blockade in the usual sense of the word, blockade outside, became
confined to Charleston and its approaches. It is true that much
depended on the class of vessel. It was obviously inexpedient to
expose sailing-ships where they might be attacked by steamers, in
ground also too contracted for manoeuvring; and two years later I
found myself again blockading Georgetown, in a paddle steamer from the
merchant service, the size and unwieldiness of which prevented her
entering. Moreover, torpedoes had then begun to play a part in the
war, though still in a very primitive stage of development. But in
1862 there was little outside work except at Charleston. The very
reasons which determine the original selection of a port--facility for
entrance, abundant anchorage, and ease of access to the interior for
distribution and receipt of the articles of commerce--determine also
the accumulation of defences, to the exclusion of other less favored
localities. All these conditions, natural and artificial, combined
with the Union occupancy of the other inlets to concentrate
blockade-running upon Charleston. This in turn drew thither the
blockaders, which had to be the more numerous because the harbor could
be entered by two or more channels, widely separated. There was thus
constituted a blockade society, which contrasted agreeably with the
somewhat hermit-like existence of the smaller stations. The weather
was usually pleasant enough--many Northerners now know the winter
climate of South Carolina--so during the daytime the ships would lift
their anchors and get more or less together; the officers, and to a
less extent the crews, exchanging visits. Old acquaintanceships were
renewed, former cruises discussed, "yarns" interchanged; and then
there was always the war with its happenings. Fort Henry, Fort
Donelson, Shiloh, the _Monitor_ and _Merrimac_ fight, the capture of
New Orleans by Farragut, all occurred during the stay of the
_Pocahontas_ upon the blockade in 1862. Our news was apt to be ten
days old, but to us it was as good as new; indeed, somewhat better,
for we heard of the first reverses at Shiloh, and by the hands of the
_Merrimac_, by the same mail which brought word of the final decided
victory. Thus we were spared the anxiety of suspense. Even the
disasters about Richmond were not by us fairly appreciated until the
ship returned North, when the mortification of defeat was somewhat
solaced, and the tendency to despondency lessened, by the happiness of
being again at home; in my case after a continuous absence of more
than three years, in the _Congress_ and _Pocahontas_.
Talking of despondency, I had an odd experience of the ease with which
people forget their frames of mind. While Burnside was engaged in the
movements preceding Fredericksburg, I was in conversation with a
veteran naval officer at his own house. Speaking of the probable
outcome of the operations in progress, which then engrossed all
thoughts, he said to me, "I think, Mr. Mahan, that if we fail this
time, we may as well strike"; the naval phrase "strike the colors"
being the equivalent of surrender--give up. I dissented heartily; not
from any really reasoned appreciation of conditions, but on general
principles, as understood by a man still very young. More than two
years later, when the war had just drawn to its triumphant close, I
again met the same gentleman. Amid our felicitations, he said to me,
"There is one thing, Mr. Mahan, which I have never allowed myself to
doubt--the ultimate success of our just cause."
After all, it was very natural. When you are cold, you're cold, and
when you're hot, you're hot; and if you are indiscreet enough to say
so to some one who feels differently, he remembers it against you.
What business have you to feel other than he? If, with the thermometer
at zero, I chance to say that I wish it were warmer, I am sure of some
one, a lady usually, bursting in upon me when it is ninety-five, with
the jeer, "Well! I hope, now, _you_ are satisfied." I recall
distinctly the long faces we pulled when we reached Philadelphia on
our return, and realized, by the withdrawal of McClellan's army to
Washington, the full extent of our disasters on the Peninsula; my old
commodore might then have found some to say, Amen. But this did not
keep our hats any lower when we chucked them aloft over Vicksburg and
Gettysburg, and forgot that we had ever felt otherwise.
Vicksburg and Gettysburg, by the way, and their coincidence with the
Fourth of July, have furnished me with a reminiscence quite otherwise
agreeable. The ship in which I then was spent that Fourth at Spithead,
England. We dressed ship with multicolored signals, red, white, and
blue, at every yard-arm, big American ensigns at the three mast-heads
and the peak, presenting a singularly gay and joyful aspect, which
could profitably be viewed from as many points as Mr. Pecksniff looked
at Salisbury Cathedral. At noon we fired a national salute, all the
more severely punctilious and observant, because by the last mail
things at home seemed to be looking particularly blue. The British
ships of war, though I fear few of their officers then were other than
pleased with our presumed discomfiture, dressed likewise, as by naval
courtesy bound, and also fired a salute. The _Times_ of the day
arrived from London in due season, and had improved the occasion to
moralize upon the sad condition to which the Republic of Bunker Hill
and Yorktown was reduced: Grant held up at Vicksburg,[10] Lee marching
victoriously into Pennsylvania, no apparent probability of escaping
disaster in either quarter. The conclusion was couched in that vein of
Pecksniffian benevolence of which we hear so much in life. "Let us
_hope_ that so much adversity may be tempered to a nation, afflicted
with evil as unprecedented as its former prosperity; and this will
indeed be the case if America ... is led on this day of festivity, now
converted into a day of humiliation, to review past errors, and to
consider that, if her present policy has led her so near ruin, in its
reversal must lie the only path that can conduct her to safety." I
wonder, if there had been a cable, would that editorial have been
headed off. It was not.
