To sink a ship, we need to build it first.
Now before we move onto the battles themselves, one question remains.
Merrimack or Virginia?
Throughout the years, the ironclad in question was and still is referred to by an assortment of different names. Whether by modern historians, primary accounts from newspapers and witnesses, or even those who directly worked with the ship, there is a large amount of disagreement on what its name actually is. So which is it, the Merrimack, Merrimac, or Virginia? Furthermore, where did any of these names come from in the first place?
The ship, prior to conversion into an ironclad, was named the USS Merrimack on September 23, 1854 after the Merrimack River in New Hampshire.3 Unfortunately, the spelling of the river itself was also under debate, leading to the most commonly used name, Merrimac, a misspelling by all accounts. A majority of newspaper coverage of the USS Merrimack misspelled the name of the ship as the USS Merrimac, which consequently made it the ship’s most well known name.
It wasn’t until February 17, 1862 that the name of the CSS Virginia was given to the USS Merrimack post-reconstruction and conversion into an ironclad.4 Technically, the CSS Virginia is the correct name to use from that day onward. Unfortunately, history doesn’t often follow the ‘correct’ route.
Most who had heard of or worked on the CSS Virginia when it was called the USS Merrimack continued to refer to it as the Merrimac. This included the man who would hold command over the ship on the second day of the Battle of Hampton Roads, when it fought against the USS Monitor.5
Northern newspapers especially had a habit of referring to the ship as the Merrimac alone, possibly to emphasize that the ship used to be one of theirs. Southern newspapers usually switched to using the name CSS Virginia once it had been given, but many of their readers had seen the name Merrimac used for long enough to have difficulty referring to it as something else.
Though some southerners took offense with it being referred to as the Merrimac(k) over the Virginia, their displeasure wasn’t enough to overtake popular consensus.
Either way, both names still refer to the same ship.
- “NH 86347-KN USS Merrimack (1856-1861).” ↩︎
- G. S. Richardson, “MERRIMAC in dry dock, being converted into the ironclad Battery VIRGINIA.” Photo-lithograph. From Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004671787/ (Accessed March 16, 2026) ↩︎
- Kinnaman, “Merrimack, The Biography of a Steam Frigate,” 23. ↩︎
- Quarstein, “The CSS Virginia: Sink Before Surrender,” 97. ↩︎
- Quarstein, “The CSS Virginia: Sink Before Surrender,” 298. ↩︎