CHAPTER XXI
Thoughthere 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 theBlack 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 steamerWater 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 rapidlybeing 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 NavalCommittee 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 theBrooklyngone, 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 thePowhatanwas 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 thePowhatanwithout 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: thePennsylvania, 120;Columbus, 74;Delaware, 74;Raritan, 44;Columbia, 44;Merrimac, 40;Germantown, 20;Plymouth, 20, andDolphin, 10. All but theMerrimacwere sailing ships and thus, with this exception, no great loss. General Scott, weakenedby 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 harborand 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 theAlabamaandShenandoahwhich, 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 theNavy, 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 theMonitor, which appearedin the very nick of time, to save our wooden fleet from total destruction in Hampton Roads by theVirginia, so much better known under her original name of theMerrimac, 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 theMonitor’sbattle, 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 thePowhatan, saw the importance and feasibility of occupying the Mississippi. Porter, north again in November, brought the subject before the Navy Department, and urgedas 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 theHartfordin 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, hefound 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 theHartford, a sister ship to theBrooklyn, 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 theHartfordafire); 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 castfire 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 theMississippi, theMississippi! 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 theHartford, 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 shipMersey, which, following Farragut’s fleet up the river, anchored near theHartford, 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 ofgallant 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 toremain such to the end of the war; the ironclad had come into extended use; the Confederate ironcladAtlantahad been captured in Wassaw Sound in Georgia by the monitorWeehawken, 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 asports 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 ironcladAlbemarle; 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 theKearsargeandAlabamaon June 19th; the battle of Mobile Bay on August 5th; the appearance of the ironcladStonewalland the bombardments of Fort Fisher at the end of December and in the beginning of the new year.
The destruction of theAlabamaon 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 yachtDeerhound, which had accompanied theAlabamaout of the harbor to the point seven miles out where theKearsargeawaited her, took him aboard before he could be reached by theboats from theKearsarge. That this aid, if it should be necessary, was prearranged, is shown by the statement of Winslow of theKearsarge, that theDeerhoundhad 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 theBrooklynwhen her captain saw the monitorTecumsehgo down before him from the explosion of a mine; Farragut’sorder, shouted from aloft: “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!”; the more than Sydneyan courtesy of Tunis Craven, the captain of the unfortunateTecumseh, 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 theHartford,Monongahela, andLackawannawith the ironcladTennessee, 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 fortwas 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.