Though there were many mutterings of the coming tempest in the decade
1850-1860, the navy, whose duty, unaffected by internal politics,
lay abroad, went its even tenor. We had come to the verge of war
with Spain in 1852 over the case of the _Black Warrior_. There had
been filibustering expeditions and the slave trade to look after;
threatenings of difficulties with England; a successful expedition to
Paraguay in 1858 and 1859 to demand reparation for the firing upon
the United States steamer _Water Witch_; and most notable and most
momentous of all, the expedition, 1852-1854, resulting in the opening
of Japan.
Meanwhile was swiftly gathering the storm of secession. Despite the
Kansas war, the John Brown raid, and fierce political antagonisms,
the illimitable optimism of the American people would not admit the
idea of danger until the convulsion was upon them. So little could
our people in 1860 recognize that they were rapidly being carried
into the abyss of war, that in the last days of the Congress which
closed on June 25th of that year, “at the instance of Sherman, of
Ohio, the estimate for repairs and equipment of the navy was cut down
a million.... Senator Pugh, of the same state, could say: ‘I think we
have spent enough money on the navy, certainly for the service it has
rendered, and for one I shall vote against building a single ship under
any pretence at all.’ The blatant Lovejoy, in the face of the rising
storm, said: ‘I am tired of appropriating money for the army and navy
when absolutely they are of no use whatever ... I want to strike a blow
at this whole navy expenditure and let the navy go out of existence....
Let us blow the whole thing up! Let these vessels rot, and when we
want vessels to fight, we can get mercantile vessels and arm them
with our citizens.’... The whole existing steam navy consisted of but
twenty-three vessels which could be called efficient and thirteen which
were worthless, and while there was a willingness and effort on the
part of the Northern senators and representatives to add to the force,
it was put wholly upon the ground of the suppression of the slave
trade. Morse, of Maine, the chairman of the Naval Committee in the
House, urged that the increase should take the form of a purchase of
small steamers of six to nine feet draught for African service. There
appears no glimmering in the mind of any one of the speakers of the
coming of a great war, then but nine months distant, and in which the
North could not have been successful had it not been for the throttling
of the blockade and the occupancy of the Mississippi.”[48]
Besides the legislative incapacity just mentioned, and the equally
inept legislation which for ten years or more had quarrelled over
carrying slavery into impossible regions, our administrative
departments were absurdly inefficient and, in the case of the War
Department, corrupt, in that the Secretary of War had steadily been
distributing arms, such as they were, in the South. Never did the
government of a great country go to war under such conditions of
ineptitude as did ours. Buchanan’s effort to reinforce Fort Sumter
had come to grief through the folly of General Scott, who had caused
the change from the heavily armed war-steamer, _Brooklyn_, lying at
Fort Monroe, to the merchant steamer, _Star of the West_. Had the
_Brooklyn_ gone, as was intended, the Confederates would not have dared
to fire upon her. Had they done so, the raw militia which had never
before fired a cannon would have been driven from their improvised
battery, and Charleston harbor would have been ours permanently. It was
the same when Mr. Lincoln made the second effort and the _Powhatan_
was diverted to Pensacola through the officiousness of the Secretary
of State, who meddled with affairs with which he had nothing to do and
caused orders to be sent to the _Powhatan_ without the knowledge of the
Secretary of the Navy.
Our officers from the South resigned by scores, and our Southern
navy yards, Norfolk and Pensacola, left under the command of aged
officers, were surrendered with enormous loss, particularly in cannon,
many hundreds of which thus went to arm the Southern batteries on
the coast and more particularly on the Mississippi. The following
ships were burned and scuttled at Norfolk on April 20, 1861: the
_Pennsylvania_, 120; _Columbus_, 74; _Delaware_, 74; _Raritan_, 44;
_Columbia_, 44; _Merrimac_, 40; _Germantown_, 20; _Plymouth_, 20, and
_Dolphin_, 10. All but the _Merrimac_ were sailing ships and thus,
with this exception, no great loss. General Scott, weakened by age,
was still commander-in-chief, and failed to man the Southern forts,
which, properly, should have been done in the first days of secession,
and every port of the South thus held by the Federal Government. In
such case there could have been no war. As it was, a few militia
marched in and took possession against what was only, in most cases, a
sergeant-in-charge. Never was any government so thoroughly inefficient,
and it was the inefficiency of years of ineptitude, not of a day.
