John Ericsson, Ornery Inventor
When the Civil War started, much of the small and antiquated U.S. Navy was in dry dock at Norfolk’s Gosport Navy Yard, which was now behind enemy lines. Rather than let the Confederates seize the ships, the commander scuttled and burned them on his way out. Among the charred wrecks was the Merrimac, which had been a big, sleek steam-and-sail frigate bristling with forty guns. Originally its name was spelled “Merrimack” for the New England river, but it somehow lost the k. The Confederates conceived a bold plan to refloat her, repair her, and sheath her hull in iron, with a massive battering ram fitted to the prow, to create a “floating battery.” She would make everything in the Union navy obsolete.
But the Confederacy was very deficient in the sort of iron works and workers who could pull this off, southern states having always depended on the industrialized north for such projects. It would be almost a year before the dreadnought was ready to fight. This gave the Union ample time to come up with a response. Reluctantly, Washington turned to a brilliant, sometimes fanatical and often quarrelsome designer and inventor in New York City, John Ericsson.
He was born in Sweden in 1803, son of a mining engineer who recognized him as a prodigy early on. By twenty-three Ericsson was in London, the roaring heart of the Industrial Revolution, inventing and designing a variety of machines. He moved to New York City at the end of the 1830s, settling in today’s Tribeca in a townhouse on Beach Street, most of which is now called Ericsson Place. In 1843 the U.S. Navy launched the Princeton, a revolutionary new warship Ericsson designed with a coal-fired steam engine, a rotary screw propeller, and a gun that could launch a 225-pound shell five miles with deadly accuracy. In February 1844 the navy was proudly showing it off to President John Tyler and some four hundred dignitaries when an innovative new cannon – not of Ericsson’s design – exploded, killing the secretaries of state and the navy, a couple of sailors, and one of Tyler’s slaves. The President and his bride-to-be Julia Gardiner (of Gardiner’s Island at the forked tip of Long Island) narrowly escaped destruction. The Navy laid the blame on Ericsson, and he spent the next several years in courtrooms trying to clear his name, while also suing infringers of his propeller patent. It all turned him into an infamously ornery cuss.
In 1851 Ericsson unveiled another stunning new design, a “caloric” engine that ran on hot air rather than steam. In the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, always ready to cheer the new, wrote that “the age of steam is closed, the age of caloric opens. Fulton and Watt belong to the past. Ericsson is the great mechanical genius of the present and future.”
In September 1861 a representative from Washington visited Ericsson in his Beach Street home, and the inventor showed him a cardboard model of an entirely new type of warship he claimed could be built in ninety days. It was an iron lozenge that would lie mostly underwater, just a flat deck breaking the surface, with a rotating pillbox gun turret in the middle. Navy men back in Washington, who still had no love for Ericsson, urged Lincoln to reject the novel plan. During the war New Yorkers would write Lincoln proposing all sorts of exotic weapons, from a steam-driven cannon to an electrically-charged artillery shell that would produce an explosion “equal to any shock of electricity in the heaviest thunder storm.” This one he liked. He said it reminded him of the Mississippi flatboats he worked on as a young man in the late 1820s (which, not coincidentally, gave him his first close encounters with plantation slavery). Resorting to one of his rustic witticisms, he declared, “All I have to say is what the girl said when she put her foot into the stocking. ‘It strikes me there’s something in it.’” His advisors groaned and gave in.
Several sites got to work. In Manhattan, the Delamater and Novelty iron works built the engine, propeller and turret. Erastus Corning’s ironworks supplied hull plates. Continental Iron Works in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint area put it all together in 101 days, then it was shifted down to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for final fittings. Ericsson shuttled from one spot to the other, hectoring the workers. (One of his assistants, curiously, was an engineer named Isaac Newton.) In mid-February the Monitor – so named because Ericsson said it would “monitor” any attempts by the Confederates to break the Union blockade of their ports – headed out gingerly on her first test run. She immediately developed serious steering problems and had to be towed back up the river. On her next test the two massive guns in the turret recoiled clean off their carriages. It was not an auspicious start.
