This Great Struggle (19 page)

The work of Swedish American engineer John Ericsson, USS
Monitor
displaced one thousand tons and rode almost entirely below the surface so that its main deck, like the
Virginia
’s, was barely above the water. There the similarity stopped. Whereas
Virginia
’s deck was mostly taken up with its armored casemate,
Monitor
’s was empty save for a tiny, boxlike pilothouse forward and a squat, twenty-one-foot-diameter cylindrical turret amidships housing
Monitor
’s entire battery of two eleven-inch Dahlgren guns, the largest guns that had ever gone to sea up to that time.
Monitor
’s hull was made of five-eighths-inch iron but was out of reach of enemy shot below the waterline. Her turret was protected by eight inches of iron plate. A steam engine drove her at speeds up to eight knots by means of the marine screw Ericsson had invented. The world had never seen the like of her. The Navy Department had it doubts but agreed to acquire the craft, provided Ericsson committed himself to reimburse the full cost if his strange design proved a failure. Other critics noted skeptically that the vessel looked like “a tin can on a shingle.”

The North’s industrial superiority would soon make itself felt in the production of saltwater ironclads even as it already was out west in the building of the ironclad river gunboats. Parts for the
Monitor
were forged in nine different foundries and brought together to make the novel ship in only 120 days, while the
New Ironsides
and the
Galena
were still weeks or even months from completion. Yet the Confederates had the jump on Union builders with the
Virginia
, and the Rebel builders had had an engine, such as it was, as well as half a hull to begin with. In early March the hastily completed
Monitor
was still making a difficult voyage down to the Virginia coast from its birthplace in Brooklyn (
Monitor
’s low freeboard gave it questionable seaworthiness) when the Confederates at Norfolk decided the time had come for
Virginia
to make her debut.

On March 8
Virginia
sortied from Norfolk under the command of Captain Franklin Buchanan and entered the body of water known as Hampton Roads, where the James River emptied into Chesapeake Bay and where Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough’s North Atlantic Blockading Squadron rode at anchor.
Virginia
first attacked the sloop-of-war
Cumberland
, riddling her with shells that slaughtered her crew and covered her decks with gore and then ramming her while
Cumberland
’s own return fire bounced off
Virginia’
s sloping casemate, doing little damage. In the finest tradition of the U.S. Navy,
Cumberland
’s gunners kept firing as long as their guns were above water. One hundred twenty-one men went down with the ship. So too did
Virginia
’s iron beak, which had broken off in
Cumberland
, creating a slight leak forward in
Virginia
.

With
Cumberland
dispatched,
Virginia
turned next to the frigate
Congress
, whose commander, seeing the fate of
Cumberland
, attempted to maneuver his ship into water too shallow for the
Virginia
to follow. His trick backfired, however, when
Congress
herself ran aground.
Virginia
could not approach, but she could and did stand off and batter
Congress
with her guns. With scores of men dead on deck, including the commander, the senior surviving officer surrendered. Unable to take possession of his prize because of rifle fire from Union infantrymen ashore (part of the garrison of Fort Monroe,
Virginia
, which had remained in Union hands since the outbreak of the war and had recently been reinforced), Buchanan ordered his men to bombard it with red-hot shot, projectiles heated in a vessel’s furnace and designed to set its opponent afire. They worked, and
Congress
burned on through the evening and well into the night before the flames reached her magazines and she exploded. One hundred ten men of the U.S. Navy were lost with her.

Next in line for destruction was USS
Minnesota
, one of the navy’s five biggest frigates, of which
Merrimack
had been one in her previous life.
Minnesota
had been coming up to join the fight but had also run aground and looked like easy prey. The tide was falling, however, and
Virginia
could not close in to ship-killing range. Light was failing too, and
Virginia
had sustained various minor damage, none of it threatening but all adding up to a nuisance—here an iron plate loose, there a man wounded by fragments coming in through a gun port. The smokestack was riddled so that the boiler fires drew poorly, and the ship became even slower. There was also the leak where the beak had broken off. Buchanan himself was wounded, and his executive officer, Catesby ap Roger Jones, decided to take
Virginia
back to port, make temporary repairs, and come out to finish what was left of the Yankee fleet the next morning.

