which would be tedious. _The Young Officer's Assistant_ was less a
specific title than a generic description. Several of them were
contemporary; and one, by a Captain Boyd of the British navy, summed
up the convictions of us all, teachers as well as pupils, in the
sententious aphorism: "It is by no means certain that coal whips will
outlive tacks and sheets." It is scarcely kind to resurrect a
prophecy, even when so guarded in expression and safely distant in
prediction as was this; but I fear that for navies tacks and sheets
are dead, and coal whips very much alive. The wish in those days
fathered the thought. Who to dumb forgetfulness a prey could
voluntarily relinquish all that had been so identified with life and
thought, nor cast a longing, lingering look behind? So we plodded on,
acquiring laboriously, yet lovingly, knowledge that would have fitted
us to pass the examinations of Basil Hall and Peter Simple. To mention
the details of cutting and fitting rigging, getting over whole and
half tops, and other operations yet more recondite, would be to
involve the unprofessional reader in a maze of incomprehensible terms,
and the professional--of that period--in familiar recollections. Let
me, however, linger lovingly for ten lines on the knotting--"knotting
and splicing," as the never-divorced terms ran in the days when
rigging a topgallant-yard was a constituent part of our curriculum.
The man who has never viewed the realm of a seaman's knots from the
outside, and tried to get in, must not flatter himself that he fully
appreciates the phrase "knotty problem." I never got in; a few
elementary "bends," a square knot, and a bowline, were very near the
extent of my manual acquirements. The last I still retain, and use
whenever I make up a bundle for the express; but before such
mysteries--to me--as a Turk's-head and a double-wall, I merely bowed
in reverence. When handsomely turned out, I could recognize the fact;
but do them myself, no. I remember with humiliation that in 1862,
being then a young lieutenant, I was called without warning to hear a
section, one hour, in seamanship. As bad luck would have it, the
subject happened to be knotting, and there was one of the midshipmen
who had made a cruise in a merchant-ship. The knots I had to ask
about--to which that diabolical youngster invariably replied, "I can't
describe it, sir, but I will make it for you"--the convolutions
through which the strands went in his ready fingers, and my eyes
vainly strove to follow, are a poignant subject. There was no room for
the time-honored refuge of a puzzled instructor--"We will take up that
subject next recitation;" the confounded boy was ready right along,
and I had only to be thankful that there were "no questions asked."
There was one professional subject, "Naval Fleet Tactics" under sail,
which at the end of my time shone forth with a kind of sunset
splendor, the dying dolphin effect curiously characteristic of
the passing period in which we were. This had always had a
recognition--_d'estime_, as the French say; but in my final year it
fell into the hands of a new instructor, who proceeded to glorify it
by amplification. He was a very accomplished man in his profession, a
student of it in all its branches, though there was among us a certain
understanding that he was not an eminently practical seaman; and he
eventually lost his life in what appeared to me a very unpractical
manner, being where it did not seem his business to be, and doing work
which a junior would probably have done better. We remember William
III. at the battle of the Boyne. "Your majesty, the Bishop of Derry
has been killed at the ford." "What business had he to be at the
ford?" was the unsympathetic answer. The text-book used by our new
instructor was by a French lieutenant, written in the thirties of the
century, and characterized by something of the peculiar French naval
genius. The simpler changes of formation were so simple that
complication could not be got into them; but, that happy stage past,
we went on to evolutions of huge masses of ships in three columns, in
which the changes of dispositions, from one order to another, became
subjects of trigonometrical demonstration, quite as troublesome as
Euclid. Sines, cosines, and tangents, of fractional angles figured
profusely in the processes; and in the result courses to be steered
would be laid down to an eighth of a point, when to keep a single
vessel, let alone a column, steady within half a point[5] was
considered good helmsmanship. There being no translation of the book,
our text was provided by copying, individually, from a manuscript
prepared by our teacher, which increased our labor; but, curiously
enough, the effect of the whole procedure was so to magnify the
subject as materially to increase the impression upon our minds.
This is really an interesting matter for speculation, as to what in
effect is practical. The mastery of conclusions, to which practical
effect never could have been given, served to drive home principles
which would have come usefully into play, had the sail era continued
and the United States maintained fleets of sailing battle-ships to
handle. For myself personally, when I came to write naval history,
long years after, I derived invaluable aid from the principles and the
simpler evolutions, thus assimilated and remembered. But for them I
should often have found it difficult to understand what with them was
obvious. A singular circumstance thus brought out was the want of
exactness and precision in English terminology in this field. The most
notable instance that occurs to me was in Nelson's journal on
Trafalgar morning, "The enemy wearing in succession," when, in fact,
as a matter of manoeuvre, the hostile fleet "wore together," though
the several vessels wore "in succession;" a paradox only to be
understood at a glance by those familiar with fleet tactics under
sail. The usual version of the attack at Trafalgar has of late been
elaborately disputed by capable critics. I myself have no doubt that
they are quite mistaken; but it would be curious to investigate how
far their argument derives from inexact phraseology--as, for example,
the definition of "column" and "line" applied to ships.