"And there it stands unto this day,
To witness if I lie."
It was bitter then to my taste; but sweet were the chuckles which I
later had, when the actual transactions of that anniversary came to
hand.
Whatever their sympathies, the British naval officers during that stay
in British waters had no difficulty in paying us all the usual
personal attentions; but a particular incident showed for our
susceptibilities a nicety of consideration, which could not have been
exacted and was very grateful at the time. We were at Plymouth, under
the breakwater, but some distance from the inner anchorage, when a
merchant-vessel lying inside hoisted a Confederate flag at her mizzen
mast-head. We saw it, but of course could do nothing. It was a clear
case of intended insult, for the ship had no claim to the flag, and
could only mean to flaunt us. It flew for perhaps an hour, and then
disappeared. The same day, and not long afterwards, a British
lieutenant from a vessel in the harbor came on board, and told me that
he had had it hauled down, acting in place of his captain, who was
absent. The communication to me, also momentarily in command, was
purely personal; indeed, there was nothing official in the whole
transaction, nor do I know by what means or by what authority he could
insist upon the removal of the flag. However managed, the thing was
done, and with the purpose of stopping a rudeness which, it is true,
reflected more upon the port than upon us, for I think the offending
vessel was British. Very many years afterwards I had occasion to quote
this, when, during the Boer War, on the visit of a British squadron to
one of our seaside resorts, a resident there thought to show American
breeding by hoisting the Four-Color. In the late winter of 1863-64 I
again met this officer and his ship in New Orleans. In conversation
then he told me he did not believe the Union cause could succeed; that
he, with others, looked to see three or four nations formed. In the
same month of 1863 this anticipation would not have surprised me; but
in 1864 it did, although Grant had not yet begun his movement upon
Richmond.
Blockading was desperately tedious work, make the best one could of
it. The largest reservoir of anecdotes was sure to run dry; the
deepest vein of original humor to be worked out. I remember hearing of
two notorious tellers of stories being pitted against each other, for
an evening's amusement, when one was driven as a last resource to
recounting that "Mary had a little lamb." We were in about that case.
Charleston, however, was a blooming garden of social refreshment
compared with the wilderness of the Texas coast, to which I found
myself exiled a year or so later; a veritable Siberia, cold only
excepted. Charleston was not very far from the Chesapeake or Delaware,
in distance or in time. Supply vessels, which came periodically, and
at not very long intervals, arrived with papers not very late, and
with fresh provisions not very long slaughtered; but by the time they
reached Galveston or Sabine Pass, which was our station, their news
was stale, and we got the bottom tier of fresh beef. The ship to which
I there belonged was a small steam-corvette, which with two gunboats
constituted all the social possibilities. Happily for myself, I did
not join till midway in the corvette's stay off the port, which lasted
in all nearly six months, before she was recalled in mercy to New
Orleans. I have never seen a body of intelligent men reduced so nearly
to imbecility as my shipmates then were.
One of my captains used to adduce, as his conception of the extreme of
isolation, to be the keeper of a lightship off Cape Horn; a
professional conceit rivalling the elder Mr. Weller's equally profound
recognition of the connection between keeping a pike and misanthropy.
We off Sabine Pass were banished about equally with the keeper of a
turnpike or of a remote lightship. We ought, of course, to have
improved the leisure which weighed so heavily on our hands; but the
improvement of idle moments is an accomplishment of itself, as many a
retired business man has found out too late. There is an impression,
derived from the experience of passengers on board ocean steamers,
that naval officers have an abundance of spare time. The ship, it
seems assumed, runs itself; the officers have only to look on and
enjoy. As a matter of fact, sea officers under normal conditions are
as busy as the busiest house-keeper, with the care to boot of two,
three, four, or five hundred children, to be kept continually doing as
they should; the old woman who lived in the shoe had a good thing in
comparison. Thus occupied, the leisure habit of self-improvement,
other than in the practice of the calling, is not formed. At sea, on a
voyage, the vicissitudes of successive days provide the desultory
succession of incidents, which vary and fill out the tenor of
occupations, keeping life full and interesting. In port, besides the
regular and fairly engrossing routine, there are the resources of the
shore to fill up the chinks. But the dead monotony of the blockade was
neither sea nor port. It supplied nothing. The crew, once drilled,
needed but a few moments each day to keep at the level of proficiency;
and there was practically nothing to do, because nothing happened that
required either a doing or an undoing.