But the South occupied every fort and began war. To the trained
strategist the action to be taken so far as the navy was concerned
was simple: to blockade every port and to occupy the Mississippi. The
former would cut off the importation of military supplies, in which
the South was terribly deficient; the latter would cut the Confederacy
in twain and isolate the great food supply of her armies. The former
of course to be effective was a matter of ships, and it took time to
supply these; the latter could and should have been done at once,
before the defences of the Mississippi were thoroughly established and
organized as they were to be.
The magnitude of the work of blockade is evident in the fact “that
there were 185 harbor and river openings in the Confederate
coastline.... This coastline extended from Alexandria, Virginia, to the
Mexican port of Matamoros, which lies forty miles up the Rio Grande.
The Continental line so measured was 3,549 miles long.”[49] Our few
ships were scattered over the world. There were but three instantly
available. During the war these were increased to 600 by building
and by purchasing everything which could steam and carry a gun, down
to ferry-boats. We improvised a great navy--of a kind. It could not,
however, until our ironclad fleet of turreted vessels were built, have
stood for a moment before a great regular force. Fortunately, foreign
complications were avoided and we had to do with a government which
itself had to improvise such vessels as it could or get them from
England and France, and the former was full willing until she came
herself to the verge of war on that account. She launched the _Alabama_
and _Shenandoah_ which, though officered by Southerners, were manned by
Englishmen, and built blockade runners by the hundreds, which kept the
Confederacy alive.
By great good fortune the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles,
himself a civilian of fine mind and good hard sense, though with
no initiative and with no knowledge of war, was supplemented by an
Assistant-Secretary, Gustavus V. Fox, a former officer of the navy,
of strong character and great energy. He was to become practically a
chief-of-staff. There had been no plan of operations, no laying down
of a broad scheme such as, had there been any real organization of
the services, there would have been by a general staff. Congress has
resisted such an organization in the navy to this day. Even the Civil
War has not been able to teach it the wisdom of this. Thus, admits
Mr. Welles himself, “but for some redeeming successes at Hatteras and
Port Royal the whole belligerent operations of 1861 would have been
pronounced weak and imbecile failures.”
The work of strengthening the blockade was carried on with great
energy. By building and purchasing every available steam vessel in the
country which could carry a gun, there were by December, 1864, 559
steam vessels in the service, carrying 3,760 guns and about 51,000 men.
Fortunately there had been enough freedom from prejudice to accept the
plans of Ericsson for building the _Monitor_, which appeared in the
very nick of time, to save our wooden fleet from total destruction
in Hampton Roads by the _Virginia_, so much better known under her
original name of the _Merrimac_, which had been one of the frigates so
ignominiously sunk at Norfolk on the surrender of that yard, raised,
and with immense energy converted by the Confederates into a formidable
ironclad. The story of the _Monitor’s_ battle, on March 9, 1862, under
Worden; his almost fatal wounding; and the continuance of the fight
to victory by Dana Greene, her young first lieutenant, a mere boy, is
among the stories which will last forever.[50]
Hatteras inlet had been taken and occupied on August 28, 1861; Port
Royal on November 7th.
There was one man at least, David D. Porter, yet only a lieutenant at
the age of forty-nine, who, when blockading, July, 1861, the passes
of the river in the _Powhatan_, saw the importance and feasibility of
occupying the Mississippi. Porter, north again in November, brought
the subject before the Navy Department, and urged as commander of the
expedition his adopted brother, Farragut, senior to Porter in age by
thirteen years, and far his superior in rank.
Farragut had left Norfolk declaring, it is reported, at a meeting of
Southern naval officers, some of whom were bound to him by his marriage
to a Norfolk wife: “Gentlemen, I would see every man of you damned
before I would raise my arm against the flag.”[51] The expression
is not exactly in consonance with Farragut’s calm and restrained
nature, but it fits so well with his later one from the shrouds of the
_Hartford_ in Mobile Bay, that it may be taken as true. In any case,
Farragut left Norfolk on April 18th, with his wife and son, Loyall.
He found Baltimore, on his arrival there in the Bay Line steamer,
in possession of the mob which had attacked the Sixth Massachusetts
Regiment passing through that morning, April 19th. He went to
Hastings-on-the-Hudson and awaited orders.
