Who won the Battle of Hampton Roads?
Neither side won outright. On 8 March 1862 the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia sank the USS Cumberland and destroyed the USS Congress. On 9 March she fought the USS Monitor for about four hours, and neither ship could sink the other. The duel was a tactical draw, but the Union blockade held.5
Around midday on 8 March 1862 a strange shape came down the Elizabeth River toward the Union warships anchored off Newport News, Virginia: a long, low hull carrying a sloping iron roof and a single funnel. It was the CSS Virginia, built on the burned hull of the U.S. frigate Merrimack. By nightfall she had sunk one wooden warship and set another on fire, and the U.S. Navy had suffered its worst defeat yet. That night a second, even stranger vessel arrived, and the next morning the two fought the first battle in history between ironclad warships.6
A battle of the American Civil War, part of the greatest battles of the Civil War · Related: Fort Sumter, Mobile Bay
Who won the Battle of Hampton Roads?
The battle had two very different days. On 8 March the Virginia, under Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan, attacked the wooden ships of the Union blockade in Hampton Roads, the anchorage where the James and Elizabeth rivers meet Chesapeake Bay. She rammed and sank the sloop Cumberland and forced the frigate Congress to surrender, then burned her. On 9 March she came back to finish the frigate Minnesota, aground off Newport News, and found the Union ironclad USS Monitor waiting for her.7
The two ironclads fought for about four hours, often at a few yards' range, and neither could pierce the other's armor. The Virginia then returned to Norfolk and the Monitor stayed with the fleet. The American Battlefield Trust calls the result inconclusive. The Naval History and Heritage Command sees no clear winner between the ironclads, although both sides claimed victory, and counts the saving of the Minnesota as a tactical success for the Union navy. The blockade of Hampton Roads was never broken.8
Why did the Confederacy build the Virginia?
The story began with a Union mistake. In April 1861, as Virginia voted to secede, the commandant of the Gosport Navy Yard at Portsmouth, opposite Norfolk, decided to abandon it. His men burned the yard and scuttled or burned the ships in it, among them the steam frigate USS Merrimack, which was waiting there for engine repairs. They failed to destroy the great dry dock, and the Confederates raised the burned hull within weeks.9
The South could never match the Union navy ship for ship, so its navy secretary, Stephen R. Mallory, wanted technology instead. In May 1861 he argued for fighting iron against wood. Lieutenant John M. Brooke, the naval constructor John L. Porter and the engineer William P. Williamson turned the burned hull into an armored casemate ship with sloping sides and submerged ends, and Brooke and Porter later each claimed the design as his own.10
The finished ship was about 263 to 280 feet long, depending on the account, and carried ten guns behind a roof of pine and oak about two feet thick, sloped at 35 or 45 degrees (accounts differ) and covered with two layers of two-inch iron plate rolled at the Tredegar works in Richmond. She had a cast-iron ram on her bow. She was also slow, about five knots, and drew 22 feet of water, which kept her to the deep channels. John Taylor Wood, one of her lieutenants, remembered that she took thirty to forty minutes to turn, that her old engines had been condemned before the war, and that her crew of about 300 was made up largely of volunteers from the army.11
Ericsson's Monitor
News of the Merrimack's conversion pushed Washington to act. Congress voted money for armored ships on 3 August 1861 and the Navy Department set up an ironclad board. Among the designs it accepted was one by the Swedish-born engineer John Ericsson, and his contract was signed on 4 October 1861. The Virginia was released into the Elizabeth River on 17 February 1862. Union Navy historian James Russell Soley later called the contest a race of constructors, and the Confederates had started months earlier.12
Ericsson's ship was built at the Continental Iron Works in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with crews working around the clock. She was launched on 30 January 1862, not quite four months after the contract, and commissioned on 25 February under Lieutenant John L. Worden. She looked like nothing else afloat: a flat armored deck rising only about 18 inches above the water, with a revolving turret 20 feet across that carried two 11-inch Dahlgren guns. Contemporaries nicknamed her a cheesebox on a raft.13