These mathematical demonstrations of naval evolutions might be
considered a lapse from practicalness characteristic of the particular
officer. They took up a good deal of valuable time, and on any
drill-ground manoeuvres are less a matter of geometric precision than
of professional aptitude and eye judgment. The same mistake could
scarcely be addressed at that time to the other parts of the Academy
curriculum. Either as foundation, or as a super-structure in which it
was sought to develop professional intelligence, to inform and improve
professional action, there was little to find fault with in detail,
and less still in general principle. The previous reasonable
professional prejudice had been in favor of the practical man, the man
who can do things--who knows _how_ to do them; the new effort was to
give the "why" of the "how," and to save time in the process by giving
it systematically. In this sense--that all we learned ministered to
professional intelligence--the scholastic part was thoroughly
professional in tone; and I think I have shown that the outside
professional sentiment was also strongly felt among us. There is
always, of course, a disposition latent in educators to deny that
practical work may be sufficiently accomplished by cruder
processes--by what we call the rule of thumb--and a corresponding
inclination to represent that to be absolutely necessary which is only
an advantage; to exaggerate the necessity of mastering the "why" in
order to put the "how" into execution. An instance in point, already
quoted, is that of the professor who maintained that every officer
should be able to calculate mathematically the relation between
weights and purchases. But between 1855 and 1860, if such a tendency
existed in germ, it had no effect in practice. As I look back, the
relation between what we were taught and what we were to do was
neither remote nor indirect. In its own sphere, in both its merits and
its faults, the Academy was in aspiration as professional as the
outside service.
This means that the Academy constituted for us an atmosphere perfectly
accordant with the life for which we were intended; and an educational
institution has no educative function to discharge higher than this.
This influence was enhanced by the social customs, in favor of which
disciplinary exactions were relaxed to the utmost possible; herein
departing from the practice at the Military Academy, as then known to
me. Not only on Saturdays and holidays, but every day, and at all
hours not positively allotted to study or drills, the midshipmen might
visit the houses of officers or professors to which they had the
entrance. As a rule, very properly, no one was allowed to be absent
from mess; but permission could always be obtained to accept an
invitation to the evening meal with any of the families. This freedom
of intercourse contributed its share to the formation of professional
tone, for the heads of the families were selected professional men,
who were thus met on terms of intimacy, precluded elsewhere by the
official relations of the parties. More training is imparted by such
association than by teaching--the familiar contrast of example and
precept. An even greater gain, however--and a strictly professional
gain, too--was the social facility thus acquired. In all callings
probably, certainly in the navy, social aptitude is professionally
valuable. Nelson's dictum that naval officers should know how to dance
was only one way of saying that they should be men of affairs, at home
in all conditions where men--or women--gather for business or
amusement. The phrase "all sorts and conditions of men" never had
wider or juster application than to the assembly of green lads, from
every variety of parentage and previous surroundings, pitchforked into
Annapolis once every year; and, of all the humanizing and harmonizing
influences under which they came, none exceeded that of the quiet
gentlefolk, of modest means, with whom they mingled thus freely.
Indeed, one of the most astute of our superintendents took into
account the family of an officer before asking that he be ordered.
An element in our social environment which should not be omitted was
the prevalence of a Southern flavor. In our microcosm, this reflected
the general sentiment of the world outside, then slowly freeing itself
from the spirit of compromise which had dominated the statesmanship of
two generations in their efforts to reconcile the incompatible. There
were certainly strong Northern men in plenty, as well as strong
Southerners; but every Southerner was convinced that the justice was
all on their side, that their rights as well as interests were being
attacked, whereas the Northerners were divided in feeling. There were
some pronounced abolitionists, here and there, prepared to go all
party lengths; but in the majority from the North, the devotion to the
Union, which rose so instantaneously to the warlike pitch when fairly
challenged, for the present counselled concession to the utmost limit,
if only thereby the Union might endure. In this the membership of the
school reproduced the political character of the House of
Representatives, with whom appointment rested; and at our age, of
course, we simply re-echoed the tones of our homes. Never in my now
long life have I seen so evident the power of conviction as in the
Southern men I then knew. They simply had no hesitations; whereas we
others were perplexed. Yet I now doubt whether the Southern conviction
was not really, if unconsciously, the resolution of despair; of doom
felt, though unacknowledged; not before the attacks of the North, but
before the resistless progress of the world, of which the North was to
be the instrument. So also the patience of the North, if so noble a
word can be conceded to our long temporizing, was an unconscious
manifestation of latent power. To those who knew what the Union meant
to those who exalted it--should I not rather say her?--in passionate
adoration, need never have doubted what the response would be, if
threat passed into act and hands were lifted against her. Conviction
was absolute and deep-rooted on that side as on the other; but it was
less on the surface, and sought ever a solution of peace.
