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Monitor And Virginia (Merrimack)

Hampton Roads Poster

Folded and two-sided the front features a print of Frank C. Muller's CSS Virginia Engages USS Congress, 8 March

1862, while the back shows a highly detailed map of the battle. 31"x 20". Front: The sinister-looking CSS Virginia battles the USS Congress one day before her infamous battle with the USS Monitor. Poster includes a worldwide chronology of ironclad history. Back: Includes a chronology of the Battle of Hampton Roads, brief biographies of the ships and commanders involved, the first-ever published illustration of the water routes taken by the CSS Virginia and the USS Monitor during the battle, and much more.

On March 19, 1862, a naval engagement near Chesapeake Bay in Virginia ended with no decisive victor and without claiming a single life. Yet no one has ever doubted that the bloodless fight changed naval warfare forever.

Hundreds of spectators watched transfixed from the surrounding shoreline, two revolutionary high-tech ironclad warships-the hulking Confederate CSS Virginia (ne USS Merrimack) and the Union's sleeker and smaller "iron pot," the USS Monitor-squared off in a sensational, protracted, smoke-shrouded duel in the eight-mile-long channel of Hampton Roads at the confluence of, the James, Elizabeth, and Nansemond Rivers. Just "the sounds of the conflict," recalled one of the Monitor's crew, "were terrible." To one soldier watching breathlessly from nearby Fortress Monroe, the first all-iron sea battle in history seemed nothing less than "one of the greatest Naval engagements that has ever occurred since the beginning of the world."

As naval engagements go, truth to say, it was not even the most dramatic of the Civil War. For more than four hours the two relatively sluggish ships circled each other with agonizing slowness, all but parodying classic sea duels from the age of sail. The Monitor and Virginia mounted powerful guns and left plenty of dents on each other's thick armor plates, but neither managed to inflict any lasting damage. The Virginia's most formidable weapon, its forward ram, had broken off the day before.

The battle's only real casualty turned out to be the captain of the Monitor, 43-year-old New Yorker John L. Worden, who had the bad luck to be peering through a viewing slit in the pilothouse at the moment a shell burst outside, blinding him, though only temporarily. Three of the Monitor's crew did tumble heavily to the deck when another shell struck full force against her hull, and two of them lapsed into unconsciousness, but they, too, soon recovered. The Virginia counted a few mildly injured seamen of her own, but nothing serious. At the end of the long day, both ships simply ceased firing and steamed off in different directions almost simultaneously, presumably to fight another day. But they never did.

Both sides claimed victory afterward, igniting a debate that continues to this day. Did the Monitor retreat to shallow waters where the heavier Virginia could not follow? Or did the Virginia chug off first, leaking badly, to resume its defense of the nearby waterways leading to the Confederate capital of Richmond? Did the Virginia win by dealing a staggering blow the day before to the less advanced vessels of the Union Navy? Or did the Monitor triumph by halting her rival's deadly rampage and turning her away before she could inflict further damage? The controversy among historians rages on, but on one subject everyone agrees, then and now: Naval warfare would never be the same again.

For one thing, the Monitor's unique revolving gun turret revolutionized seagoing weapons technology-at least in concept. To say the least, the turret did not function properly during the engagement. "It was difficult to start it revolving," said a crew member named Samuel Dana Greene, "or, when once started, to stop it." After a while it simply turned round and round on its own, requiring gunners to fire on the fly whenever the Virginia returned to dizzying view. Nonetheless, warships would thereafter feature guns that rotated so that ships themselves would not have to waste time turning about to fire on enemy vessels.

Of equal significance, the age of sail abruptly came to an end on March 9, for at Hampton Roads the day before the famous duel the Virginia had decimated the Federal blockading squadron, ramming or shelling three wooden warships into submission, leaving two of them ablaze, killing some 250 sailors, and inflicting more damage than the U.S. Navy suffered in a single day until Pearl Harbor, some fourscore years later. The catastrophe drove Abraham Lincoln's cabinet into what Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles described as a frenzy of "excitement and alarm:" Even the usually unflappable Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, appeared "the most frightened man on that gloomy day," Welles remembered with competitive satisfaction. Stanton was "almost frantic" in his worry that the entire North might soon be under siege from the impregnable Rebel behemoth.

