A Sailor's History of the U.S. Navy

by Thomas J. Cutler

  Williams snaked his way among piles of metal plating, then got his first look at the mystery ship he had heard so much about. What he saw was even more amazing than what he had heard. Stretched out before him was an extremely low, flat deck—indeed so low that he could barely see any freeboard—broken only by a very large cylinder directly amidships and a much smaller projection closer to one end of the vessel. None of the things Williams associated with a ship seemed to be there. No majestic hull rising out of the water to support decks cluttered with weapons, capstans, and the like. No towering masts reaching for the heavens, nor webs of lines to awe and confuse a landsman.

  Though the ship was teeming with busy people, no one challenged his presence, so Williams boldly went aboard and gave himself a tour. He discovered that the large cylinder amidships was a revolving turret about twenty feet in diameter and nine feet high, housing two 11-inch guns. It was the first time such a design had ever been used in a warship. Williams, whose naval experience had primarily been as a helmsman on vessels with rows of cannons along their sides, had more than once heard a gunner’s mate say, “You seamen aim the ship and we’ll fire the guns.” He was awed by this new invention that allowed the guns to be trained in any direction—the single exception being dead ahead because of the projection near the bow, which Williams learned was the pilothouse.

  As a professional helmsman, Williams was most interested in that pilothouse. It stood just four feet above the deck and reminded him of a log cabin because it had been constructed of nine-inch square logs that were notched and bolted on the ends. Inside, Williams noted there was room for no more than three men. He would later describe it as a “chicken coop.”

  As he moved about the strange vessel, he learned that there were two steam-powered engines, one to propel the ship through the water and the other to rotate the turret. Heavy iron plating encased the entire ship, which made Williams feel uneasy about her seaworthiness but reassured him when he thought about riding her into combat.

  Williams met an older Sailor named George Geer who told Williams that he was a first-class fireman. He made sure Williams knew that he was not one of the “coal-heavers” who would stoke the engines when the ship was under way. His job was to attend to the more complicated aspects of keeping pressure up and steam flowing. Geer explained that the ship’s name was Monitor; two pistons in one cylinder drove her engines, and she had a forced-air ventilation system that fed air to the boilers and actually moved air throughout the ship for the crew. The smoke from the engines was vented through gratings in the deck aft of the turret, and a detachable stack could be mounted over the gratings to funnel the smoke upward when the ship was not in battle. Peter Williams left the ship very impressed.

  As he passed through the gate for the second time, the old watchman reminded him, “Next time bring me something in writing.” Continuing his earlier lie, Williams said, “I’m her quartermaster.” As he headed back through the shipyard, he realized that he liked the sound of that.

  Rampage

  Far to the south, near Norfolk, Virginia, another strange vessel was taking shape. She too was clad in iron, and she too had no masts, sails, or associated rigging. She was CSS Virginia, and she had been created on the hull of USS Merrimack, a steam-and-sail-powered frigate that had been seized when Confederate forces captured Gosport Navy Yard a year earlier. The retreating Union Sailors had set her afire before they were driven out, and her masts and rigging had been destroyed, but her hull and engines remained relatively intact. Unlike Monitor, taking shape to the north, Virginia had no rotating turret; instead, she had a more conventional array of ten guns aligned along the length of the hull, their muzzles protruding from the armor that was angled upward at a 35-degree slope. Like an ancient Greek galley, she also had a ram protruding from her bow, just below the waterline.

  Virginia had been under construction since the previous summer, and by the first thaw of 1862, her commander, Franklin Buchanan, the first superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy before he left the Union Navy to fight for the Confederacy, decided it was time for the iron ship to go to war, even though the yard workers still had things to do. On 8 March, with clouds of black smoke initially belching from her untried engines, she moved slowly away from the shore and then gained momentum as her great weight began moving down the Elizabeth River, headed for nearby Hampton Roads where a Union fleet had taken up blockade duty. She glistened in the sun because her crew had greased her topsides with pork fat to help deflect enemy shot and to make boarding her more difficult. As the cumbersome but fearsome-looking vessel made her way down the river at six knots—her top speed—crowds waved and cheered from the banks. The Confederate Navy had been the underdog to the more powerful Union Navy since the war had begun, and it seemed at this moment all of that was about to change.

  Out in the more open waters of Hampton Roads, the wooden Union ships were at Saturday routine, the laundry fluttering from their rigging, drying in the midday sun. Scuttlebutt had been warning of a great iron monster for so long that few took it seriously when reports began to circulate that something was coming out of the river.

  On board USS Congress, a sailing frigate of fifty guns lying directly across the roads from the mouth of the Elizabeth River, Quartermaster John Leroy had been peering southward through a telescope for several minutes when he turned to a nearby officer and said: “I wish you would take the glass and have a look over there, Sir. I believe that thing is a-comin’ down at last.”

  As Virginia emerged from the river, all eyes in Hampton Roads were fixed upon her. Among those watching was a young lieutenant named T. McKeen Buchanan, Congress’s paymaster and brother of Virginia’s captain—such are the terrible ironies of a civil war. Curiosity, awe, and dread seemed to be the prevailing emotions among the onlookers. Seaman Frederick Curtis, captain of Number 8 gun in Congress, later recalled, “Not a word was spoken, and the silence that prevailed was awful.” Those who watched the iron monster come out of its lair remembered it as looking like a “barracks building on water,” “a long, low barn,” a “crocodile,” and “an iron-plated coffin.”

