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Thunder at Hampton Roads
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231 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1976
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May 2, 2025
The thunder of naval ordnance would have been a familiar sound to the people of the Hampton Roads area of Virginia in 1862, during the second year of the American Civil War. What would have been completely un-familiar, however, was the sight of two ironclad naval vessels – the Union’s U.S.S. Monitor and the Confederacy’s C.S.S. Virginia – battling at close range, not far off Newport News’ shoreline.
No one in that age of wooden ships had ever seen anything like it before. It would be as if contemporary Americans looked up into the sky to see flying saucers dueling in the skies over New York City or Washington, D.C., peppering each other with laser blasts at point-blank range. The battle between the Monitor and the Virginia was a truly pivotal historical moment – a time when new technology and new ideas forever changed the way in which naval wars had been fought since Troy and Actium – and it is a story that A.A. Hoehling tells well in his 1976 book Thunder at Hampton Roads.
Hoehling, a prolific naval historian, approaches with enthusiasm his telling of the story of The U.S.S. Monitor – Its Battle with the Merrimack and Its Recent Discovery (the book’s cover subtitle). And recounting the saga of the Monitor is impossible without chronicling the life of its designer, John Ericsson. The Swedish-born Ericsson was known for his irascibility, and some considered him eccentric, but no one could deny his genius.
Nor could anyone deny his determination. He won over skeptical U.S. Navy brass to his idea for an ironclad ship, and secured a contract to build his Monitor. Having done so, he arranged a meeting with Brooklyn shipbuilder Thomas Rowland, and once again showed a determination that was, well, ironclad: “At his charming best, [Ericsson] asked, ‘Tom, my boy, what are you going to charge me to build my iron ship?’ Ericsson was not too subtly putting the thought in Rowland’s mind that building his ship was already a foregone conclusion. He thereby seized the initiative from the younger man” (pp. 50-51). Ericsson emerges from the pages of Thunder at Hampton Roads as a truly formidable customer.
And it is good that he was; for the Confederates, regardless of what the Union might do, were forging ahead with their own plans for an ironclad warship. Stephen Mallory, the Confederacy’s Secretary of the Navy, was a strong believer in the potential of ironclads, and therefore he seized the opportunity that was offered when the Union Navy, in its evacuation of the Norfolk Navy Yard, did a less-than-perfect job of scuttling the steam frigate U.S.S. Merrimack. Burned to the waterline, the Merrimack nonetheless had an intact hull; and realizing their good fortune, the enterprising rebels raised the Merrimack, sheathed her in 4-inch-thick iron plate, and rechristened her the C.S.S. Virginia.
Slow and difficult to maneuver, the Virginia nonetheless proved quite an asset to the fledgling Confederate Navy. Sent against the wooden vessels of the Union blockading fleet at Hampton Roads on March 8, 1862, the Virginia promptly destroyed the sailing frigates U.S.S. Cumberland and U.S.S. Congress. A third frigate, the U.S.S. Minnesota, ran aground during the battle, and its crew feared that they would share the fate of the Cumberland and the Congress the following day.
Hoehling makes clear the devastating impact of the Virginia’s sortie:
On the Federal shores, it had to be the gloomiest evening of the war, after in some respects a more stunning defeat than Bull Run. It was the navy’s worst day in history, its greatest humiliation since the U.S.S. Chesapeake, in 1813, struck to H.M.S. Shannon. Never had there been such human toll in one United States naval action – some 250 killed outright…at least one hundred injured in varying degrees of severity. (p. 127)
Yet fortunately for the grounded U.S.S. Minnesota, and for the Union cause, the Monitor – after a rough voyage down from the Brooklyn shipyard, through seas that she was not designed to withstand – arrived at Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862, and engaged the Virginia in battle.
