International Journal of Naval History

“ ‘The fiery focus’: An Analysis of the Union Ironclad Repulse at Charleston, 7 April 1863”

Howard J. Fuller, King’s College, London

It was a vicious circle of strategic, tactical and political misconception.  DuPont, increasingly skeptical of the defensive, let alone offensive capabilities of the monitors against fortifications, was nonetheless obliged ‘to take Charleston’.  The pressure was far too great to back down; there was national as well as private professional reputation at stake.

“The opportunity to punish their infamy”

On the morning of April 7 1863, a small but powerful squadron of Union ironclads waited impatiently inside the bar of Charleston harbour to begin the long-expected attack against Fort Sumter—if not also against the city beyond.  Here was where the great ‘Rebellion’ began.  Two years earlier South Carolina was the first American state to declare its secession from the Union.  Moreover, the Civil War itself (1861-1865) was precipitated by the surrender of this Federal installation in the middle of the outer harbour, following a three day bombardment from the surrounding Confederate batteries.[1]  As a result Fort Sumter became the most potent symbol of both Southern and Northern patriotism—in a ‘peoples war’ where morale was everything and the ‘will to fight’ was becoming more and more a target in itself.[2]

Active Union preparations to retake the fort and humble Charleston began shortly after the famous though inconclusive ironclad duel between the U.S.S. Monitor and the Confederate Virginia, or ‘Merrimac’, on March 9, 1862, which seemed to establish the limitless potential of these ‘wonder weapons’ of the Industrial Age.[3]  Pressure went from top to bottom in the Navy’s chain of command and only increased as the Union Army of the Potomac under General George B. McClellan was finally driven out of the Peninsula by Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, in the summer of 1862.  The North was in fact desperate for a sensational victory to boost public support for the war and demonstrate to increasingly sceptical, increasingly dangerous European Powers tempted to intervene that the United States of America could take care of itself after all.[4]  If the Army suffered reverses, the Navy simply had to provide convincing proof of inevitable Union triumph, as it had with Flag-Officer David G. Farragut’s daring capture of New Orleans on April 25, 1862.[5] 

Thus, two days after Lee began his counter-invasion of the North the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Gustavus Vasa Fox, complained to his wife that “[Secretary of State William H. Seward] was here just now to get us to attack Charleston, his remedy for all evils...”[6]  Eight days after Lee’s strategic repulse at Antietam (September 17, 1862), and three days after President Abraham Lincoln’s politically risky decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, Fox again relayed the Government’s sense of urgency to the General Inspector of Ironclads, Chief Engineer Alban Stimers, reminding him that “when Congress adjourned last session, we promised them Charleston on assembling.  I am afraid the Monitors will be behind hand.”[7] 

True enough, it was not until late March 1863 that Senator Charles Sumner, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, could write to his English friend Richard Cobden that the fleet destined to attack Charleston was finally ready.  “The delay has been caused by the extent of the preparations,” he explained, for “the rebels are confident there,” but “so also is our Navy Department.”[8]  This was reflected by Captain Thomas Turner of the broadside-ironclad U.S.S. New Ironsides, who confirmed to the Chairman of the Union League Defense Committee that the officers and crew of the fleet “detest the conduct of the South from the bottom of our hearts, and pine for the opportunity to punish their infamy—and this feeling especially towards this place steels our hearts…”[9]  But the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, meanwhile had his doubts, particularly with the leadership of the expedition under Rear-Admiral Samuel Francis DuPont.  In his diary he confided “Du Pont is getting as prudent as McClellan, is very careful; all dash, energy, and force are softened under the great responsibility.  He has a reputation to preserve instead of one to make.”[10]

“To crush his vessels and repel his attack”

It was not until noon of April 7^th that the New Ironsides, the flagship of the Union squadron, finally hoisted the signal to weigh anchor and proceed with DuPont’s  pre-arranged order of battle: line-ahead, with the monitors Weehawken, Passaic, Montauk, and Patapsco;  New Ironsides at the middle of the formation (to better facilitate signalling during the action); followed by the monitors Catskill, Nantucket, and Nahant; with the experimental, twin ‘fixed-turret’-ram U.S.S. Keokuk bringing up the rear.[11]  The ships were to navigate between forts Sumter and Moultrie, firing “when within easy range”, to a position “six…to eight hundred yards” off Sumter’s northwest face.  “After the reduction of Fort Sumter,” the plan concluded somewhat vaguely, “it is probable that the next point of attack will be the batteries on Morris island.”[12]

