Ancient Web: NOVA Monitor Read a Civil War Ironclad Battle Through Letters

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A Union ironclad could carry enormous naval guns and revolutionary armor. It also carried a man who desperately wanted his wife to know he was alive.

Read NOVA's Eyewitness to the Battle.

The page is part of PBS NOVA's old Lincoln's Secret Weapon companion website. It presents excerpts from letters written by William F. Keeler, acting paymaster aboard USS Monitor, to his wife Anna around the ship's battle with the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862.

In the short note written after the engagement, Keeler says that the two vessels were at times so close they touched. He tells his family that the Monitor drove the enemy off, describes damage to the Union captain, and apologizes for the dirt and powder smoke staining his writing.

The longer account begins before the battle. Keeler remembers glimpsing gunfire in the darkness, anxious waiting, the grounded USS Minnesota, and the confusion of a damaged fleet preparing for another attack.

A web edition with an unusually useful source note

The companion explanation identifies the excerpts' actual documentary source: Aboard the USS Monitor: 1862, edited by Robert W. Daly and published by the United States Naval Institute in 1964. The editors retained Keeler's period spelling and sometimes tangled syntax rather than smoothing away his voice.

That matters when a nineteenth-century sailor uses Merrimac for the Confederate ironclad officially renamed Virginia. The webpage provides the editorial distinction instead of quietly correcting his words.

The second page shifts the camera, as it were, inside the armored ship. Keeler describes men waiting in dim light, unable to see the approaching opponent, with little certainty that their unfamiliar ironclad would withstand a direct hit.

PBS surrounded this primary-source feature with navigation to a tour of the Monitor, a steam-engine explanation, production notes, and classroom resources. It is a good illustration of how early educational websites turned a television documentary into a browsable archive.

The surviving pages show an updated May 2003 notice. They are not themselves Civil War documents, but an editorial presentation of nineteenth-century letters, with the source and limits acknowledged.

Read Keeler's account and the editors' source explanation.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.