Under such conditions even a gale of wind was a not unwelcome change.
Although little activity was required to meet it, it at least
presented new surroundings--something different from the daily
outlook. After a very brief period, it became the rule to ride out the
storms at anchor; and I remember one of our volunteer officers, who
had commanded a merchant-ship for some years, saying that he would
have been spared a good deal of trouble, on occasions, had he had our
experience of holding on with an anchor instead of keeping under way.
It was, however, an old if forgotten expedient, where anchorage ground
was good--bottom sticky and water not too deep. In the ancient days of
the French wars, the British fleets off Brest and Toulon had to keep
under way, but that blockading Cadiz, in 1797-98, used to hold its
position at anchor, and under harder conditions than ours; for there
the worst gales blew on shore, whereas ours swept chiefly along the
coast. A standing dispute in the British navy, in those days of hemp
cables, used to be whether it was safer to ride with three anchors
down, or with one only, having to it three cables, bent together, so
as to form one of thrice the usual length. The balance of opinion
leaned to the latter; the dead weight of so much hemp held the ship
without transmitting the strain to the anchor itself. She "rode to the
bight," as the expression was; that is, to the cable, curved by its
own weight and length, lying even in part on the bottom, which
prevented its tightening and pulling at the anchor. What was true of
hemp was yet more true of iron chains. The _Pocahontas_ used to veer
to a hundred fathoms, and there lie like a duck in fifty or sixty feet
of water. I remember on one occasion, however, that when we next
weighed the anchor, it came up with parts polished bright, as in my
childhood we used sometimes to burnish a copper cent. This seemed to
show that it had been scoured hard along a sandy bottom. We had had no
suspicion of the ship's dragging during the gale, and I have since
supposed that it may have started from its bed as we began to heave,
and so been scrubbed along towards us.
The problem of maintaining the health of ships' companies condemned to
long months of salt provisions, and to equally depressing short
allowance of social salt for the intellect, which reasonable beings
crave, has to be ever present to those charged with administration.
Nelson's "cattle and onions" sums up in homely phrase the first
requirement; while, for the others, his policy during a weary two
years, in which he himself never left the flag-ship, was to keep the
vessels in constant movement, changing scene, and thereby maintaining
expectation of something exciting turning up. "Our men's minds," he
said, "are always kept up with the daily hopes of meeting the enemy."
As the Confederacy had practically no navy, this particular
distraction was debarred our blockaders; but in the matter of food, we
in the early sixties had not got beyond his prescription for the
opening years of the century. The primitive methods then still in
vogue, for preserving meats and vegetables fresh, accomplished chiefly
the making them perfectly tasteless, and to the eye uninviting; the
palate, accustomed to the constant stimulant of salt, turned from
"bully" (bouilli) beef and "desecrated" (dessicated) potatoes, jaded
before exercise. Like liquor, salt, long used in large measures, at
last becomes a craving. I have heard old seamen more than once say, "I
must have my salt;" and I have even known one to express his utter
weariness of the fresh butter France sends up with its morning coffee
and rolls. So we on the blockade depended more upon the good offices
of salt than upon those of tin cans, for giving us acceptable food;
the consequence being, with us as with our British forebears, a keen
physical demand for "cattle and onions." In one principal respect our
supplies differed from theirs--in the profusion of ice afforded by
our country. Our beef, therefore, came to us already butchered, while
theirs was received on the hoof. Many of my readers doubtless will
recall the adventures of Mr. Midshipman Easy, when in charge of the
transport from Tetuan with bullocks for the fleet off Toulon.
Onions--blessings on their heads, if they have any--came to both us
and our predecessors as easily as they were welcome. I have sometimes
heard the plea, that Nature is the best guide in matters of appetite,
advanced for indulgences which, so construed, seemed to reflect upon
her parental character; but there can be no such doubt concerning
onions to a system well saturated with salt. When you see them you
know what you want; and a half-dozen raw, with a simple salad
dressing, were little more than a whetter on the blockade. Would it be
possible now to manage a single one?
