A Year on a Monitor and the Destruction of Fort Sumter

great reading,well writen,you think you are onboard,you see & feel what went on in play,work & war.of all the book's i have read on the civil war this hit the spot.

Hunter, barely past the age of 16, enlisted in the Federal Navy in November 1862 as a "ship's boy." He was never a regular seaman, but more or less a steward, or waiter in the officers' wardroom. He had great curiosity about everything he encountered in the new world of the Navy, and somehow found astonishing freedom to explore it as he liked. His book is based upon a rather sketchy diary he kept at the time, and greatly expanded with (one hopes) a good memory for details. Hunter later became a schoolteacher, and his writing is entirely readable. His vessel was the monitor "Nahant," one of a class of Federal ironclads similar in design to the original "Monitor," but larger. And every bit as slow, cranky and unseaworthy. Hunter writes often of the bad air and cramped conditions belowdecks, giving a personal closeup view of the Civil War Navy that's available in few if any other books. His monitor saw action in several significant naval assaults by the Union's South Atlantic Squadron. It took part in the failed Federal attack on Sumter in April 1863. The "Nahant" also participated in the capture of the Confederate Ram "Atlanta," and in the famous and deadly Union assault on Fort Wagner, like Sumter a part of the defenses of Charleston. Hunter's story is basically a memoir, written 60 years after the events, a likeable old veteran's gift to his grandchildren. This is a superb book, one that deserves top rating except for the qualification (for historians) that such a large part of the text was necessarily written from an old timer's memory. All the same, both scholars and we enthusiasts are lucky to have it. Great reading.