All of the new ironclads were fairly ponderous and unwieldy, taking the better part of an hour just to jostle into formation.  The ships’ local pilots carried perhaps the greatest responsibility of all, steering through treacherous shoals in unfamiliar and novel vessels from crowded armoured pilot houses.  It was their decision to wait for the morning mists to clear and the timing of an ebb tide.  Running aground here and now could prove fatal; for a squadron in line-ahead it would be worse.  The lead monitor Weehawken, commanded by Captain John Rodgers, ran into further problems.  Specially fitted with a large armoured raft at her bow intended to destroy channel obstructions, Weehawken’s anchor became entangled with one of the grappling chains which dangled below the raft.  It was not until 1:15 that she was ready again and slowly steamed up the main ship channel towards the right of Fort Sumter.  Time dragged on, as did the ironclads.  Their hulls already encumbered with marine growth and “grass”, with engines never intended for high speed, they made no more than 4 knots’ with difficulty against the flowing tide and a notorious current.[13]

A Confederate circular of Instructions from over three months before the attack, specified that:

As the enemy approaches, let the distance he will be in passing be accurately estimated by the distance buoys, and the elevation made to correspond, making it too little rather than too great for direct fire…

In the case of wooden vessels, the object will be to hit them near the water line, just abaft the smokestack. In the case of ironclad vessels, to hit the deck or the turrets at the intersection with the deck, and especially to let all the shots strike at once…

The guns of Beauregard battery, Fort Moultrie, Battery Bee, and the eastern, northeastern, and northwestern faces of Fort Sumter will be used to form the first circle of fire to which the enemy must be subjected, the center being a little to the eastward of a line between the forts and midway. Every effort must be made to crush his vessels and repel his attack within this circle, and especially while he is entangled in the obstructions…[14]

At ten minutes past two, as the Weehawken slowly approached a point directly between forts Sumter and Moultrie, Rodgers saw “rows of casks very near together…and there was more than one line of them.”  Their appearance “was so formidable”, he later reported, “that, upon deliberate judgement I thought it right not to entangle the vessel in the obstructions which I did not think we could have passed through, and in which we should have been caught.”[15]  Before the obstructions Weehawken now hesitated—next to a pre-placed Confederate ranging buoy, “No. 3”, in the middle of the channel.  Moultrie then opened fire.  Ranges in the various reports are conflicting but probably stood at 900 yards.  Weehawken responded with both her heavy guns directed against Fort Sumter. 

Many accounts have described what happened next.  Immediately, guns from Sumter joined the action, in addition to more distant fire from batteries Bee, Beauregard, Cumming’s Point, Wagner, and Fort Johnson.  It was a  sight “that no one who witnessed it will ever forget,” wrote C. Raymond P. Rodgers, DuPont’s chief of staff.  “Sublime, infernal, it seemed as if the fires of hell were turned upon the fleet.  The air seemed full of shot, and as they flew they could be seen as plainly as a base-ball in one of our games.”[16]  Soon the Weehawken “was so enveloped in spray from the shot showered at her as to be completely invisible and people thought we had gone down,” John Rodgers later explained to his wife.[17]  Turning to starboard, the Weehawken threw the rest of the squadron into confusion as the Passaic and the rest of the ironclads bunched forward to receive similar treatment.[18]  New Ironsides, even more unwieldy in the tide and current than the monitors, and burdened by her deep draft, was obliged to anchor out of effective range.[19]  She managed only a single broadside that day, while the rest of the Union ironclads, huddled before the obstructions, could only return a fraction of the enemy’s concentrated fire.  Indeed, by 4:30 many of the monitors had suffered breakdowns, while the Keokuk herself was riddled by hits which penetrated her weaker armour protection.[20]  The signal to withdraw was made, and the battered and beaten Union squadron returned to its original anchorage inside the bar to lick its wounds and perhaps renew the attack the following day.