Hoehling captures well the drama of this important moment of naval combat – the Virginia, big and unwieldy, with more guns, yet perpetually foiled in her efforts to ram her adversary; the Monitor, low of draft, yet smaller and more maneuverable, and taking full advantage of Ericsson’s innovative rotating gun turret. With both commanders – Commodore John L. Worden of the Monitor and Captain Franklin Buchanan of the Virginia – having been wounded during the two days’ fighting, the crews of the duelling ironclads found themselves in a surprisingly similar situation:
[B]oth combatants, the Monitor and the Merrimack, were pursuing the battle with acting captains. There were other shared conditions: depletion of ammunition, of coal, and the near-exhaustion of both crews. One had fought the previous day. The other had fought, for a far longer time, a yet more implacable enemy: the sea. (p. 166)
The battle was a tactical draw: both ships withdrew, neither having sunk or disabled the other. Yet strategically, it was an unmistakable Union victory: the Virginia was effectively neutralized by the presence of the Monitor in Hampton Roads waters; and with Union military gains in the region, the rebels eventually felt constrained to move C.S.S. Virginia up the James River and scuttle her with explosives.
The later career of U.S.S. Monitor was short as well; she sank in a sea storm off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on 31 December 1862, with the loss of 16 of her 62-man crew. But the ship’s sinking was not the last that the world would see of the Monitor – for the heroic ironclad was found by an expedition aboard Duke University’s maritime research ship Eastward in 1973. More than forty years after that “great historic and emotional moment” (p. 210), the Monitor is a National Marine Sanctuary.
I have stood on the shore at Monitor-Merrimac Overlook Park in contemporary Newport News – not too far from where the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel, a portion of Interstate Highway 664, connects Newport News with Suffolk – and have tried to imagine the drama of the naval combat that spectators witnessed from those shores in 1862. Also in Newport News is the Mariners’ Museum, where one can see the Monitor’s innovative revolving turret and other artifacts from the historic ship, all of them in the process of painstaking restoration. Yet if a trip to Newport News is not convenient for you at this time, Hoehling’s Thunder at Hampton Roads is a fine way to connect with the story of one of the most important naval battles of all time.
No one in that age of wooden ships had ever seen anything like it before. It would be as if contemporary Americans looked up into the sky to see flying saucers dueling in the skies over New York City or Washington, D.C., peppering each other with laser blasts at point-blank range. The battle between the Monitor and the Virginia was a truly pivotal historical moment – a time when new technology and new ideas forever changed the way in which naval wars had been fought since Troy and Actium – and it is a story that A.A. Hoehling tells well in his 1976 book Thunder at Hampton Roads.
Hoehling, a prolific naval historian, approaches with enthusiasm his telling of the story of The U.S.S. Monitor – Its Battle with the Merrimack and Its Recent Discovery (the book’s cover subtitle). And recounting the saga of the Monitor is impossible without chronicling the life of its designer, John Ericsson. The Swedish-born Ericsson was known for his irascibility, and some considered him eccentric, but no one could deny his genius.
Nor could anyone deny his determination. He won over skeptical U.S. Navy brass to his idea for an ironclad ship, and secured a contract to build his Monitor. Having done so, he arranged a meeting with Brooklyn shipbuilder Thomas Rowland, and once again showed a determination that was, well, ironclad: “At his charming best, [Ericsson] asked, ‘Tom, my boy, what are you going to charge me to build my iron ship?’ Ericsson was not too subtly putting the thought in Rowland’s mind that building his ship was already a foregone conclusion. He thereby seized the initiative from the younger man” (pp. 50-51). Ericsson emerges from the pages of Thunder at Hampton Roads as a truly formidable customer.
And it is good that he was; for the Confederates, regardless of what the Union might do, were forging ahead with their own plans for an ironclad warship. Stephen Mallory, the Confederacy’s Secretary of the Navy, was a strong believer in the potential of ironclads, and therefore he seized the opportunity that was offered when the Union Navy, in its evacuation of the Norfolk Navy Yard, did a less-than-perfect job of scuttling the steam frigate U.S.S. Merrimack. Burned to the waterline, the Merrimack nonetheless had an intact hull; and realizing their good fortune, the enterprising rebels raised the Merrimack, sheathed her in 4-inch-thick iron plate, and rechristened her the C.S.S. Virginia.
