CHAPTER 26

Three Cheers for Ericsson

In September 1861, while McClellan was still drilling his army in Washington, a representative of the Navy Department had traveled to New York and knocked on the door of the three-story brick house at 36 Beach Street, facing the handsome St. John’s Park in the lower Manhattan area now called Tribeca. Some of Beach Street has vanished since; the length of it where the house once stood has long been called Ericsson Place for the man who lived at 36.

John Ericsson was a brilliant but quarrelsome inventor. Born in Sweden in 1803, he had moved to New York at the end of the 1830s and would remain there until he died in 1888, taking U.S. citizenship along the way. By 1861 he’d had a long and stormy relationship with the U.S. Navy. In 1844 he designed the USS Princeton, a revolutionary new warship with a coal-fired steam engine, a rotary screw propeller (as opposed to the paddlewheels that had been in use until then), and a gun that could launch a 225-pound shell five miles with deadly accuracy. The navy was showing off the Princeton to President John Tyler, his future wife, Julia Gardiner, 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, one of Tyler’s slaves, and Julia Gardiner’s father. The navy had unfairly blamed Ericsson, and he’d 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 he had unveiled another stunning new design, a “caloric” engine that ran on hot air rather than steam. In the Tribune, 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.”

Ericsson’s visitor was on a mission from Navy Secretary Gideon Welles. Among the wrecks the fleeing Union officers had scuttled in Gosport Navy Yard when the war started was the Merrimac. Once a big, sleek steam-and-sail frigate bristling with forty guns, it was turned overnight into a charred and sunken wreck. 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,” “a warship of unparalleled power and terror.” The concept was not new. In the early 1840s the brothers Edwin and John Stevens of Hoboken had designed and partially built the giant “Stevens Battery,” an iron warship meant to augment the defense of New York’s harbor against a possible British invasion. They never completed it. The French launched the first ironclad in 1859. But the U.S. Navy had not caught up, and the Merrimac could make everything in the Union fleet obsolete.

The Confederacy was not rich in the sort of ironworks and workers who could pull this off, however. The South had always depended on the industrialized North for such projects. It would be almost a year before the dreadnought was ready to fight. Mary Touvestre, a free black woman working as a domestic for one of the engineers, stole a copy of the plans and sneaked them to Washington. The Union had ample time to come up with a response.

Ericsson was confident he had just the thing. He showed his visitor plans and a cardboard model of a “sub-aquatic system of naval warfare,” 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. The visitor returned to Washington and in a few days was showing the radical design to Lincoln. 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). A panel of naval officers, recalling the navy’s prickly relationship with Ericsson, urged Lincoln to reject the plan. 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.’”

Several sites got to work. In Manhattan, the Delamater and Novelty ironworks 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. In mid-February the Monitor—so named because Ericsson said it would “monitor” any attempts by the Confederates or their allies to break the Anaconda blockade—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, but 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 Times correspondent would report, 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 had only two guns to the Merrimac’s twelve, and looked tiny going up against the massive foe—Confederate sailors jeered that she looked like a cheesebox on a raft—but she was more maneuverable, and Worden sailed rings around the behemoth, their shells clanging off each other’s sides. Worden was the only casualty in the battle, blinded by a bursting shell. 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. All New York cheered Ericsson and his invention. Tony Pastor debuted a new song, “The Monitor and the Merrimac.” Since the start of the war he’d specialized in songs on ripped-from-the-headlines topics like “The Irish Volunteers” (“Long life to Colonel Meagher, he is a man of birth and fame / And, while our Union does exist, applauded be his name!”). The chorus of “The Monitor and the Merrimac” 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.

Worden wasn’t the only one who still felt a healthy fear of the Rebel beast. Rumors flew around the North that “the marine monster” was steaming toward Washington to “smash Congress as badly as it did the vessel of that name at Hampton Roads.” After that, it was feared, she would do the same to New York. In fact she was undergoing repairs in Gosport, but New York and Washington trembled anyway. In Washington, to Secretary Welles’s great indignation, Stanton convinced Lincoln that Welles’s navy could not stop the monster. With the president’s permission, he called on another New Yorker for help.