Keokuk could be barely kept afloat that night, and on the following morning finally sank in shallow water, her two towers just above the surface of the water at low tide—her guns later salvaged by the Confederates under DuPont’s nose.  At the longest range involved, though representing a far larger and often stationary target, New Ironsides was struck at least 95 times.  One of these ripped off an external iron port shutter, four inches thick, and several penetrated into her unarmoured wooden ends, but caused no serious injury.[21]

“A failure into a disaster”

Damage sustained by the monitors in this contest between forts and ironcladsproved to be much more historically controversial, if not ‘critical’. According to John Rodgers’s report several heavy shot struck the Weehawken’s 5-inch laminated side armour near the same place, shattering it enough to expose the wood backing; Passaic was hit by two successive shots near the base of her turret “which bulged in its plate and beams, and, forcing together the rails on which the XI-inch carriage worked, rendered it wholly useless for the remainder of the action.”  More serious damage occurred when “a very heavy rifle shot struck the upper edge of the turret, broke all of its eleven plates, and then glancing upward took the pilot house, yet with such force as to make an indentation of 2½ inches, extending nearly the whole length of the shot.”  The damage to Nahant’s pilot house was also severe; the monitor itself was pounded 36 times including six on the pilot house and nine on the turret, with an alarming number of bolts loosened, broke, and even found lying outside on the deck.  As with Weehawken, a chance heavy shot or two at the vulnerable juncture between pilot house and turret proved sufficient to disable its rotation.[22]  Nantucket had her 15-inch gunport stopper jammed, being struck a total of “fifty-one times, besides a number of dents by fragments of shells”.  Though some were bent, none of the turret plates were broken.  The executive officer assured his commander “the ship is tight and can, if necessary, go into another fight at once, but to do so would, in my opinion, greatly endanger the ship, unless considerable

U.S.S. Passaic, after the repulse at Charleston, 7 April 1863.

repairs are first given her, there being several places too much weakened to resist a second blow.”  On the other hand, Captain John Worden, the hero of the original Monitor, acknowledged 14 hits on the Montauk with “no material damage”; Catskill “was struck some twenty times but without any serious injury except one shot upon the forward part of the deck, which broke both plates, the deck planking, and drove down the iron stanchion sustaining this beam about 1 inch, causing the deck to leak”; while the Patapsco’s commander, Daniel Ammen, reported “47 perceptible blows” , but, as with Montauk and Catskill, “no damage was done which disabled her”.[23]

The next morning Chief Engineer Stimers, assigned to the ironclad squadron with a corps of specialized mechanics, examined the vessels.  Having witnessing the action, he “expected to find…at least an approach to the destructive results which had been obtained by the Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance in his experiments against iron targets in the ordnance yard at Washington.”  Instead he was “agreeably disappointed” that none of the monitors were actually penetrated, despite the vigorous hammering they received, and reported to Secretary Welles his “firm opinion that the obstructions can be readily passed with the means already provided,” but never used, “and that the monitor vessels still retain sufficient enduring powers to enable them to pass all the forts and batteries which may reasonably by expected.”[24]  This infuriated DuPont, who shortly afterwards called for Stimers’ court-martial.  Stimers was later exonerated after five months of testimonies and cross-examinations.  In closing his defense he accused the charges made against him as an attempt to “justify a failure by Rear-Admiral DuPont, which had attracted the observation of the world, by condemning as inadequate the instruments which a liberal government had placed in his hands.”  This referred specifically to the armoured rafts intended to blast through the obstructions armed with a torpedo, which the none of the monitors’ officers were willing to use, John Rodgers concluding that “folly would rise into crime which should carry torpedoes in a rapid tide-way in a somewhat narrow channel, without known buoys, under fire, and with the attention divided amongst a friendly fleet.”  As for  the monitors’ condition after their abortive attack on April 7, 1863 Stimers regarded their trial as one of vindication.[25]  Probably the most significant statistic was the number of casualties on board the monitors as a result of their ordeal: 1 dead and 6 wounded, all from the Nahant—and these were attributed by her commander to the inferior quality of iron used for the armour bolts, since “the other vessels were most of the them struck quite as frequently on the turret, and some of them much more so than the Nahant, and yet their loss of bolts has been trifling in comparison...”[26]  For Rodgers’ wife Anne this was the critical factor, nevermind the controversy.  “Hurrah for the ironclads! Hurrah for the ironclads!” she wrote on receiving the news from Charleston.  “I have always had strong faith in the Monitors, but I had not dared to hope they would prove so entirely invulnerable.”[27]

