Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  The Virginia’s dark hulk entered the James River under the command of Commodore Franklin Buchanan, who had been the first superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. Buchanan drew a bead on the big wooden warships lying at anchor between Norfolk and the Union bastion of Fort Monroe on the opposite shore. At full steam, the ironclad made barely five knots, so the crews of the Federal ships had sufficient time to prepare for the oncoming monster. As she came in range, the fifty-gun USS Congress fired first. The cannonballs bounced off the ironclad like hailstones hitting a frying pan. Nearby, the Cumberland, carrying thirty guns, opened fire, along with batteries ashore, but equally in vain. Closing the distance, the Virginia loosed a volley at the Congress and then rammed the Cumberland. Water poured through the pierced hull, and the wooden warship sank quickly.

  Shaking loose, and losing her ram in the process, the Rebel ironclad began a slow, ponderous turn to fire on the Congress again. The Union crew tried to sail away but struck a shoal. Three other Federal ships, steaming upstream toward the fight, also ran aground. Helpless and shot to pieces, the Congress surrendered, but by that time the tide was running out and the heavy ironclad, with its twenty-two-foot draft, was in danger of grounding as well. As a parting shot, the Rebels set fire to the Congress with a shower of heated cannonballs, eventually producing an immense explosion when the frigate’s magazine went up. Then the Virginia withdrew for the evening, her crew confident of finishing the Federal flotilla come morning.

  Nothing like it had ever occurred before: one ship, carrying a mere ten guns, had achieved a great victory over five wooden vessels bearing more than two hundred guns among them.

  * * *

  The telegraph between Fort Monroe and the War Department happened to be out that night, so news of the disaster did not reach Lincoln until the next morning, March 9. Nicolay was in the office reading aloud from editorials in leading New York newspapers—both Republican and Democratic—that praised the Tycoon’s proposal for compensated emancipation. The postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, whose roots in Maryland and Missouri gave him a keen understanding of border state politics, came by, at which point Lincoln asked him why the proposal wasn’t generating any discussion where it really counted. “Since I sent in my message [to Congress], about the usual amount of calling by the border state Congressmen has taken place,” Lincoln said. “Although they have all been very friendly, not one of them has yet said a word to me about it.” He asked Blair whether it would be a good idea to convene a meeting with the border state delegations to “have a frank and direct talk” about his proposal. Perhaps it would be better, Blair replied, to wait for another military victory.

  “That is just the reason why I do not wish to wait,” Lincoln answered. “If we should have successes, they may feel and say, ‘the rebellion is crushed, and it matters not whether we do anything about this matter.’ … I want to tell them that if they will take hold and do this, the war will cease.” Blair agreed to arrange the session.

  Shortly after that, Assistant Secretary of War Peter Watson rushed into Lincoln’s office with the first report from Hampton Roads. He was soon followed by Stanton, Seward, and Secretary of the Navy Welles. McClellan hurried in, as did Montgomery Meigs. People were talking all at once, each outdoing the others in imagining the calamities that would befall the Union now that the Confederacy had created a new and indestructible war machine. As one of those present reported: “One thought she would go to New York and levy tribute—another to Phila[delphia]—a third to Baltimore, or to Annapolis,” where the transport ships for McClellan’s army were collected and vulnerable. Another participant in the ad hoc meeting “said that she would come up and burn Washington.”

  Lincoln listened to this panicky talk for a while, then called for his carriage. He needed some fresh air and decided he would fetch a favorite adviser to join the deliberations at the White House: Captain John Dahlgren, commander of the Washington Navy Yard. Among other skills, Dahlgren was one of the navy’s foremost inventors—he specialized in refinements to artillery—and the president was always eager to hear his views about new weapons and technology. When Dahlgren opened his door to the president, the captain was shocked to see how “thin and wasted” Lincoln had become in the fortnight since his son’s funeral. On the ride back to the White House, Lincoln asked what would happen if the former Merrimack came up the Potomac to Washington. Should the ironclad reach the capital, Dahlgren answered grimly, there would be no defense. The only option, if the ship came north, was to sink obstructions in the river channel to block its path.