  Virginia closed on Congress. According to the latter’s surgeon, the ship waited until the ironclad’s “plating and ports” could be clearly seen and then “tried her with a solid shot from one of the stern guns, the projectile glancing off her forward casement like a drop of water from a duck’s back. . . . This opened our eyes.” The doctor had little time left for observation because Virginia replied with a broadside of grapeshot, “killing and wounding quite a number on board the Congress.”

  There was a deafening roar as Congress fired a thirty-two-gun broadside at her attacker. A Soldier on the nearby shore could hear the great blast of the guns but was amazed when the shower of projectiles “rattled on the armored Merrimack [Virginia] without the least injury.”

  One of Virginia’s shells made a direct hit on Congress’s Number 7 gun. Seaman Curtis “felt something warm, and the next instant I found myself lying on the deck beside a number of my shipmates.” The cannon next to him had been blown off its carriage, “sweeping the men about it back into a heap, bruised and bleeding. The shell struck right in back of me and took my left-hand man.”

  Quartermaster Leroy, who had first spotted Virginia, lost both legs in that first broadside and was carried below, bleeding profusely. He did not live long, but in his last few minutes of life he urged the men to fight on, telling them to “stand by our ship.”

  The Confederate ironclad moved away, and the men on Congress’s deck began to cheer, thinking that Virginia had given up. But the Confederate was simply heading for the next target, Cumberland, a thirty-gun sailing sloop of war. Furthermore, what those cheering men did not yet realize was that Congress was burning in her main hold, sick bay, and below the wardroom, dangerously close to the after powder magazine.

  As CSS Virginia headed for USS Cumberland, shore batteries and smaller Union gunboats pounded her with numerous direct hits. But as one dism
ayed Union officer described it, they either exploded harmlessly against the iron sides or ricocheted into the water “like India rubber balls.”

  The Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia (formerly USS Merrimack) attacking the wooden-hulled USS Congress in Hampton Roads, Virginia, during the American Civil War. Naval Historical Center

  Virginia raked her new adversary with her guns and then rammed her. The ram broke off as the ironclad backed away, but the gaping hole left in the wooden ship quickly filled with a torrent of water. In the Confederate captain’s admiring words: “She commenced sinking, gallantly firing her guns as long as they were above water. She went down bravely with her colors flying.”

  Attempting to get under way to join the battle, the forty-gun frigate Minnesota ran aground and was now a helpless target for the rampaging ironclad and several Confederate gunboats who had joined the fray. But the light of day was fading, and Virginia’s Captain Buchanan decided to retire for the night, saving the remainder of the destruction for the next day.

  Sometime after midnight, the raging fires reached Congress’s magazine and a huge explosion destroyed the ship. It had been a bad day for the Union Navy, and the next day promised to be more of the same. It seemed apparent that no wooden ship was going to be able to stand up to the Confederate ironclad. When word reached Washington of the day’s events, President Abraham Lincoln met with his cabinet. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton feared that the ironclad might be on her way up the Chesapeake Bay to attack Washington itself. He warned that the “monster” will “change the whole character of the war; she will destroy every naval vessel; she will . . . come up the Potomac and disperse Congress, destroy the Capitol and public buildings.”

  But Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had other thoughts on the matter. He told Lincoln and the cabinet that all was not lost, that help was on the way. On 6 March, two days before Virginia had gone on her rampage in Hampton Roads, USS Monitor had left Brooklyn Navy Yard and headed south for the Norfolk area. She was due to arrive the next day, Sunday, 9 March 1862, a day that would make naval history and change surface warfare forever.

  Cheese Box on a Raft

  During the voyage down the East Coast, Peter Williams had reason to wonder if he had made a serious mistake when he managed to land a berth in USS Monitor as one of her crew of fifty-eight. He had quickly earned the confidence of her captain, Lieutenant John Worden, and had been designated as one of the strange new ship’s helmsmen. He was steering the ship when she encountered heavy seas in the stormy Atlantic. With her extremely low freeboard, Monitor was nearly swamped as water poured over and into her. Crashing waves knocked down her smokestack, and the ventilator drive belts began to malfunction when the intruding water soaked them. Only heroic efforts by the engineers had managed to repair them before the crew suffocated from the mounting fumes inside the iron hull.

  On the helm, Williams peered out through one of the narrow slits that served as windows, studying the angry sea, trying to read patterns among the chaos. He fought the ship’s apparent desire to slip down into the inviting troughs that seemed like havens beneath the raging mountains of the swells. Williams knew that once in a trough, Monitor would be seductively rocked from side to side until she could no longer right herself and might then turn turtle and disappear beneath the waves into an eternal peace. His experience as a seaman told him that safety could be found only on the broad backs of those monstrous swells, that he must keep her head into the sea, perpendicular to the seductive troughs, to climb up the formidable slopes and then careen down the far side like a sled racing down a snow-covered slope.

