and it's an advertisement from general electric depicting the air war over europe, which was a pretty brutal and in some ways very monitor-like experience for the crews aboard the b-17s. and you can see the introduction of electronics and electronic technology, the idea is without it everybody's flying all around and it's a big mess and there are these messy people in there. add the electronics and everything's clean and the sun is shining and you have this bright new horizon. very much the idea that john ericsson had about what he called his new system of naval attack. very much the reaction that i'll come to when you i close that nathaniel hawthorne had about the battle. and here you see it again in its new form in world war ii. and of course in the last ten years the original book, i talked a little bit about unmanned aircraft now in development. but they've of course been used a great deal in the last ten years, particularly really the last 15. this particular one, predator,

and then the armed version, which is called reaper. and all the different technologies about it. you see this all the time on the news, and i've had students now do dissertations about it, about what does it mean that these people are fighting in afghanistan and killing our enemies from air-conditioned, darkened trailers in las vegas? and how do they feel about it? and what do they say about it? and what is their reaction to it? one of my students who just finished his dissertation last summer was an air force fighter pilot, and he went in and did an anthropological study of these remote systems. and none of them actually said what samuel dana green said, but they said very many things that are very, very similar to that. and a few summers ago the air force held a symposium which i was invited to give the keynote for, called the future operator. who are we going to be, they asked themselves. because pilots are no longer the social -- who have always been the social backbone of the air

force have suddenly -- they're changing into something and we don't know how our entire social structure will be organized. and this was about 30 350 -- basically mid-career lieutenants and above. many of them fighter pilots, bomber pilots. spent three days debating exactly this issue that had been raised in the 1860s surrounding the with the monitor." and i opened with that talk. so i'll close then with nathaniel hawthorne's really prophetic response. he actually did visit the "monitor." he came down. his college roommate. hawthorne had two college roommates. one of them was franklin pierce, who became president of the united states. and the other guy was someone named horatio bridge, which with a name like that you have to go into the navy, right? and he was the head paymaster of the navy. so he was keeler's boss.

and hawthorne had a rough time just personally during the war, and a friend said why don't you go down and visit the battlefields? that'll make you feel better. and he went to find his friend bridge in washington. the two of them came and visited the "monitor" soon after the battle. and actually, interestingly, neither hawthorne nor keeler mentions the other, but they had so many similar reactions to the ship that i feel like they had a conversation. and this was one of keeler's reactions. "there must come up a race of enginemen and smoke-blackened cannoneers." so a whole different kind of person emerges from this whole idea of an ironclad warship, fighting inside a machine. "who will hammer at their enemies under the direction of a single pair of eyes. and even heroism so deadly a grip is science laying on our noble possibilities will become a quality of very minor importance when its possessor cannot break through the iron crust and give the world a glimpse of it."

and he had other great sayings like "how can an admiral condescend to go to sea nan iron pot?" issues that are very much still with us. i think it's one of the reasons that the "monitor" still appeals quite in the way it does. interestingly enough, if this is not quite the accurate picture, but behind -- this is the picture that people actually operate these remote vehicles in afghanistan. and it occurred to me yesterday as we were flying in, there are vast gymnasium-size rooms of people who just stare at the screens of the data that this comes in to and observe what's happening in villages on the other side of the earth. and one of those, the major one, is actually about three miles from here at langley air force base. another three miles to hampton road. so it's particularly fight fitting in a way that this issue is something we're dusting here in this particular place. i'll just leave it at that, say a little bit about for any of those in the room, my nephew sam

is here, who's having a great time, and just getting interested in history. one of the things that's so satisfying about it is that it doesn't change. it hasn't all been figured out before. and the "monitor" as we know it is constantly changing and evolving, very much thanks to the efforts of a lot of the people here at the museum and at the marine sanctuary. and again, maybe all graduate students feel this way but 20 years ago i certainly felt like i was the only person in the world interested in the "monitor" and the "merrimack." it felt like such an old story. and now a lot of people have become interested in it and the wreck sort of continues to evolve. so it's great to be here. and thanks for your attention. >> happy to take questions.

>> you mentioned that john ericsson's design was to avoid consideration. i wonder what you think it might have been if he this incorporated some ergonomics or some concern for the human. >> okay. well, that's a good question. i mean, we probably shouldn't say it was entirely devoid. because he did appoint the ward rooms very nicely and he had this notion that the officers would be so comfortable beneath the waves. i guess there were two points that i think he really missed. one was the details of the construction. he was right that his design was quite radical. but that design could really only hold together if it was -- and we saw a quote from the contract in the previous talk. "perfectly engineered" or "perfectly constructed." and any new technology has a lot of bugs. he was not that interested in working through those bugs. the major change he made with the second class of monitors was to put pilot house on top of the turret. but there were a lot of other changes about ventilation and