  Back in his office, Lincoln found Stanton pacing the room “like a caged lion,” as one witness put it. He would stalk across the office, drop into a chair, and then leap up again a moment later, all the while listing more and more catastrophic implications. The more agitated he became, the more annoyed he was by the fact that Welles, whose navy had failed to prevent this crisis, was sitting in front of him rather calmly and saying little.

  As Welles later described Stanton’s tirade: “The Merrimac, he said, would destroy every vessel in the service, could lay every city on the coast under contribution, could take Fortress Monroe; McClellan’s [plan] to advance by the Peninsula must be abandoned, and Burnside would inevitably be captured” on the North Carolina coast. “Likely the first movement of the Merrimac would be to come up the Potomac and disperse Congress, destroy the Capitol and public buildings; or she might go to New York and Boston and destroy those cities, or levy from them contributions sufficient to carry on the War. He asked what vessel or means we had to resist or prevent her from doing whatever she pleased.”

  Welles replied acidly that the ship couldn’t go to Washington and New York simultaneously. Nor could the heavy ironclad, with its deep draft, get through the Kettle Bottom Shoals downriver from Washington or navigate the shallows that protected Burnside’s base on Roanoke Island. Indeed, according to the navy’s spies in Norfolk, it was doubtful that the Virginia was sufficiently seaworthy to leave Hampton Roads. As for a vessel that would prevent the dreaded ship from “doing whatever she pleased,” Welles continued, the Union’s own coastal ironclad, the USS Monitor, had just arrived at Fort Monroe, having left New York the previous Thursday.

  Seward brightened at the news that the Rebel craft had limitations and vulnerabilities; so far, people had discussed only its awesome powers. But Stanton was not mollified. He demanded to know more about the Monitor.

  Welles described the vessel, an utterly original design by a Swedish-born engineer named John Ericsson. Its 172-foot wooden hull was covered in one-inch iron plates, and the ship rode so low that only eighteen inches showed above the waterline. Topside, the Monitor was flat like a raft; mounted at the center was a round turret that was twenty feet across, nine feet high, and encased in iron eight inches thick. The turret rotated to allow its guns to fire in any direction. A board of navy men assigned to consider possible ironclad designs had been skeptical of Ericsson’s proposal, but Lincoln, when he saw the plans, thought the idea made sense. Blessing the project, he had said, “I think there is something in it.”

  Now Stanton homed in on one key detail: How many guns?

  Two 11-inch Dahlgren guns, Welles replied.

  Stanton’s “mingled look of incredulity and contempt cannot be described,” Welles wrote afterward, and the tone of his follow-up question—did Welles really mean that the Union should rely on a ship with just two guns?—was “equally indescribable.”

  But rely on this odd and unproven craft was exactly what the Union did. For even as this tense exchange was taking place, the Monitor’s two guns were blazing away at the Rebel ironclad from point-blank range, while the Virginia’s guns fired back.

  * * *

  The crew of the Virginia had awakened that Sunday morning ready to make short work of the three grounded warships near Fort Monroe, starting with the USS Minnesota, sister ship of the ruined Congress. To their surprise, they saw, sitting defiantly in their path, a
strange vessel that looked “like a pygmy compared with the lofty frigate which she guarded,” as one observer described it. The Monitor had steamed into place late the night before.

  After breakfast, the Rebels started downriver toward a collision that would be, in the words of one Confederate officer, “in some respects the most momentous naval conflict ever witnessed,” when “a thousand years of battle and breeze would be forgotten.” In a matter of hours, as the London Times later put it, almost the entire fleet of Britain’s world-dominating navy—147 first-class wooden warships—would be rendered obsolete.