VIII
INCIDENTS OF WAR AND BLOCKADE SERVICE--CONTINUED
1863-1865
The _Pocahontas_ came North for repairs in the late summer of 1862,
and after a brief leave I was ordered to the Naval Academy. Under the
stress of the war, this had been broken out from its regular seat at
Annapolis and transferred for the moment to Newport. All the
arrangements were temporary and extemporized. The principal
establishment, housing the three older classes, was in a building in
the town formerly known as the Atlantic Hotel; while the new entries,
who were very numerous, were quartered on two sailing-frigates, moored
head and stern in the inner harbor, off Goat Island. This duplex
arrangement necessitated a double set of officers, not easy to be had
with war going on; the more so that the original corps had been
depleted by the resignations of Southern men. The embarrassment
arising from the immediate scantness of officers led naturally, if
perhaps somewhat irreflectively, to a great number of admissions to
the Naval Academy, disregardful of past experience with the '41 Date,
and of the future, when room at the top would be lacking to take in
all these youngsters as captains and admirals. Thus was constituted
the "hump," as it came to be called, which, like a tumor on the body,
engaged at a later day the attention of many professional
practitioners. As it would not absorb, and as the rough-and-ready
methods by which civil life and the survival of the fittest deal with
such conditions could not be applied, it had to be dissipated; a
process ultimately carried out with indifferent success. While it
lasted it caused many a heartache from postponement. As one of the
sufferers said, when hearing the matter discussed, "I don't know about
this or that. All I know is that I have been a lieutenant for twenty
years." Owing to the slimness of the service in the lower grades they
became lieutenants young; but there they stuck. Every boom is followed
by such reaction, and for a military service war is a boom. Expansion
sets in; and when contraction follows somebody is squeezed. At the end
of the Napoleonic Wars there were over eight hundred post-captains in
the British navy. What could peace do for them?
Eight pleasant months I spent on shore at the Academy, and then was
again whisked off to sea, there to remain for substantially all the
rest of the war. Although already prominent as a fashionable
watering-place, Newport then was very far from its present
development; but in winter it had a settled and pleasant, if small,
society. At this time I met the widow of Captain Lawrence of the
_Chesapeake_, who survived until two years later. She was already
failing, and not prematurely; for it was then, 1862-63, the fiftieth
year since her husband fell. She lived with a sister, also the widow
of an officer, and was frequently visited by her granddaughter, the
child of Lawrence's daughter, a singularly beautiful girl. I remember
her pointing to me a picture of the defeat of the _Peacock_, by the
_Hornet_, under her grandfather's command; on which, she laughingly
said, she had been brought up. This meeting had for me not only the
usual interest which a link with the distant past supplies, but a
certain special association; for my grandmother, then recently dead,
had known several of Lawrence's contemporaries in the navy, and my
recollection is that she told me she had seen him leaving his wife at
their doorstep, when departing to take command of the _Chesapeake_.
When the summer of 1863 drew nigh, the question of the usual practice
cruise came up. I have before stated the two opinions: one favoring a
regular ocean voyage, with its customary routine and accidents of
weather; the other more disposed to contracted cruising in our own
waters, anchoring at night, and by day following a formulated
programme of varied practical exercises. For this year both plans were
adopted. There were two practice-ships, one of which was to remain
between Narragansett and Gardiner's Bay, in Long Island. I was ordered
as first lieutenant of the other, which was to go to Europe. The
advisability of this step for a sailing-ship was on this occasion
doubly questioned, for the _Alabama_ had already begun her career. In
fact, one of the officers then stationed at the school had been
recently captured by her, when making a passage to Panama in a
mail-steamer. I remember his telling me, with glee, that when the
_Alabama_ fired a shot in the direction of the packet, called, I
think, the _Ariel_, a number of the passengers took refuge behind the
bulkheads of the upper-deck saloons, which, being of light pine,
afforded as much protection as the air, with the additional risk of
splinters. He hoped to escape observation, but the Confederate
boarding-officer had been a classmate of his, and spotted him at once.
Being paroled, he was for the time shut off from war service, and was
sent to the Academy. He was a singular man, by name Tecumseh Steece,
and looked with a certain disdain upon the navy as a profession. In
his opinion, it was for him only a stepping-stone to some great
future, rather undefined. At bottom a very honest fellow, with a sense
of duty which while a midshipman had led him to persist defiantly in a
very unpopular--though very proper--course of action, he yet seemed to
see no impropriety in utterly neglecting professional acquirement,
rather boasting of his ignorance. The result was that, having been
detailed for the European cruise, he was subsequently detached; I
think from doubt of his fitness for the deck of a sailing-vessel.
While at the Academy at this time, he took a first step in his
proposed career by writing a pamphlet, the title and scope of which I
now forget; but unluckily, by a slip of the pen, he wrote on the first
page, "We judge the _known_ by the _unknown_." This, being speedily
detected, raised a laugh, and I fear prevented most from further
exploration of a somewhat misty thesis. He was rather chummy with me,
and tried mildly to persuade me that I also should stand poised on the
navy for a flight into the empyrean; but, if fain to soar, which I do
not think I was, like Raleigh, I feared a fall. For himself, poor
fellow, weighted by his aspirations, he said to me, "I don't fear
death, I fear life;" and death caught him early, in 1864, in the shape
of yellow-fever. One of his idiosyncrasies was a faith in coffee as a
panacea; and I heard that while sickening he deluged himself with that
beverage, to what profit let physicians say.