What do you think?
Rate this book
The Monitor and the Merrimac
Excerpt from The Monitor and the Merrimac
But the main result was reached. The Union ?eet was saved. The career of the Merrimac was checked. N 0 Union vessel was destroyed after the Monitor appeared. It seems prop er to note these facts here, in view of the fact that Mr. Ramsay's fresh and striking story of the M errimac, which is presented for the first time, enters upon the details of the battle more fully than the narrative of Lieutenant Worden and Lieutenant Greene. Fortunately the discussion has become academic in the half-cen.
But the main result was reached. The Union ?eet was saved. The career of the Merrimac was checked. N 0 Union vessel was destroyed after the Monitor appeared. It seems prop er to note these facts here, in view of the fact that Mr. Ramsay's fresh and striking story of the M errimac, which is presented for the first time, enters upon the details of the battle more fully than the narrative of Lieutenant Worden and Lieutenant Greene. Fortunately the discussion has become academic in the half-cen.
97 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1912
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 1, 2021
The Monitor and the Merrimack – or, if you prefer, the U.S.S. Monitor and the C.S.S. Virginia – fought their famous naval battle in the waters of Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862. It was the first duel between ironclad warships, and it signaled a sea change (so to speak) in how nations fought at sea from that time forward. And this modest 1912 volume, under the title of The Monitor and the Merrimac: Both Sides of the Story, constitutes a helpful primary source for students of the battle.
In an introduction, an unnamed editor acknowledges controversies that were still current at that time regarding the design of the Monitor and the tactical deployment of the ship during the Battle of Hampton Roads, but emphasizes that “the main result was reached. The Union fleet was saved. The career of the Merrimac was checked. No Union vessel was destroyed after the Monitor appeared.”
The three authors to whom credit is given for The Monitor and the Merrimac: Both Sides of the Story are Lieutenant John L. Worden, U.S.N., who commanded the Monitor during the battle until he was wounded and rendered hors de combat; Lieutenant Samuel Greene, U.S.N., who took over command after Worden’s wounding and commanded the Monitor through the rest of the battle; and H. Ashton Ramsay, C.S.N., chief engineer of the Virginia.
Part 1 of this book, Worden and Greene’s “The Monitor and the Merrimac,” was reprinted from Lucius Chittenden’s Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration (1891). Chittenden, who served as Register of the Treasury for the Lincoln Administration, recounts President Lincoln’s visit to Hampton Roads, weeks after the battle, with Assistant Naval Secretary Captain Gustavus V. Fox and other dignitaries.
When introducing Lieutenant Worden to the reader, Chittenden emphasizes that Worden still carries the physical marks of his battle wounds from the engagement: “One side of his face was permanently blackened by the powder shot into it from the muzzle of a cannon carrying a shell of one hundred pounds’ weight, discharged less than twenty yards away.”
Worden tells the story of the duel between the first ironclads up through his wounding, when a shell from the Virginia struck near the pilot house of the Monitor, and partially blinded him: “I was below the deck when the corner of the pilot-house was first struck by a shot or a shell. It either burst or was broken, and no harm was done. A short time after I had given the signal and, with my eye close against the lookout crack, was watching the effect of our shot, something happened to me – my part in the fight was ended.”
Greene then tells the rest of the story. As “the modest, diffident young Greene was half pushed forward into the circle”, Chittenden asks, “Can it be possible that this beardless boy fought one of the historic battles of the world?” And Greene is indeed modest, as he stresses to President Lincoln and the other listeners who are gathered there that “I cannot add much to the Captain’s story….He had cut out the work for us, and we had only to follow his pattern.”