That night the
Monitor
steamed into Hampton Roads, still lit by the blazing
Congress
, and on orders from the senior naval officer afloat, anchored alongside the
Minnesota
. The next morning when the
Virginia
came out,
Monitor
stood out to meet her. For the next several hours the two ironclads blasted away at each other at close range, their sides sometimes actually touching, but neither ship’s guns could pierce the other’s armor, though each suffered minor damage. A shell penetrated the
Monitor
’s pilothouse, wounding her commander, Lieutenant John L. Worden. His executive officer took over and prepared to continue the fight, but by that time
Virginia
was retiring toward Norfolk.

Both sides claimed victory, but though Union losses had been greater, the U.S. Navy had achieved its strategic purpose at Hampton Roads, maintaining the blockade and containing the
Virginia
. Still, the continued existence of a weapon like
Virginia
presented problems for the Union, especially for McClellan, whose strategic ideas focused on approaching Richmond via Chesapeake Bay.

MCCLELLAN TARGETS THE VIRGINIA PENINSULA

News of the Battle of Hampton Roads and the appearance of the
Virginia
complicated McClellan’s strategic problems. So too did a simultaneous Confederate movement in northern Virginia. On March 9, the day the
Monitor
and the
Virginia
slugged it out in Hampton Roads, Joseph Johnston put his Confederate army on the retreat from its positions near Centerville and fell back all the way to the south bank of the Rappahannock. Though the retreat turned over several hundred square miles of northern Virginia to Union control and would have allowed McClellan’s army to advance a good thirty miles closer to Richmond, if he had wanted to go that way, it completely destroyed his plan for a landing at Urbanna that would turn the Confederate position at Centerville and made it that much harder for McClellan to resist Lincoln’s hints that he ought to adopt a direct overland approach to Richmond.

But resist he would. On March 13 McClellan got his corps and division commanders to agree to his new plan to land not at Urbanna but rather on the peninsula between the York and James rivers, using the Union enclave at Fort Monroe, scene of the recent naval battle. The
Virginia
’s presence at Norfolk would make the operation riskier and preclude the kind of easy access up the James River that the U.S. Navy could otherwise have offered. Every misgiving that applied to the Urbanna Plan applied a fortiori to the proposed Peninsula Campaign, but with McClellan and his generals presenting a united front, Lincoln felt he had to accept their recommendation. After once again cautioning McClellan in writing about the absolute necessity of leaving adequate troops in the Washington area to ensure the security of the capital, Lincoln gave his approval to the general’s new scheme. Four days later, on March 17, McClellan began embarking his troops at Alexandria, Virginia, for their short voyage down the Chesapeake to Fort Monroe.

Meanwhile, Union troops had advanced and temporarily taken over the abandoned Confederate camps before returning to their own bases in the Washington area. Newspapermen who accompanied the troops found a number of peeled logs, painted black and placed in gun embrasures in the Confederate fortifications to give the appearance to Union observers at a distance that the Confederates had more cannon than they actually did. These “Quaker Guns,” as they were quickly dubbed in the press, suggested that McClellan had for months been held at bay by an enemy force of such extreme weakness that its cannon were mere wooden dummies. The logs became a subject of ridicule of McClellan in the public and especially among the Radical Republicans in Congress, who, according to their dispositions, became either increasingly contemptuous of the general’s ability or increasingly suspicious about his allegiance.