Finally, with a crew of fifty-eight understandably nervous volunteers, she made for the open sea on March 6 1862. Lieutenant John Worden, a New Yorker, was commanding. He wasn’t happy about it. Like many navy men, he distrusted Ericsson and his inventions. He was a slight man, not the picture of machismo despite a bushy beard – other officers, for instance, noted his soft, ladylike hands – but he was tough in a fight. The journey southward almost ended the Monitor’s career before it had a chance to fire a shot. It foundered in stormy seas its second day out. Then the engines quit, filling the ship with deadly carbon monoxide. The crew kept passing out but managed to make repairs.
On Saturday March 8 the massive, barely maneuverable Merrimac finally lumbered out of Gosport. She was officially rechristened the Virginia, but everyone in the Union and even some in the Confederate navy continued to use her original name, which is how she’s gone down in history – not least because “the Monitor and the Merrimac” has a more felicitous and memorable ring than “the Monitor and the Virginia.” At Hampton Roads just outside Norfolk, three wooden Union ships had set up a blockade. The Merrimac engaged them. As cannonballs bounced off her plating, “having no more effect than peas from a pop-gun” as a New York Times correspondent would report a bit inaccurately, she rammed and sank the Union’s Cumberland while her guns bludgeoned the Congress. The third Federal ship, the Minnesota, ran aground in the fight. The triumphant yet battered and dented Merrimac, its ram broken off, quit the fight and returned to Gosport for overnight repairs.
The Monitor and the Merrimac met at Hampton Roads the next morning for their much-storied battle. The Monitor looked tiny going up against the massive Merrimac – Confederate sailors jeered that she looked like a cheesebox on a raft – but she was far more maneuverable, and Worden sailed rings around the behemoth, their shells clanging off each other’s sides. Worden was blinded by a bursting shell, the only casualty in the battle. After four hours both ships backed away, damaged but still more or less seaworthy.
Though they had fought to a draw, both sides claimed victory. The Union had perhaps the better reason to. Despite the damage the Merrimac had inflicted, the blockade held. Rumors flew around the North at first that “the marine monster” Merrimac was steaming north to bombard New York, or maybe toward Washington, the Times reported, to “smash Congress as badly as it did the vessel of that name at Hampton Roads.” In fact she was undergoing repairs in Norfolk.
All New York cheered Ericsson and his invention. Song and dance man Tony Pastor debuted a new song, “The Monitor and the Merrimac.” The chorus went:
Raise your voices everyone –
Give three cheers for Ericsson,
Who gave us such a vessel, neat and handy, oh –
And now we’ll give three more
For the gallant Monitor;
And three we’ll give for Yankee Doodle Dandy, oh.
Lincoln visited Worden in his hospital bed in Washington. “You do me a great honor, Mr. President, and I am only sorry that I can’t see you,” the lieutenant said. “You have done me more honor, sir, than I can ever do to you,” Lincoln replied. Worden still held a relatively low opinion of Ericsson’s ship, and warned Lincoln, as the president paraphrased it, that “she should not go sky-larking up to Norfolk” to seek another clash with the Merrimac. Over the next couple of months the Merrimac would steam up to the blockade a few times, daring the Monitor to come out and fight, but the Union captain was under orders not to take the bait. That May, when the Confederate troops abandoned Norfolk to protect Richmond, the captain of the Merrimac ran her aground and set her alight, rather than let her fall into Yankee hands.
On New Year’s Eve 1862 the Monitor would sink in a storm off Cape Hatteras. But it had done its job. Lincoln ordered more Monitor-type ships built; during the course of the war almost seventy of them would prove that the age of the wooden warship was over. The British Royal Navy had already cancelled all construction of wooden warships just two days after the Hampton Roads battle. The Confederate navy, with its very limited resources, built a few odd and innovative ironclads too, including one shaped like a giant turtle with a long iron tusk.
Ericsson, finally vindicated, oversaw constant improvements and additions to ironclads’ design. After the war he would continue to experiment with his caloric engine, with “hydrostatic javelins” (torpedoes), even with solar power. He died in 1889 and was buried first in New York; later his remains were moved to Sweden with all honors. Worden was at his funeral. He’d regained his sight, though the side of his face was permanently darkened from the gunpowder burn that had temporarily blinded him. He reached the rank of admiral, served as superintendent of the Naval Academy, and died in 1897.
by John Strausbaugh