The four-hour duel between the Monitor and Virginia on 9 March 1862 was frustrating for both ships, as neither was able to inflict significant damage to the other. At around midday the Monitor’s commanding officer, Lieutenant John L. Worden, tried to disable the Confederate ironclad by ramming her rudder. He missed, but the attempt put the Union ship’s pilothouse directly under the muzzle of the 7-inch Brooke rifle commanded by Lieutenant John Taylor Wood, who fired. The cannon’s 100-pound shell damaged the structure, breaking one of the 9-by-12-inch iron bars of which it was made and dislodging its 2-inch-thick roof plate. Moreover, the Brooke rifle’s blast and projectile’s impact injured Worden, who could no longer command. This was the pivotal moment in the battle.
According to the Union version of subsequent events, Worden quickly gave command of the Monitor to his executive officer, Lieutenant Samuel Dana Greene, who helped the captain to his cabin, tended to him, and assessed damage. After a slight delay Greene tried to continue the battle, only to discover that the Virginia had retreated out of range. The Monitor had won a decisive victory, and throughout the North she was hailed for saving the blockade, seaboard cities, and the Union.
The Confederates saw things differently. The Virginia’s crewmen swore that amid the battle the Monitor broke off the engagement, retreated into shoal waters where the Confederate ship could not follow, and remained there. After waiting up to an hour for the Monitor’s return, the Virginia steamed back to Norfolk only because of the ebbing tide. In the South, the Virginia was acclaimed for her great triumph over the powerful Union Navy and the Monitor.
Greene’s Accounts
On board the Monitor there were few eyewitnesses to how the battle ended, and her officers and men left even fewer written accounts. Greene had the most direct knowledge of events, and over the years he wrote different versions of what happened.
In his official report, dated 12 March 1862, he does not mention any break in the action:
We . . . received orders . . . to proceed to Newport News and protect the [frigate] Minnesota from the attack of the Merrimack [Virginia]. . . . At 8:45 a.m. we opened fire upon the Merrimack and continued the action until 11:30 a.m., when Captain Worden was injured. . . . Captain Worden then sent for me and told me to take charge of the vessel. We continued the action until 12:15 p.m., when the Merrimack retreated to Sewell’s Point and we went to the Minnesota.1
Greene’s long letter to his father, dated 14 March, was more explanatory—as well as defensive in tone:
At about 11:30 the Captain sent for me. . . . a shot had struck the pilot-house exactly opposite his eyes, and blinded him, and he thought the pilot-house was damaged. He told me to take charge of the ship and use my discretion. . . . The Merrimac was retreating . . . we had strict orders to act on the defense and protect the Minnesota. We had evidently finished the Merrimac as far as the Minnesota was concerned. . . . This is the reason we did not sink the Merrimac.2
This letter was not completed until near the end of April.3 By then Northern jubilation after the battle had become somewhat muted by criticism that the Monitor had not pursued and sunk the Virginia.4
Greene’s most complete narrative was not published until 1885. In it he wrote that Worden was wounded
Soon after noon. . . . and directed me to take command. . . . In the confusion of the moment resulting from so serious an injury to the commanding officer, the Monitor had been moving without direction. Exactly how much time elapsed from the moment that Worden was wounded until I had reached the pilot-house . . . it is impossible to state; but it could hardly have exceeded twenty minutes at the utmost. . . . and, on taking my position in the pilot-house and turning the vessel’s head in the direction of the Merrimac, I saw that she was already in retreat. . . . I returned with the Monitor to the side of the Minnesota, where preparations were being made to abandon the ship. . . .”5
Other Versions of Events
Greene’s last account includes most of what happened, but not all. Three men were in the Monitor’s dark, 32-by-42-inch pilothouse when it was hit. On the left was the pilot, Acting Master Samuel Howard; at the helm was Quarter Master Peter Williams, who received the Medal of Honor for his actions during the battle; and Worden was on the right, by the ladder. Miraculously, neither Howard nor Williams was injured, nor was the helm damaged.
But Worden’s face and eyes had absorbed iron fragments, powder, and paint from the Rebel blast. Sunlight flooding into the pilothouse because of the dislodged roof plate caused the bloodied and nearly blinded captain to believe that something was seriously wrong with his vessel, and he immediately ordered, “Put the helm to starboard and sheer off.”6 That turned the Monitor away from the Virginia, with the ships heading in opposite directions—the Virginia toward the Minnesota and the Monitor away to the northeast.
Assistant Paymaster William Keeler, stationed near the pilothouse, helped Worden down, and the captain told him to get Greene from the turret. The executive officer had been unaware of damage to the ship or Worden’s injury. After the turret was turned so that the hatch in the structure’s floor aligned with the one in the deck, Greene descended and came forward. Worden told him that he was seriously injured, he feared the Monitor was damaged, and Greene was now in command. The 22-year-old lieutenant then helped Worden lie down in his stateroom, just a few feet away.
Howard meanwhile had continued to follow Worden’s last order, steering the Monitor into shoal waters where the Virginia could not follow. The acting master later wrote that he was told Worden had given “over direction of the vessel to Lieutenant Greene” and that he was “to report to Greene every five minutes.”7 Greene remained with Worden, along with a number of the other officers. At one point, concerned for both Worden and his ship, Greene ordered Howard to “move off and make for Fortress Monroe.”8 Instead of obeying, Howard, unaware that the actual command of the Monitor had been given to Greene, said to Worden: “they want me to move to Fortress Monroe. If we do this, the Virginia will surely destroy the Minnesota. I don’t want to do it.” Worden replied that Greene “is now in command, and you must get your orders from him.” Howard wrote that he then “begged” Greene “not to leave the Minnesota.”9
The lieutenant asked Chief Engineer Alban C. Stimers, who had supervised the Monitor’s construction, to come forward from the turret and assess the damage. He determined that it was slight and both the pilothouse and helm were serviceable.10
Keeler wrote his wife a few days later that a number of officers had gathered around Worden, and “we held a hurried consultation & ‘fight’ was the unanimous voice of all. Lieut. Greene took Capt. W.’s position & our bow was again pointed for the Merrimac.” But she “seemed inclined to haul off.”11
The “Monitor Boys” wanted to finish the Virginia and were upset at the time it took Greene to re-engage the ship. Afterward the disgruntled crew stood on the Monitor’s deck in groups, discussing their dissatisfaction in allowing the Virginia to escape.12 Some on board later said that the “officers and crew felt mortified at the little they had done . . . and returned to their moorings crestfallen.” However when Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox, who had observed the battle from the deck of the Minnesota, came aboard greeting them as conquering heroes who had saved the frigate and the Union, “a great change took place” in the crew’s attitude and self-esteem.13
From eyewitness accounts, there does not appear to be sufficient evidence to support Greene’s claim that the Monitor was only out of the action for less than 20 minutes and stayed close to the Minnesota. Those on board the Virginia, the captain of the Minnesota, that ship’s log, at least one Union soldier on the northern shore, and even the Monitor’s own log have the Union ironclad out of the fight for at least 30 minutes and maybe as long as an hour. The Monitor’s log states that the pilothouse was struck at 1230 and the Virginia started back toward Norfolk at 1300, but the Union ironclad did not anchor by the Minnesota until 1700.14 Greene’s account may have differed from the Monitor’s log because he did not have access to it.15
Some of the Monitor’s crew accused Greene of cowardice, but there is no record of any of her officers sharing that opinion. Keeler wrote his wife: “When Capt. Worden was hurt, which for a time occasioned some confusion, we felt the want of a head, one who was willing to take the responsibility of our further movements. Of courage & willingness to continue the fight there was no want . . . we had retreated some distance from [the Virginia] in the meantime.”16 The paymaster believed that Greene was simply young, inexperienced, and overwhelmed.
In the 1880s Monitor designer John Ericsson made scathing remarks about Greene and his actions, statements actually aimed at the Navy Department for placing a young, untried officer in such an important position. Greene, tragically, was haunted by innuendo and scuttlebutt about his brief command of the Monitor. On 11 December 1884, shortly after mailing his final account of the battle for publication, he took his own life.
Final Assessment
In one sense the Battle of Hampton Roads had two victors. The Virginia was the decisive winner on the battle’s first day, when she defeated the sloop Cumberland and frigate Congress, and the Monitor achieved a tactical victory on the second by preventing the Virginia from destroying the Minnesota. However, during the fight between the ironclads, the Virginia, with what was perhaps a lucky shot, clearly disabled the Monitor, which retired from the contest.
Confusion and indecision on board the Union ship delayed her return for so long that the Minnesota’s captain and the Confederate ironclad’s crew believed the battle was over. The Virginia had triumphed. The reasons the story of the Monitor’s victory over the Virginia were propagated in the North are complex but understandable. Perhaps as Samuel Howard, the Monitor’s pilot, once wrote, “The truth of the engagement will never be known”—or agreed upon.17
1. U.S. War Department, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895–1929), ser. I, vol. 7, p. 25.
2. Samuel Dana Greene, letter to his parents, 14 March 1862, U.S. Naval Academy Museum Library, Annapolis, MD.
3. Although started shortly after the engagement, Greene’s letter mentions events that did not occur until 27 April.
4. William Keeler to his wife, 30 March 1862, in William Frederick Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor: 1862, ed. Robert Daly (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1964), p. 63. In this letter, Keeler addresses this same criticism from his wife.
5. Samuel Dana Greene, “In the Monitor Turret,” Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York: Century, 1887–89), vol. 1, p. 727.
6. Robert L. Preston, “Monitor-Merrimac Conflict Misrepresented In History,” The Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, 16 March 1912.
7. Samuel Howard in Philadelphia Press, 21 July 1895, in Frank Pierce Scrapbook, p. 77, Frank H. Pierce Papers, New York Public Library, New York (hereafter cited as Pierce Papers).
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. John M. White to Frank H. Pierce, 6 September 1886, Pierce Papers.
11. Keeler to his wife, 6 March 1862 (completed and sent later), in Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor, p. 38.
12. White to Pierce, 6 September 1886, Pierce Papers.
13. Samuel W. Taylor to Frank Pierce, 12 September 1885, Pierce Papers.
14. Log of the USS Monitor, 9 March 1862, National Archives and Records Administration, RG 45, Naval Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records and Library, Washington, DC, vol. 161 PC-30, entry 392, subseries D-110.
15. Acting Master Louis N. Stodder of the Monitor privately held the log from 1862 until 1910, when he gave it to the Navy Library.
16. Keeler to his wife, 30 March 1862, in Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor, p. 63.
17. Samuel Howard to Frank Pierce, 25 October 1885, Pierce Papers.