A page from the Keeler family album shows the paymaster in his uniform.
A page from the Keeler family album shows the paymaster in his uniform.
The jail pallor was still on Worden when his paymaster, William Keeler, met him three weeks later and wrote, “Capt. Worden is in the regular service. He is tall, thin & quite effeminate looking, notwithstanding a long beard hanging down his breast—he is white & delicate probably from long confinement & never was a lady the possessor of a smaller or more delicate hand.” Rather surprisingly, Keeler goes on to say, “. . . But if I am not very much mistaken he will not hesitate to submit our iron sides to as severe a test as the most warlike could desire.”
William Frederick Keeler was a perceptive man, a lively, loquacious Midwesterner whose letters to his wife, Anna, offer not only an intimate look at life aboard the Monitor, but also the most immediate record we have of day-to-day service in the Civil War Navy.
Thirty years earlier, Keeler would not have been in uniform. The growing complexity of the Navy had both formed the position of paymaster and brought it up to parity with the rank of lieutenant. A clerical job, it had steadily expanded in importance. As Keeler explained his duties to Anna, “I have charge of all provisions, clothing, stationery, what are called Small Stores, such as Tobacco, Soap, candles, thread, buttons, needles, jack knives, & all the thousand & one little things a Sailor will stand in need of—besides the money. The Arms, ammunition, & Ship Stores, such as sails, cordage & the like, I have nothing to do with. My Steward’s business is to give out the men’s rations daily & render me an a/c [account]. Clothing, Small Stores & everything but the daily rations I issue myself.”
While he was telling Anna all this, he had “not yet seen my iron home & know nothing more about it than what I hear from others, but I conclude that it is a novel looking craft.”
Keeler’s only previous maritime experience had been rounding the Horn on a journey to the California gold fields that proved unrewarding (but not uneventful: his two brothers died during that violent Western migration). He had, however, learned to keep careful track of a wide variety of objects, and he knew a good deal about machinery.
Born in Utica, New York, in 1821—he was forty when he joined the Monitor—he had, one of his sons wrote, “a roving disposition.” It first brought him to Connecticut, where he met and married Anna Dutton, then to California, and finally to China before he came back to America and settled in LaSalle, a town one hundred miles west of Chicago on the Illinois River. There he built a trade as—his crowded business card records—“Watchmaker & Jeweller, Dealer in Fine Gold & Silver Watches, Jewelry, Silver-ware, Clocks, Looking-Glasses, Guns, Pistols, Stationery, Toys, Gilt Mouldings, Fish Tackle, Sportsmen’s Materials, of every description, and Fancy Goods of all kinds.” By 1857 Keeler had forsaken this commercial Golconda to become the senior partner in the “La Salle Iron Works, Founders & Machinists . . . Manufacturers of Steam Engines, Mill Gearing, Horse Powers, Corn Shellers, Coal Cars, Stoves, Iron Railing & Machinery of all kinds, Brass & Iron Casings . . .” The workings of the Monitor would not have intimidated him.
Forty was old to begin a military career, but Keeler thought slavery a “hideous deformity,” and his anger at the “traitorous and wretched souls” of the secessionists, coupled with that roving disposition, got him to pull strings—Anna’s father was friendly with Cornelius Bushnell—to become an “Acting Assistant Paymaster and Clerk.” On January 4, Welles signed orders summoning him to New York.
Eight days later, Keeler sent Anna the first installment of what would become a highly entertaining war-long Iliad.
“. . . To begin at the beginning—I took a Sleeping Car at the Rock Island depot, got a good double berth to myself, in a few minutes heard them call out Ottawa, have a very indistinct recollection of something being said about Morris & the next thing of which I was conscious was a vigorous shake” from the porter “with the announcement that we were ‘most to Chicago,’ accompanied with the modest demand of ten cents for blacking the gentleman’s boots.”
Keeler got out of his berth “feeling much refreshed & at 1/2 past 5 found myself in Chicago. I took a ticket for N.Y. via Lake Shore and Erie R.R. paying $24.00, making the fare through $27.00.” That was pretty hefty, the equivalent of perhaps $750 today, but Uncle Sam was paying. “At Six we started for New York. In the evening we were at Toledo where we changed cars & went to Cleveland, changed again—took a narrow top shelf in a sleeping car & on the morning found myself in Buffalo after a good night’s sleep.” But he’d missed his connection for New York by half an hour, and checked into a railroad hotel, “a slow drizzling mist Keeping me in the house most of the day.”