And yet Greene, his protestations notwithstanding, does add to the reader’s understanding of what went on during the battle of the ironclads; and it becomes clear that Greene played an important part in the Monitor’s success at protecting the Minnesota and neutralizing the threat posed by the Virginia:
“I kept the Monitor either moving around the circle or around the enemy, and endeavored to place our shots as near her amidships as possible, where Captain Worden believed he had already broken through her armor. We knew that she could not sink us, and I thought I would keep right on pounding her as long as she would stand it. There is really nothing new to be added to Captain Worden’s account. We could strike her wherever we chose. Weary as they must have been, our men were full of enthusiasm, and I do not think we wasted a shot.”
When it is Ashton Ramsay’s turn to tell the story of “The Merrimac and the Monitor,” he understandably focuses on the irony of his situation. After all, Ramsay had served as second engineer on the C.S.S. Virginia back when it was the U.S.S. Merrimack, serving under chief engineer Alban Stimers. Within just a couple of years, the two men would both be serving as chief engineers of ironclad vessels, on opposing sides in the battle of Hampton Roads – Stimers for the Monitor, and Ramsay for the Virginia.
Ramsay records his vivid impressions of the vitality and aggressiveness of Franklin Buchanan, the Virginia’s commander, who said to Ramsay before the battle that “I am going to ram the Cumberland….I’m told she has the new rifled guns, the only ones in their whole fleet we have cause to fear. The moment we are in the Roads I’m going to make right for her and ram her.” Buchanan asked Ramsay about the ship’s long-problematic engines, Ramsay offered a noncommittal but generally encouraging answer, and the Virginia went forward into battle.
Like Worden and Greene, Ramsay emphasizes the action and drama of battle, as when he describes the moment when the Virginia rammed the Cumberland: “Two gongs, the signal to stop, were quickly followed by three, the signal to reverse. There was an ominous pause, then a crash, shaking us all off our feet. The engines labored. The vessel was shaken in every fiber.”
Thus Ramsay describes the Virginia’s destruction of the frigates U.S.S. Cumberland and U.S.S. Congress, along with the severe damage that the rebel ironclad inflicted upon the frigate U.S.S. Minnesota. But then came a moment of most propitious timing for the Union cause:
The Monitor arrived during the evening and anchored under the stern of the Minnesota, her lighter draught enabling her to do so without danger. To us the ensuing engagement was in the nature of a surprise. If we had known we were to meet her, we would at least have been supplied with solid shot for our rifled guns. We might even have thought to wait until our iron beak, lost in the side of the Cumberland, could be replaced. Buchanan was incapacitated by his wound, and the command devolved upon Lieutenant Jones.
Yet regardless of issues of inconvenient timing for either side, “the great fight was on, a fight the like of which the world had never seen. With the battle of yesterday old methods had passed away, and with them the experience of a thousand years ‘of battle and of breeze’ was brought to naught.”
Ramsay, rather like Worden and Greene, focuses on the issues that kept his ship from fighting at its very best in the Battle of Hampton Roads: “The coal consumption of the two days’ fight had lightened our prow until our unprotected submerged deck was almost awash. The armor on our sides below the water-line had been extended but about three feet”, and the lightened Virginia was, in effect, “no longer an ironclad.” The Virginia “glided past, leaving the Monitor unscathed, but got between her and the Minnesota and opened fire on the latter”; but the Monitor successfully protected her stricken sister ship, and the two ironclads fought to a draw.
Ramsay seems to wish, as many of his shipmates on the Virginia no doubt did, that their ship could have engaged in a rematch with the Monitor: “We went into dry-dock that very afternoon, and in about three weeks were ready to renew the battle upon more advantageous terms, but the Monitor, though reinforced by two other ironclads, the Galena and the Naugatuck, and every available vessel of the United States navy, was under orders from Washington to refuse our challenge and bottle us up in the Roads. This strategy filled us with rage and dismay, but it proved very effective.”
Within a few weeks, Confederate military forces withdrew from Norfolk, ensuring the fall of the city and its naval base to Union forces. And the Virginia, with its deep draft, could not withdraw up the James River to guard the Confederate capital at Richmond. Accordingly, the decision was made to scuttle the Virginia, and Ramsay describes the emotions of that moment:
Still unconquered, we hauled down our drooping colors, their laurels all fresh and green, with mingled pride and grief, gave her to the flames, and set the lambent fires roaring about the shotted guns. The slow match, the magazine, and that last, deep, slow, sullen, mournful boom told our people, now far away on the march, that their gallant ship was no more.