Slow and difficult to maneuver, the Virginia nonetheless proved quite an asset to the fledgling Confederate Navy. Sent against the wooden vessels of the Union blockading fleet at Hampton Roads on March 8, 1862, the Virginia promptly destroyed the sailing frigates U.S.S. Cumberland and U.S.S. Congress. A third frigate, the U.S.S. Minnesota, ran aground during the battle, and its crew feared that they would share the fate of the Cumberland and the Congress the following day.
Hoehling makes clear the devastating impact of the Virginia’s sortie:
On the Federal shores, it had to be the gloomiest evening of the war, after in some respects a more stunning defeat than Bull Run. It was the navy’s worst day in history, its greatest humiliation since the U.S.S. Chesapeake, in 1813, struck to H.M.S. Shannon. Never had there been such human toll in one United States naval action – some 250 killed outright…at least one hundred injured in varying degrees of severity. (p. 127)
Yet fortunately for the grounded U.S.S. Minnesota, and for the Union cause, the Monitor – after a rough voyage down from the Brooklyn shipyard, through seas that she was not designed to withstand – arrived at Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862, and engaged the Virginia in battle.
Hoehling captures well the drama of this important moment of naval combat – the Virginia, big and unwieldy, with more guns, yet perpetually foiled in her efforts to ram her adversary; the Monitor, low of draft, yet smaller and more maneuverable, and taking full advantage of Ericsson’s innovative rotating gun turret. With both commanders – Commodore John L. Worden of the Monitor and Captain Franklin Buchanan of the Virginia – having been wounded during the two days’ fighting, the crews of the duelling ironclads found themselves in a surprisingly similar situation:
[B]oth combatants, the Monitor and the Merrimack, were pursuing the battle with acting captains. There were other shared conditions: depletion of ammunition, of coal, and the near-exhaustion of both crews. One had fought the previous day. The other had fought, for a far longer time, a yet more implacable enemy: the sea. (p. 166)
The battle was a tactical draw: both ships withdrew, neither having sunk or disabled the other. Yet strategically, it was an unmistakable Union victory: the Virginia was effectively neutralized by the presence of the Monitor in Hampton Roads waters; and with Union military gains in the region, the rebels eventually felt constrained to move C.S.S. Virginia up the James River and scuttle her with explosives.
The later career of U.S.S. Monitor was short as well; she sank in a sea storm off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on 31 December 1862, with the loss of 16 of her 62-man crew. But the ship’s sinking was not the last that the world would see of the Monitor – for the heroic ironclad was found by an expedition aboard Duke University’s maritime research ship Eastward in 1973. More than forty years after that “great historic and emotional moment” (p. 210), the Monitor is a National Marine Sanctuary.
I have stood on the shore at Monitor-Merrimac Overlook Park in contemporary Newport News – not too far from where the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel, a portion of Interstate Highway 664, connects Newport News with Suffolk – and have tried to imagine the drama of the naval combat that spectators witnessed from those shores in 1862. Also in Newport News is the Mariners’ Museum, where one can see the Monitor’s innovative revolving turret and other artifacts from the historic ship, all of them in the process of painstaking restoration. Yet if a trip to Newport News is not convenient for you at this time, Hoehling’s Thunder at Hampton Roads is a fine way to connect with the story of one of the most important naval battles of all time.
November 8, 2020
I have been long fascinated by the Monitor and Virginia's battle and intertwined stories. Hoehling's Thunder at Hampton Roads is a good entry to this study. He brings in great sources from the eyewitnesses to the battle to the politicians involved. His information on the Southern leaders is very small but that could be a lack of surviving materials rather than oversight. What was nice was to see how he wrote about John Ericsson and provided a better insight on the man. Ericsson was truly remarkable but not very likeable. This book is reccommended but the reader should also consider John Tetris DeKay's excellent Monitor and William C. Davis' classic Duel Between the First Ironclads as books to read as well.
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