Hampton Roads

Fought across two days in early March 1862, specifically the 8th and 9th, the clash known as the Battle of Hampton Roads unfolded in the waterway where the Elizabeth and Nansemond rivers join the James River before it empties into Chesapeake Bay near Norfolk, Virginia. It is sometimes called the Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack or the Battle of Ironclads, and it stands as one of the pivotal naval engagements of the American Civil War. Its origins lay in the Confederacy's push to shatter the Union blockade that had sealed off Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia's largest cities and industrial hubs, from trade with the rest of the world.

What made this engagement historic was that it marked the first time two ironclad vessels, the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia, clashed directly. Virginia, a ram built atop the salvaged hull of the burned steam frigate USS Merrimack, led the Confederate fleet into battle alongside several accompanying ships. Facing them on the opening day were Union Navy vessels of the older, wooden-hulled variety.

During that first day's fighting, Virginia sank two Union ships, the USS Congress and USS Cumberland, and turned her attention toward a third target, the grounded USS Minnesota. Darkness and a receding tide forced her to break off before she could finish the job, and she withdrew to tend her wounded, among them her commanding officer, Flag Officer Franklin Buchanan, and to see to minor repairs.

Command fell to Catesby ap Roger Jones in Buchanan's absence, and he brought Virginia back out the following morning, March 9, intent on finishing off Minnesota. Overnight, though, the Union ironclad Monitor had slipped into position to guard the stranded vessel. As Virginia moved in, Monitor met her in combat. Roughly three hours of fighting followed, neither ship able to seriously damage the other, and the contest ended without a clear victor. Virginia headed back to the Gosport Navy Yard for repair and reinforcement, while Monitor resumed her watch over Minnesota. Neither ironclad returned to fight the other again, and the blockade held firm.

News of the engagement spread quickly and left a lasting mark on naval forces across the globe. Britain and France, the two dominant naval powers of the era, both abandoned further construction of wooden warships, a decision other nations soon mirrored. Britain and France had already been racing to build ironclads since the 1830s, yet this battle made clear to the entire world that naval combat had entered a new era. It gave rise to an entirely new class of warship, the monitor, modeled on the original vessel's design. Monitor was also the first to showcase mounting a handful of exceptionally heavy guns capable of firing in every direction, a feature that quickly became the norm across all types of warships. For decades afterward, shipbuilders continued to build rams directly into their vessels' hulls.

Background

On April 19, 1861, in the days just after fighting erupted at Charleston Harbor, President Lincoln announced that the ports of the states that had left the Union would be sealed off by naval blockade. Eight days later, once Virginia and North Carolina had likewise voted to secede, he widened that blockade to cover their coastlines as well. Even before this expansion took effect, local Virginia forces had already occupied Norfolk and stood poised to move against the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth. Captain Charles S. McCauley, who commanded the yard and remained loyal to the Union, found himself paralyzed by counsel from subordinates, many of whom leaned toward the Confederate cause. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had instructed him to send his vessels north, yet McCauley delayed until April 20, when he finally ordered the ships scuttled and the yard's facilities wrecked.

Nine ships or more went up in flames, including the screw frigate USS Merrimack, though her hull burned down only to the waterline and her machinery survived largely intact. The attempt to disable the yard fell far short of its goal; the massive drydock in particular suffered little damage and could be brought back into service without much trouble. Southern sympathizers thus claimed the Confederacy's largest naval yard, along with the remains of the vessel destined to become its most celebrated warship, all without a single shot fired. Alongside this, they came into possession of over a thousand heavy cannon, plus carriages and vast stores of powder.

Possession of Norfolk together with the Portsmouth yard gave the Confederacy command of the southern shore of Hampton Roads. Guarding against Union naval assaults on the yard, Confederate forces installed artillery batteries at Sewell's Point and Craney Island, positioned where the Elizabeth River meets the James. Meanwhile Union troops held onto Fort Monroe at Old Point Comfort on the Virginia Peninsula, along with a small artificial island called the Rip Raps situated across the channel, where they built a second fortification named Fort Wool.

Battle

The Confederate command structure surrounding the ironclad was unusual from the start. Lieutenant Catesby ap Roger Jones had overseen much of the work converting the Merrimack into the Virginia, and he felt slighted when someone else was chosen to command her. He stayed aboard as executive officer instead. Normal practice called for a Confederate States Navy captain to take charge, selected according to a strict seniority system. Secretary Mallory favored the combative Franklin Buchanan for the role, but two captains outranked him and had already put in requests for the position. To sidestep the problem, Mallory instead named Buchanan flag officer over the defenses of Norfolk and the James River, a post from which he could still direct the ironclad's movements while heading the Office of Orders and Detail. In a technical sense, then, the vessel entered combat with no captain assigned to her.

Union naval authority in the area rested with Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough, commander of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron. He had drawn up a scheme to catch the Confederate ironclad in a crossfire using his frigates, but it collapsed entirely once four vessels ran aground in the tight waters of the roadstead, one of them deliberately. Goldsborough himself was elsewhere on the day of the fight, occupied with ships supporting the Burnside Expedition along the North Carolina coast. Command therefore passed to his subordinate, Captain John Marston aboard USS Roanoke. Since Roanoke was among the grounded vessels, Marston could do little to shape events, and historians often overlook his role, focusing instead on Monitor's captain, John L. Worden. Still, it was Marston who chose to ignore Secretary of War Gideon Welles's instructions to send Monitor back toward Washington before the fighting started, a decision that kept the vessel available to meet the Merrimack.