The Monitor, like the Virginia, never fought another battle after Hampton Roads. Towed southward by the U.S.S. Rhode Island to assist in U.S. Navy operations against rebel forces on the Carolina coast, the Monitor encountered heavy seas off Cape Hatteras and foundered; and Rear-Admiral E.W. Watson sadly recounts how, “When the survivors of the ill-fated vessel were mustered on the deck of the Rhode Island, four officers and twelve men were found missing” – their final resting place unknown until a Duke University research team found the wreckage of the Monitor on the sea floor in 1973. Today, the site is a National Marine Sanctuary.
Published in 1912, The Monitor and the Merrimac: Both Sides of the Story reminds the reader how views of war have changed over the past century. Chittenden’s account of Worden’s behavior after the battle emphasizes the naval officer’s quiet, stiff-upper-lip heroism:
“Have you heard what Captain Worden’s first inquiry was when he recovered his senses after the general shock to his system?” asked Captain Fox of the President.
“I think I have,” replied Mr. Lincoln, “but it is worth relating to these gentlemen.”
“His question was,” said Captain Fox, “‘Have I saved the Minnesota?’
“‘Yes, and whipped the Merrimac!’ someone answered.
“‘Then,’ said Captain Worden, ‘I don’t care what becomes of me.’”
It all sounds very Nelsonian, and it reminds the reader of just how much naval warfare had changed, and would continue to change. Two years after the publication of The Monitor and the Merrimac: Both Sides of the Story, the guns of August 1914 roared, and the First World War began. The World War I navies fought vast naval battles like Jutland, with numbers of ironclad warships that might have seemed inconceivable to the sailors and naval officers of Civil War times - and they deployed submarines that struck without warning and could not rescue the crews of the ships they sunk, as had been an honored naval tradition since Arginusae and Actium. The Monitor and the Merrimac: Both Sides of the Story reminds the modern reader how much naval warfare changed at Hampton Roads in March of 1862 – and again between 1914 and 1918 – and over and over again in the decades since.
In an introduction, an unnamed editor acknowledges controversies that were still current at that time regarding the design of the Monitor and the tactical deployment of the ship during the Battle of Hampton Roads, but emphasizes that “the main result was reached. The Union fleet was saved. The career of the Merrimac was checked. No Union vessel was destroyed after the Monitor appeared.”
The three authors to whom credit is given for The Monitor and the Merrimac: Both Sides of the Story are Lieutenant John L. Worden, U.S.N., who commanded the Monitor during the battle until he was wounded and rendered hors de combat; Lieutenant Samuel Greene, U.S.N., who took over command after Worden’s wounding and commanded the Monitor through the rest of the battle; and H. Ashton Ramsay, C.S.N., chief engineer of the Virginia.
Part 1 of this book, Worden and Greene’s “The Monitor and the Merrimac,” was reprinted from Lucius Chittenden’s Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration (1891). Chittenden, who served as Register of the Treasury for the Lincoln Administration, recounts President Lincoln’s visit to Hampton Roads, weeks after the battle, with Assistant Naval Secretary Captain Gustavus V. Fox and other dignitaries.
When introducing Lieutenant Worden to the reader, Chittenden emphasizes that Worden still carries the physical marks of his battle wounds from the engagement: “One side of his face was permanently blackened by the powder shot into it from the muzzle of a cannon carrying a shell of one hundred pounds’ weight, discharged less than twenty yards away.”
Worden tells the story of the duel between the first ironclads up through his wounding, when a shell from the Virginia struck near the pilot house of the Monitor, and partially blinded him: “I was below the deck when the corner of the pilot-house was first struck by a shot or a shell. It either burst or was broken, and no harm was done. A short time after I had given the signal and, with my eye close against the lookout crack, was watching the effect of our shot, something happened to me – my part in the fight was ended.”