Though Johnston’s retreat had come as a severe blow to McClellan, it was not correspondingly welcome in Richmond. Johnston had enjoyed a sterling reputation in the prewar U.S. Army, and Davis prided himself as a former officer and secretary of war on knowing the best officers. He remained unshakable in his belief that Johnston possessed enormous skill, but he was becoming increasingly frustrated with that general’s propensity for precipitate retreat. During the early days of the war, prior to Bull Run, Johnston had been stationed at Harpers Ferry and had bombarded Richmond with requests to be ordered to retreat. Recently he had started making noises about possibly having to abandon Manassas Junction and fall back behind the Rappahannock. Davis had admitted that such a step might become necessary, but he had counseled that Johnston make thorough preparations for any withdrawal so that valuable stocks of supplies and equipment would not be lost.

Johnston did the opposite, retreating suddenly and with no further warning to Davis or to the officers in charge of logistics. Immense stocks of baggage were left behind. Worse, the army abandoned mountainous supply depots that had taken the Confederate commissary department all winter to build up. Throughout the rest of the war the Confederate commissary department in Virginia never really caught up with demand after that loss. The last Rebel cavalrymen to pull out of the abandoned camps had orders to set fire to the supplies, and as the never-overly-well-fed Rebel soldiers turned their backs to the enemy and marched south, they were tantalized by the smell of sizzling bacon, wafting far and wide across the Virginia countryside from the burning supply depot. Davis was as disgusted as his soldiers, but he maintained Johnston in command and continued to believe he could do great things as a general if only he could be motivated to fight.

In reality, Johnston had begun to build a well-deserved reputation as the war’s foremost retreater. Lacking nerve, he hoped for a grand battle in which his Rebel troops would man entrenched positions and cut down waves of blue-clad attackers. Unfortunately for the Confederacy, that fantasy never materialized. Johnston lacked the skill and audacity required to goad an opposing commander to order such an attack, and when his tactical dream failed to materialize, he continued to cede ground to the Union, both during the Peninsula Campaign and throughout the remainder of the war.

When Lincoln had relieved McClellan of duty as general in chief of all the Union armies, he had appointed no other general to fill that role. Henceforth he would do his best, with the aid of fellow lawyer, Secretary of War Stanton, to “boss the job” himself, as he put it. Two days later, Jefferson Davis had appointed Robert E. Lee to fulfill the role of general in chief, at least nominally, for the Confederate armies. Davis, who unlike Lincoln had an extensive military background, was confident that he could direct the war himself, but he wanted the assistance and advice of Lee, a former engineer officer whom Davis seemed to consider rather bookish and well suited to a desk job. Davis would have been well advised to rely heavily on Lee or another officer as a sort of chief of staff since he tended to attempt to micro-manage the Confederate war effort in a way that proved detrimental both to it and to his own health.

So far, Lee was not having a very good war. He had served as Virginia’s top general prior to its official incorporation into the Confederacy and had organized the Virginia forces, but that role had kept him on the sidelines while Beauregard and Johnston won laurels at Bull Run. Then Davis had assigned him to try to repair Confederate fortunes in western Virginia, but nothing could save the Confederate cause there, and Lee had returned to Richmond branded a failure in the press. His next assignment was to oversee and inspect the defenses of the Carolina and Georgia coastline. There too the task was more or less impossible, as the Federals with their naval superiority could make successful landings at almost any given place along the coast. Lee made the best arrangements he could before being called back to Richmond to take on the new role as what really amounted to a top adviser and assistant to the president in the direction of the war.

THE BATTLE OF KERNSTOWN AND THE BEGINNING OF THE PENINSULA CAMPAIGN

One hundred thirty miles northwest of where Lee was in Richmond and eighty due west of Washington, Major General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, of Bull Run fame, commanded a small division of about 3,500 Confederate troops in the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson had had a frustrating winter. An expedition he led to take the town of Romney, Virginia (now West Virginia), from the Federals had resulted in much suffering for his troops in the bitter cold. Some of his officers had complained to Richmond, triggering an order from Davis to withdraw from Romney and a corresponding threat from Jackson to resign. His friends had smoothed the matter over, and now Jackson was the Confederacy’s man in the Shenandoah.