Terrible Swift Sword (32 page)

Nothing more could be done tonight. The tide
was ebbing, and there was danger that
Virginia
would
go aground along with everybody else, so at dusk the ironclad and her gunboats
drew off to a safe anchorage at the mouth of the Elizabeth River, under
protection of Confederate batteries, to send dead and wounded ashore and make
emergency repairs. After dark the flames from burning
Congress
made a red glow in the night by Newport News
Point. Toward midnight the flames reached the frigate's magazines and she blew
up with a great burst of fire and sparks and a heavy concussion that went
echoing off across the still water. With morning,
Virginia
would come out again to finish the job.

Then, at the last possible moment, hope
for salvation returned to the Federal Navy; U.S.S.
Monitor
came steaming in past the Virginia capes
after sunset, moved up into Hampton Roads, and anchored near
Minnesota,
which was still struggling to get afloat like
a man trying to wriggle out of a straitjacket. Now the Federals had an ironclad
of their own. With it they could turn overwhelming disaster into a face-saving,
life-saving stalemate. When morning came, ironclad would fight ironclad . . .
and every navy in the world would have to rebuild.

As a matter of fact the rebuilding had
already begun. Both the British and the French navies already had ironclads in
commission, with more under construction and still others under design; and
Foote's gunboats on the western rivers were armored, even though they were
armored too lightly.
Virginia
had simply dramatized
the fact that an unarmored ship could not possibly fight an armored ship, and
when the smoke from the burning frigate fogged the sunset on the evening of
March 8 that lesson had been driven home once and forever. The next day's fight
between
Monitor
and
Virginia
would supplement it;
putting on display not the world's first ironclads, but just the world's first
fight between ironclads.

In all of this there was acute
embarrassment for the United States Navy, if the Navy had had time to reflect.
Its professionals had been completely outthought and outmaneu-vered by the
underrated civilian who served as Jefferson Davis's Secretary of the Navy,
Stephen R. Mallory of Florida. Mallory had seen what the experts failed to see
and he had acted on what he saw, and the United States Navy was extremely
lucky to be getting out of this fix at all.

Less than a month after Fort Sumter,
Mallory had seen the need for ironclads. Sadly deficient in shipyards,
shipwrights, and naval architects, the South could not hope to build a seagoing
fleet that would match the Federal fleet, and Mallory knew it. He knew, too,
that wooden warships were obsolete anyway. Firing shell, he said, wooden ships
would destroy one another so quickly that a sea fight would be nothing more
than a contest to see which ship would sink first; and early in May he had
urged the Congress to meditate on "the wisdom and expediency of fighting
with iron against wood." When
Merrimack
was raised and
rebuilt he saw to it that she was heavily armored, and the job was well under
way before Secretary Welles's people got around to consider the question of
using armor at all. Not until October did the Federal government contract for
the building of
Monitor,
and the only thing
that saved the day for the United States Navy was the fact that the North had
an industrial plant that could handle a job like this with impressive speed.

In her own way
Monitor
was just as odd as
Virginia.
A heavily armored
turret carrying two 11-inch guns stood amidships on a long, armored hull that
had no more than a foot or two of freeboard; there was a little knob of a pilothouse
forward and a smokestack aft, and nothing more. If the Confederate ship looked
like a half-submerged barn, the Federal looked (as men said) like a tin can on
a shingle. Built after the designs of the irascible genius John Ericsson,
Monitor
was as hard to live
in as
Virginia,
and very little more
seaworthy—she had come close to foundering, on her trip down from New York—but
she drew much less water and answered her helm better; and, all in all, here
she was in Hampton Roads on the morning of March 9, and Ericsson's idea would
quickly be put to the test.
⁷

Skipper of
Monitor
was Lieutenant John
Worden. He reported to the senior naval officer present, Captain John Marston
of
Roanoke,
who sensibly ignored
Washington's orders to send the ironclad up the Potomac and told Worden to
stand by
Minnesota.
Worden cleared for
action and his crew turned in for the night, while tugboats continued their unavailing
efforts to get
Minnesota
afloat. Dawn brought
a fog, which thinned out toward eight o'clock to reveal once more that moving
pillar of smoke down by the mouth of the Elizabeth; here was
Virginia,
ready for another
battle.
Monitor's
men were
called to battle stations, and Worden steered down to meet his opponent. The
two vessels got to close range and opened fire, and for the next two hours the
world's first fight between armored ships was on, the two ships so wreathed
with clouds of coal smoke and powder smoke that they could hardly see each
other.