Greene then tells the rest of the story. As “the modest, diffident young Greene was half pushed forward into the circle”, Chittenden asks, “Can it be possible that this beardless boy fought one of the historic battles of the world?” And Greene is indeed modest, as he stresses to President Lincoln and the other listeners who are gathered there that “I cannot add much to the Captain’s story….He had cut out the work for us, and we had only to follow his pattern.”
And yet Greene, his protestations notwithstanding, does add to the reader’s understanding of what went on during the battle of the ironclads; and it becomes clear that Greene played an important part in the Monitor’s success at protecting the Minnesota and neutralizing the threat posed by the Virginia:
“I kept the Monitor either moving around the circle or around the enemy, and endeavored to place our shots as near her amidships as possible, where Captain Worden believed he had already broken through her armor. We knew that she could not sink us, and I thought I would keep right on pounding her as long as she would stand it. There is really nothing new to be added to Captain Worden’s account. We could strike her wherever we chose. Weary as they must have been, our men were full of enthusiasm, and I do not think we wasted a shot.”
When it is Ashton Ramsay’s turn to tell the story of “The Merrimac and the Monitor,” he understandably focuses on the irony of his situation. After all, Ramsay had served as second engineer on the C.S.S. Virginia back when it was the U.S.S. Merrimack, serving under chief engineer Alban Stimers. Within just a couple of years, the two men would both be serving as chief engineers of ironclad vessels, on opposing sides in the battle of Hampton Roads – Stimers for the Monitor, and Ramsay for the Virginia.
Ramsay records his vivid impressions of the vitality and aggressiveness of Franklin Buchanan, the Virginia’s commander, who said to Ramsay before the battle that “I am going to ram the Cumberland….I’m told she has the new rifled guns, the only ones in their whole fleet we have cause to fear. The moment we are in the Roads I’m going to make right for her and ram her.” Buchanan asked Ramsay about the ship’s long-problematic engines, Ramsay offered a noncommittal but generally encouraging answer, and the Virginia went forward into battle.
Like Worden and Greene, Ramsay emphasizes the action and drama of battle, as when he describes the moment when the Virginia rammed the Cumberland: “Two gongs, the signal to stop, were quickly followed by three, the signal to reverse. There was an ominous pause, then a crash, shaking us all off our feet. The engines labored. The vessel was shaken in every fiber.”
Thus Ramsay describes the Virginia’s destruction of the frigates U.S.S. Cumberland and U.S.S. Congress, along with the severe damage that the rebel ironclad inflicted upon the frigate U.S.S. Minnesota. But then came a moment of most propitious timing for the Union cause:
The Monitor arrived during the evening and anchored under the stern of the Minnesota, her lighter draught enabling her to do so without danger. To us the ensuing engagement was in the nature of a surprise. If we had known we were to meet her, we would at least have been supplied with solid shot for our rifled guns. We might even have thought to wait until our iron beak, lost in the side of the Cumberland, could be replaced. Buchanan was incapacitated by his wound, and the command devolved upon Lieutenant Jones.
Yet regardless of issues of inconvenient timing for either side, “the great fight was on, a fight the like of which the world had never seen. With the battle of yesterday old methods had passed away, and with them the experience of a thousand years ‘of battle and of breeze’ was brought to naught.”
Ramsay, rather like Worden and Greene, focuses on the issues that kept his ship from fighting at its very best in the Battle of Hampton Roads: “The coal consumption of the two days’ fight had lightened our prow until our unprotected submerged deck was almost awash. The armor on our sides below the water-line had been extended but about three feet”, and the lightened Virginia was, in effect, “no longer an ironclad.” The Virginia “glided past, leaving the Monitor unscathed, but got between her and the Minnesota and opened fire on the latter”; but the Monitor successfully protected her stricken sister ship, and the two ironclads fought to a draw.
