"Captain Ericsson, I congratulate you upon your great success. Thousands have this day blessed you. I have heard whole crews cheer you. Every man feels 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." - Letter from Chief Engineer Stimers, USS Monitor, to Captain John Ericsson
On March 8 and 9, 1862, a sea battle off the Virginia coast changed naval warfare forever. It began when the Confederate States Navy's CSS Virginia led a task force to break the Union blockade of Hampton Roads. The assignment was to hold Hampton Roads, a wide, shallow channel eight miles long where three Virginia rivers join and flow into the Chesapeake Bay. The waterway was crucial to both sides, but the situation there had been solidified for 10 months. The Federal warships had made no serious efforts to defeat the Confederate gunboats and shore defenses in the James River, which prevented them from sailing up river to Richmond. Rumors about the U.S.S. Merrimac started to disperse and caused consternation in Washington and had pushed the Navy Department to begin its own ironclad building program with an odd little experimental craft called the Monitor.
|
The battle of Hampton Roads was the first naval battle between two ironclad ships. The ironclads were claimed to be invented long before the Civil War. In 1859, the French Navy launched the first true ironclad warship, the La Gloire. The British responded by inventing the ironclad HMS Warrior in 1860. Both nations had at least 16 ironclads either in service or under construction by 1862 but none were ever engaged in battle with another (Ironclad Warships). The Monitor and Merrimack were both ironclads but each was built differently. The Northern built Merrimack had its upper hull cut away and was armored with complete iron (Battle).The Monitor was much smaller than the Merrimack (172 feet long compared to 264 feet , and only a quarter of the weight). She was designed to sail with her deck only a couple of feet above the water. All of her firepower would come from two eleven-inch guns contained in a rotating turret an entirely new concept of naval design. |
|