Every Southern officer was then suspected, and it required Porter’s
utmost powers to convince the Secretary of the Navy that Farragut was
the man for the great effort which was to be made. On Porter’s going
to Hastings, he found Farragut thoroughly in accord with the plan and
eager for the work. He reached Washington on December 12, 1861, and
on January 9, 1862, was appointed commander-in-chief of the West Gulf
Blockading Squadron, with his flag in the _Hartford_, a sister ship to
the _Brooklyn_, each carrying twenty-two 9-inch smooth-bore guns and
two 20-pounder rifles. It is far from the least of Porter’s services to
his country that he should have been the instrument of this selection.
We all know the story of the passage of the forts by the fleet
(numbering seventeen ships, with 179 guns) with the rising of the moon,
early in the morning of April 24, 1862; of the fire rafts (one of which
set the _Hartford_ afire); of the fight with the eleven Confederate
steamers (one an ironclad ram) above the forts; the arrival off New
Orleans. Says George W. Cable: “I went to the riverside; there far
into the night I saw hundreds of drays carrying cotton out of the
presses and yards to the wharves, where it was fired. The glare of
these sinuous miles of flame set men and women weeping and wailing
thirty miles away on the farther shore of Lake Pontchartrain. But the
next day was a day of terrors.... The firemen were out, but they cast
fire upon the waters, putting the torch to the empty ships and cutting
them loose to float down the river. Whoever could go was going.... My
employer left the city. I closed the doors and ran to the river to
see the sights.... ‘Are the Yankee ships in sight?’ I asked an idler.
He pointed to the tops of their naked masts as they showed up across
the huge bend of the river. They were engaging the batteries at Camp
Chalmette--the old field of Jackson’s renown. Presently that was over.
Ah me! I see them now as they came slowly round Slaughter House Point
into full view, silent, so grim and terrible, black with men, heavy
with deadly portent, the long-banished Stars and Stripes flying against
the frowning sky. Oh, for the _Mississippi_, the _Mississippi_! Just
then she came down upon them. But now drifting helplessly--a mass of
flames.
“The crowds on the levee howled and screamed with rage. The swarming
decks answered never a word; but one old tar on the _Hartford_,
standing with a lanyard in his hand beside a great pivot gun, so plain
in view you could see him smile, silently patted its big black breech
and blandly grinned.”[52]
The ships anchored, and now came as bold an act as any of these
stirring hours. Captain Theodorus Bailey, Farragut’s flag captain, and
Lieutenant George Perkins, of beloved memory in the navy, landed and
calmly walked through a howling mob crying “Hang them! hang them!”
to the city hall and demanded the hauling down of the state flag and
surrender of the city.
It was not until the 28th that everything was settled by the surrender
of the forts to Commander Porter, who had remained below with his
mortar flotilla, which had done such good service. Mention should be
made of the very improper action of the British ship _Mersey_, which,
following Farragut’s fleet up the river, anchored near the _Hartford_,
where the men aboard sang Confederate songs and acted otherwise in
a way so offensive that Farragut was obliged to call the English
captain’s attention to their conduct. Farragut should, in fact, have
ordered the ship out of the river.
The first step only had been taken. There were yet to come great and
ever-memorable battles before Port Hudson and Vicksburg; fights with
ironclads, and expeditions up the rivers by squadrons of improvised
men-of-war under Flag Officers Davis and Foote, both of gallant
memory. Finally the command of the navy, extending over the whole of
the vast river system of which the Mississippi was the main artery,
fell gradually to Porter, who on the fall of Vicksburg, in which his
fleet played so great a part, was made a rear-admiral. His command was
now extended down to New Orleans. He had over 150 vessels under his
flag, and on August 7, 1863, he was able to write from New Orleans
that the “river is entirely free from guerrillas, and merchant vessels
can travel it without danger.” But there was plenty of fighting yet
for the navy in the affluents of the Mississippi, and the Red River
expedition of March 12 to May 16, 1864, in aid of General Banks’s
ill-advised campaign, came near to causing the destruction of the most
important part of Porter’s fleet through the falling of the water. The
building of the famous dam by Colonel Bailey of the volunteers, and the
successful passage thereby of the fleet into deeper water, is one of
the great dramatic events of the war.
While such things were happening on the western rivers, scores of
actions were taking place in Atlantic waters. The siege of Charleston
was a continuous operation and was to remain such to the end of the
war; the ironclad had come into extended use; the Confederate ironclad
_Atlanta_ had been captured in Wassaw Sound in Georgia by the monitor
_Weehawken_, under Captain John Rodgers. There were in all, during the
year 1863, 145 engagements by the navy, great and small.
