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The March 9, 1862 clash of
the ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimack) has
always had a tenacious grip on the American imagination. It is easily the
best-known naval engagement of the war. Many historians call the first-ever
battle between two armored warships a draw; after all, neither warship was
sunk or seriously damaged. However, when the battle was over, it was the
larger, more heavily-armed Virginia which withdrew, and the smaller, more
maneuverable Monitor which remained in place, having successfully guarded the
vulnerable wooden warships of the U.S. Navy blockading fleet in Hampton Roads,
Va.
With the raising of the
Monitor's turret this summer (2002), interest in the stalwart Union ironclad has
perhaps never been stronger. Two recent books reexamine the Monitor's origins,
history and mythology in very different ways. Both The Monitor Chronicles,
edited by William Marvel (Simon & Schuster, 2000), and War, Technology
and Experience aboard the USS Monitor by David A. Mindell (Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000), are interesting and informative, and they're
complimentary in the different approaches they take to the subject.
 The
Monitor Chronicles was published in conjunction with the Mariners' Museum
of Newport News, Va., the official repository of artifacts raised from the
Monitor's wreck. In the book, William Marvel selects and edits dozens of
letters written by George S. Geer, a 25-year-old sailor. Born in Troy, N.Y.,
Geer joined the Navy on Feb. 15, 1862, "less to help save the Union than
to earn some money and learn a reliable trade," as Marvel writes. Geer
served aboard the Monitor throughout her short career and, with erratic
spelling, wrote to his wife Martha about virtually everything that happened
aboard - particularly his tireless angling for promotion, his denunciation of
liquor and its effect upon his shipmates, and his keen entrepreneurial spirit.
His wife bought and sent him newspapers, small locks and keys (useful against
shipboard thieves), silk and sewing notions, all of which Geer sold aboard at
great profit.
As a first-class fireman,
Geer's duties included working with the ship's engines, heaving coal, and
storing ammunition and supplies. He had every sailor's concern for his own
creature comforts. The pursuit of food, sleep and light duty was a major
motivation for Geer, who in those days of more relaxed hygiene wasn't too
embarrassed to admit he'd once worn the same underwear for almost three weeks.
Still, his thoughts were never far from home. Martha Geer raised their
tight-knit family in a small Manhattan tenement, and depended on money her
husband sent home to make ends meet. Geer worried about his family, and
expressions of love and concern often appear in his letters. On March 2, 1862,
just a week before the battle with the Virginia, Geer wrote: "Kiss both
the Babys about 24 times apiec for me and dont let them get sick and as for
you I have got no love for you, you have it all."
After the Battle of Hampton
Roads, the Navy Department decided it could not take undue risks with the
unique Monitor, and the ship stayed at anchor throughout the steamy summer of
1862 as a deterrent against further Confederate naval attack. Geer and his
crewmates grew bored and weary in the heat. He wrote to Martha on August 13,
"I do not wounder you are worid at what you read in the Papers…about
the doings of the Monitor, but they are all bosh. We have not had our Anchor
up, Fired a Gun, or been of the least use or service except to act as a scare
crow, for most [of] one month."
By the end of the year the
Navy decided to send the Monitor south and, while being towed to Beaufort,
N.C. in late December, she sank in a severe storm off Cape Hatteras, N.C. Geer
barely escaped with his life, and wrote to Martha at the first opportunity,
"I am sorry to have to write you that we have lost the Monitor, and what
is worse we had 16 poor fellows drownded. I can tell you I thank God my life
is spaired… do not worry. I am safe and well." He later wrote her (in a
turn of phrase I'd thought was from a century later), "You need not worry
for me, as I am always looking out for No. 1 and am not going to get killed or
drowned in this war." He wasn't, as it happened, but the book's biggest
shortcoming is that we don't learn much more about Geer's later life other
than that he served almost another three years in the Navy, including service
as an engineer aboard the USS Galena. Still, this is a worthwhile look at life
aboard the Monitor through the eyes of one of her crew. The book concludes
with an interesting account of current efforts to preserve what remains of the
Monitor's wreck.
 By
contrast, War, Technology and Experience aboard the USS Monitor is more
academic in tone, exploring the broader significance of the Union's most
notable and technologically advanced ironclad. In author David A. Mindell's
conception, the ship's story "provides a lens through which to see issues
of …society, military technology, and the human implications of new
machinery."
This is an ambitious goal,
and Mindell achieves it. He provides good background on the naval arms race in
Europe in the mid-1800s, noting that U.S. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles
had his eye on France and Britain at least as much as on the Confederacy when
he set up an Ironclad Board to consider construction proposals. John Ericsson,
the brilliant but mercurial designer of the Monitor, wrote in suggesting her
name, "The impregnable and aggressive character of this vessel will
admonish the leaders of the Southern Rebellion that the batteries on the banks
of their rivers will no longer present barriers to the entrance of Union
forces… but there are other leaders who will also by startled and admonished….To
the Lords of the [British] Admiralty the new craft will be a monitor,
suggesting doubts….On these and many similar grounds I propose to name the
new battery Monitor."
