On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia met at Hampton Roads, Virginia—the first time in history that ironclad vessels encountered one another in combat.  Although the battle ended in a draw, this four-hour engagement forever changed naval warfare.  Military and political leaders around the world concluded that their wooden warships would soon be obsolete. Sailors also realized that their world of wooden walls and white sails was rapidly vanishing, and that their roles were changing from that of active participants in the workings of the vessel to operatives within a machine.

The Monitor was a model of ingenuity. It boasted dozens of patentable inventions, including her famous rotating gun turret and, perhaps more importantly to the crew, the world’s first below-the-waterline flushing toilet, which used a system of valves to allow it to flush to the exterior of the vessel. (Turning the valves in the wrong sequence, however, created an embarrassing geyser within the ship, which one officer discovered—much to his chagrin).

The Monitor also transformed the experience of being a sailor on a warship.  Men who served on the ironclad vessel now had a shield to protect them from enemy fire—something far more effective than the “wooden walls” of traditional naval vessels.  On March 8, 1862, the day before the Monitor arrived in Hampton Roads, the Confederate ironclad Virginia emerged from the Elizabeth River and destroyed two wooden Union blockading vessels.  The USS Cumberland lost 121 men in the attack, while the USS Congress lost 240, more than half of her complement.  In contrast, only the Monitor’s commanding officer John Worden was significantly injured in the action between the Monitor and the Virginia on March 9.

Following the Battle of Hampton Roads, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Vasa Fox went on board the Monitor, expecting to find a disabled vessel and long casualty list.  Instead, he encountered the officers having a “merry party . . . enjoying some good beef steak [and] green peas.”  Surprised, he exclaimed, “Well, gentlemen, you don’t look as though you were just through one of the greatest naval conflicts on record.”  One of the officers joked in response, “No Sir, we haven’t done much fighting, merely drilling the men at the guns a little.”

The men aboard the vessel recognized that fighting on an ironclad vessel changed the very nature of naval warfare.  “I think we get more credit for the mere fight than we deserve,” wrote the Monitor’s paymaster William F. Keeler.  “Any one could fight behind an impenetrable armour—many have fought as well behind wooden walls or behind none at all.”  Sadly, he concluded, “There isn’t even danger enough to give us any glory.”

Observers on the home front began to understand what Keeler had experienced.  Fighting aboard an ironclad vessel was fundamentally different from serving on a wooden warship.  “All the pomp and splendor of naval warfare are gone by,” observed the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne.  “Henceforth there must come up a race of enginemen and smoke-blackened cannoneers, who will hammer away at their enemies under the direction of a single pair of eyes; and even heroism . . . will become a quality of very minor importance.”  Fellow literati Herman Melville wrote in a poem that the Monitor brought “victory without the gaud” and that “plain mechanic power” replaced traditional military banners.  War now belonged to “the trades and artisans.”  He continued:

Yet this was battle, and intense—
Beyond the strife of fleets heroic;
Deadlier, closer, calm ’mid storm;
No passion; all went on by crank.
Pivot, and screw,
And calculations of caloric.

Around the world, Melville wrote, ears still heard the “ringing of those plates on plates” and the “clangor of the blacksmiths’ fray.”  He concluded, “War yet shall be, but the warriors / Are now but operatives.”  Like Hawthorne, Melville believed that the changing technology of ironclad vessels made sailors more like factory workers than traditional fighting men.

At least one woman, whose husband was serving on a wooden vessel, was furious at the praise heaped upon the sailors of the Monitor.  “I am disgusted that the Officers & crew of the Monitor should be so noticed when those of the Cumberland are unmentioned,” she wrote to her husband shortly after the battle, since the latter “were more exposed to danger.”

Despite these reservations, the Union’s first ironclad vessel soon became affectionately known throughout the nation as “Our Little Monitor,” and she was mourned as keenly as the sixteen men who died with her when she sank in a gale in the early morning hours of New Year’s Eve in 1862.  For more than a century, she lay upside down on the ocean floor off Cape Hatteras, until being discovered in 1973.  The site is now the principal feature of NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary.  Between 1977 and 2002, major artifacts from the wreck site were recovered and currently are being conserved and displayed at the USS Monitor Center at The Mariners’ Museum, in Newport News, Virginia.  These artifacts are silent yet poignant reminders of how the American Civil War was a pivot point on the path to modern warfare.

[Starting in November 2018, The Mariners’ Museum lowered its admission price to only one dollar, making the exhibits readily accessible to anyone who wishes to visit.  Readers will find much to see at the museum’s USS Monitor Center, including many pieces of the Monitor—a machine that transformed the nature of naval warfare.]