On the morning of 9 March 1862, two ships met in Hampton Roads, Virginia, that looked like nothing else afloat. One was a sloped iron roof with a ram on the front. The other was a flat raft with a round iron box in the middle.
They fired into each other for hours, at times at close range. When it was over, neither had sunk and both sides claimed they had won.
The day before had gone very differently.
A burned frigate with an iron roof
The Confederate ship started life as USS Merrimack, a steam frigate of the United States Navy. In April 1861, after Fort Sumter, Union forces abandoned the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia. Merrimack was in the yard for engine repairs and could not be sailed out, so the retreating sailors set her on fire.
They did not finish the job. The Confederates raised the burned hull, cut it down, and built a sloping casemate on top, covered in 2-inch iron plate rolled at the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond. She was relaunched in February 1862 as CSS Virginia. Union newspapers and sailors kept calling her the Merrimac, which is why the battle is still sold on souvenir prints under the wrong name.
8 March: iron against wood
On 8 March, Virginia steamed out under Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan into the Union blockading squadron at Hampton Roads. The wooden warships fired at her. The shot bounced off.
She rammed the sloop USS Cumberland, tearing a hole in her hull, and Cumberland sank. By the Wikipedia account of the battle she took 121 men down with her. Virginia then turned her guns on the frigate USS Congress, which had run aground trying to escape. Congress burned and surrendered, with about 110 killed or missing.
Buchanan was wounded during the fight and command passed to his executive officer, Lieutenant Catesby ap Roger Jones. The American Battlefield Trust puts Union losses over the two days at 261 killed and 108 wounded. The Confederates lost 7 killed and 17 wounded.
For a few hours it looked like one ship could break the blockade on its own. The wooden navy that had fought from USS Constitution onward had just been shown to be useless against iron.
9 March: hours of shells that went nowhere
That night a strange new Union ship arrived. USS Monitor had been designed by the Swedish engineer John Ericsson and commissioned on 25 February 1862, less than two weeks earlier. She carried just two 11-inch Dahlgren guns, both inside a single rotating turret. Instead of turning the ship to aim, her crew turned the gun house.
Her commander was Lieutenant John L. Worden. He placed Monitor near the Union ships still in the roads and waited for morning.
Virginia came out at dawn expecting to finish the job. Instead she found Monitor in her way. The fight that followed lasted about three to four hours; the sources disagree, and the Wikipedia articles on the ship and on the battle do not even agree with each other.
The problem for both crews was simple. Neither ship’s guns could get through the other’s armor. Virginia tried to ram and failed. Monitor’s turret took hits and kept turning.
Then a Confederate shell struck Monitor’s small pilothouse, just as Worden was looking out through the viewing slit. Fragments of paint and iron went into his eyes and temporarily blinded him. Lieutenant Samuel Dana Greene, the executive officer, took over, and Monitor pulled back into shallow water where the deeper-drafting Virginia could not follow.
Virginia, low on ammunition and facing a falling tide, went back to Norfolk.
Who actually won
Currier and Ives sold a print of the fight with the caption “the little Monitor whipped the Merrimac.” That is the Northern version. The Southern version points out that Virginia had sunk two warships and killed hundreds of men the day before, and that Monitor was the one who withdrew first.
The honest answer is a draw in the duel and a strategic win for the Union. Monitor did not beat Virginia. She just stood in front of the rest of the fleet so Virginia could not finish it. The blockade held.
What both sides agreed on was that wooden warships were now obsolete. The Confederacy kept hunting for other ways to hurt Union shipping, including the British-built commerce raider CSS Alabama, launched two months after the duel.
Neither ship lived to see 1863
Virginia never fought Monitor again. When the Confederates gave up Norfolk in May 1862, she had nowhere left to go. On 11 May 1862 her own crew ran her near Craney Island and blew her up.
Monitor lasted seven more months. In late December 1862 she was ordered south and was being towed off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, when a storm hit. Water came in around the base of the turret, where the seal was loosened by the heaving sea. She went down in the night. Sixteen men died.
Here again the sources split on the date. History.com and the National Archives give 30 December. NOAA and the Navy count her as lost on New Year’s Eve. She sank somewhere around midnight, so both are close enough.
The turret came back up
The wreck was located in 1973 off Hatteras. In 1975 the site became the first National Marine Sanctuary in the United States.
On 5 August 2002, Navy divers working with NOAA raised Monitor’s turret. Inside it they found the remains of two of her crew. Forensic work, DNA testing and genealogy narrowed down who they might be, but could not name them. On 8 March 2013, one day short of 151 years after the duel, the two unknown sailors were buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
Like the Mary Rose, Monitor is a warship you can now stand next to after centuries, or in her case 140 years, under water. The turret is in conservation at The Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, a few miles from the water where the two ships fought.
