About 12 o'clock that night, after two days of terrible buffeting on the voyage down the coast, the little _Monitor_ anchored on the scene lighted up by the burning wreck of the _Congress_. The first battle of ironclads began next morning at 8:30 and continued with slight intermission till noon. It ended in a triumph, not for either ship, but for armor over guns. The _Monitor_ fired 41 solid shot, 20 of which struck home, but merely cracked some of the _Merrimac's_ outer plates. The _Monitor_ was hit 22 times by enemy shells. Neither craft was seriously harmed and not a man was killed on either side, though several were stunned or otherwise injured. Lieut. Worden, in command of the _Monitor_, was nearly blinded by a shell that smashed in the pilot house, a square iron structure then located not above the turret but on the forward deck.
The drawn battle was hailed as a Northern victory. Imagination had been drawing dire pictures of what the _Merrimac_ might do. At a Cabinet meeting in Washington Sunday morning, March 9, Secretary of War Stanton declared: "The _Merrimac_ will change the course of the war; she will destroy _seriatim_ every naval vessel; she will lay all the cities on the seaboard under contribution. I have no doubt that the enemy is at this minute on the way to Washington, and that we shall have a shell from one of her guns in the White House before we leave this room." The menace was somewhat exaggerated. With her submerged decks, feeble engines, and general awkwardness, the _Merrimac_ could scarcely navigate in Hampton Roads. In the first day's fighting her beak was wrenched off and a leak started, two guns were put out of action, and her funnel and all other top-hamper were riddled. As was shown by Farragut in Mobile Bay, and again by Tegetthoff at Lissa, even wooden vessels, if in superior numbers, might do something against an ironclad in an aggressive mêlée.
Both the antagonists at Hampton Roads ended their careers before the close of 1862; the _Merrimac_ was burned by her crew at the evacuation of Norfolk, and the _Monitor_ was sunk under tow in a gale off Hatteras. But turret ships, monitors, and armored gunboats soon multiplied in the Union navy and did effective service against the defenses of Southern harbors and rivers. Under Farragut's energetic leadership, vessels both armored and unarmored passed with relatively slight injury the forts below New Orleans, at Vicksburg, and at the entrance to Mobile Bay. Even granting that the shore artillery was out of date and not very expertly served, it is well to realize that similar conditions may conceivably recur, and that the superiority of forts over ships is qualified by conditions of equipment and personnel.