Abstract
There was a time in American history when every school child knew about the first battle of the ironclads, the famous clash between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (ex-USS Merrimack) on 9 March 1862. Sadly, today this is most certainly not the case, but it is not because historians have ignored this earthshattering clash that forever changed warfare at sea. Richard Snow, the prolific author and long-time editor of American Heritage magazine, is the latest historian to take on the challenge of making sense of the battle and its lasting legacy. Iron Dawn: The Monitor, Merrimack, and the Sea Battle that Changed History, is a superbly written and well-organized page-turner that tells the exciting story with verve and energy.
What sets this version of the familiar story apart is Snow’s outstanding depiction of a cast of characters that few fiction writers could imagine. The visionary President Abraham Lincoln, who embraced new and promising technology. Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, Gideon Wells, who presided over the unprecedented expansion of the US Navy at the outbreak of the American Civil War. The irascible but brilliant inventor and engineer, John Ericsson, who designed and built the Monitor, the first warship in history to sport a revolving turret. Franklin Buchanan, the CSS Virginia’s commander, a cantankerous but capable career naval officer who like many of his comrades in the pre-war Army and Navy resigned his commission to join the Confederacy. Finally, the USS Monitor’s captain, John Worden, while a highly capable if obscure officer, became a celebrated but unlikely hero. These are just some of the main figures. The supporting company is just as compelling. Snow’s account of the Monitor and the Virginia saga is proof once again just how captivating the best history can be.
Snow does not get to the actual battle between the two ironic warships until the final third of the book, but this is a strength not a weakness. The momentous events that led to history’s first clash of ironclads and the aftermath are as important as the battle itself. When the Confederates captured the important Norfolk Navy yard early in the war, they also seized the burned out wreckage of the USS Merrimack, a wooden first-class steam frigate. At the direction of Stephen Mallory, the rebel secretary of the navy, the hulk was refurbished and sheathed with iron plates to create the first ironclad warship, soon rechristened as the CSS Virginia, in the Western Hemisphere. Virginia boasted a strong battery of fourteen guns of varying sizes.
Driven by the knowledge that the Confederates were building an ironclad at Norfolk, Ericsson and his team feverishly built the Monitor in an astounding 118 days (eighteen more than Ericsson had promised). Unlike the Virginia, the USS Monitor was original from the keel up. Indeed, by the time the two ships met, the Monitor was arguably the most complex and technologically advanced machine ever built. Its structural components were made entirely of iron and not simply iron plates laid upon a wooden superstructure like the Virginia. Aside from her novel turret with its two XI-inch Dahlgren guns, Ericsson’s masterpiece incorporated state-of-the-art propulsion, ordnance, sanitation, and ventilation systems. As a weapon of war, she was the HMS Queen Elizabeth of her day, but even more so.
The Virginia made the first move on 8 March 1862, attacking the US Navy’s North Atlantic Blockading Squadron’s fleet of wooden ships stationed in Hampton Roads. The Confederate warship mauled the Union vessels, destroying both the USS Cumberland and the USS Congress with great loss of life. Determined to renew the attack the next day in order to destroy the remainder of the US fleet, the Virginia withdrew. After a nightmarish voyage through heavy seas south from New York, the Monitor arrived on the scene, as Gustavus Fox, Welles’s able assistance secretary of the navy, and an eyewitness to the battle put it, ‘at the moment the novelist would have produced her’ (p. 262). On the morning of 9 March 1962 the two iron warships faced off, losing round after round at each other often at point-blank range. As sluggish as the Monitor was with her extremely low freeboard, she literally ‘sailed rings around her lumbering opponent’ (p. 273). Finally, after three hours of almost constant combat, the Virginia withdrew from the contest, leaving the dented but essentially unscathed Monitor controlling the waters, having saved the remaining vulnerable wooden warships.
Both sides claimed victory for understandable reasons. The Virginia had inflicted an unprecedented and bloody defeat on the blockading squadron and the Monitor had done her job protecting the remaining ships and forcing her opponent from the scene of battle. Neither ship survived for long. The Virginia was blown up by her crew in May 1862 to prevent capture by advancing Union forces and the Monitor sank in a storm off Cape Hatteras on New Year’s Eve 1862, but their impact far outlived them. Immediately after the battle, the US Navy embarked on an extensive building program that historians have called ‘monitor fever’, including the follow-on Passaic-class monitors that were larger and much improved versions of the original ship. The Confederates, with their limited resources, also attempted to build as many ironclads as they could manage. Snow does an excellent job showing how the battle shook foreign navies to the core forcing them to re-evaluate the composition of their own fleets.
Even excellent books are not without flaws, and this one is no exception. There are no citations of any kind in the book, which is perhaps understandable for a popular history like Iron Dawn, but in a book filled with direct quotations and vivid descriptions of conversations, meetings, and so on, basic citations would be very useful to guide readers to sources. There are a number of minor but annoying errors such as referring to Commander John Dahlgren as a ‘Major’ (p. 2). Snow’s breezy style can be a little overboard at times. After describing shipping entrepreneur Cornelius Bushnell’s decision to lobby the government in support of John Ericsson’s invention, Snow unnecessarily exclaims ‘Good for Bushnell!’ (p. 107). The author also makes a few exaggerated statements, such as his claim that had the Monitor failed to meet the Virginia at Hampton Roads it would have ‘changed the course of the war’ (p. 258). This was highly unlikely. Absent the Monitor the Virginia might well have destroyed a few more US Navy warships in the area, but she was so unwieldy and her machinery so unreliable that her potential for operations outside the narrow and protected confines of Hampton Roads was limited at best. Snow’s narrative can go on for pages relating multiple conversations and events without providing the dates, thus leaving the reader without important chronological context. But these failings are minor when compared to the book’s many strengths, which include good maps and illustrations that nicely complement Snow’s vivid writing style.
I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in naval history, the history of the American Civil War, and for any reader looking for a great story well told.