The Muse of History of late years has become so analytic, and withal
so embarrassed with the accumulations of new material, revealing still
more the complication of causes which undoubtedly concur to any
general result, that she is prone to overlook the overpowering
influence of the simple elemental passions of human nature. "Our
country, right or wrong," may be very bad morality, but it is a
tremendous force to reckon with. One is wise overmuch who thinks that
interest can restrain or statesmen control; wise unto folly who
ignores that disinterested emotion, even unreasoning, may be just the
one factor which diplomacy cannot master. I was in Rome when our late
troubles with Spain came on, and dined with a number of the diplomatic
body. "Oh yes," said to me one of these illuminati, "it is all very
well to talk about humanity. The truth is, the United States wants
Cuba." More profound was the remark of an American politician, who had
recently visited the island. "I did not dare to tell all I saw; for,
if I had, there would be no holding our people back." Personally, I
believed that the interests of the United States made expedient the
acquisition of Cuba, if righteously accomplished, and prior to the war
I knew little of the conditions on the island; but Cuba would be
Spanish now, if interests chiefly had power to move us. So in the War
of Secession. Innumerable precedent occurrences had produced a
condition, but it was the passion for the Union, the strong loyalty to
that sovereign, which dominated the situation, and in truth had been
dominating it silently for years; a passion as profound and, though
justifiable to reason, as unreasoning as any simple love that ever
bound man to woman. Could this have been appreciated, what reams of
demonstration might have been spared to foreign pens--demonstration of
the folly, the hopelessness, the lust of conquest, the self-interest
in myriad forms, which were supposed to be the actuating causes.
Effectively, the South had lost this love of the Union. In this
respect the two sections, I fancy, had parted company, unwittingly,
soon after the War of 1812; through which, as we all well know, in
many quarters sectional feeling had still prevailed over national. The
North had since moved towards national consciousness, the South
towards sectional, on paths steadily and rapidly diverging. As I
recall those days, when I first awoke to political observation, I
should say that the feeling of my Southern associates towards the
Union was that which men have towards a friend lately buried.
Affection had not wholly disappeared; but life called. Let the dead
bury their dead. I remember on my first practice cruise, in 1857,
standing in the main-top of the ship with a member of the class
immediately before mine, the son of a North Carolina member of
Congress. "Yes," he said to me, "Buchanan [inaugurated four months
before] will be the last President of the United States." He was
entirely unmoved, simply repeating certitudes to which familiarity had
reconciled him; I, to whom such talk was new, as much aghast as though
I had been told my mother would die within the like term. This outlook
was common to them all. The Union still was, and they continued in
it; but to them the warning had sounded, they were ready and
acquiescent in its fall; regretful, but resigned--very much resigned.
This attitude was more marked among the younger men, those at the
school. In the service outside I found somewhat the same point of
view, but repulsion was keener. The navy then, even more than now,
symbolized the exterior activities of the country, which are committed
by the Constitution to the Union. Hence, the life of the profession
naturally nurtured pride in the nation; and while States'-Rights had
undermined the principle of loyalty to the Union, it had been less
successful in destroying love for it. But to most the prospect was
gloomy. That Massachusetts and South Carolina should be put into a pen
together, and left to fight it out, was the solution expressed to me
by a lieutenant who afterwards fell nobly, in command, on a Union deck
in the war; the gallant Joe Smith, concerning whom runs a story that
cannot be too widely known, even though often repeated. When it was
reported to his father that the _Congress_ had surrendered, he said,
simply, "Then Joe's dead." Joe was dead; but it is only fair to the
survivors to say that ninety out of her crew of four hundred were also
dead, the ship aground, helpless, and in flames.
In Annapolis, the capital of a border slave state, the general
sentiment was, as might be expected, a blending of North and South; a
desire to maintain the Union, but, distinctly superior in motive,
sympathy with the Southern view of the case. In all my fairly intimate
acquaintance with the small society of the town outside the Academy
walls, there was but one family the heads of which were decisively
Union--not Northern; and of it two sons fought in the Southern armies.
Between this influence and that of my comrades I remained as I had
been brought up--the Union first and above all, but with the
conviction that the great danger to the Union lay in the abolition
propaganda. My father was by upbringing a Virginian; by life-long
occupation an officer of the general government, imbued to the marrow
with the principles of military loyalty. Having married and
continuously lived in the North, he had escaped all taint of the
extreme States'-Rights school; but the memories of his youth kept him
broadly Southern in feeling, less by local attachment than by
affection for friends. More than twenty years after his death, when I
was on court-martial duty in Richmond, an old Confederate general,
whom I had never seen, sought me out in memory of the ties that had
bound both himself and his wife's family to my father. With these
clinging sympathies, the abolition agitation was an attack upon his
friends, and, still worse, a wanton endangering of the Union. To save
me from being carried away by the swelling tide was one of his chief
aims.