Ramsay seems to wish, as many of his shipmates on the Virginia no doubt did, that their ship could have engaged in a rematch with the Monitor: “We went into dry-dock that very afternoon, and in about three weeks were ready to renew the battle upon more advantageous terms, but the Monitor, though reinforced by two other ironclads, the Galena and the Naugatuck, and every available vessel of the United States navy, was under orders from Washington to refuse our challenge and bottle us up in the Roads. This strategy filled us with rage and dismay, but it proved very effective.”
Within a few weeks, Confederate military forces withdrew from Norfolk, ensuring the fall of the city and its naval base to Union forces. And the Virginia, with its deep draft, could not withdraw up the James River to guard the Confederate capital at Richmond. Accordingly, the decision was made to scuttle the Virginia, and Ramsay describes the emotions of that moment:
Still unconquered, we hauled down our drooping colors, their laurels all fresh and green, with mingled pride and grief, gave her to the flames, and set the lambent fires roaring about the shotted guns. The slow match, the magazine, and that last, deep, slow, sullen, mournful boom told our people, now far away on the march, that their gallant ship was no more.
The Monitor, like the Virginia, never fought another battle after Hampton Roads. Towed southward by the U.S.S. Rhode Island to assist in U.S. Navy operations against rebel forces on the Carolina coast, the Monitor encountered heavy seas off Cape Hatteras and foundered; and Rear-Admiral E.W. Watson sadly recounts how, “When the survivors of the ill-fated vessel were mustered on the deck of the Rhode Island, four officers and twelve men were found missing” – their final resting place unknown until a Duke University research team found the wreckage of the Monitor on the sea floor in 1973. Today, the site is a National Marine Sanctuary.
Published in 1912, The Monitor and the Merrimac: Both Sides of the Story reminds the reader how views of war have changed over the past century. Chittenden’s account of Worden’s behavior after the battle emphasizes the naval officer’s quiet, stiff-upper-lip heroism:
“Have you heard what Captain Worden’s first inquiry was when he recovered his senses after the general shock to his system?” asked Captain Fox of the President.
“I think I have,” replied Mr. Lincoln, “but it is worth relating to these gentlemen.”
“His question was,” said Captain Fox, “‘Have I saved the Minnesota?’
“‘Yes, and whipped the Merrimac!’ someone answered.
“‘Then,’ said Captain Worden, ‘I don’t care what becomes of me.’”
It all sounds very Nelsonian, and it reminds the reader of just how much naval warfare had changed, and would continue to change. Two years after the publication of The Monitor and the Merrimac: Both Sides of the Story, the guns of August 1914 roared, and the First World War began. The World War I navies fought vast naval battles like Jutland, with numbers of ironclad warships that might have seemed inconceivable to the sailors and naval officers of Civil War times - and they deployed submarines that struck without warning and could not rescue the crews of the ships they sunk, as had been an honored naval tradition since Arginusae and Actium. The Monitor and the Merrimac: Both Sides of the Story reminds the modern reader how much naval warfare changed at Hampton Roads in March of 1862 – and again between 1914 and 1918 – and over and over again in the decades since.
June 6, 2022
A battle or a disaster?
A quick look at the battle from both sides. I thought the Merrimack was better thought out and designed? The monitor benefited from Northern technology. Still a very equal fight.
A quick look at the battle from both sides. I thought the Merrimack was better thought out and designed? The monitor benefited from Northern technology. Still a very equal fight.
June 21, 2023
This firsthand account is very interesting, and easy to read. Two thumbs up.
September 28, 2023
Short, but descriptive, accounts of the fight by the officers commanding each vessel. Also included is an eye-witness description of the Monitor's sinking several months later.
July 13, 2014
Amazing set of writings from the people who served on both vessels. Gave me a world of understanding of the ships, the conditions aboard them, and the men who made them work.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews