Monitor vs Merrimack

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On August 3, 1861 the United States Navy’s Ironclad Board placed ads in Northern Newspapers inviting designers to submit their plans for the construction of ironclad warships. In a letter to Abraham Lincoln dated August 29, 1861 John Ericsson offered to build a vessel, “…that within ten weeks after commencing the structure I would engage to be ready to take up position under the Rebel guns at Norfolk…” Ericsson was a Swedish-American inventor that designed the Union Monitor nicknamed “cheese box on a raft.’ The Confederate Merrimack or Merrimac was originally a wooden frigate. Federal troops fled the ship when they evacuated the Naval yard at Portsmouth, Virginia in 1861. Confederate forces raised it, and then covered the ship with iron plates. They renamed the ship Virginia, although I’ll be using Merrimack by which it is better known. On March 6, 1862 the Monitor was delayed by a storm. Two days later on March 8, 1862 naval history was made. The first Confederate ironclad steamed down the Elizabeth River into Hampton Roads to attack the U.S. blockade. The Merrimack first headed toward a twenty-four-gun wooden hulled steam-sailing slope, Cumberland. After ramming and sinking the Cumberland the Merrimack headed for the Congress, a fifty-gun frigate. An awestruck Union officer watched the fight as the Merrimack fired “shot and shell into her with terrific effect, while the shot from the Congress glanced from her iron-plated sloping sides without doing any apparent injury.” After the first day the Confederates were leading 2-0 proving iron superior to wood. | | On March 9, 1862 as the Merrimack arrived for day two of fighting, it found a Union ship called the Monitor waiting for it. The Confederate ironclad carried more guns than the Monitor, but it was slow, clumsy, and prone to engine trouble. The Union Monitor was the faster and more maneuverable ironclad,
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