The battle did not amount to much: not a single man was killed, and neither the Monitor nor the Merrimack[1] suffered much damage. Yet the world's first encounter between ironclads[2] remains the best known naval battle in American history. Two new books now join the extensive literature on the subject. The first, Richard Snow's beautifully written Iron Dawn, provides a fast-paced account that concentrates on the people—inventors, officers, politicians—involved in creating and commanding the two ships. On the other hand, the much longer "Our Little Monitor", by maritime historian Anna Gibson Holloway (Museum Services Director, SEARCH, Inc.) and American Studies professor Jonathan White (Christopher Newport Univ.), covers the same ground, but features as well lavish photography and illustrations, along with many pages of letters and documents. It also describes the recovery of the Monitor's turret, engine, and other artifacts in the last twenty years, something Snow mentions only in passing.

"Our Little Monitor" virtually ignores the battle of 8 March to focus on the fighting of the following day. That battle itself was anticlimactic, and neither book wrings much drama from it. Even at ranges less than fifty yards, neither the Monitor's two XI-inch Dahlgren shell guns, nor the smaller guns on the Merrimack, could inflict any significant damage on their armored targets. Each ship was handicapped by ammunition problems: the Monitor's guns were fired using 15-pound charges, rather than the usual thirty pounds, due to concerns about the effects of cannon recoiling inside the vessel's 21-foot turret. Full charges might have penetrated the armor of the Merrimack, which came equipped to destroy the Union's wooden ships with explosive shells rather than armor-piercing rounds. Readers may be left with the impression that iron armor was simply too much for the guns of that era. Neither book mentions the June 1863 battle between the CSS Atlanta (with armor similar to the Merrimack's) and a new, better armed monitor, the USS Weehawken. The monitor fired only five shots before the Confederate ship, with a hole in its casemate, surrendered.[3]

Both ships remained near Hampton Roads for many weeks after the battle, but there was never a rematch. In May 1862, the Confederates blew up the Merrimack rather than let it be captured as Union troops advanced into Virginia. On the last day of 1862, the Monitor sank in a storm as it was being moved down the coast to a new station. Though both books describe the tremendous popularity of the Monitor after the battle, they also reveal just how ill-designed it was for anything beyond duels with other ironclads in shallow water. When the ship went up to Washington after the battle, it was overwhelmed with crowds of politicians, VIPs (Nathaniel Hawthorne among them), and ordinary tourists who came on board. But when put back into service and sent into southern rivers to shell forts, it proved a failure, and a hellishly hot ship for its crew.

Snow moves briskly along throughout Iron Dawn, which, except for a seven-page epilogue, ends with the Monitor foundering off Cape Hatteras on New Year's Eve, 1862. "Our Little Monitor", on the other hand, offers a long chapter on the discovery and recovery of the Monitor's wreck. And, too, its many pages of contemporary documents and letters will interest nautical archaeology fans and cultural historians.