Among the coincidences of history, none is more remarkable than the arrival at Hampton Roads on the night of March 8, 1862, of the strange and freakish-looking craft known as the Monitor. Proposed to the Navy Department in the preceding fall by John Ericsson, in spite of sneers and doubts, a contract was given him in October to construct a vessel after his design. The form of the Monitor is too well known to need description—"a cheese-box on a raft," the name given her in derision, describes her as well as anything. She was launched on the last day of January, and three weeks later was handed over to the Government, but it was not until the fourth of March that her guns were mounted, two powerful rifled cannon. At the request of Ericsson, she was named the Monitor, and this name came afterwards to be adopted to describe the class of ships of which she was the first. So dangerous was service in her considered, that volunteers were called for, and Lieutenant John Lorimer Worden was given command of her.
Worden had entered the navy twenty-seven years before, and at the opening of the Civil War, had delivered the orders from the secretary of the navy which saved Fort Pickens, in the harbor of Pensacola, to the Union. Attempting to return North overland, he was arrested and held as a prisoner seven months, being exchanged just in time to enable him to procure command of the Monitor. Rumors of the construction of the Merrimac had reached the North, and two days after her guns were aboard, the Monitor left New York harbor for Hampton Roads. Just after she passed Sandy Hook, orders recalling her were received there, fortunately too late to be delivered. By such slight threads do the events of history depend.
Meanwhile, Captain Worden was making such progress southward as he could with his unwieldy and dangerous craft, which had been designed only for the smooth waters of rivers and harbors and which was wholly unable to cope with the boisterous Atlantic. There was a brisk wind, and the vessel was soon in imminent danger of foundering. The waves broke over her smoke-stack and poured down into her fires, so that steam could not be kept up; the blowers which ventilated the ship would not work, and she became filled with gas which rendered some of her crew unconscious. Undoubtedly she would have gone to the bottom very shortly had not the wind moderated. Even then, it was almost a miracle that she should win through, but win through she did, and at four o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, March 8, as she was passing Cape Henry, Captain Worden heard the distant booming of guns. As darkness came, he saw far ahead the glare of the burning Congress.
About midnight, the little vessel crept up beside the Minnesota and anchored. Her crew were completely exhausted. For fifty hours, they had fought to keep their ship afloat, and on the morrow they must be prepared to meet a formidable foe. All that night they worked with their vessel, making such repairs as they could. At eight o'clock next morning, the Merrimac appeared, and the Monitor started to meet her.
Amazed at sight of what appeared to be an iron turret sliding over the water toward him, the commander of the Merrimac swung toward this tiny antagonist, intending to destroy her before proceeding to the work in hand. Captain Worden had taken his station in the pilot-house, and reserved his fire until within short range. Then, slowly circling about his unwieldy foe, he fired shot after shot, which, while they did not disable her, prevented her from destroying the Union ships in the harbor. Finding the Monitor apparently invulnerable, and with her machinery giving trouble, the Merrimac at last withdrew to Norfolk.
That the battle was a victory for the Monitor cannot be questioned; she had prevented the destruction of the Union ships, and this she continued to do, until, in the following May, the Confederates, finding themselves compelled to abandon Norfolk, set the Merrimac on fire and blew her up. Six months later, the Monitor met a tragic fate, foundering in a storm off Cape Hatteras, a portion of her crew going down with her.
Honors were showered upon Worden for his gallant work. He was given command of the monitor Montauk, and later on destroyed the Confederate privateer Nashville. After the war, he was promoted to rear-admiral, and remained in the service until 1886.
There were others in the war whose deeds brought glory to themselves and to the navy—Lieutenant William B. Cushing, who destroyed the Confederate ram Albemarle in Plymouth harbor, a deed comparable with the burning of the Philadelphia early in the century; David Dixon Porter, whose work on the Mississippi was second only to Farragut's, who four times received the thanks of Congress, and who, in the end, became admiral of the navy; Charles Stuart Boggs, who, in the sloop-of-war Varuna, sank five Confederate vessels in the river below New Orleans, before he was himself sunk—but none of them, and, indeed, none of those whose exploits we have given, measured up to the stature of Farragut, one of the greatest commanders of all time, and, all things considered, the very greatest in the history of America.
Thirty years and more passed after that epoch-making contest between the Monitor and the Merrimac before the world witnessed another battle to the death between ironclads. Theoretically, wood had long since been displaced by iron, iron by steel, and steel by specially-forged armor-plate, battleship designers struggling always to build a vessel which could withstand modern projectiles. But as to the actual results in warfare, there was nothing but theory to go upon until that first day of May, 1898, when George Dewey steamed into the harbor of Manila, at the head of his squadron, and opened fire upon the Spanish fleet.