“The Clangor of That Blacksmith’s Fray”: Technology, War, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor DAVID A. MINDELL Needless to dwell; the story’s known. The ringing of those plates on plates Still ringeth round the world— The clangor of that blacksmith’s fray. The anvil-din Resounds this message from the fates: War shall yet be, and to the end; But war-paint shows the streaks of weather; War yet shall be, but warriors Are now but operatives; War’s made Less grand than Peace, And a singe runs through lace and feather. [Herman Melville, “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight” (1862)] On March 9, 1862, at Hampton Roads, Virginia, two novel and strange warships, the Monitor and the Virginia, squared off in the “first fight between ironclads.” Contemporary observers hailed the event as a revolution in technology, marking the end of wooden na vies and the rise of superior steam-powered, armored fleets. For Americans, this technological change had a political dimension as well, for the older era of wooden warships meant European (i.e., British) dominance of sea power. The new age of naval weapons would belong to the United States, with its technical innovation and industrial strength, and so too would the international power and prestige that accompanies naval mastery. The two ships that fought at Hampton Roads, however, had little Mr. Mindell is a doctoral candidate in history of technology in the Science, Technol ogy, and Society Program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He gratefully acknowledges the help of Professors Merritt Roe Smith, Deborah Fitzgerald, Leo Marx, and Sherry Turkle in writing this article.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3602-0004$01.00 242 Technology, War, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor 243 in common besides steam and iron plate. The Southern Virginia was a steam frigate whose standard wooden structure was literally clad with iron. The Northern Monitor, in contrast, represented a more radical innovation; though called an “ironclad,” it was designed from the first as an iron ship and incorporated numerous new mechanisms. More than its opponent, the Monitor thus elicited broad and complex reactions to the changes it seemed to foreshadow, both for the future of technological warfare and for the human encounter with technol ogy. Unfortunately, celebration of the glorious new technology has obscured much of the subtlety and insight of these reactions. Seeking to incorporate diverse perspectives into a wider understanding of the Monitor’s significance, this article reexamines the ironclad’s history along a new axis, that of technology and culture. It examines the public accounts of popular culture, the symbolic and speculative work of literary writers, as well as the personal experiences of those living, working, and fighting with the new technology. These sources con nect at every point to technical, political, and strategic views of the Monitor, but they also convey compelling and ambivalent personal reactions to the strange new ship. A history of the Monitor and its epic battle emerges that accounts for changing relationships between people and machinery, especially in warfare. Hampton Roads drew such an energetic and lasting public re sponse that the battle became a familiar icon of popular culture. The Monitor symbolized American technology, and success in military technology meant strength in commercial technology as well. A typi cal promotion proclaimed: “The fight settled the fate of the ‘Wooden Walls’ of the World and taught all nations that the War Ship of the future must be—like the McCormick Harvester—a Machine of Steel” (fig. 1). Official sources, expressed in congressional commendations, newspaper reports, and traditional histories, reflected a similar view.1 All touted the revolution in naval warfare, the new American stand ing on the international stage, and the maturity of industrial technol ogy. Even today, the battle between the Monitor and the Virginia forms the most mythic and the most technological image of the Civil War. But, for Herman Melville, Hampton Roads conveyed another mes sage. Both broader in its implications and more personal in its effects, 'Gideon Welles, letter to John Worden, March 15, 1862, in Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War...