She also had flaws. Her pilothouse, a box of iron bars on the deck forward of the turret, kept the guns from firing straight ahead without the risk of hitting it, and cut the captain off from the officer fighting the guns. She was no seaboat. Towed south from New York on 6 March, she nearly foundered in a gale when water poured through her hawse hole, smokestacks and blower pipes and the engineers were overcome by gas. She passed Cape Henry on the afternoon of 8 March and heard the guns of Hampton Roads.14
8 March: the worst day in the history of the U.S. Navy
At about 11 a.m. on Saturday, 8 March, the Virginia left the navy yard with the gunboats Beaufort and Raleigh, her crew still strangers to the ship. Many aboard thought they were going on a trial trip. Off Newport News lay the sailing frigate Congress and the sloop Cumberland, and the heavy frigates Minnesota, Roanoke and St. Lawrence lay near Fort Monroe, some miles to the east.15
The Virginia passed the Congress, exchanging broadsides, and steered straight for the Cumberland, whose shot bounced off her armor. She struck the sloop under the starboard bow and opened a hole that, in John Taylor Wood's words, could have taken a horse and cart. Her ram broke off and stayed in the wreck. The Cumberland kept firing as she sank, and went down at about 3:35 p.m. with her flag still flying. Her acting captain, Lieutenant George U. Morris, reported the loss at upward of one hundred men, and the American Battlefield Trust counts 121.16
The Congress tried to escape and ran aground in shallow water. The Virginia took a raking position astern of her and, with the gunboats of the James River Squadron, which had come down the James to join the fight, shelled the frigate for about an hour. Her commander, Lieutenant Joseph B. Smith, was killed, and Lieutenant Austin Pendergrast hauled down the colors. When the Confederate gunboats came alongside to take off prisoners, Union troops on shore opened fire on them, and Buchanan, standing on the Virginia's upper deck, was badly wounded in the thigh. He ordered the Congress set on fire with hot shot and handed command to his executive officer, Lieutenant Catesby ap Roger Jones.17
The Minnesota had run aground on her way to help, and the Virginia's deep draft kept her about a mile away. As darkness fell the Confederates anchored off Sewell's Point, meaning to finish the frigate in the morning. The Congress burned into the night until, after midnight, the fire reached her magazine and she blew up. For the U.S. Navy, Robert Schneller writes, it was the worst defeat it had yet suffered, and NOAA calls it the navy's worst defeat until Pearl Harbor.18
9 March: what happened when the Monitor met the Virginia?
The Monitor anchored at Hampton Roads at 9 p.m. on 8 March. Captain John Marston, the senior officer present, had orders to send her on to Washington, but he kept her to protect the fleet, and she was sent to stand by the Minnesota. At about 1 a.m. she anchored near the frigate, and soon afterward her men watched the Congress explode.19
Soon after 8 a.m. on Sunday, 9 March, the Virginia steamed toward the Minnesota, and the Monitor came out from beside the frigate to meet her. Captain Gershom Van Brunt of the Minnesota, watching from his stranded ship, called the contrast that of a pygmy to a giant. The Monitor opened fire at about 8:45. For the next hours the two ships circled each other and fired, often only a few yards apart, the Virginia with her broadsides and the Monitor with the two guns of her turning turret.20
Neither could do serious harm. The Virginia had been sent out with shells for fighting wooden ships and had almost no solid shot. The Monitor fired her 11-inch guns with the standard charge of 15 pounds of powder, as the Navy's ordnance bureau had ordered, although later tests showed the guns could take 30 pounds. The turret was hard to start and stop, and Greene, who fired every gun himself, could see out only over the muzzles. Chief Engineer Alban Stimers counted 22 hits on the Monitor. On the Virginia, Wood found, the Monitor's shot broke the iron plates but not the wood behind them.21
The Virginia ran aground for about a quarter of an hour, and later Jones tried to ram, but the Monitor turned and took only a glancing blow. Wood recalled that Jones found Lieutenant J. R. Eggleston with his gun crew idle, and Eggleston told him he could do as much damage by snapping his thumb at the enemy every two and a half minutes. According to Wood, the Confederates then concentrated their fire on the Monitor's pilothouse.22
At about 11:30 a.m., by Greene's report, a shell burst against the pilothouse eye slit just as Worden was looking through it. It broke one of the iron logs and drove powder and scales of iron into his eyes. Blinded, he ordered the ship to sheer off and handed command to Greene. While the Monitor drew off into shallow water, the Virginia, leaking, short of steam and low on ammunition, headed back toward Norfolk. Greene fired a few shots after her, logged the end of the action at 12:15 p.m. and returned to the Minnesota.23
How many died at the Battle of Hampton Roads?
