Each ship passed through occasional moments of danger, but the long three hours’ encounter ended without other serious damage than an injury to Lieutenant Worden by the explosion of a rebel shell against a crevice of the Monitor’s pilot-house through which he was looking, which, temporarily blinding his eye-sight, disabled him from command.  At that point the battle ended by mutual consent.  The Monitor, unharmed except by a few unimportant dents in her plating, ran into shoal water to permit surgical attendance to her wounded officer.  On her part, the Merrimac, abandoning any further molestation of the other ships, steamed away at noon to her retreat in Elizabeth River.  The forty-one rounds fired from the Monitor’s guns had so far weakened the Merrimac’s armor that, added to the injuries of the previous day, it was of the highest prudence to avoid further conflict.  A tragic fate soon ended the careers of both vessels.  Owing to other military events, the Merrimac was abandoned, burned, and blown up by her officers about two months later; and in the following December, the Monitor foundered in a gale off Cape Hatteras.  But the types of these pioneer ironclads, which had demonstrated such unprecedented fighting qualities, were continued.  Before the end of the war the Union navy had more than twenty monitors in service; and the structure of the Merrimac was in a number of instances repeated by the Confederates.

The most brilliant of all the exploits of the navy during the year 1862 were those carried on under the command of Flag-Officer David G. Farragut, who, though a born Southerner and residing in Virginia when the rebellion broke out, remained loyal to the government and true to the flag he had served for forty-eight years.  Various preparations had been made and various plans discussed for an effective attempt against some prominent point on the Gulf coast.  Very naturally, all examinations of the subject inevitably pointed to the opening of the Mississippi as the dominant problem to be solved; and on January 9, Farragut was appointed to the command of the western Gulf blockading squadron, and eleven days thereafter received his confidential instructions to attempt the capture of the city of New Orleans.

Thus far in the war, Farragut had been assigned to no prominent service, but the patience with which he had awaited his opportunity was now more than compensated by the energy and thoroughness with which he superintended the organization of his fleet.  By the middle of April he was in the lower Mississippi with seventeen men-of-war and one hundred and seventy-seven guns.  With him were Commander David D. Porter, in charge of a mortar flotilla of nineteen schooners and six armed steamships, and General Benjamin F. Butler, at the head of an army contingent of six thousand men, soon to be followed by considerable reinforcements.