After the March 8, 1862, sinking of the USS Congress and USS Cumberland, Abraham Lincoln viewed the disaster as the greatest Union calamity since Bull Run, while Secretary of War Edwin W. Stanton feared that the CSS Virginia (Merrimack) might ascend the Potomac, scatter Congress, and destroy the Capitol and other public buildings, forcing abandonment of McClellan’s Peninsula advance. That same evening, as the burning Congress cast an eerie glow across Hampton Roads, the USS Monitor arrived after nearly sinking en route from New York. Unlike the Virginia (Merrimack), an ingenious adaptation of available materials, the Monitor was a wholly new naval design created by Swedish inventor John Ericsson, with a revolving turret carrying two 11-inch Dahlgrens. On the morning of March 9, 1862, Lieutenant Jones was surprised to see the “cheesebox on a raft” move out from beside the USS Minnesota to confront the Virginia (Merrimack), and for the next two hours the two ironclads dueled until a shell struck the Monitor’s pilothouse, blinding her commander, Lieutenant Lorimer Worden, and causing her to break off action temporarily. Believing the Federal ironclad beaten and with the Virginia (Merrimack) herself suffering several leaks, Jones took her back to Norfolk on the receding tide. The two ironclads never fought again, but the battle was not only a major turning point in naval warfare: the undefeated Virginia (Merrimack) continued to block the James River and close that approach to Richmond to Federal use, though McClellan, worried that she might paralyze his army’s movement, still chose to continue the Peninsula Campaign by way of the York River.