Yet while their powers of resistance were almost unbelievable against Charleston harbour’s outer network of forts, their offensive powers were extremely limited.  Official Confederate records list 76 heavy guns that fired a total of 2,209 rounds, which in the opinion of one of the batteries’ commanding officers was perhaps “a little too rapid, but I have no doubt that in the end it [served] a good purpose. The storm of shot and bolts which fell around the enemy confused, if it did not appall him.”[28]  The Union squadron replied with 139 rounds—eight of these from New Ironsides’ only broadside and three from the Keokuk.  The 14 guns of the seven Passaic-class monitors therefore managed only 128 discharges.[29]  Accuracy was equivalent:

About 19% of the fort[s’] rounds hit (520), while the Union forces had a 50% rate of hitting, though their target [Fort Sumter] was certainly larger than the individual ships.  The Confederates were helped by preplaced range markers, since normal gunnery percentages for hits would have been closer to 10% than the 19% achieved.[30]

The damage to Fort Sumter’s 5-foot thick brick casemates was largely superficial, with only five men wounded.  As against the monitors, continued hits in the same areas might have produced more serious breaches.  “The greatest penetration in good, sound masonry was 3 feet,” recalled one of Sumter’s captains of artillery, “but everything around was cracked and

started more or less. The most severe blow, I think, was about 3 or 4 feet below the crest of the parapet, where two or three balls struck and just loosened everything clear through for a space of about 6 feet in length.”[31]  But fearing the effect of plunging shot striking the moderately armoured decks of his ironclads, DuPont directed their fire against the fort’s upper barbettes (where much of it overshot) rather than at the base, where repeated blasts from 15-inch calibre shells, each weighing 330-pounds, might have brought down an entire wall.[32]

At any rate, the various reports made to the Union admiral from the monitor captains on the evening of April 7 convinced him not to renew a strictly naval attack which, as he expressed in a letter to the Secretary of the Navy the following day, “would have converted a failure into a disaster”.[33]  The withdrawal from action officially became a repulse.  This news travelled slowly back to Washington, where Gideon Welles felt “a yearning, craving desire for tidings from Charleston.”  Army and Navy operations in the west against Vicksburg were stalled, bitterness over the new national draft and emancipation was feeding a growing ‘Peace Party’ of Democrats in the North, and the prospect of a war with England loomed larger than ever.  “For months my confidence has not increased, and now that the conflict is upon us my disquietude is greater still,” he wrote in his diary.  “I do not believe the monitors are impregnable, as [Fox] does, under the concentrated fire and immense weight of metal that can be thrown upon them, but it can hardly be otherwise than that some, probably most of them, will pass Sumter.  What man can do, our brave fellows will accomplish, but impossibilities cannot be overcome.”[34]

“The people who are to use their tests & inventions”

Was a Union naval victory at Charleston ‘impossible’?  Certainly to the ‘brave fellows’ in the fleet, or at least the commanding officers, the harbour defences could not be challenged by the means at their disposal—particularly by the monitor-ironclads.  Individual weight of shell mattered little when a rapid and overwhelming ‘suppressing’ fire was needed to subdue forts.  It was a question of matériel.[35]  Then again, dashing through the extended gauntlet of the main ship channel, up to the wharves of Charleston, was not DuPont’s intention, despite the popular expectation that this was precisely what he, like Farragut, would do.  Nearly a year before, he warned Fox to “think coolly and dispassionately on the main object,” for unlike the lower Mississippi river approach to New Orleans, or even Mobile Bay, Charleston harbour was a cul-de-sac.[36]  There would be no shelter for the ironclads from start to finish.  In the absence of a methodical joint Army-Navy siege, a strictly naval incursion would be all or nothing, all at once.  Neither the War Department or the White House had the resources or patience to spare for yet another siege, and Welles was willing to accept heavy losses if the coveted Rebel city was nevertheless brought to heel.[37]  In that respect it was a question of tactics.

