Snow - Iron Dawn: the Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle That Changed History

One of a galaxy of patriotic tokens and medals struck in honor of the Union ironclad.

H er creator had come up with the name Monitor and he meant it to have the broadest implications. Not only was his ship to cast her stern gaze on all Southern deviltry, but there are other leaders who will also be startled and admonished by the booming of the guns from the impregnable iron turret. These leaders, he said, dwelt in Downing Street, London.

But neither the rebellious South nor the Lords of the Admiralty would have felt much admonished had they seen the USS Monitor on her maiden voyage.

It wasnt a long trip, just from Brooklyn down to the Chesapeake Bay, but during the journey she had nearly sunk twice in twenty-four hours. She had no business being out on the open sea in early March when the Atlantic is full of brutal caprice; she should still have been making cautious trial river voyages near the yard in Greenpoint where shed been built. Workmen had been hammering away at her iron skin right up to the time she raised anchor and steamed down through the Narrows of New York Harbor and out into the ocean.

The first few days of her life were encouraging. She hadnt sunk like an anvil, as many had predicted, and after some adjustments she went in the direction the helmsman wanted. The few inches of freeboard stayed above water, and the deck remained dry once she got to sea. Soon enough, though, a gale was kicking her around, and nothing about her was dry, inside or out, and most of her crew, with no sails to set or ropes to haul, could only brace themselves against sweating metal bulkheads in a drizzling darkness falteringly lit by oil lamps and engine fires. They could all feel the sea, but none of them could see it because they were sealed in below the waterlinein a submarine, really, although the word did not yet exist to describe a kind of boat. They were sailors, they knew the ocean and its ways, but this duty was new to them. Theyd never sailed in a ship like this one. Nobody had.

The captain got seasickno shame in that; Lord Nelson always had at the start of his voyagesand then many of the men did too. They were helped topside to lie, sketchily shielded from the spray by canvas sheets, on the only part of their ship that was above water now: the turret (although this was so new a development that many of them called it the tower). Below inside it were the gunsonly two of them, and all but untried. They were good cannon, big seven-ton Dahlgrens, but their inventor, Major John Dahlgren, wished theyd never left port. There hadnt been time to test them properly, and it seemed likely there wouldnt be until they were fired in battle.

The prospect of that battle was what had brought the Monitor and its men, half-trained and ill prepared, out into the March Atlantic. Some four hundred miles to the south, in Norfolk, Virginia, the Rebels were buildinghad builta vessel sheathed in iron. Unlike the Monitor , its upperworks rested on a wooden hull; it wasnt all iron. But what showed above the waterline was, and the vessels guarding the immense natural harbor of Hampton Roads, and thus Chesapeake Bay, the finest ships in the Union fleet, were all made of wood.