It was a strange fight. Neither ship
could really hurt the other. Solid shot clanged against the iron plates and
ricocheted far across the bay; shell burst with spectacular but ineffective
explosions against iron turret and slanting citadel;
Virginia
tried to ram, but was
far too sluggish, and gave
Monitor
no more than a nudge.
In each ship the seamen quickly learned to refrain from leaning against the
bulkheads; if a shot struck the armor while a man was touching the wall just
inside the man could be killed or stunned. One of
Monitor's
men was knocked
unconscious for ten minutes because his knee touched the turret wall when shot
hit the armor outside.

Once
Virginia
hit a corner of
Monitor's
pilothouse with a
heavy shell, breaking ironwork and leaving the structure somewhat insecure; and
a moment later a shell exploded against the face of the pilothouse, driving
flecks of paint, iron and powder in though the sighting slit, stunning and
blinding Lieutenant Worden and putting him out of action. Until the youthful
executive officer, Lieutenant Samuel Dana Greene, could be called from the
turret
Monitor
was without a
commander, and she drifted off into the shallows, temporarily out of the
fight.
Virginia
promptly turned on
Minnesota
and opened a fire
which set that luckless frigate ablaze and sank one of the tugs that had been
trying so unsuccessfully to get the ship afloat.

Captain G. J. Van Brunt,
Minnesota's
commanding officer,
suddenly found that he had the ironclad where every gun would bear, at easy
range, and he fired an enormous broadside—two 10-inch guns, fourteen 9-inch
and seven 8-inch: a weight of shot and shell which, as he said, would have
blown any wooden ship clear out of the water. The missiles struck
Virginia
and bounced away, and
Captain Van Brunt suddenly realized that the day of ships like his was over
forever. When he came to make his report on the fight he wrote, as if bemused:
"Never before was anything like it dreamed of by the greatest enthusiast
in maritime warfare." It seemed to him that
Minnesota
was not merely out of
date but immediately doomed, and he made preparations to destroy the ship and
abandon it; but then
Monitor
got back into action,
and it was ironclad against ironclad once more. Once
Virginia
ran aground, but her
engine room crew tied down the safety valves, piled oil-soaked rags into the
furnaces, raised a perilous head of steam, and the ungainly fighting machine
floundered off into deeper water.
⁸

Somewhere around noon the fight died
down as if by mutual consent. Because she had lost her ram and had consumed
so much fuel,
Virginia
was riding higher at
the bow than she normally would, and Lieutenant Jones was well aware that if
the Yankees fired at her unarmored water-line, forward, they could riddle her.
Her leak was troublesome, and the channel where she fought was narrow, and
there was always the danger that she would become stranded again and hang there
helpless.
Monitor,
in her turn, was in
no mood to insist on a finish fight. She was under command of a junior officer,
and orders were to play it safe and take no chances;
Monitor's
assignment today was
strictly to save
Minnesota
from destruction, and
this had been done, by the narrowest margin. In addition, Greene feared that if
another shot hit the pilothouse where the first one had struck, the ship's
steering gear would be disabled—Worden had always believed the pilothouse was
Monitor's
most vulnerable
spot. So when at last
Virginia
steamed back to her
base,
Monitor
stayed close to
Minnesota
and made no attempt
to pursue.

The battle was over.
It had been a complete stand-off, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus
V. Fox said the most that could be said when he telegraphed McClellan that
night that the battle showed "a slight superiority in favor of the
Monitor."
He added that the
Confederate ironclad "is an ugly customer, and it is too good luck to
believe that we are yet clear of her"; and a few days later he warned the
Navy Department that although
Monitor
was more than a match
for her opponent she might easily be put out of action in her next fight and it
was unwise to place too great dependence on her.
Monitor's
chief engineer, Alban
C. Stimers, was more optimistic, and he telegraphed congratulations to
Ericsson, telling him that "you have saved this place to the nation by
furnishing us with the means to whip an ironclad frigate that was, until our
arrival, having it all her own way with our most powerful vessels."
⁹