Even assuming some of the ironclads managed to reach the city—with constant motion and the smoke of Confederate gun fire perhaps working to their advantage—they would face a morale, if not moral, dilemma.  Less than two months before the attack Fox wrote to DuPont “it seems to me very clear that our course is to go in and demand a surrender of the Forts or the alternative of destruction to their city.”[38]  But there was no guarantee Charleston would surrender easily, let alone quickly; and the monitors only carried reserves of ammunition proportionate to their size, if a general bombardment followed a gunfight with the city’s waterfront batteries.[39]  Perhaps sensing this, Lincoln telegraphed to Welles on April 9^th an extract from the Richmond Whig, which stated “at last the hour of trial has come for Charleston. The hour of deliverance or destruction, for no one believes the other alternative, surrender…We predict a Saragossa defense, and that if Charleston is taken it will be only a heap of ruins.”[40]  Examples throughout the Civil War are mixed on this point of conjecture.  General Pierre Gustave Beauregard, in charge of the city’s defence, stated he planned to fight “street by street, and house by house” in the event of a landing.[41]  Few Federal troops were on hand to actually take possession and hold the city, let alone the forts, against any major counterattack, so the ironclads might have resorted to setting defiant Charleston on fire, before turning to run the long gauntlet back out again: a Pyrhic raid, not a propaganda victory.[42]  It was therefore in the dubious hope that the good citizens of Charleston would acknowledge defeat—if only a few monitors proved impenetrable enough to reach them—that the Lincoln administration was willing to decimate the nation’s only coastal ironclad force.[43] 

It was a vicious circle of strategic, tactical and political misconception.  DuPont, increasingly sceptical of the defensive, let alone offensive capabilities of the monitors against fortifications, was nonetheless obliged ‘to take Charleston’.  The pressure was far too great to back down; there was national as well as private professional reputation at stake.  To minimise this sense of risk the Union admiral therefore delayed action until every possible resource was placed at his disposal.  The Department of the Navy was willing to comply, at the cost of depriving every other theatre of operation of the armoured means of taking more realistic and strategically-valuable prizes—in addition to exposing other vital areas to attack from new Confederate rams.  “You will see that threatened at all points and at all points continual disaster, all of which is laid solely at the door of the Secretary,” Fox reminded DuPont before the attack, “yet he has given you every vessel except Sangamon, which against three Iron Clads of the enemy, guards Hampton Roads, the waters of the Chesapeake & Washington itself.”[44]  But this was based in turn on the understanding that the iron-plated squadron would be used more as a battering ram than a siege train against Charleston.  For the Department it was the quickest, cleanest tactical method of satisfying a multitude of strategic and political commitments.  Somewhere in the intervening months, between Washington’s belief that ironclad-monitors could run even the gauntlet of Charleston harbour—that a sensational coup would logically follow this ‘sublime’ Yankee demonstration of superior technology and morale resolve—and the growing opinion amongst the professional officers themselves that such an enterprise was doomed, even dangerous, victory did in fact become impossible. 

First, by dismissing the idea, but never quite an order, of charging straight up to Charleston the monitors were automatically relegated to a stand-up fight against forts, which some experience already suggested would be in favour of the latter.[45]  Yet it was this obvious weakness, amongst others, which made the prospect of an even more daring and extensive test of the monitors’ ultimate potential seem ridiculous.  Secondly, DuPont’s alternative of reducing Fort Sumter, even if the obstructions could be negotiated first, played into Confederate hands perfectly.  If Charleston would not surrender directly under the guns of Union ironclads, how would the destruction of a single fort be any more decisive?  If the entire outer harbour’s defences were to be conquered one at a time before making a drive upon the city, why start at the middle of a multiple crossfire everyone knew existed? 