Regarded by themselves, nothing can well be less important than the
political opinions of one boy of eighteen to twenty; but few things
are more important, if they are those of the mass of his generation,
for then they are the echo from many homes. I believe, from what I saw
at the Naval Academy, that mine were those of the large majority of
the Northern youth, and that the very greatness of the concession
which such were ready to make for the sake of the Union should have
warned the disunionists that the same love was capable of equally
great sacrifices in the other direction. They failed so to understand;
chiefly, perhaps, because they could not appreciate the living force
of the simple sentiment. Never in their lifetimes, if ever before, had
the Union held the first place in the hearts of men of their section;
and such love as had been felt was already moribund, overcome by
supposed interest and local pride. Thus misled, it was easy to believe
that in the North, controlled by considerations of advantage,
yielding would follow yielding, even to permitting a disruption of the
Union--a miscalculation of forces more fatal even than that of "Cotton
is King." But forces will often be miscalculated by those who reckon
interest as more powerful than principle or than sentiment.
Singularly enough, considering the exodus of States'-Rights officers
from the navy at the outbreak of the War of Secession, my first
service during it brought me into close relations with two captains,
both Southerners, whose differing points of view shed interesting
light upon the varying motives which in times of stress determined men
into a common path. The first, Percival Drayton, a South-Carolinian,
had a strength of conviction on the question of slavery, in itself,
and the wrong-headed course of the slave power, as well as a strong
devotion to the Union, all which were needed to keep a son of that
extreme state firm in his allegiance. I question, however, whether any
other one of the seceding communities furnished as large a proportion
of officers who stuck to the national flag, chiefly among the older
men; a result scarcely surprising, for the intensity of affection for
the Union necessary to withstand nearest relatives and the headlong
sweep of separatist impulse, where fiercest, naturally throve upon the
opposition which it met, eliciting a corresponding tenacity of
adherence to the cause it had embraced. No more than that other
Southerner, Farragut, did Drayton feel doubt as to where he belonged
in the coming struggle. "I cannot exactly see the difference between
my relations fighting against me and I against them, except that their
cause is as unholy a one as the world has ever seen, and mine just the
reverse." "Were the sword in the one hand powerful enough, the
secessionists would carry slavery with the other to the uttermost
parts of the Union, and I do not think the North has been at all too
quick in stopping the movement." "I do not think there will ever be
peace between the two sections until slavery is so completely
scotched as to make extension a hopeless matter."[6]
Drayton stayed with us but a brief time. His successor, George B.
Balch, who still survives, now the senior rear-admiral on the retired
list of the navy, a man beloved by all who have known him for his
gallantry, benevolence, and piety, was equally pronounced and equally
firm; but his position illustrated and carried on my experiences at
the Academy, and afterwards in the service, and for the time confirmed
my old prepossessions. He was fighting for the Union, assailed without
just cause; not against slavery, nor for its abolition. Were the
latter the motive of the war, he would not be in arms. This, of
course, was then the attitude of the government and of the people at
large. Abolition, which came not long after, was a war measure simply;
received with doubt by many, but which a few months of hostilities had
prepared us all to accept. My own conversion was early and sudden. The
ship had made an expedition of some fifty miles up a South Carolina
river, in the course of which numerous negroes fled to her. Unlike
Drayton, our captain was rather disconcerted, I think, at having
forced upon him a kind of practical abolition, in carrying off slaves;
but his duty was clear. As for me, it was my first meeting with
slavery; except in the house-servants of Maryland, superficially a
very different condition; and as I looked at the cowed, imbruted faces
of the field-hands, my early training fell away like a cloak. The
process was not logical; I was generalizing from a few instances, but
I was convinced. Knowing how strongly my father had felt, I wondered
how I should break to him my instability; but when we met I found that
he, too, had gone over. Youngster as I still was, I should have
divined the truth, that in assailing the Union his best friend became
his enemy, to down whom abolition was good and fit as any other club.
"My son," he said, "I did not think I could ever again be happy should
our country fall into her present state; but now I am so absorbed in
seeing those fellows beaten that I lose sight of the rest." Peculiar
and personal association enhanced his interest; for, having been then
over thirty years at the Military Academy, there were very few of the
prominent generals on either side who had not been his pupils. The
successful leaders were almost all from that school: Grant, Sherman,
Thomas, Schofield, on the Union side; Lee, Jackson, and the two
Johnstons on the Confederate, were all graduates, not to mention a
host of others only less conspicuous.