habitability and so, you know, the blowers -- the belts on the blowers were a single-point failure. if the blowers failed, the crew died. and they did fail from time to time. and the crew almost died. the "monitor" was hopelessly vulnerable to boarding. and the crew were terrified about that eventuality. all the crew of the "virginia" would have to do would be to jump on board and stuff up the ventilator holes and the story would have been over. so there were a lot of things that could have been prevented that way. gustavus fox and gideon wells and many others constantly pleaded with ericsson to pay more attention to the question of habitability. and jeffers basically said, we had to pull off -- we had to end the battle at drury's bluff because half the crew were prostrate with heat exhaustion. same thing happened in the attacks on charleston harbor with the later "monitors." so improving the ventilation, improving the reliability of the ventilation, those were big

ones. paying a little more attenti attention -- again, we saw this in the earlier talk -- to the visibility that the captain would have had and that the crew would have had. communications internally aboard the ship. there were any number of things. not rocket science in a certain way. not maybe the kind of geometric genius that he conceived of. but he is remarkable in his correspondence for how unwilling he is to acknowledge. and he says, you know -- he basically derides them and says, you know, the days of comfortable sailing ships are gone, get with the program, we're in a new world. and you know, these very professional active naval officers say i can't fight if my crew is sick, you know. and that comes up again and again. yeah. >> in the years after the battle prior to his suicide did warden ever come out speaking in defense of green? >> yeah, that's actually a really good question. he did. in the 1870s he finally wrote -- and warden actually never wrote

a formal report about the battle. nor did he make public statements about green or anything. and this upset green a great deal. and in the 1870s warden did write a letter where he said it's come to my attention that people are questioning green's heroism and basically he said i have to say he served heroically the whole time. because green said, "i didn't pursue the "merrimack," and i laid back to defend the "minnesota" because warden told me to do that when he was injured. what else could i -- he was 21 years old. and then people criticized him for that. again, you have to remember the crew were convinced they were going to go out the next day and have a rematch. and the next day and the next day. and all right up until the "virginia's" destruction the crew is convinced they're going to fight it again. so the fact it was left as a draw didn't seem at the time to be a problem. when they find out that the virginia has been blown up in norfolk, they're not excited. they're terribly disappointed

because they're dying for the chance to go out and prove themselves, that they really could beat it. and now they realize, literally this is a quote, "that day will never come." warden did defend green, but it may have been too little too late. and then a few years later -- and ericsson, there's a whole little episode where in about 1875 gideon wells begins to raise some questions. and catesby jones from the "virginia" has a few questions. so gideon wells writes to ericsson and says what do you think of all this? i'm just trying to collect some data. and ericsson is literally -- you can't read his handwriting, he's so angry. and he says, we closed all these issues ten years ago, why are you talking about this? we all know -- and then he says, that the miserable lieutenant failed to win the battle because he was a coward and didn't

pursue the "virginia." so. >> green never got it. >> he was commander of the "monitor" for a day or two. keeler served with him on the florida the rest of the war and they became good friends. but that wouldn't have been unusual i think for someone at that stage, because when the war ended there wasn't a lot of opportunity. i don't remember what he did careerwise after that. he was a naval academy graduate, which was rare at the time. yes. my friend sam. >> did ericsson picture in his head the bottom of the ship which was underwater, or did he just imagine the part that was on top? >> very good question. he designed it to be what he called a submarine battery.

so the whole conception of the ship was that most of it would be underwater, which allowed the most destructive ways to just sort of flow over the deck and not damage the ship. also, because the turret was there, there wasn't much to shoot at if you were the enemy. so most of the crew he felt were well protected below the water line. nothing about that is necessarily a bad idea. but again, it depends on, you know, the seals between the two decks. there were -- if you look at this classic cross-section of the ship, it's really two hulls. there's this upper hull which is described as a raft which is wood clad by iron and this lower iron hull which hangs underneath it. and this was really one of the great weak points of this particular "monitor." and probably what happened when it sank was either on the beam or forward that split and let in

an awful lot of water. that joint and that union just required a lot, a lot of thought and a lot of great deal of precision. in the later "monitors" it was a smoother transition and didn't have that sharp corner. but so it's possible to build a submarine. there's nothing inherently wrong with that idea. but it depended on the details of the construction. and ericsson wasn't that interested in managing that part. he just felt that if they didn't do it absolutely right they're not following my directions. but it was so novel and it was so hurried that it was difficult to get all that really right. good question. >> you have talked a lot about the ship itself. but how about some of the systems inside the ship that would have advanced our

technological understanding from the 1860s? >> good question. there were a lot of very state-of-the-art systems from the toilets to the anchors to the, as we just heard, the pumps. and again, ericsson really imagined this mechanical environment. it was a kind of fully automated -- it's again -- to the modern mind it's not that foreign. when you think about -- i mean, every time you go into a subway or into an airplane, you're living in that kind of environment. it was quite radical for the time. and you know, there's a myth that people say oh, there were 15 -- there were 50 patentable inventions on the ship. nobody actually went through and counted them. but isaac newton once came on board and said, wow, there must be 50 patentable inventions here. and that number has always kind of come down as the classic number. but there were a lot of very interesting modern pieces.