Fighting commenced on the morning of March 8, 1862, when the ponderous CS

Impact upon naval warfare

Nearly every navy on earth took notice of what happened over those two days of fighting. The Monitor went on to serve as the model for an entirely new category of warship, making her the first vessel besides Britain's HMS Dreadnought to have her name attached to a whole line of successors. Shipbuilders produced many more of these craft, among them river monitors that would prove essential during Civil War engagements along the Mississippi and James rivers.

Ericsson's original, larger design became the basis for ten additional monitors that the US began building right away, a group that became known as the Passaic class. By the war's conclusion, the Union had constructed more than twenty of these vessels beyond that initial batch. The style of ship handled river fighting remarkably well, yet its heavy turret and low profile made it perform poorly whenever seas grew rough. Concerned that fighting from the American conflict might reach Russian Alaska, Russia built ten matching vessels the moment Ericsson's blueprints arrived in St. Petersburg, sparking what has since been called "Monitor mania." Eventually, the rotating turret concept influenced later warship construction, ultimately giving rise to the modern battleship.

Britain and France paid especially close attention to how vulnerable wooden-hulled ships proved against armored opponents, and this served as a striking argument for their own plans to convert their fleets to armor plating. A second lesson drawn from the encounter did not translate as well. Because Virginia had so easily destroyed Cumberland, naval designers started building rams into the hulls of their ships.

The French armored vessel Taureau became the modern era's first ram constructed specifically for that purpose, and its weapons were reportedly meant only "to prepare the way for the ram." Warship hulls kept incorporating rams as standard design almost until World War I began.

Commemorating the battle: Virginia

Confusion has long surrounded the identity of the Confederate warship that fought at Hampton Roads, and debate about her proper name continues even today. Built originally as a screw frigate for the United States Navy, she sailed under the name USS Merrimack. After secessionists captured the vessel and began converting her into an ironclad, most people kept calling her by that same name. Only near the end of her rebuilding did the Confederacy officially rename her Virginia. That formal change did little to alter common usage, however: Union writers kept referring to her as Merrimack, while those on the Confederate side favored either Virginia or the variant spelling Merrimac. Because "Monitor and Merrimack" rolls off the tongue so easily, popular retellings have largely stuck with that pairing, even while admitting it is not strictly accurate.

Interestingly, a vessel called CSS Merrimac genuinely existed, separate from the ironclad. This one was a paddle wheel steamer, christened in honor of the ship many Southerners considered the true victor at Hampton Roads. She spent her career running the blockade until Federal forces captured her and folded her into their own fleet, keeping the name Merrimac throughout. That name traced back to a variant spelling of the river which had originally lent its name to USS Merrimack. Even now, both spellings remain in everyday use around the Hampton Roads region.

Near the site in Montgomery County, Virginia, where iron for the Confederate ironclad was once forged, a small community today bears the name Merrimac. Some of the very iron extracted there, later used to armor the ship, can be viewed at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth. Meanwhile, the anchor once belonging to Virginia now rests on display outside the American Civil War Museum in Richmond.

Aftermath

In the days right after Hampton Roads, both sides announced they had won, but those claims rested on misreadings of what the enemy had actually done, and modern historians no longer take them seriously. There is broad agreement now that neither the Monitor nor the Virginia truly prevailed in their clash. Since the ironclad duel was the heart of the battle's importance, most scholars now call the outcome a draw. Still, nobody disputes that the Southern ships dealt out much more punishment than they absorbed, a fact that would normally point to a tactical win for the Confederacy. Measured against other engagements of the war, the toll of dead sailors and sunk vessels on the Union side looks like a plain defeat. Yet the blockade itself never came under real threat, so the whole affair can also be read as a failed Confederate attempt to break it.

At the time, newspapers on both sides rushed to declare triumph. One Boston paper ran a headline the very next day proclaiming that the Merrimac had been driven back by the steamer, framing the fight as a Union success, while Southern outlets dwelled instead on the earlier destruction of Union wooden warships. Even though the actual fighting settled nothing, both governments treated it as a morale-boosting event, all the more so because ironclad warfare was a startling new development that had captured public imagination.

Judging the strategic consequences proves just as contentious. The blockade held firm, and in fact grew tighter, while the Virginia remained trapped inside Hampton Roads. Because this neutralized a weapon the Confederacy had counted on, some argue the strategic edge belonged to the Union. Defenders of the Confederate side push back, pointing out that the Virginia's value went well beyond the blockade, which was only one piece of the broader conflict along the Tidewater. Her presence alone kept Federal ships out of the James River entirely. She also placed limits on the Peninsula Campaign that McClellan's Union forces were then conducting, since he feared she might threaten his positions along the York River. That fear turned out to be unfounded, but it nonetheless shaped how his army moved right up until the Virginia was finally destroyed.