  The Monitor quickly proved a match for the much bigger Virginia. Her light draft and comparatively nimble handling allowed the ship to dance around her sluggish foe, pounding away, and after shots from the rotating guns blew holes in the Rebel craft’s smokestack, the Virginia was in danger of losing all power. Meanwhile, the Rebel shells fired in response skittered across the low deck of the Monitor or left harmless dents in the turret. (Not quite harmless, actually: by the end of the battle the gunners were nearly deaf from the clangor of shells smashing into their iron enclosure, and the Monitor’s captain, John Worden, was temporarily blinded by a direct hit on the pilot house.) After a while, one Rebel gun gave up shooting altogether. “Why are you not firing. Mr. Eggleston?” the commander of the Virginia demanded. Firing was a waste of powder, the officer replied: “I find I can do her about as much damage by snapping my thumb at her every two minutes and a half.”

  In an attempt to ram the Monitor, the Virginia proved “as unwieldy as Noah’s ark,” in the words of one combatant, and the spry Union ship dodged at the last minute. Frustrated, the Rebel commander ordered his men to prepare to board the enemy for hand-to-hand combat, but the Monitor wouldn’t remain still long enough. This was fortunate for the Rebels, because the Union sailors were ready to greet the boarders with hand grenades.

  After more than four hours of combat, the Monitor retreated into shallow water, leaving the battered Virginia to sputter its way back to Norfolk. Both crews had discovered flaws in their ships and weaknesses in their strategies, and ultimately the battle was declared a draw. But the draw was in fact a significant Union victory. The Confederates had invested heavily in the construction of their ironclad, only to see it neutralized in less than a day. They did not have, and never would have, the resources to build more ships of the same power. In the North, however, additional Monitor-class gunboats and other ironclads were already under construction. And there would be as many as it took to win.

  The battle of Hampton Roads proved the viability and power of armored warships, but only the North could take advantage of that lesson, especially after the loss of the ironworks in Tennessee to Grant’s campaign. In short, the arrival of the Monitor put an end to the South’s hopes of fighting its way through the Union blockade. As one navy man wrote to another: “Iron will be King, instead of Cotton!”

  * * *

  Back at the White House, none of this was known until about four P.M., when a messenger announced that a telegraph connection had been opened to Fort Monroe. The first message over the wire reassured Lincoln and his impromptu war council that the Rebel ironclad was still at Hampton Roads—although the news did little to calm Stanton, who had ordered a fleet of small boats to be sunk at the Potomac shoals to block the river. Next came a more comprehensive dispatch from Gustavus Fox of the Navy Department, who had gone south to greet the Monitor and thus became a witness to the great battle. The good news from Fox was followed by even more: the Confederate retreat from Manassas was at last confirmed. Brigadier General Joseph Hooker wired a report that the Rebels had abandoned their Potomac batteries without a fight, spiking their guns and burning their camps. Meanwhile, escaping slaves were entering Federal camps in northern Virginia with word that the Confederate army was gone from its trenches. McClellan called for his horse and set out across the river to see what he could learn.

  The emotional span of that single day—from despair to celebration—left indelible marks on the memories of Lincoln’s advisers. Nicolay and Hay said the activity in the president’s office on March 9 was “perhaps the most excited and impressive of the whole war.” And as the calm eye of the storm, Lincoln may well have taken note of the fact that the news from Manassas was carried by contrabands—slaves leaving their owners and seeking a haven with advancing Federal troops. With Union forces on the march from Virginia to Arkansas, the number of slaves liberated in this way was rising steeply. In his conversations with conservatives around this time, the president frequently made the point that this influx of self-liberated slaves meant that emancipation had already started whether they liked it or not.

  Lincoln repeated this point the next day, when Montgomery Blair convened the panel of border state congressmen he had promised. The president told the group that he was afraid his proposal might have been misunderstood as an attack on the citizens of the critically important loyal slave states. That was not his intent, he assured them. He believed slavery “was wrong and should continue to think so,” and he would not, in the words of one participant, “pretend to disguise his antislavery feeling.” But his proposal was not motivated by his sentiments. The Constitution did not give him or Congress any power over slavery in their states, he said, because “emancipation was a subject exclusively under the control of the states.”