some of them worked better than others. and again, it's possible that the rudder -- sorry, the anchor compartment, the hass hole in the rudder may have been one of the things that contributed to the flooding and the sinking. and we just heard also there was a new pump installed in the yard period. so there were a lot of new con triechbss, contrivances as they called it at the time. although the question of the speaking tube came earlier. every crew member's account said there was a speaking tube between the pilot house and turret but it was out of commission during the battle. nobody's really clear on what that actually means and how a speak tube can be out of commission. but again, the communications part, the internal part for how the crew was going to learn what was new, and to expect the crew to fight the ship without any training. they had no training on the ship the first day.

the exigencies of war forced them there. but you would have thought they'd have thought that through a little bit more. time for more or are we getting pulled off? okay. great. thanks so much. [ applause ] tomorrow afternoon, republican presidential candidates mitt romney and newt gingrich will address the national rifle association's annual meeting, held in st. louis. we'll also hear remarks from former candidates rick santorum and rick perry as well as house majority leader eric cantor. you can see the event live tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. you can also watch online at cspan.org or listen on c-span radio. the pope has a very famous way of being determined and

that's with the camera lingo which is a cardinal-level post. the pope handpicks this person, and this person decides when the pope is dead. he hits him three times in the head with a silver hammer and calls out. he isn't dead till the camera lingo says he's dead. >> saturday night at 10:00 eastern on "after words," dick terese describes the ever changing description of death and the controversial argument that the business of organ harvesting is blurring that line. also this week on book tv former pennsylvania senator arlen specter on the split between old guard members of his former party and those supported by the tea party sunday at 8:00 p.m. book tv, every weekend on c-span 2. all this week it's american history tv in prime time. and we now return to the mariners museum in newport news, virginia where a civil war navy conference was held last month to mark the 150th anniversary of the battle of hampton roads. this was the first time

ironclads faced off during battle. up next, a discussion on some of the ideas and suggestions offered by northerners for fighting the confederate ironclad known as the "merrimac." this is about an hour. if everyone would grab their seats. good morning. my name is jonathan white, and i'm an assistant professor of american studies and a fellow at the center for american studies at christopher newport university, which is right across the road here from the mariners museum. it is a pleasure to welcome you this morning to the mariners museum in newport news. i know tham of you have come a long way to be here today at this wonderful event at this incredible museum. and for our friends who are watching us on c-span, i'd like to say that if you've never been to newport news i'd strongly recommend visiting if for no other reason than to see this incredible maritime museum, the mariners' museum. before we begin i'd like to

thank our response ords aors an partners without whom the conference would not be possible and the weekend events. our sponsors are bank of america, the virginia foundation for the humanities, and southern structural steel. and our partners are the museum of the confederacy, the center for american studies at christopher newport university, the hampton roads naval museum, and noah's monitor national marine sanctuary. now, i'm pleased to introduce our next speaker, david gurlman. david is an assistant editor with the papers of abraham lincoln project and an adjunct professor of history at george mason university where he teaches courses on 19th century u.s. history and military history. he earned his ph.d. in 1999 from southern illinois university at carbondale under the direction of john y. simon. his dissertation was on the care, treatment, and use of civil war cavalry horses. now, i'd like to tell you just a little bit about the work that

david does with the papers of abraham lincoln. david and his fellow editors are doing an incredibly lab-intensive but extraordinarily important job with the papers of abraham lincoln. the editors are traveling the country looking for any letters or documents sent to or by abraham lincoln. and there are many editors working at the national archives every day, 40 hours a week, going through millions of documents. every piece of paper that was generated by the federal government or sent to the federal government from the civil war years that is held at the national archives will be looked at by one of the editors of the papers of abraham lincoln. and they are daily finding new insights about our nation's 16th president. this work is extraordinarily important, and it's shedding new light on someone who we thought we knew a lot about, and we did, but we're learning more every day. and david is a part of that project. that project has been a wonderful boon to historians like myself. and today we're going to get a

little bit of what david has stumbled upon while looking at the miscellaneous letters received by the secretary of the navy during the civil war. so would you please join me in welcoming david gurlman. [ applause ] >> good morning. it's wonderful to be here. thank you, john, for that wonderful welcome. i must confess that as a youngster i very much enjoyed putting together model ships. so being here at the museum i'm positively giddy with excitement that all the models that are here to be viewed. it's true, i am an assistant editor with the papers of abraham lincoln. and as john mentioned, it has given me an extraordinary opportunity to look at documents that i normally would never have seen, and that includes the documents that i'm largely going to be talking about today. you see all sorts of interesting