Finally, the War Department was unwilling to divert significant numbers of troops away from Mississippi, Tennessee or Virginia for an extensive and strictly ‘political’ campaign against Charleston, South Carolina.  12,500 Union soldiers at Port Royal were available for combined operations with the Navy; but bickering amongst the local generals frustrated the development of any plan to establish a beachhead that could be protected by the fleet and begin a long-range bombardment against the outer forts by land.  DuPont knew he had no practical alternative left but to run the gauntlet after all.  But instead of making optimistic preparations to fulfil the Department’s wishes he initiated an ulterior strategy which would minimise the risk to his ships even at the cost of their reputation.  This included an unwillingness to seriously employ the torpedo rafts the Department furnished for clearing obstructions. 

Indeed, the issue of both the obstructions and the monitors dominated the sensational public controversy in the aftermath of the Union naval repulse of April 7^th.  The former laid stress upon the poor tactics chosen by DuPont.  “The ironclads stood very well…[against]…the slave-mongers at Charleston,” wrote Charles Sumner to another English Radical, and advocate of the Union cause, John Bright.  “The difficulty was in the obstruction of the harbor, which kept the vessels in the fiery focus.  Had these been removed they could have

pushed forward.”[46]  Fox more or less agreed.  “He is of a wooden-age, eminent in that, but in an engineering one, behind the times.”[47]  DuPont, on the other hand, focused attention on the tools at his disposal.  “I think these Monitors are wonderful conceptions,” he wrote before the attack, “but oh! the errors of details, which would have been corrected if these men of genius could be induced to pay attention to the people who are to use their tests & inventions.”[48]  If another attempt was made, DuPont and the monitor captains later argued, the ironclads might be destroyed, or even worse, be captured by the Rebels and used to sweep away the Federal blockade of the eastern seaboard.  Foreign intervention would soon follow.[49]  Defeat by this reasoning was nicely converted into something more important than victory.  Implied here, moreover, was a condemnation by seamen of their civilian Government’s huge investment in ironclad-monitors—a naive faith in ‘engineers’ and ‘inventors’.  What troubled Scientific American, however, was “the spirit, if not the exact letter, of the accounts furnished” by the officers of the ironclad squadron.[50]  Harper’s Weekly solemnly reflected that:

Each person draws his own inferences and forms his own opinion of the affair, according to his hopes and views, and the temper of his mind.  The most obvious of all inferences is that it insures an indefinite prolongation of the war.  Had we destroyed Fort Sumter and occupied Charleston there would have been good ground for expecting the early collapse of the rebellion.  As it is, the rebels will of course be encouraged to persevere in their rebellion, while we shall merely renew our preparations for another and possibly a more successful attack…To a nation fixed and resolute in its purpose as this is, failure is impossible.[51]

Not surprisingly, an antagonistic London Times preferred DuPont’s analysis of the repulse, and carried it to a different logical extreme:

Hopes reversed, designs baffled, all efforts made in vain—is there no lesson for the North in this stern teaching of events, if passion could read them rightly, or if reason were allowed a voice?  This naval campaign was to retrieve all previous disasters and to avenge them.  It has ended in a catastrophe more signal than any reverse the North has yet sustained.  Continual failures are not mere accidents.  The object of the North is impossible.[52]

When DuPont insisted that the Navy Department publish his official reports to answer criticism of his actions from the Baltimore American—based, he maintained, on information supplied from Chief Engineer Stimers—Welles crisply replied “What public benefit, let me ask, could be derived from its publicity[?]”[53]  As historian James McPherson writes, the monitors “had been repulsed in a manner that gave the Union navy a black eye.”[54]  Now the commanding officer responsible seemed determined to add insult to injury.

Precious weeks passed.  DuPont refused to back down in his defensive, increasingly political attack upon his superiors, or to venture any more Navy action against Charleston.  Rebellion occurred within his own ranks, however, when Percival Drayton, the most outspoken of the monitor captains critical of their own vessels, realised there were more careers at stake than DuPont’s.[55]  On a visit to Washington he tactfully regretted the Rear-Admiral’s “over-

 Rear Admiral Samuel Francis DuPont                      Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles

sensitive nature” to the Secretary, suggesting his “morbid infirmity was aggravated by his long continuance on shipboard”.  As a crowning touch he offered that the monitors, even despite their crawling pace, “would have passed the batteries and reached the wharves of Charleston but for submerged obstructions”.[56]  Though DuPont was rallying powerful connections, Welles finally relieved him of command on June 3^rd, to be replaced by Rear-Admiral Andrew H. Foote.  There was little left to be said: “the Government is unwilling to relinquish all further efforts upon a place that has been so conspicuous in this rebellion, and which continues to stimulate treason and resistance to the Union and Government…”[57]