Ericsson, Mindell writes, was
not above altering his own public persona to fit the image of a hero of the
Industrial Revolution, clashing with hidebound traditionalists in the Navy
(some of whom insisted his ship would sink like a stone as soon as she was
launched), insisting on his own grand vision and inventing - or re-inventing -
himself along the way. Ericsson was distrusted by many for both his genius and
his imperious manner, but what is now forgotten is that his private life was,
by the standards of his day, rather scandalous. Mindell notes that Ericsson
had a failed romance that resulted in the birth of an illegitimate child in
his native Sweden. He was a poor businessman, declaring bankruptcy while
working in England and spending some time in debtor's prison. He later
married, but left his wife Amelia behind in England when he came to America in
1839; he supported her financially but never saw her again. His work in
designing the USS Princeton, and the blame wrongly heaped upon him when a
cannon not of his design disastrously exploded aboard her in 1844 (killing
several observers, including the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the
Navy), made Ericsson and the Navy mutually leery. However, the inventor
learned his lessons well. Mindell writes pungently of the obstacles Ericsson
overcame in getting the Monitor built, with all of the political wire-pulling
and maneuvering that entailed: "Appearances count; demonstrations
convince; nationality inspires; politics gets things done."
While Marvel takes us aboard
the Monitor in the company of fireman Geer, Mindell reintroduces us to one of
the ship's officers, Acting Assistant Paymaster William F. Keeler. Like Geer,
Keeler was born in New York. He married the daughter of a prominent
Connecticut politician, and became a small businessman with a flair for
machinery. He had two years' sea experience and was an ardent abolitionist. He
was 41 when he came aboard the Monitor for service as a glorified clerk, the
oldest man aboard but for the captain. On such a small ship, he and Geer knew
one another; Keeler was blamed by the crew when the ship's fund ran out of
money or the captain decided to withhold pay; in one letter, Geer denounced
Keeler a "devilish scoundrel." Keeler disapproved of the crew's
excessive drinking and pranks, and kept his distance. As Mindell writes,
"Amid the crew, Keeler had that tinge of social awkwardness that makes a
good observer." Keeler wrote 79 letters to his wife Anna while serving
aboard the Monitor, and in them he provided a thorough description of ironclad
shipboard life.
Mindell makes good use of
Keeler's letters and other documents in showing how sharp a break the Monitor
made with maritime tradition. The role of engineers and staff officers was in
flux; the Navy's traditionalist deck officers considered them almost
second-class citizens. Officers and crew also mixed and mingled much more
aboard the compact ironclad than they would on a sailing ship, breaking down
some social barriers that the officers might rather have maintained. The
delicate but complex machinery of the Monitor needed constant watching, and
the crew was "living on a technological frontier," Mindell writes,
with constant uncertainty as to what lay ahead. The Monitor's crew prized
physical courage, as did most Americans of that era, so fighting in an
ironclad vessel seemed almost unsporting. After the clash with the Virginia,
Keeler wrote, "I think we get more credit for the fight than we deserve -
anyone could fight behind an impenetrable armor - many have fought as well
behind wooden walls or none at all. The credit, if any is due, is in daring to
undertake the trip and go into the fight in an untried experiment and in our
unprepared condition." Years later, John Worden, the Monitor's commanding
officer during her battle with the Virginia, agreed with Keeler, writing,
"Here was an unknown, untried vessel, with all but a small portion of her
below the waterline, her crew to live with the ocean beating over their heads
- an iron coffin-like ship of which the gloomiest predictions were made, with
her crew shut out from sunlight and the air above the sea, depending entirely
on artificial means to supply the air they breathe. A failure of the machinery
… would be almost certain death to her men." Mindell persuasively
argues that, for all of the successes of the Monitor and her sister ships,
they were oversold by Ericsson, were almost as hazardous to their crews as to
the enemy, and sank with disconcerting ease.
Paymaster Keeler, like Geer
and the rest of the crew, chafed under the Navy's cautious policy after the
Virginia steamed away. Keeler wrote his wife in frustration that "the
Government is getting to regard the Monitor in pretty much the same light as
an over careful housewife regards her ancient china set - too valuable to use,
too useful to keep as a relic, yet anxious that all shall know what she owns
and that she can use it when the occasion demands, though she fears much its
beauty may be marred or its usefulness impaired." Keeler later wrote,
"I believe the department [is] going to build a glass case to put us in
for fear of harm coming to us." However, Mindell acknowledges the
tremendous risk Lincoln and Welles would run if the ship were lost or captured
after her first battle: "The ironclad gained value as a symbol as well as
a weapon, and an emblem of victory could quickly become an emblem of
defeat."
Although ultimately lost not
in battle but in a storm at sea, the Monitor was the model for most of the
ironclad warships built by the U.S. Navy during and just after the Civil War.
Monitor-type ships remained on the Navy List until 1937. Mindell writes that
Ericsson's little ship and her progeny "sold the ideas that navies could
build both ships and machines, that naval officers had to share their glory
with designers and constructors, and that mechanical warfare, whatever its
indignities, might also leave a place for human skill, and hence for
heroism."
In examining the Monitor
phenomena from every angle, and putting it in context with the ever-changing
nature of technological warfare up through the 1991 Gulf War, Mindell offers
an offbeat and fascinating look at the broader issues surrounding perhaps the
most influential warship ever built.
Purchase the books reviewed here:
The Monitor Chronicles : One Sailor's Account. Today's Campaign to Recover the Civil War Wreck
by William Marvel
War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor
by David A. Mindell
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