* * * * *
The year 1864 was to bring the Civil War well toward a close. The
blockade had become one of extreme rigor; the region west of the
Mississippi had been entirely cut off, and the whole South was now
reduced to a poverty of arms, equipment, food, clothing, and medical
supplies, the want of all of which was gradually reducing its armies
to a state of inanition. Before the end of the war every port had
been closed, Wilmington, in North Carolina, being the last. Between
November, 1861, and March, 1864, eighty-four different steamers were
running between Nassau and Confederate ports, of which thirty-seven
were captured and twenty-four wrecked or otherwise destroyed.[53] These
vessels were built in Great Britain especially for the service, were
laden with British cargoes, and used the British Bahamas and Bermudas
as ports of call and supply. Nassau bloomed into one of the greatest
and most active ports of the world.
In addition to the remarkable episode of Red River already mentioned,
which resulted in saving Porter’s fleet, the last year of the war
was to include some of its most important and striking events: the
appearance in April of the powerful ironclad _Albemarle_; her career,
and her final destruction by a torpedo through the heroic bravery
of Lieutenant Cushing on the night of October 27-28; the fight of
the _Kearsarge_ and _Alabama_ on June 19th; the battle of Mobile Bay
on August 5th; the appearance of the ironclad _Stonewall_ and the
bombardments of Fort Fisher at the end of December and in the beginning
of the new year.
The destruction of the _Alabama_ on a Sunday morning off Cherbourg
brought to an end the career of a ship built in England and manned by
an English crew, which for more than two years had sunk or burned our
merchantmen. Her captain escaped being taken, as the English yacht
_Deerhound_, which had accompanied the _Alabama_ out of the harbor to
the point seven miles out where the _Kearsarge_ awaited her, took him
aboard before he could be reached by the boats from the _Kearsarge_.
That this aid, if it should be necessary, was prearranged, is shown
by the statement of Winslow of the _Kearsarge_, that the _Deerhound_
had received aboard Captain Semmes’s valuables the night before. It
was a notable victory and went far to set aright the British mind, so
susceptible to “success.”
Mobile, which so soon followed, was the crown of Farragut’s career, and
fixes his place as the greatest of naval commanders. His daring, his
consummate decision, his perfect self-reliance in situations such as
never before fell to an admiral to face, and his thorough command of
such, justify every praise. And in character--simplicity, kindliness,
and uprightness, and in every quality which we are apt to assign to
the best breeding of the sea--he was among the very first. Of but one
other, so far as I have known men, can so much be said--Sampson his
successor of thirty-three years after.
Farragut’s climbing aloft in the main shrouds, where his
flag-lieutenant, John Crittenden Watson (who still survives him, an
honored admiral), lashed him to prevent his falling; his anger with the
slowing of the _Brooklyn_ when her captain saw the monitor _Tecumseh_
go down before him from the explosion of a mine; Farragut’s order,
shouted from aloft: “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!”; the more
than Sydneyan courtesy of Tunis Craven, the captain of the unfortunate
_Tecumseh_, in stepping aside from the port of the turret and saying
to the pilot: “After you, sir,” and going down with his ship; the
final magnificent grappling of the _Hartford_, _Monongahela_, and
_Lackawanna_ with the ironclad _Tennessee_, make a story which it needs
a poet to tell and which should be enshrined in the heart of every
lover of complete courage and genius in action, and in no man were
these more personified than in Farragut. America would seem to have
lost that genius for praise in poetry of her heroes and heroic actions
which has remained in full vigor in England, whose poets seem to rise
ever to the occasion, even if at times soaring somewhat above it. But
better the latter than none at all. Still, whether sung or not (for
Brownell’s fine poem was but a taste of what should be), Mobile Bay
remains one of the finest dramas ever enacted upon the salt flood of
ocean.
The great bombardments of Fort Fisher on December 24th, 25th, and 27th,
and again on January 11th-15th by the fleet of fifty-eight ships under
Admiral Porter, during which the fort was assaulted by 2,000 seamen
and marines which, though unsuccessful in itself, greatly assisted that
of the army, were the last naval events of high importance of the war.
During this bombardment, in which the most powerful ships of the navy
assisted, 16,682 projectiles were fired, weighing 1,652,638 pounds. All
of the nineteen guns on the sea face of the fort were dismounted.
On April 9th came the surrender of Lee at Appomattox, and peace.