He caught a 7:00 PM train “for N.Y., at Hornelsville laid myself away on a shelf for the night.” By noon the next day he was on “the Jersey City ferry for N.Y., the boat grinding her way through masses of floating ice with which the harbor was filled.
“As soon as we landed I made my way across the city & from there to the [Brooklyn] Navy Yard. . . . At the entrance to the Yard I was stopped by a guard who demanded my business.”
Keeler said he’d been ordered to report to Commodore Hiram Paulding, who had charge of the yard, and “was referred to the Sergeant of the guard who told me to pass and directed me to the Commodore’s office which I found filled with men & officers, getting orders, signing passes, &c.” Keeler approached a desk. “I made my business known to one of the Clerks who entered my name in two or three different books, then turned me over to another who entered my name again in as many more.” The flurry of record keeping completed, the recorder “endorsed the time of my reporting on the back of my dispatch, then sent me back to Clerk No. 1, who told me that the Commodore’s signature was needed on my papers.”
Commodore Paulding wasn’t there. Keeler, threading his way through a routine that any junior officer seeking his post in World War II—or on the eve of Desert Storm—would recognize, finally got to Commander John Almy, “a frank, blunt sort of sailor man.”
Almy glanced over Keeler’s papers and said, “Oh, Paymaster Keeler. Glad to see you, sir. Where are you from, sir?”
Keeler told him Illinois.
Almy, looking “a little surprised,” said, “Well, we don’t get a great many sailors from the prairies out there.”
Keeler pertly responded that “folks there were doing their duty on land.”
“Yes, glad to hear it. Ever been to sea?”
Keeler gave him a firm yes, but Almy probably guessed the sea time had been logged as a passenger when Keeler asked if it was necessary to get a uniform; he would feel more comfortable in the clothes he’d brought East with him.
Almy snapped, “Not at all, not at all, get a uniform before you go to sea.” Taking pity on the landlubber, he added, “We will let you rest a while before you go.”
Yet the Navy had apparently already seeped into Keeler’s spirit. After Almy put his name to them, the papers had to further feed bureaucracy’s maw with an infinitude of countersignings, and “I was introduced to quite a number of the officers in the different offices I went into & was much pleased with their looks & appearance—‘First impressions’ are good at any rate. There appeared to be more real earnestness of purpose & less of that swagger & bluster & rowdyism about them than among many of the land officers I have met with.”
He had to stop once again at Clerk No. 1’s desk before his office round ended, but Keeler didn’t mind that at all because the clerk “gave me an order on the Navy Agent in N.Y. for my traveling allowance at the rate of 10 cents per mile. As the distance cannot be less than 1000 miles,” he stood to clear nearly seventy-five 1861 dollars on his train trip.
Keeler obediently acquired a uniform (and, to his irritation, a dress sword: “the regulations require it so I had to go to the expense of $16.00 for one of those useless toys”). He would wear Navy blue for the next five years, but at the outset told his wife that although “bright handsome uniforms are so common here that scarcely any notice is taken of them[,] I felt awkward enough at first in mine, it seemed as if everyone was looking at me, but I am getting used to it now.” As he became more comfortable in his new clothes, Keeler met his girlish but warlike captain and his fellow officers. “Mr. Green, Our lieutenant is a young man also in the regular service, black hair & eyes that look through a person & will carry out his orders I have no doubt.”
Mr. Green was Samuel Dana Greene, and he was young, just shy of his twenty-second birthday. A Marylander who had graduated seventh in his class from Annapolis in 1859, he began his naval career on Farragut’s future flagship. The sloop of war Hartford was in Chinese waters when Sumter surrendered, so far from home that it took her nine months to get back to Philadelphia. Once there, in December 1861, Greene volunteered for the Monitor. That he was chosen as her second-in-command so early in his career is another reflection of how thin spread the Navy was just then.
Still, Worden wanted him and told Smith so. On January 23 Smith wrote Stimers saying, “Lt. Green will be ordered today. Lt. Worden applied for him.” Then, having expanded the circle of those privileged to hear his ever-renewed doubts to include Stimers, Smith added, “A good deal of wonderment and many surmises are afloat.”