Thus a week after the Monitor and Merrimac clashed, Cornelius Vanderbilt answered Stanton’s urgent request to come to the White House and consult with him and the president. Welles fumed. He considered Stanton a hopeless ninny, and had already had flinty relations with Vanderbilt as well.

At sixty-seven, Vanderbilt had come a very long way from his humble origins among the Knickerbocker farmers of Staten Island. He’d started out as a teenager with a small sailboat ferrying passengers between there and Manhattan for a shilling each way. In the 1820s he’d jumped into the free-for-all among competitors for control of Hudson River steamboat traffic. Now the commodore was the multimillionaire master of a steamship empire linking the Atlantic and Pacific, and expanding into railroads as well. Along with oceanic passengers, his ships had hauled cotton from the South to the mills of the Northeast, taken many of the miners to the California gold rush, and carried tens of millions of dollars in gold bullion back to the Wall Street banks. The commodore was an imposing presence, tall, stony-jawed, strong, and fearless. He was also irrepressibly virile—he wore his wife out siring more than a dozen children with her, and always had pretty young women on the side. He was just as driven by a lust for competing and dominating in business. In an 1859 critique that compared him to the highwaymen of old, the Times said he displayed a “sordid audacity” for winning at any cost. He was one of the first of a new breed of monopolists, tycoons, and robber barons who would radically alter American business and high finance after the war.

But fiercely focused on his own empire as he was, Vanderbilt was still a patriot. When Sumter fell he’d written to Welles, offering the navy the use of his flagship, modestly named the Vanderbilt. When he launched it at a Greenpoint shipyard in 1855 it was the largest, fastest steamship in the world. With two giant paddlewheels, two colossal engines, and five decks of opulent cabins, it made travel to Liverpool luxurious and quick, slashing the time to nine days. Vanderbilt proposed that Welles arm it and use it to crush the Confederate navy.

The infamously tetchy Welles didn’t even reply to what the Herald called this “princely and munificent” offer. Washington did then lease the Vanderbilt and several other of the commodore’s Atlantic and Pacific Steamship Company vessels for use as transport ships, operating through New York middlemen who drove the price up as they took their cuts. Because of this, and the fact that a couple of the ships were leaky old tubs, Vanderbilt developed a not altogether undeserved reputation as a war profiteer.

Nevertheless, Lincoln and Stanton now eagerly accepted the commodore’s offer to pit the Vanderbilt against the Merrimac. Vanderbilt rushed home and had the huge steamship refitted in Greenpoint with a ramming prow of timbers and iron. Toward the end of March he personally sailed it down to Virginia and up the Potomac to join the Monitor and other Union warships in the blockade. But the Vanderbilt and the Merrimac never clashed in battle. The Merrimac steamed out of Gosport a few times, but kept a respectfully wary distance. That May, when Confederate troops abandoned Portsmouth to protect Richmond against McClellan’s advance, 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, several built on the East River, would prove that the age of the wooden warship was over. The Royal Navy had already canceled all construction of wooden warships just two days after the Hampton Roads battle. The Confederacy, with its limited means, also built a few more ironclads, as well as the H. L. Hunley, the first submarine to sink a warship (the Hunley also sank in the process).

Ericsson, finally vindicated, oversaw constant improvements and additions to ironclads’ designs. After the war he would continue to experiment with his caloric engine, with “hydrostatic javelins” (torpedoes), even with solar power. When he died in 1889 he 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.

