Harold Holzer "THE OTHER DAY, there came ... to see the President ... a massive, vigorous, fine-looking man" to "show to the President, a model of a strange, altogether new sea-going war monster, devised by another man named Ericsson." So observed Abraham Lincoln's White House secretary, William 0. Stoddard, on a momentous winter day in Washington in late 1861. Stoddard understood at once the importance of the visit-and of the "strange" vessel the visitor brought with him. And so did Lincoln.

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... set by unexpectedly strong Confederate military strength, frantically worried over reports of new and dangerous technological advancements in the South, the president desperately needed to shore up Union forces, on sea as well as on land. As Stoddard remembered: "Mr. Lincoln made a careful study of what was said to resemble a cheese-box on a raft, and he ordered a board of naval offices to get together and examine it .... There were adverse opinions from several other old salts, but Mr. Lincoln said he was like the fat girl when she put on her stockings-she thought there was something in it." 1 With that quintessentially Lincolnesque conclusion, work began on the USS Monitor, the ship that would change the course of the Civil War. Nearly a century and a halflater, on March 5, 2003-to commemorate the 141st anniversary of the battle that the ironclad went on to