Hello everyone.
I’m curious about the USS Monitor and its historical significance during the Civil War.
What were the primary innovations that made this ironclad ship stand out from traditional wooden ships of the time?
I know it played a crucial role in the Battle of Hampton Roads against the CSS Virginia, but I'm interested in the technological advancements it introduced, such as its revolving turret and armor plating.
Additionally, how did the Monitor influence naval warfare in the years that followed?
Any insights or resources would be greatly appreciated
Probably a revolving turret is the most long lasting innovation, but the method of construction that the Monitor used for its turret wasn't really repeated by anyone else, to my knowledge. The Monitor had all the weight of the turret attached to a central iron pillar that could be jacked up and rotated, whereas pretty much all turrets that came after it, on all ships, had some sort of turn table on rollers underneath their circumference. I
think they used this method because the ships were optimized for fighting in the shallows of the American coast. The Monitor (and pretty much all of her successors) had a very shallow draft so it could get into very shallow waters. This meant it couldn't have that sort of large assemblage of rollers that the turret would rest on that other ships would employ, since there was simply too little space in the hull to build that kind of structure, have enough space for all the other essential requirements of the ship (engine spaces, stores, crew accommodations, which were extremely spartan to start with),
AND maintain the low hull profile which made her so hard to hit, which was basically the primary virtue of the design in the first place.
As far as armor plating is concerned, Monitor can't lay claim to that innovation. The British and French had built armored floating batteries in the Crimean War most of a decade before Monitor launched, and both those nations had honest-to-god armored warships before Monitor, too. I can't remember at the moment what the armor was like for the early French ironclad warships, but I know the British warships (HMS Warrior, Black Prince, etc.) all had solid armor plates, which was superior to the sort of armor all the US ironclads that fought in the Civil War used. US iron industry just wasn't quite up to rolling solid plates of those thicknesses, so they had to use layers of iron plates bolted together, which offered inferior protection to solid plates of equal thickness. Pretty much as soon as US industry was up to producing solid plates, they abandoned the sort of armor construction the Monitor used.
The Monitor's influence on naval warfare is generally overstated by pop culture (or pop history, anyway), and I think modern scholarship holds this position. You can argue, perhaps persuasively, that the Monitor's all heavy gun armament presaged the sort of firepower optimization that we would later see in the Dreadnought era of battleships, but it's a stretch. The Monitor was designed for a purpose: fighting against forts and whatever naval forces an unprepared South could muster close in to the shallow ports of the American South in the Civil War. As stated above, to maneuver in those shallow waters required a shallow draft. The armor was, obviously, meant to provide protection from enemy fire, but this was supplemented with a design that featured very low freeboard (like, on the order of a foot, if memory serves) which means that even from a "close" range of a few hundred yards, there simply wasn't much ship above the waterline for an enemy to shoot at, except for the turret, which naturally had the thickest armor on the ship. Because the ship was so small, the only way to shoehorn in a useful amount of firepower was to put the heaviest guns available in the turret. And forget about powerful engines. There's no room for those, either. The result was a ship that was basically an armored raft that could maneuver itself at truly unimpressive speeds around calm coast lines and harbors but was a liability under almost any other circumstance. I mean, the Monitor had to be towed from the shipyard it was built in up in New York City down to Virginia before its battle with the Virginia, and it almost sank along the way. And, indeed, it would sink in a storm later on, because small, shallow vessels like that have very poor sea-keeping qualities on the open ocean.
Basically, even though THE Monitor gave its name to an entire category of similar ships called "monitors" because they were specialized shore bombardment vessels, it was not that influential, as every navy in the world that had any pretensions of being even second rate would copy the work the British and French were doing, a progression of ironclad frigates into central battery frigates that were more identifiable as classic warships, somewhat slower because all the extra weight of armor taxed the engines, but also at least somewhat capable of blue water operation. This era of naval development gets messy, fast, and it's getting late. If I remember, I'll post some videos and books tomorrow illustrating my points, but hopefully this word dump is a little useful.
