A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy (28 page)

Virginia
had been under construction since the previous summer, and by the first thaw of 1862, her commander, Franklin Buchanan, the first superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy before he left the Union Navy to fight for the Confederacy, decided it was time for the iron ship to go to war, even though the yard workers still had things to do. On 8 March, with clouds of black smoke initially belching from her untried engines, she moved slowly away from the shore and then gained momentum as her great weight began moving down the Elizabeth River, headed for nearby Hampton Roads where a Union fleet had taken up blockade duty. She glistened in the sun because her crew had greased her topsides with pork fat to help deflect enemy shot and to make boarding her more difficult. As the cumbersome but fearsome-looking vessel made her way down the river at six knots—her top speed—crowds waved and cheered from the banks. The Confederate Navy had been the underdog to the more powerful Union Navy since the war had begun, and it seemed at this moment all of that was about to change.

Out in the more open waters of Hampton Roads, the wooden Union ships were at Saturday routine, the laundry fluttering from their rigging, drying in the midday sun. Scuttlebutt had been warning of a great iron monster for so long that few took it seriously when reports began to circulate that something was coming out of the river.

On board USS
Congress,
a sailing frigate of fifty guns lying directly across the roads from the mouth of the Elizabeth River, Quartermaster John Leroy had been peering southward through a telescope for several minutes when he turned to a nearby officer and said: “I wish you would take the glass and have a look over there, Sir. I believe that
thing
is a-comin' down at last.”

As
Virginia
emerged from the river, all eyes in Hampton Roads were fixed upon her. Among those watching was a young lieutenant named T. McKeen Buchanan,
Congress
's paymaster and brother of
Virginia
's captain—such are the terrible ironies of a civil war. Curiosity, awe, and dread seemed to be the prevailing emotions among the onlookers. Seaman Frederick Curtis, captain of Number 8 gun in
Congress,
later recalled, “Not a word was spoken, and the silence that prevailed was awful.” Those who watched the iron monster come out of its lair remembered it as looking like a “barracks building on water,” “a long, low barn,” a “crocodile,” and “an iron-plated coffin.”

Virginia
closed on
Congress.
According to the latter's surgeon, the ship waited until the ironclad's “plating and ports” could be clearly seen and then “tried her with a solid shot from one of the stern guns, the projectile glancing off her forward casement like a drop of water from a duck's back. . . . This opened our eyes.” The doctor had little time left for observation because
Virginia
replied with a broadside of grapeshot, “killing and wounding quite a number on board the
Congress.
”

There was a deafening roar as
Congress
fired a thirty-two-gun broadside at her attacker. A Soldier on the nearby shore could hear the great blast of the guns but was amazed when the shower of projectiles “rattled on the armored
Merrimack
[
Virginia
] without the least injury.”

One of
Virginia
's shells made a direct hit on
Congress
's Number 7 gun. Seaman Curtis “felt something warm, and the next instant I found myself lying on the deck beside a number of my shipmates.” The cannon next to him had been blown off its carriage, “sweeping the men about it back into a heap, bruised and bleeding. The shell struck right in back of me and took my left-hand man.”

Quartermaster Leroy, who had first spotted
Virginia,
lost both legs in that first broadside and was carried below, bleeding profusely. He did not live long, but in his last few minutes of life he urged the men to fight on, telling them to “stand by our ship.”

The Confederate ironclad moved away, and the men on
Congress
's deck began to cheer, thinking that
Virginia
had given up. But the Confederate was simply heading for the next target,
Cumberland,
a thirty-gun sailing sloop of war. Furthermore, what those cheering men did not yet realize was that
Congress
was burning in her main hold, sick bay, and below the wardroom, dangerously close to the after powder magazine.

As CSS
Virginia
headed for USS
Cumberland,
shore batteries and smaller Union gunboats pounded her with numerous direct hits. But as one dismayed Union officer described it, they either exploded harmlessly against the iron sides or ricocheted into the water “like India rubber balls.”

The Confederate ironclad CSS
Virginia
(formerly USS
Merrimack
) attacking the wooden-hulled USS
Congress
in Hampton Roads, Virginia, during the American Civil War.
Naval Historical Center

Virginia
raked her new adversary with her guns and then rammed her. The ram broke off as the ironclad backed away, but the gaping hole left in the wooden ship quickly filled with a torrent of water. In the Confederate captain's admiring words: “She commenced sinking, gallantly firing her guns as long as they were above water. She went down bravely with her colors flying.”

Attempting to get under way to join the battle, the forty-gun frigate
Minnesota
ran aground and was now a helpless target for the rampaging ironclad and several Confederate gunboats who had joined the fray. But the light of day was fading, and
Virginia
's Captain Buchanan decided to retire for the night, saving the remainder of the destruction for the next day.

Sometime after midnight, the raging fires reached
Congress
's magazine and a huge explosion destroyed the ship. It had been a bad day for the Union Navy, and the next day promised to be more of the same. It seemed apparent that no wooden ship was going to be able to stand up to the Confederate ironclad. When word reached Washington of the day's events, President Abraham Lincoln met with his cabinet. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton feared that the ironclad might be on her way up the Chesapeake Bay to attack Washington itself. He warned that the “monster” will “change the whole character of the war; she will destroy every naval vessel; she will . . . come up the Potomac and disperse Congress, destroy the Capitol and public buildings.”

But Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had other thoughts on the matter. He told Lincoln and the cabinet that all was not lost, that help was on
the way. On 6 March, two days before
Virginia
had gone on her rampage in Hampton Roads, USS
Monitor
had left Brooklyn Navy Yard and headed south for the Norfolk area. She was due to arrive the next day, Sunday, 9 March 1862, a day that would make naval history and change surface warfare forever.

During the voyage down the East Coast, Peter Williams had reason to wonder if he had made a serious mistake when he managed to land a berth in USS
Monitor
as one of her crew of fifty-eight. He had quickly earned the confidence of her captain, Lieutenant John Worden, and had been designated as one of the strange new ship's helmsmen. He was steering the ship when she encountered heavy seas in the stormy Atlantic. With her extremely low freeboard,
Monitor
was nearly swamped as water poured over and into her. Crashing waves knocked down her smokestack, and the ventilator drive belts began to malfunction when the intruding water soaked them. Only heroic efforts by the engineers had managed to repair them before the crew suffocated from the mounting fumes inside the iron hull.

On the helm, Williams peered out through one of the narrow slits that served as windows, studying the angry sea, trying to read patterns among the chaos. He fought the ship's apparent desire to slip down into the inviting troughs that seemed like havens beneath the raging mountains of the swells. Williams knew that once in a trough,
Monitor
would be seductively rocked from side to side until she could no longer right herself and might then turn turtle and disappear beneath the waves into an eternal peace. His experience as a seaman told him that safety could be found only on the broad backs of those monstrous swells, that he must keep her head into the sea, perpendicular to the seductive troughs, to climb up the formidable slopes and then careen down the far side like a sled racing down a snow-covered slope.

At one point, water came driving into the pilothouse through the narrow slits with such force that it knocked Williams down, away from the helm. He struggled to his feet, seized the spinning wheel, and fought the heaving seas for control of the ship. “You
will,
will you?” he said to his ship as he struggled to keep her out of the trough. “Well, you
won't
! You're going to do it
my
way.” His arms ached as he fought with the tons of water pushing against the rudder. Despite her seeming reluctance to do what was best for her, Williams had already developed an “exasperated affection” for this iron monster. Back in New York, he had knocked a man down for calling her a “filthy old tub.”

By the great efforts of Williams and his shipmates—many of whom had bailed water with buckets for long, exhausting hours—
Monitor
survived. In the evening of 8 March, the “cheese box on a raft”—as some had aptly dubbed her—rounded the tip of the Delmarva peninsula, heading into calmer waters. Safe from the raging sea at last,
Monitor
and her crew were now headed into a storm of another sort.

As they steamed up the channel, they could hear the distant booming of gunfire, and soon they could see a Union frigate burning. It became clear that there would not be much time to recover; these exhausted Sailors were going to have to find the strength to fight in the morning.

All night long,
Monitor
's crew made preparations for the coming battle. There was a lot to do, both in the aftermath of the arduous voyage and in getting ready to face
Virginia.
As they worked, it suddenly occurred to Williams that the next day would be the first time the crew had ever fired the guns; there had been no time in the hasty preparations and the harrowing voyage to exercise the crew at battle stations. His even more sobering thought was that
Virginia
's crew had already had experience working
their
guns—fresh experience indeed! The burning wreck of
Congress
was evidence enough of that.

After many hours of exhausting work, Williams found time for a quick nap just before dawn. He rolled himself into a blanket and dropped to the deck. Gazing up at the constellations above, he breathed in the fresh night air—it was like a tonic after so many hours in
Monitor
's stifling interior—and wondered, before sleep overtook him, what the day would bring.

At dawn, Williams got up, shook the stiffness out of his limbs, and set about a final inspection of
Monitor
's steering gear. Finding everything in order, he joined his messmates for breakfast.

He was relieved that the cooks had chosen to open one of those “new-fangled” tin cans that kept meat fresh. It was so much better than the dehydrated vegetables they sometimes ate after soaking them in water for an hour. He was grateful that the hardtack was fresh and had not yet molded nor been infested. It was a good breakfast and a good start to a day that would soon prove to be like no other before.

As he ate, Williams watched a group of engineers messing nearby. He wondered how they did it, how they endured the conditions below decks. It was confining and stifling enough in his tiny pilothouse, but at least he did have the slits through which to see the outside world and to get an occasional breath of fresh air. Those men who worked among the tangles of piping
and in the coal bins were in a class of their own. His friend George Geer had told him of the hell below decks when the ship was under way. Under optimum conditions, the coal heavers had to shovel nearly six hundred pounds of anthracite into the fireboxes. Their sweat produced steam at a pressure of twenty-six pounds per square inch and at a temperature of 240 degrees Fahrenheit. The pipes had no insulation and were 230 degrees to the touch. In a letter to a friend, a Sailor wrote: “When we beat to quarters, my place is in the boiler room—hot steam pipes all around me and I know the gas inside would admire to get at me for the work I've made it do; it hisses out sometimes as if to say, ‘Look out young man, you got me in a tight place right now, but it may be my turn someday.'”

Williams knew it was not all disadvantage working in that hellish world. Geer told him they always had plenty of hot coffee down there. Nonetheless, Williams was glad to be a helmsman and not an engineer.