After the March 8, 1862, sinking of the USS Congress and USS Cumberland, Abraham Lincoln regarded the disaster as the greatest Union calamity since Bull Run, and Secretary of War Edwin W. Stanton feared that the CSS Virginia (Merrimack) might move up the Potomac, disperse Congress, destroy the Capitol and public buildings, and force abandonment of McClellan’s Peninsula advance. As the burning Congress lit Hampton Roads on the evening of March 8, the USS Monitor arrived from New York after nearly sinking on the way. The Virginia (Merrimack), an adaptation of available materials, faced the Monitor, a radically new warship designed by Swedish inventor John Ericsson with a revolving turret mounting two 11-inch Dahlgrens. On the morning of March 9, Lt. Jones saw the Monitor approach from alongside the USS Minnesota, and for the next two hours the two ironclads fought until a shell struck the Monitor’s pilothouse, blinding Lt. Lorimer Worden and causing the vessel to withdraw temporarily. Believing the Federal ironclad beaten and with the Virginia (Merrimack) itself leaking, Jones took his ship back to Norfolk on the receding tide. The two ironclads never met in combat again, but the battle immediately mattered not only as a major turning point in naval warfare but also because the undefeated Virginia (Merrimack) blocked the James River, closed this route to Richmond to Federal use, and threatened to paralyze McClellan’s army movement even as he chose to continue the Peninsula Campaign by way of the York River.
