Iron Dawn

Iron Dawn, The Monitor, the Merrimack, and the Civil War Sea Battle that Changed History, by Richard Snow, Scribner 2016

When the South converted the hull of the captured Union ship, the Merrimack, into a powerful, technologically advanced and revolutionary iron warship, the North was alarmed and decided to build its own superior iron ship.  This push to produce a Union ship engaged the deep attention of Abraham Lincoln who was intimately involved in the plans for the Monitor.  He and his staff agreed that the South had to be bottled up in its ports, and that Richmond - as well as Washington -  needed to be rendered untouchable by potential allies Britain and France.  To do that Lincoln knew that the North had to build the superior naval force, despite the South's advantage of having many experienced,  Annapolis-trained officers.

The development of the strange-looking Northern ship which was eventually named the Monitor, and its rival The Merrimack, renamed the Virginia, took many design, manufacturing and funding twists and turns.  As for the life of her crews, with their quarters wedged alongside the steamship's boilers, it must have been like living in a submarine - no view to the horizon, occasional gusts of black coal dust and smoke, accompanied by initially frightening thumps as enemy fire bounced of the ship's iron plates.  Even gunners confined to the turrets found that their vision was limited. And there was not as much to do aboard a steam-powered ship, compared to a sailing rig with minute-by-minute chores assigned to nimble sailors. Both ironclads sat low in the water, naturally increasing crew anxiety about storms and other disruptions.  No one, including the designers, really knew how the ships would perform under fire.  In fact, the Merrimack's soft-underbelly, as well as its rudder, was another source of anxiety; the ships did not manoeuvre well or quickly, and the Southern ship bottom was vulnerable to attack below the heavy iron plates that reinforced its sides.  

For years thereafter, at least until iron ships had fully taken the seas by WWI, eyewitnesses remembered the decisive battle of two great Civil War ironclads - one, author Richard Snow tells us, looked like a rhinoceros, and the other like a "metal pie plate."  But this was so much more than a long-ago encounter - together they signaled the end of the wooden, sail-driven warship;  the technology discovered and utilized to build these ships led to so many more technology changes that, looking back, are clear now.

Readers will love the hand-drawn schematics of the two ironclads - the Union ship, The Monitor, 179 feet long with a 41.5 foot beam; the Confederate ship, the Merrimack (what irony!), 275 feet by 51 feet.  By the end of the war, the North could claim to have built 64 monitors, of which only six failed to survive it.  But the Monitor, one of the two ships that started it all,  was taken down by a force-of-nature sea storm later, along with sixteen of her crew; her turrets and engines rusted away until 1973 when the ship was raised and moved to the Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia.  Remains of her entombed sailors were discovered, and in the words of Commander Scholley, "It appears we might actually be bringing home more of our shipmates." 

Today the Monitor's two Dahlgren guns are available for viewing at the Newport News museum, resting in a water bath, gradually losing over 150 years of marine encrustation.