  At one point, water came driving into the pilothouse through the narrow slits with such force that it knocked Williams down, away from the helm. He struggled to his feet, seized the spinning wheel, and fought the heaving seas for control of the ship. “You will, will you?” he said to his ship as he struggled to keep her out of the trough. “Well, you won’t! You’re going to do it my way.” His arms ached as he fought with the tons of water pushing against the rudder. Despite her seeming reluctance to do what was best for her, Williams had already developed an “exasperated affection” for this iron monster. Back in New York, he had knocked a man down for calling her a “filthy old tub.”

  By the great efforts of Williams and his shipmates—many of whom had bailed water with buckets for long, exhausting hours—Monitor survived. In the evening of 8 March, the “cheese box on a raft”—as some had aptly dubbed her—rounded the tip of the Delmarva peninsula, heading into calmer waters. Safe from the raging sea at last, Monitor and her crew were now headed into a storm of another sort.

  As they steamed up the channel, they could hear the distant booming of gunfire, and soon they could see a Union frigate burning. It became clear that there would not be much time to recover; these exhausted Sailors were going to have to find the strength to fight in the morning.

  Duel of Iron

  All night long, Monitor’s crew made preparations for the coming battle. There was a lot to do, both in the aftermath of the arduous voyage and in getting ready to face Virginia. As they worked, it suddenly occurred to Williams that the next day would be the first time the crew had ever fired the guns; there had been no time in the hasty preparations and the harrowing voyage to exercise the crew at battle stations. His even more sobering thought was that Virginia’s crew had already had experience working their guns—fresh experience indeed! The burning wreck of Congress was evidence enough of that.

  After many hours of exhausting work, Williams found time for a quick nap just before dawn. He rolled himself into a blanket and dropped to the deck. Gazing up at the constellations above, he breathed in the fresh night air—it was like a tonic after so many hours in Monitor’s stifling interior—and wondered, before sleep overtook him, what the day would bring.

  At dawn, Williams got up, shook the stiffness out of his limbs, and set about a final inspection of Monitor’s steering gear. Finding everything in order, he joined his messmates for breakfast.

  He was relieved that the cooks had chosen to open one of those “new-fangled” tin cans that kept meat fresh. It was so much better than the dehydrated vegetables they sometimes ate after soaking them in water for an hour. He was grateful that the hardtack was fresh and had not yet molded nor been infested. It was a good breakfast and a good start to a day that would soon prove to be like no other before.

  As he ate, Williams watched a group of engineers messing nearby. He wondered how they did it, how they endured the conditions below decks. It was confining and stifling enough in his tiny pilothouse, but at least he did have the slits through which to see the outside world and to get an occasional breath of fresh air. Those men who worked among the tangles of piping and in the coal bins were in a class of their own. His friend George Geer had told him of the hell below decks when the ship was under way. Under optimum conditions, the coal heavers had to shovel nearly six hundred pounds of anthracite into the fireboxes. Their sweat produced steam at a pressure of twenty-six pounds per square inch and at a temperature of 240 degrees Fahrenheit. The pipes had no insulation and were 230 degrees to the touch. In a letter to a friend, a Sailor wrote: “When we beat to quarters, my place is in the boiler room—hot steam pipes all around me and I know the gas inside would admire to get at me for the work I’ve made it do; it hisses out sometimes as if to say, ‘Look out young man, you got me in a tight place right now, but it may be my turn someday.’”

  Williams knew it was not all disadvantage working in that hellish world. Geer told him they always had plenty of hot coffee down there. Nonetheless, Williams was glad to be a helmsman and not an engineer.

  At about half past seven, excited voices reported that Virginia was under way and heading straight for helpless Minnesota, the latter still hard aground. Monitor’s crew raced to their stations, closing hatches behind them, removing the stack, and placing protective covers over her running lights. Within minutes, she was steaming toward her Confederate counterpart.r />
  To those watching from shore, it was evident that Virginia was much larger and more heavily armed than Monitor, and many anticipated seeing a quick end to this Union newcomer. On board Virginia, her chief engineer was astonished to see “a black object that looked like . . . a barrelhead afloat with a cheese box on top of it” come out from behind Minnesota and head right for them.

  Peter Williams was at the helm as Monitor positioned herself between Minnesota and Virginia. Also crammed into the tiny space were the captain and Samuel Howard, who was acting master of the bark Amanda. The latter, being familiar with the waters of Hampton Roads and a brave man, had volunteered to serve as pilot for the Union ironclad.

  Paymaster William Keeler had no assigned battle station, so he positioned himself in the turret in case he could be of assistance there. He watched in awe as the men loaded 175-pound projectiles into the big guns. Once they were loaded, Keeler noted that “the most profound silence reigned.” Sealed inside the armored turret, unable to see out with the gun ports closed, the men seemed almost to freeze in place as they waited for the battle to begin. Keeler thought, “If there had been a coward heart there, its throb would have been audible, so intense was the stillness.” Although he admitted no fear, Keeler did ponder their circumstance as he waited, noting that “ours was an untried experiment and the enemy’s first fire might make it a coffin for us all.”