Background
He was the son of Ananias and Harriet (Graham) Worden and the great-grandson of Surgeon Andrew Graham, who was on the Connecticut Committee of Public Safety in the Revolution.
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John Lorimer Worden
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During and after the Mexican War he served in the storeship Southampton and other vessels on the west coast.
Duty at the Naval Observatory (1850 - 52) and cruises in the Mediterranean and Home Squadrons occupied most of the next decade.
Stationed in Washington just before the Civil War, he was sent south, on Apr. 7, 1861, with secret orders to the squadron at Pensacola for the reinforcement of Fort Pickens.
After delivering his message he was arrested on his return journey near Montgomery, Ala. , and held prisoner until his exchange seven months later.
After supervising her completion he commanded her on her rough passage down the coast.
Worden later declared that the difficulties then overcome were as great as those of the subsequent battle (see Schley, post, p. 106).
Reaching Hampton Roads about 9 p. m. Mar. 8, all hands spent a disturbed night in preparation for meeting the Merrimac next day.
After three hours of fighting he was wounded in the face and nearly blinded by a shell exploding just oustide.
The command was taken over by his first officer, Samuel D. Greene [q. v. ], but when the Monitor returned after temporary withdrawal the Merrimac had also withdrawn.
From October 1862 to April 1863 he commanded the monitor Montauk in the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, engaging on Jan. 27 in a four-hour action with Fort McAllister which served chiefly as a favorable test of the monitor type, and a month later destroying, by five well-placed shots, the Confederate cruiser Nashville under the guns of this fort.
His vessel was struck fourteen times on Apr. 7 in the general monitor attack on Charleston.
Detached shortly afterwards, he was subsequently engaged in ironclad construction work at New York till after the close of the war.
From 1875 to 1877 he commanded the European Squadron, which visited many ports of northern Europe and was in the eastern Mediterranean during the Russo-Turkish War.
His home continued to be in Washington, D. C. , where he died of pneumonia.
His funeral was at St. John's Episcopal Church, Washington, and his interment at Pawling, N. Y.
[Two letter-books (Personnel Files) and official reports (Captains' Letters), Navy Dept. Library; J. T. Headley, Farragut and Our Naval Commanders (1867); War of the Rebellion: Official Records (Navy), see index volume; L. H. Cornish, Nat.
Reg.
of the Soc.
of the Sons of the Am.
Revolution (1902); W. S. Schley, Forty-Five Years under the Flag (1904); Army and Navy Jour. , Oct. 23, 1897; Washington Post, Oct. 19, 1897. ]
Politics
In 1840-42 he was in the Pacific Squadron, and in 1844-46 at the Naval Observatory.
Connections
The devotion of his ship's company is demonstrated in the exclamation, "How I love and venerate that man, " used by his young lieutenant, Greene, in a letter to the latter's mother (Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, November 1923, p. 1845).
