Flaunt o sea,
your separate flags of nations!
A pennant universal,
subtly waving all time,
o’er all brave sailors.

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Walt Whitman, 1865

Before construction was even complete on the Union ironclad USS Monitor, the vessel attracted a lot of attention. Many enterprising young men clamored to sign up for service on board it, and in the end the ship, which had originally been dubbed Ericsson Battery, attracted many more volunteers than would be required for its first crew.

On March 6, 1862, Monitor left New York with a crew of 63, seven officers and 56 seamen. The men who served aboard the famous ship would develop a special bond with each other during the nine months they spent together, and they soon came to refer to themselves as ‘Monitor Boys.’ The young sailors were three-year volunteers who wanted to serve their country. They had heard about the Swedish inventor John Ericsson and his ironclad, and in signing up for service aboard Monitor they looked forward to exciting times aboard the Navy’s most modern warship.

Monitor’s crew members came from various backgrounds. Many had been born in northern Europe, particularly Ireland and Scandinavia. This foreign recruitment by the Navy was due to the scarcity of native seamen. More and more inexperienced men, many of them immigrants, had to be commissioned, and at one time during the war foreign-born men constituted one-fourth of enlisted Union sailors. Monitor was especially attractive to the Swedish because of her designer. On March 9, 1862, during the battle at Hampton Roads, the vessel’s crew included three Swedes: Mark T. Sunstrom, third assistant engineer, and Seamen Hans Anderson and Charles Peterson, who were stationed in the gun turret.

Another member of the ironclad’s crew had arrived from Bombay. Tired of being a landlubber, he decided to volunteer for Ericsson’s Monitor ‘about which something had been whispered among the men.’ After having seen her, he provided the following description:

She was a little bit the strangest craft I had ever seen, nothing but a few inches of deck above the water line, her big round tower in the center, and the pilothouse at the end….We had confidence in her though, from the start, for the little ship looked somehow like she meant business, and it didn’t take us long to learn the ropes.

In addition to enlisted crew, top officers often hired black men as private servants. Because they had been Confederate ‘property,’ and therefore were liable to confiscation, they were termed ‘contraband of war.’ Since September 1861 the secretary of the Navy had ruled that escaped slaves could be enlisted, but at ‘no higher rating than ‘boys.” They were treated as second-class sailors, but nonetheless were much appreciated. Most of the black crewmen served as cooks or stewards. On board Monitor was black servant Thomas Carroll, who became very popular. When Acting Asst. Paymaster William Keeler was looking for a manservant to tend to his needs, he wrote, ‘I have spent a portion of two or three days in hunting up a contraband & finally found a good looking young darkey that came to me well recommended.’

Lieutenant John L. Worden, who served as Monitor’s first commanding officer, was wounded during the Hampton Roads battle. (Library of Congress)

Lieutenant John Lorimer Worden was proud of his crew, declaring, ‘A better one no naval commander ever had the honor to command.’ Before sailing, he fully explained the dangers of a sea passage, with the absolute certainty of a battle to follow.

All the accommodations on Monitor lay below the water line on the berth deck. The living quarters were in front of the bulkhead that divided the vessel in two halves, with engine and boiler rooms aft. As a custom from the age of sail, officers almost never associated with sailors, for they considered ‘the men’ as belonging to a lower class. It was an insult to refer to an officer as a’sailor.’ As a result, officers had access to better food, uniforms and quarters than enlisted men. The seven commissioned officers enjoyed private cabins and a handsomely fitted wardroom near the bow. The crew, however, had to hang their hammocks in a common room behind the wardroom with storage lockers on the side.

Life belowdecks enclosed the crew in an artificial environment. Ericsson had tried to make it as bearable as possible and designed the interior with skill. There were no windows on the nicely decorated iron walls, but skylights of thick glass in iron frames above enabled light to enter during the day. Rough seas washed the skylights with water, and during action the crew covered them with iron plates. Monitor included a ventilation system, powered by a ‘donkey’ engine that supplied fresh air through openings in the floor to cabins and boilers. Despite Ericsson’s intricate constructions, one crew member recalled that ‘no ship was ever devised which was so uncomfortable for her crew’ and termed Monitor ‘the worst craft for a man to live aboard that ever floated upon water.’

When Monitor was scheduled to leave Brooklyn, a severe storm prevented its departure. Waiting out the weather, the officer of the watch penned in the log, ‘John Aitkins deserted and took with him the ship’s cat and left for parts unknown.’ The boy probably was frightened by the enclosed atmosphere belowdecks, and never came back with the pet.

The iron ship magnified surrounding temperatures, making it hotter than it was outside during daylight and cooler at night. During the summer months the crew suffered from the heat. Once when a blower belt broke the temperature reportedly rose to 132 degrees on the berth deck. Members of the crew therefore slept on deck as much as possible while the vessel was in the James River, although that was not always possible, due to enemy fire.

Keeler recalled, ‘We lay broiling in our iron box, or cage as it has now become, out of humor with ourselves & the world generally.’ In winter the ocean chilled the air, although steam heaters had been installed in the wardroom. Of course, the crews of the Confederate ironclads also suffered enormously from heat, cold and sickness. Their accommodations were located on the berth deck among the guns, and their ships lacked Ericsson’s ventilation and heating system.

Because waste could not be gotten rid of by gravity, Ericsson designed an intricate ‘rubbish-gun’ for dealing with excrement. On Monitor’s first voyage, Dr. Daniel Logue, the ship’s surgeon, had a vague idea that ‘the guns’ involved the activation of levers for evacuation into the sea. Unfortunately, he omitted an essential part of the procedure and ‘found himself suddenly at the end of a column of water rushing up from the depth of the ocean and pouring into the ship.’ When Dr. Logue was found lying in a big pool of water, engineer Isaac Newton had to be called to close the lower port of the tube. After that event, he lectured the crew on how to properly operate the ‘gun.’

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