About midnight, the little vessel crept up beside the Minnesota and anchored.  Her crew were completely exhausted.  For fifty hours, they had fought to keep their ship afloat, and on the morrow they must be prepared to meet a formidable foe.  All that night they worked with their vessel, making such repairs as they could.  At eight o’clock next morning, the Merrimac appeared, and the Monitor started to meet her.

Amazed at sight of what appeared to be an iron turret sliding over the water toward him, the commander of the Merrimac swung toward this tiny antagonist, intending to destroy her before proceeding to the work in hand.  Captain Worden had taken his station in the pilot-house, and reserved his fire until within short range.  Then, slowly circling about his unwieldy foe, he fired shot after shot, which, while they did not disable her, prevented her from destroying the Union ships in the harbor.  Finding the Monitor apparently invulnerable, and with her machinery giving trouble, the Merrimac at last withdrew to Norfolk.

That the battle was a victory for the Monitor cannot be questioned; she had prevented the destruction of the Union ships, and this she continued to do, until, in the following May, the Confederates, finding themselves compelled to abandon Norfolk, set the Merrimac on fire and blew her up.  Six months later, the Monitor met a tragic fate, foundering in a storm off Cape Hatteras, a portion of her crew going down with her.

Honors were showered upon Worden for his gallant work.  He was given command of the monitor Montauk, and later on destroyed the Confederate privateer Nashville.  After the war, he was promoted to rear-admiral, and remained in the service until 1886.

There were others in the war whose deeds brought glory to themselves and to the navy—­Lieutenant William B. Cushing, who destroyed the Confederate ram Albemarle in Plymouth harbor, a deed comparable with the burning of the Philadelphia early in the century; David Dixon Porter, whose work on the Mississippi was second only to Farragut’s, who four times received the thanks of Congress, and who, in the end, became admiral of the navy; Charles Stuart Boggs, who, in the sloop-of-war Varuna, sank five Confederate vessels in the river below New Orleans, before he was himself sunk—­but none of them, and, indeed, none of those whose exploits we have given, measured up to the stature of Farragut, one of the greatest commanders of all time, and, all things considered, the very greatest in the history of America.

* * * * *

Thirty years and more passed after that epoch-making contest between the Monitor and the Merrimac before the world witnessed another battle to the death between ironclads.  Theoretically, wood had long since been displaced by iron, iron by steel, and steel by specially-forged armor-plate, battleship designers struggling always to build a vessel which could withstand modern projectiles.  But as to the actual results in warfare, there was nothing but theory to go upon until that first day of May, 1898, when George Dewey steamed into the harbor of Manila, at the head of his squadron, and opened fire upon the Spanish fleet.