  Continuing, the president told the congressmen that the unavoidable fact of this war meant that “immense [Union] armies were in the field and must continue in the field as long as the war lasts.” Inevitably, the armies would come in contact with slaves, and some of those slaves would seek the army’s protection. This was a distraction to Union troops operating in the border states and a source of “continual irritation” for the Federal cause, because he could not order volunteer troops, many of whom ardently opposed slavery, to force these human beings back into bondage. (As Lincoln put it in another conversation about this time, “The Negro who has once touched the hem of the government’s garment shall never again be a slave.”) His proposal to compensate the border states in exchange for ending slavery, he explained to the group, was his “good faith” answer to the self-emancipation of slaves, and if they would embrace it, they would deal a blow to the rebellion greater than any battle could inflict.

  Unfortunately for Lincoln, the border states were still unwilling to change. John Noell of Missouri assured Lincoln that since slavery in his state would soon die out on its own, there was no need to take any action. Maryland’s John Crisfield protested that his constituents were ready to end slavery, but that even indirect pressure from outsiders—pressure such as Lincoln’s proposal—was unacceptable to them. Stated another way, the citizens of Maryland would be happy to give up slavery provided no one asked them to. Another Missouri representative, William Hall, suggested a national referendum, but this would be exactly the sort of outside pressure that raised the hackles of the Marylanders. Expressing yet another view, Kentucky’s Charles Wickliffe argued that Lincoln’s idea was unconstitutional.

  The meeting broke up without having made any progress. A line of reasoning that seemed obvious and persuasive to Lincoln had failed to break through the emotional responses built up over whole lives accustomed to slavery. Especially in the border states, the default position of elected representatives was to put the divisive question of slavery as far away as possible, whether that required wishful thinking or circular logic, stratagems of delay or appeals to the Constitution.

  Lincoln’s disappointment must have been apparent to his advisers, because later that week Edward Bates decided that the president needed to be bucked up. In a private visit to the White House, the attorney general—who was from Missouri and well understood the ingrained habits of thought that made slavery so hard to reject—commiserated with Lincoln about the difficulty of steering a course between the extremes of opinion in the Union coalition. He urged the president to “stand firm on his present rock (as to the slavery question) and not yield an inch to
either the fierce rush of the northern abolitionists or the timid doubters of the border slave states.” Bates added: “You have taken your positions cautiously. Now maintain them bravely, and I will sink or swim with you.”

  * * *

  Edwin Stanton was still angry when he arrived for a cabinet meeting in Lincoln’s office on March 11. His nasty exchange with Welles two days earlier had festered: Welles had countermanded Stanton’s order to prepare obstructions for the Potomac, prompting another furious outburst from Stanton and another acid response from Welles. The Union had spent months trying to open the river and now the Rebel batteries were finally gone, Welles said. Why did Stanton want to block the Potomac again?

  Today’s unpleasant task for the secretary of war was to report on the state of the Union’s military bureaucracy. In two months on the job, Stanton had managed to look under a lot of rocks and throw open plenty of closed doors in his notoriously mismanaged department, and he did not like what he was finding. “Great ignorance, negligence, and lack of order and subordination—and reckless extravagance,” summarized one person who heard the secretary’s presentation. Cabinet members were shocked when Stanton revealed that the army payroll now numbered nearly 700,000 and that its finances were “shamefully managed.” Stanton said that he routinely received requisitions from the quartermaster general’s office that Meigs, the head of the office, knew absolutely nothing about. A bit defensively, Stanton added that he would not take the blame for conditions in his department, which had deteriorated before he arrived.

  Indeed, Stanton deserved credit: he was making real progress in cleaning up the mess he had inherited. “Stanton is exceedingly industrious, mindful of the interests of his Bureau, never off from his post, works like a trooper and spends day and night at his office when under a strong pressure,” wrote one observer. One of the secretary’s most effective innovations was the institution of “public days,” when he personally attended to petitions from would-be contractors while standing at an upright desk in a room where anyone could come and watch his deliberations. He put on quite a show. An individual wanting to do business with the army would wait in a long line until his turn was called. Then, typically, the petitioner would state his case in a low voice, trying to achieve a modicum of privacy, only to have Stanton restate the proposal in booming tones, along with his instant verdict.