things in the holdings of the national archives. so i heartily encourage you to go visit and dig through the records for yourself. the letters that i'm going to be talking about today were largely sent either to gideon wells, the secretary of the navy, or president lincoln himself. in the 19th century the president was viewed as sort of your go-to guy for if you have a question, you've got a problem, not getting your pay, you write to the president and hopefully he will respond. well, what happens is he'll forward it or one of his secretaries will forward it to where it needs to go. i also have had a chance to see some of the letters of resignation that are handed in at the start of the civil war by u.s. navy officers including franklin buchanan, who discovers to his chagrin that when maryland does not secede he writes another letter to the

president saying, can you cancel my previous resignation? i've decided to stay. no. that certainly is not permitted. i also have seen a number of what i would say rather pathetic letters of resignation from serving officers saying i know i should stand by the american flag, i know it's my duty to be loyal to the government, but i just can't do it, my family is in nashville, i would be a pariah if i did my duties, so i have to resign. and go south. who are the people that write in? certainly the letters that i'm going to talk about today, they come from all walks of life. bankers, civil engineers, average people, carriage makers, and including a fair number of anonymous. i'm always curious when i see these letters by anonymous, either they really wish to remain completely unknown or

they sort of knew that the ideas that they were suggesting were so ludicrous that they did not want their name to be attached to it. well, certainly the -- oh, i should also say that in all the letters that i looked at the words "css virginia" are never used. it's always the "merrimac." and so call her what you will. she will always be the "merrimac" to me. so if anyone doesn't approve of that, every time i say "merrimac," just mentally insert "virginia." but certainly the race to build an ironclad warship was well under way before the civil war ever began. indeed, the race had begun really by the turn of the 19th century. that is, in 1800. if not before. in fact, one of the first people to propose one of these more modern warships was robert

fulton. fulton actually builds, desig d s and builds the first steam warship for the u.s. navy, which eventually bears his name. he also tried to sell the french an idea for his submarine. he had a submarine called the "nautilus," which he tried to sell to the french and other governments. no one really was buying. it was quite a risky venture. no one thought they would waste money on it. also, clinton roosevelt writes in in 1840, and he sends in this lovely color -- it's almost a painting. it's rather massive series of paper that is taped together of his invulnerable steam battery, which looks sort of merrimacesque if you go by some of the descriptions that she looked like a barn that was floating down the river up to

her eaves. so clinton roosevelt submits this. and again, it really goes nowhere. but the british and french in the 1850s were already building ironclads -- well, not ironclads. we really think of them, iron-plated warships. the french had the glory, and the british had built the "warrior." and thus this first clash of ironclads that happens here in hampton roads is of immense interest not only at home but abroad. in fact, one of the correspondents tells lincoln that england is in a blaze from one end to the other. after news has arrived that these two ships have engaged. and of course, every time you have advances in military technology, you also have people trying to find ways of counteracting that. for each and every action there is a reaction.

and that is what you will see today when i get to the portion talking about all these different inventions and suggestions that people are writing in how to deal with this new weapon of war, the merrimac. whether it be throwing grenades down the smokestack, electronic-triggered mines, underwater grappling hooks, elongated pronged projectiles, or pools of fire, all of these ideas are floated for how to deal with the "merrimac." and of course, people write to lincoln because they feel, again, not only he's the president, the commander in chief, that he can get their invention accepted. that he will work his executive magic and get them a contract with the war department. of course, lincoln had many, many other things to deal with rather than help people get contracts. and indeed, citizens from all

walks of life are flooding the federal government with these different suggestions that they have. as another correspondent put it, the whole yankee world is studying and contriving some method of destroying the "merrimac." and certainly the panic that was felt in washington and especially in the eastern seaboard cities after the events of march 8th, 1862, was almost palpable. gideon wells, although he's certainly no fan of stanton, wells says in his diary and elsewhere, he describes how stanton is panicked, that he's afraid that the "merrimac" is going to sail up the potomac and shell the white house, that it's basically a game changer, that the entire war is going to be changed because of this invention. and indeed, the northern public were very fearful of this exact

thing happening. another correspondent writes to lincoln saying that if the rebels by cunning or superior skill achieve in getting her to sea, the navy department will never be acquitted or forgiven and that the whole current of the war will be changed and no one will predict how it will end. there was even a special committee formed in new york city at stanton's behest of some of the leading engineers. how to go about counteracting the "merrimac." and that the whole wealth and power of the united states would be committed for that purpose. now, oftentimes these citizens that are writing in, they usually fall into two categories in that they either write in very humbly saying i'm terribly sorry to bother you with this idea, which you may not like, but here it is. or they're just the opposite, that