“Time to get in earnest”

Even so, political opponents of Lincoln’s administration were bound to exploit another apparent misconduct of the war.  The resulting Congressional inquiry led to the largest ever Report of the Secretary of the Navy—“in Relation to Armored Vessels”.  The big question was “What were these monitors good for?”[58]  The answer began with what the monitors were designed for.  John Ericsson, the brilliant Swedish-American engineer-inventor, believed science would prove more decisive in modern warfare than “numbers”.  “By a proper application of mechanical devices alone,” he wrote to President Lincoln, “will you be able with absolute certainty to destroy the enemies of the Union.”[59]  The original Monitor, according to her inventor, was intended to “admonish the leaders of the Southern Rebellion that the batteries on the banks of their rivers will no longer present barriers to the entrance of Union forces.”  This suggested barriers to be passed through towards a set objective.  Ericsson also referred, perhaps crucially, to ‘Monitoring’ the activities of “Downing Street”, and was unable to resist the opportunity of piquing an old acquaintance, the British Admiralty, by  “suggesting doubts as to the propriety” of their ironclads which, if nothing else, cost more than his own.[60]  The next-generation monitors of the Passaic-class were to fulfil the same roles as the original but on a more ambitious level.  They would be armed with even greater guns, themselves protected by even thicker turret armour, making them perfect ‘weapons platforms’.[61]  As such, the nature of the monitors’ armament should have been self-explanatory to contemporaries: these were ironclad-killing machines.[62]  Against armour plate, calibre was ultimately more decisive than numbers.  For that matter, the wounds inflicted upon the ironclads at Charleston might have been mortal ones if fewer though heavier guns were employed.  The only ironclad that was penetrated on April 7 1863, the Keokuk, was the only ironclad sunk.[63] 

Here, therefore, lay the roots of another fateful misconception.  As early as September 1862, the man behind the monitors wrote to Fox, their biggest advocate, how he “strongly urged Mr. Stimers…to impress you with the fact that the number of 15 inch guns rather than the number of vessel will decide your success against the Stone forts,”[64] and just before news reached him in New York of the great ironclad repulse, Ericsson confessed:

…I cannot share in your confidence relative to the capture of Charleston.  I am so much in the habit of estimating force and resistance that I cannot feel sanguine of success.  If you do succeed, it will not be a mechanical consequence of your ‘marvellous’ vessels, but because you are marvellously fortunate.  The most I dare hope is that the contest will end without the loss of that prestige which your Iron Clads have conferred on the Nation abroad…A single shot will sink a Ship while a hundred rounds cannot silence a fort.[65]

Assistant Secretary Gustavus Vasa Fox                  John Ericsson

But this sentiment did not necessarily conflict with Fox’s original hope for a strictly naval victory, one that would magnify the importance of the Navy to Congress; free up the large blockading fleet before Charleston for operations elsewhere; including the pursuit of British-built Confederate commerce raiders that were busy wrecking the North’s merchant marine (angering powerful New England interests); and impress foreign powers.[66]  Indeed, for the Assistant Secretary there was more:

Being myself responsible that some twenty [monitors] are now underway, and knowing that the exigencies of the public service did not permit experiments with the details, I have personally considerable at stake in the matter.  It is a stake of reputation which is the greatest one that can be imposed.  It is briefly whether I shall be considered an Ass or a very sensible man.[67]

It was not surprising then that John Ericsson referred to the damage reports of the monitors as “trifling”, remarking “it has…given me pain to think that our fighting machines were intrusted [sic] to officers who know nothing of mechanics and therefore have no confidence in their vessels.”[68]  A week before the attack, he wrote to Welles that the monitor captains should be reminded by the Department that “they have entered on a new era, that they are now handling not ships, but floating fighting machines, and that however eminent their seamanship, they cannot afford to disregard the advice of the Engineer.”[69]  It took another twenty years before Drayton’s successor in command of the Passaic, Edward Simpson acknowledged that perhaps things—the monitors—were not as they hopeless seemed at the time.  “Of course I took the liberty of criticising, and sometimes when one is suffering from the trials of confinement and war annoyances one may criticise rather roughly.”[70]