Only the arrival of the Monitor late that evening, after being hastily towed down the Atlantic coast from the Brooklyn yard where she had been launched, had prevented far more grievous destruction at Hampton Roads, not to mention hysteria in Washington. An artist who portrayed the historic encounter years later titled his canvas Last o f the Wooden Navy, and the battered, smoldering hulks of once proud Union warships like the USS Congress and USS Cumberland testified to its accuracy.

For many, the Monitor-Virginia duel also signaled the end of the age of romance on the high seas-the rise of the machine at the expense of the heroic individual. To Herman Melville, the Monitor's successful defense of the remnants of the Union fleet represented something decidedly unglamorous: "victory without the gaud / Of glory," as he put it, with "plain mechanic power" now "placed- / Where War belongs - / Among the trades and artisans:" Here, Melville believed, was the dawn of a modern era of naval warfare "beyond the strife of fleets heroic." Nathaniel Hawthorne was more succinct: "All the pomp and splendor of naval warfare are gone by" It is no surprise that one of the most famous prints depicting the battle, Endicott & Company's popular lithograph The First Naval Conflict Between Iron Clad Vessels, featured celebratory portraiture not of Captain Worden or his crew but of the vessel's Swedish-born inventor John Ericsson and the machinery he invented.

As for the two ships, they never met each other again. Two months after the Battle of Hampton Roads, on May 11, 1862, the crew blew up the Virginia rather than allow it to fall into Union hands after General McClellan's army had forced the Confederacy to abandon her anchorage in Norfolk. The Monitor saw brief action at Drewry's Bluff but, unable to elevate her guns high enough to fire on Confederate fortifications, did no damage there. Nine months after Hampton Roads, under tow to duty in the Carolinas, she capsized in a winter gale off Cape Hatteras and on December 31 sank to the bottom, taking 16 men with her.

Once described derisively as a "cheese-box on a raft," the original Monitor, like the accurate replica, was actually a substantial 173 feet long, with a broad 41-footwide deck that, after Hampton Roads, carried a protective canvas tent strung over the turret to keep crew members below as cool as possible. Abraham Lincoln himself roamed the deck at will, two months after the vessel had returned from her world-changing fight.

Lincoln first glimpsed the "model of a strange, altogether new sea-going war monster" on a momentous 1861 winter day at the White House. Besieged with "adverse opinions from several other old salts" who insisted the proposed ship would never float, much less change history, Lincoln sent the project forward, remarking, "All I have to say is what the girl said when she stuck her foot in the stocking. It strikes me there's something in it."

Her sad, anticlimactic death confirmed worries that the new ironclads were less than seaworthy. And there the story might well have ended. Though Union and Confederate yards alike quickly produced improved ironclads, iron rams, and monitors, the original vessels passed into the realm of legend, perhaps enshrined there because ironclads never really opposed each other one-on-one again. Artists in all media on both sides of the Atlantic burnished the Monitor-Virginia legend with engravings, lithographs, and paintings of the "terrific combat." They kept the lost ironclads vividly alive in public memory for years. But certainly no one ever expected to see the actual Monitor again.

Now, astonishingly, they can. This March 2007, coinciding with the 145th anniversary of the epochal encounter, a new 63,500-square-foot $30 million USS Monitor Center opens at the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia. It houses a remarkable array of long-lost original artifacts that have been meticulously recovered in recent years from the ship's underwater grave (now the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary) and then expertly conserved.

click image to enlarge

Harold Holzer. The Monitor Makes Port. . April / May 2007.

The Battle of the Ironclads This book brings to life the dramatic events that occurred in Hampton Roads on March 8 and 9, 1862, when the first battle between armored vessels - in what was perhaps the most significant naval event of the entire Civil War - took place. It's a visual chronicle not only of the exciting story of the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (Merrimack), but also a saga of uncommon valor and leadership.

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