Whatever worries Worden may have held about his ship—and he did have some—he made a shrewd and careful assessment of its manning requirements. “In estimating the number of her crew,” he wrote Welles, “I allowed 15 men and a quarter gunner for the two guns, 11 men for the powder division, and 1 for the wheel, which I deem ample for the efficient working of her guns in action. That would leave 12 men (including those available in the engineering department) to supply deficiencies at the guns, caused by sickness or casualties.”
This was modern thinking. Worden saw his engineers’ primary function as tending machinery, and only a distant second one to stand in as fighting sailors. And there would be a lot of engineers. On a sailing ship with auxiliary steam, the total number of them ranged from 10 to 20 percent of the ship’s company. On the Monitor, the figure was closer to 40 percent.
Captain Worden turned out to be fortunate in his chief engineer, who had arrived in New York more than a month earlier. He bore the reassuring name of Isaac Newton and had won Stimers’s strong approval while serving with him aboard the Roanoke. Newton had been watching the Monitor under construction, and he liked everything he’d seen. He shared Ericsson’s conviction that a steam plant on a sailing vessel—which described half the significant fighting ships in the Navy—was an archaism. “In all vessels now being built for the navy,” he wrote, “speed under steam is the sine qua non; the hallucination of auxiliary steam power has been exploded.” For him, masts and sails were auxiliary to steam, rather than the other way around, and at best should be done away with altogether. Even so, Newton encountered drawbacks on his new, entirely rigging-free ship. “As there are no sails and ropes on the Monitor, the spare time this deficiency gives the first Lieut. causes me very great annoyance.”
WORDEN HAD TO FIND A crew. Welles, fearing this might prove time-consuming and difficult, wrote that if volunteers were not forthcoming, he would draft enough men. He needn’t have worried. The ship of the line North Carolina and the frigate Sabine were in New York Harbor (the former was never going anywhere else; launched in 1820, she had been immobile for more than twenty years, a receiving ship housing sailors pending assignment). Worden went aboard both and spoke about the Monitor to their assembled crews in forthright terms: “I won’t draft any of you for service on that thing. I can’t promise to get you to Hampton Roads, but if I ever do, I think she will do good service.” Not the tenor of Shakespeare’s King Harry encouraging his soldiers before Agincourt, but it worked: more men stepped forward to volunteer than Worden had room for.
A very different crowd from the largely homogenous crew of the Merrimack, the Monitor’s men were a microcosm of the disparate elements alloyed into the Northern war effort.
More than a third came from the tides of immigration that had flowed into the country in recent years: three from Germany, among them Master’s Mate George Frederickson (Keeler thought him “a good honest Dutchman”), one from Alaska, another from Quebec, four from England, one from Austria, a Scott named Fenwick, three Swedes, and many whose families had been driven from Ireland by the potato famine of little more than a decade earlier: Garety (or Garetty, Garrety, or Garity), Hannan, Connelly, Joice, Malone, Mooney, Egan, Driscoll, Quinn . . . Others were from earlier arrivals that had settled in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, Syracuse; five enlisted from New York City, three from the Monitor’s natal Brooklyn.
Some were black. During the Monitor’s life a tenth of her crew were African-American; that’s a close reflection of their percentage in the national population, and it is remarkable. The US Navy seems to have been one of the more advanced social forces in the country during the early 1860s. Years would pass before black soldiers were permitted to join Union forces in the field, but the Navy recruited them from the start. In part this speaks to tradition—a quarter of Oliver Hazard Perry’s crew at the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813 were African-American—and part is pragmatism: on land only the ability to shoulder a musket mattered at the outset; sea service demanded more specific skills. Mere utility, though, doesn’t account for a Navy man, Robert Blake, becoming the first African-American to win the Medal of Honor. He worked a gun that drove the Confederates away from their shore battery during a hard-fought battle on Christmas Day 1863.
This is not to say that the Navy was the Peaceable Kingdom. Aboard the USS Brazileira some of the white complement mounted a skit called “Nigger Serenade” and augmented the hilarity with “Nigger in a Daguerreotype Gallery.” The septic little theatrical so poisoned the shipboard atmosphere that the captain had to transfer his African-American sailors to another vessel to avoid violence.
But such incitements were the exception. The black and white crewmen of the Monitor lived together with no record of any friction; Worden never had to cope with internal ructions on his ship. After the war he said of his crew, “A better one no naval commander ever had the honor to command.”