Another sea battle that spring pitted a Southerner who had moved to New York against a New Yorker who had defected to the South. David Farragut was born in Tennessee in 1801 and spent most of his life on land in Norfolk. When the war broke out he’d served half a century in the U.S. Navy. Commissioned as a midshipman when he was only nine, he’d been through some of the fiercest sea battles of the War of 1812 before his thirteenth birthday. Over the ensuing decades he’d persevered through the painfully slow process of advancement in the small and antiquated navy. When the firing on Sumter began he was a captain approaching his sixtieth birthday. Confederate leaders wooed him for their new navy, but he and his family slipped out of Norfolk a few days after Fort Sumter fell and made their way to the hamlet of Hastings-on-Hudson just north of New York City, where they’d live for the duration.

He was posted to the Brooklyn Navy Yard while the wary War Department grilled him on his willingness to lead combat missions against the South. (Some Southern officers who’d chosen the Union side had asked for noncombat postings.) After some soul-searching, Farragut answered in the affirmative, and was appointed to lead a daring naval invasion of New Orleans. In April 1862 he led a squadron of seventeen Union warships from the Gulf of Mexico into the mouth of the Mississippi River, running the gauntlet of two river fortresses and a Confederate naval force that included the Manassas, a low-lying 143-foot ironclad designed solely to sink ships with its twenty-foot ram. William Waud, drawing from one of Farragut’s ships, said the Manassas looked like “an enormous turtle” as it scudded through the water toward its prey. Farragut’s fleet sank it in a maelstrom of cannon fire and steamed on to New Orleans.

Confederate general Mansfield Lovell, who was tasked with defending New Orleans, was a West Point graduate and Mexican War vet who settled in New York City in 1854 and went into business as a civil engineer. He commanded the Old Guard of the City of New York, a ceremonial unit that turned out for parades. As a faithful Tammany Democrat, he secured a ripe appointment as deputy street commissioner, serving under another engineer and retired West Point man, Gustavus W. Smith. When the war started, Smith and Lovell, both pro-South conservatives, left the city to go fight for Jefferson Davis. General Smith led Rebel troops against McClellan on the Peninsula, while Lovell was sent to New Orleans.

Lovell commanded a ragtag lot of three thousand volunteers carrying their own muskets and shotguns. Expecting that Farragut’s flotilla would flatten the city with its guns if he tried to mount a defense, he withdrew his force by rail. The entire Confederacy denounced him as a coward and he was relieved of his command. Tony Pastor mocked him in “The New Ballad of Lord Lovell,” a parody of the traditional song:

Sir Farragut came with a mighty fleet,

With a mighty fleet came he,

And Lord Lovell instanter began to retreat

Before the first boat he could see.

Lovell would return to New York City after the war.

When Farragut’s armada steamed up to New Orleans’ undefended wharves, the city was in a wild panic. Mobs looted warehouses and stores and had set so many fires that the city lay under dense clouds of black smoke. An enraged crowd at the waterfront shouted and jeered at Farragut’s ships, but the city managed little more in the way of resistance. Farragut continued up the river, leaving the occupation of New Orleans to General Benjamin Butler. Butler was a political officer. A Massachusetts Democrat who had cast his ballot fifty-seven times for Jefferson Davis at the fractious 1860 convention, he became one of the harshest of War Democrats with the firing on Sumter. Like Stanton, he would switch to the Republican Party and become one of the Radicals. He made himself hated in New Orleans right away by hanging a man who had tried to haul down one of the American flags that had replaced the stars and bars on flagpoles all over the fallen city. He ordered the arrest of local women who insulted Union officers in public. Butler had already angered Southerners a year earlier, when slaves from nearby plantations escaped to his camp in Virginia and he refused to return them, declaring them “contraband of war.” Lincoln soon signed a law authorizing confiscation of Rebel property, implicitly including slaves. “Contrabands” became the common term for the many thousands of slaves who ran away to Union-held territory during the war. Butler earned a death sentence from Jefferson Davis, and the nickname “Beast.” He looked the part, a squat, bandy-legged troll with a large pumpkin of a head. Later in the war he’d bring what he learned about urban pacification in New Orleans to the unruly streets of New York City.