Originally aired on March 10, 1995 - In part 28 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson explains why a Sunday March 9, 1862 naval battle made every other navy on earth obsolete.
#28 – Monitor vs. Virginia
On Sunday, March 9, 1862, every navy on earth became obsolete. A strange and inconsequential engagement occurred in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The two vessels involved were so unique, and their contest so unusual, that modern generations seem incapable of giving one of the ships its authentic name.
Federals in the spring of 1861 had abandoned the Norfolk navy yard. They did so with such haste that they failed to destroy the one warship that had to be left behind. This was the USS Merrimack, a large frigate which had both defective engines and the letter “k” on the end of its name. Union sailors partially scuttled the vessel. At that point, the Merrick (the letter “k” included) ceased to exist forever.
Confederates then occupied the navy yard, lifted the hulk, and found it largely intact. In the months that followed, shipbuilders fashioned a nautical monster. The new vessel had a slanting superstructure with 24-inch oaken walls covered by a 4-foot iron beak. Little improvement could be made to the engines. As a result, it took an hour for the vessel to execute a 180-degree turn.
From a distance she looked like a floating barn – or, as one observer call her, “a half-submerged crocodile”. Yet she was the Western Hemisphere’s first ironclad warship. Confederates proudly christened her the CSS Virginia.
On March 8, 1862, she steamed out into Hampton Roads. Three wooden Federal warships were in the harbor. The Virginia sank two with ease and drove the third aground. Meanwhile, Union naval officials had not been idle. They too had developed an ironclad. It was called the Monitor, but sailors found her in appearance to be a “tin can on a shingle”.
The iron structure of the Union ship was a flat raft, pointed at the ends, with the deck barely a foot above the water line. The superstructure consisted in the main of a ponderous revolving turret containing two 11-inch guns set side by side. The Union vessel was smaller but more maneuverable than the Confederate ironclad.
It was a remarkable set of circumstances that brought the Monitor and Virginia face to face on a cold Sunday. The Civil War was not yet a year old when the black, odd-looking ships met in the middle of Hampton Roads. They circled one another, got in close, they exchanged salvo after salvo in futile efforts to destroy the other. At day’s end, each warship backed off, battered but intact. The battle was a draw, but it heralded the passing of the age of wooden vessels and the advent of iron battleships.
Neither of the two Civil War ships survived the year 1862. When Confederates had to abandon Norfolk that spring, the Virginia had nowhere to go. On May 10, her crew blew up the ship to prevent its capture. The Monitor participated in a naval assault on Richmond but was forced back down the James River by heavy gunfire from Confederate batteries at Drewry’s Bluff. Late in the year, the Monitor was assigned to blockade duty at Charleston. Not built for ocean duty, the ironclad was being towed to South Carolina. On New Year’s Eve, she sank in a storm off the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
Bits and pieces of the Virginia survive in museums. In 1973 the Monitor was found on the ocean bottom offshore from Cape Hatteras. Present technology is not capable of bringing the vessel up intact, or preserving it from deterioration once it emerges from the water. The Monitor has slept safely on the ocean floor for more than 30 years. Let her sleep while man develops the wherewithal to bring up and display the ship, which will forever be one of the most famous vessels in American naval history.
