By Jason W. Smith My country, ‘tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty Of thee I sing The words floated in the air, its melody carried by a school band over the newly-christened Monitor Square on the morning of May 30, 1906—Memorial Day. Land where my fathers died, Land of the pilgrims' pride, From every mountain side Let Freedom ring. The assembled crowd must have found those words telling as they recalled Cornelius Scranton Bushnell, a New Haven shipbuilder and—apropos of this occasion—financier of the revolutionary ironclad warship USS Monitor . The ship, designed by Swedish inventor John Ericsson with a rotating turret atop an iron-plated hull, met the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia on March 9, 1863 at Hampton Roads, Virginia. Though the battle was a draw, the Monitor had protected the Union blockade. If not for the Monitor , the Morning Journal and Courier observed in 1901, “ there is a question whether our arms might have been successful in achieving the en...