Whatever ‘deterrence value’ the Union Navy’s ironclad-monitors carried in terms of its international relations, their importance in sustaining the blockade from within, against Confederate ironclad-rams was unquestionable.  John Rodgers’ feelings towards the new men-of-war tended to vary over time as well.  He was surprised and then confident in the seagoing qualities of the Weehawken on her maiden voyage south, weathering a Cape Hatteras gale while his tow sought shelter.  A week before the attack on Charleston he proudly wrote to his wife he was “very well pleased with the Weehawken compared with the other monitors”:

All of our 12 engines work to a charm.  Did I ever tell you we have 12 engines[?] .[71]

This love affair between the Captain and his Ship promptly soured when ‘she’ betrayed ‘him’ before Charleston’s outer defences; and by the beginning of May Rodgers was writing to his wife how John Ericsson, “a charlatan”, “has not made as far as I know a single good engine,” and was “suffered to spend millions of public money without experiment to test the soundness of his ideas…”[72] 

Things changed again, however on June 17, 1863.  Encouraged by jubilant Charleston reports of ‘feeble monitors’, and the gloominess of the Northern press, the Confederacy despatched its best ironclad-ram, the Atlanta, to recapture Port Royal and scatter the Union blockade. 

Waiting for her outside Savannah, in Wassaw Sound, were the monitors Weehawken and Nahant.[73]  Four hits and fifteen minutes after the battle started it was over, and so was the Atlanta.  Weehawken did all the shooting before Nahant could even get in on the kill.  The first hit, a 15-inch cored-shot weighing 400-pounds, blasted through the Atlanta’s 30-degree casemate armour at an angle of fifty degrees in line with the keel.[74] 

The captain of the Weehawken was more than pleasantly surprised.  “Every long lane has a turning,” he pondered, “the rebels treated me badly at Fort Darling, and did their best to sink my vessel at Charleston, but here on the 17^th, the Anniversary of Bunker Hill, I took the strongest iron clad in the Confederacy in the opinion of the officers of the Atlanta, so easily that we scarcely had time to get in earnest.”[75]  Gideon Welles knew exactly how to take it, however.  The Navy, if not the entire nation, holding its breath for too long, could now breathe a small sigh of relief.  By positively “demonstrating the offensive power of the new and improved monitors armed with guns of XV-inch caliber,” he explained to Rodgers, the Union’s ironclad policy, based on the lessons of the original Monitor-Merrimac action, was proven sensible after all:

To your heroic daring and persistent moral courage, beyond that of any other individual, is the country indebted for the development, under trying and varied circumstances, on the ocean, under enormous batteries on land, and in successful encounter with a formidable floating antagonist, of the capabilities and qualities of attack and resistance of the monitor class of vessels and their heavy armament. For these heroic and serviceable acts I have presented your name to the President, requesting him to recommend that Congress give you a vote of thanks in order that you may be advanced to the grade of commodore in the American Navy.[76]

Conclusion

Ironically, it was the sailors’ obsession with the monitors’ lack of offensive power which placed them in a defensive role at Charleston on April 7, 1863 guaranteed to magnify this very weakness; while the engineers’ fixation with their impregnability advocated a bold offensive thrust through the heart of the enemy’s defences.  Their inventor, John Ericsson, never intended them to act as ‘fort-killers’.  They might be employed to run gauntlets, and given their peculiar defensive powers, were better fit to risk such a manoeuvre than large broadside-ironclads simply on a point of evading rather than overpowering enemy fire.  What happened after that was more problematic, but not necessarily impossible.  A large degree of their efficacy was psychological.  An irresistible ‘infernal machine’ appearing off the shore and wielding ‘monster’ guns could be a source of fear and wonder.  At times this was enough, and this is what Fox had in mind for Charleston: the enemy’s will to fight, crushed without even firing a shot.  But on April 7, 1863 nearly the reverse happened.  ‘Moral Courage’ meant conviction during the Civil War, a do or die conflict where every available mental and material resource frequently tested the calibre of fellow Americans, North and South.