Almost all the dead fell on 8 March, and almost all were Union sailors. The American Battlefield Trust counts 261 Union killed and 108 wounded. Pendergrast reported that of 434 men on the Congress, 120 were killed, missing or died of wounds, and the Cumberland lost about the same number. On 9 March the Monitor had no one killed. Her surgeon reported Worden's wound and two men stunned when shot struck the turret.24
Confederate losses were small. Jones reported 2 killed and 19 wounded on the Virginia, and Scharf gives 21 killed and wounded for the whole squadron. On the Patrick Henry a shot through her boiler scalded four men to death, and two officers of the Raleigh were killed by fire from shore while helping the Congress's wounded. The American Battlefield Trust puts the Confederate total at 7 killed and 17 wounded.25
Was the Battle of Hampton Roads a draw?
As a fight between two ships it is generally called a draw. Even the participants disagreed. Greene wrote in Battles and Leaders that the men of the Monitor thought, and still thought, that they had won a great victory, because the Virginia had come to destroy the fleet and had been driven off. Soley, writing for the Union navy, called it the victory of the Monitor. On the other side Wood, who served on the Virginia, judged the battle drawn so far as the two ships were concerned, but admitted that in its general results the advantage lay with the Monitor.26
Confederate writers stressed the first day. Mallory told Jefferson Davis that Buchanan had won the most remarkable victory in naval annals, and J. Thomas Scharf, himself a Confederate navy veteran, counted the ships the Virginia had sunk, burned or damaged and asked why, if the Monitor had won, she had not chased her beaten enemy. Worden himself answered that the Monitor was the only ironclad guarding Hampton Roads and could not be risked under the Confederate batteries.27
The strategic balance was more mixed than either claim. The Naval History and Heritage Command notes that the Virginia's presence kept Union ships out of the James River and forced George B. McClellan to plan his campaign up the Virginia Peninsula from Fort Monroe, where he landed on 17 March. But the blockade held, the Union kept its foothold at Fort Monroe, and the British naval historian H. W. Wilson judged in 1896 that the attempt to destroy the Union fleet had been completely frustrated.28
What happened to the Monitor and the Virginia?
For two months the ships watched each other. Neither side had a second ironclad in those waters, and neither wanted to risk the one it had. The repaired Virginia, now under Flag Officer Josiah Tattnall, came out on 11 April and again in May, but neither side would fight on the other's terms, and the Monitor's captain kept to his orders not to attack. When the Confederates abandoned Norfolk, the Virginia drew too much water to escape up the James. On 11 May 1862 her crew ran her ashore off Craney Island and set her on fire, and she blew up.29
The Monitor served on the James River that summer, where James F. Gibson photographed her crew. On 29 December 1862 she left Hampton Roads under tow for Beaufort, North Carolina, and in a storm off Cape Hatteras she began to take on water. She went down around midnight, and her loss is dated 31 December. Sixteen of her men, four officers and twelve sailors, were lost, and the rest were taken off by the boats of the steamer Rhode Island.30
The wreck was found in 1973 about 16 miles off Cape Hatteras, and on 30 January 1975 it became the first national marine sanctuary in the United States. NOAA and the Navy raised her turret on 5 August 2002. Inside it were the remains of two of her sailors, who were buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on 8 March 2013, 151 years after the battle. The turret, guns and engine are now at The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, close to where the battle was fought.31
How did Hampton Roads change the world's navies?
Armored ships were not new in 1862. As Wood pointed out, France already had the Gloire and Britain the Warrior, but no ironclads had yet fought each other, and Hampton Roads was the first test of iron against iron. Wood also recalled that the London Times now counted only two first-class warships fit to fight, the Warrior and her sister, and that Britain and France both set about rebuilding their fleets. Buker writes that the battle presaged an eventual revolution in naval warfare, and the National Park Service calls it the start of a new era of steam-powered iron ships.32
The lessons were immediate. Greene noted that the name Monitor became generic for a new type of ship, and the American Battlefield Trust counts 56 more monitors ordered by the Union navy after the battle. Gustavus Fox, the assistant navy secretary, decided after watching the duel that the next monitors needed 15-inch guns, and John Dahlgren began firing heavier charges at armor targets to learn how to break an ironclad. Robert Schneller writes that the two days came to symbolize the naval revolution in which wooden sailing ships with smoothbore cannon gave way to armored steamships with rifled guns.33
