-quarter moon, which came up early. From time to time, another of her loaded guns went off with a deep reverberant boom, but the big effect did not come until 1 o’clock in the morning, when her magazine blew up. After that, the Confederate crew turned in to get some sleep. Ashore, a Georgia private, writing home of the sea battle he had watched, exulted that the
Virginia
had “invented a new way of destroying the blockade. Instead of raising it, she sinks it. Or I believe she is good at both,” he added, “for the one she burned was raised to a pretty considerable height when the magazine exploded.”

A telegram reached Washington from Fort Monroe within two hours of the explosion of the
Congress
, informing the War Department that the Confederates’ indestructible “floating battery” had sunk two frigates and would sink three more tomorrow before moving against the fortress itself—after which there was no telling what might happen.

Lincoln had his cabinet in session by 6.30, the prevailing gloom being broken only by the Secretary of War, who put on for his colleagues a remarkable display of jangled nerves. The jaunty Seward was glum for once; Chase was petulant; the President himself seemed quite unstrung; but Stanton was unquestionably the star of the piece. According to Welles, who did not like him, he was “inexpressibly ludicrous” with his “wild, frantic talk, action, and rage” as he “sat down and jumped up … swung his arms, scolded and raved.” The
Virginia
would “change the whole character of the war,” the lawyer-statesman cried. “She will destroy,
seriatim
, every naval vessel; she will lay all the cities on the seaboard under contribution.” He would recall Burnside, abandon Port Royal, and “notify the governors and municipal authorities in the North to take instant measures to protect their harbors.” Then, crossing to a window which commanded a long view of the Potomac, he looked out and, trembling visibly, exclaimed: “Not unlikely, we shall have a shell or a cannonball from one of her guns in the White House before we leave this room.”

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 to 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.