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2015 Designing Victory on the Civil War’s Sea: The Development and Use of Ironclad in the , 1830-1865 Gregory N. (Gregory Nathaniel) Stern

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

DESIGNING VICTORY ON THE CIVIL WAR’S SEA: THE DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF

IRONCLAD WARSHIPS IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, 1830-1865

By

GREGORY N. STERN

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2015

Copyright © 2015 Gregory N. Stern All Rights Reserved

Gregory N. Stern defended this dissertation on November 3, 2015. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Michael Creswell Professor Directing Dissertation

Mark Souva University Representative

Ron Doel Committee Member

Kristine Harper Committee Member

Kurt Piehler Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with the university requirements.

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To inventors for their ingenuity, to sailors for their courage, to my professors for their guidance, and to my parents for their patience.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has been a combined effort that includes research that started over ten years earlier. My travels to the coast, New , , D.C., pouring over print and electronic resources would not have been possible without a great deal of guid- ance and support from members of my dissertation committee, parents, and some truly energetic archivists. My major advisor, Dr. Michael Creswell, always pushed me to be a better writer and make professional connections wherever my path led. Dr. Kristine Harper, who has served in the U.S. Navy as a meteorologist, continually showed me ways to make sense of the complexes of technology and science from a historical perspective. Dr. Ron Doel, a scholar who sees ideas and opportunities in every question posed, has provided me with a host of different views of the world that I can apply to this and future projects. I would like to thank Dr. Kurt Piehler for join- ing my committee and lending his considerable breadth of knowledge of history to the examination of my manuscript. And I am also appreciative of Dr. Mark Souva’s expertise in po- litical science—grateful that I can contribute to the conversation between his field and history. I additionally would like to recognize Dr. P. David Dillard from at University— who was always an encouraging voice for my work at that stage. Conversations between myself and archivists are also something I have appreciated. Of particular I would like to note the exceptional work done at , repositories including Harvard’s Baker Library and particularly at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Hart Nautical Collection in Boston—led in part by Kurt Hasselbalch. I would like to thank the archivists at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, the Washington, D.C. Navy Yard library, Smithsonian, and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association for their tireless work, as well as those at the U.S. National Archives Building I in D.C.—especially Chris Killillay who did some extra digging for some obscure scraps of material for me. I must also credit the staffs at the collections in New York at the Public Library in Manhattan and the Histor- ical Society. This project also benefited from timely assistance by the staff at the Missouri His- tory Museum Library and Research Center. Lastly, I would like to thank Paul Thomsen from the Society for Military History in par- ticular, and the Society in general for giving me opportunities to refine some portions of the work you see here. Some sections were proofread privately, but others were also presented to conferences for feedback—including at the Society’s annual meetings. For that privilege, I will always be grateful.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...... vi

ABSTRACT ...... vii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 2: -HULLED SHIPPING IN BRITAIN, , AND THE , 1821-1859 ...... 32

CHAPTER 3: STEPHEN R. MALLORY’S IRONCLAD SOLUTION ...... 60

CHAPTER 4: WELLES’S WAY AND THE UNION IRONCLAD PROGRAM ...... 88

CHAPTER 5: IRONCLADS AND THE OPERATIONAL ENVIRONMENT ...... 136

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION ...... 167

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 174

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ..………………………………………………………… ...... 184

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Explosion of the "Peace-maker" on board the USS Princeton ...... 66

Figure 2: Harper's Weekly rendering of Rebel ironclad Merrimac on 2 November 1861 ...... 83

Figure 3: Sketch of the Atlantic Coast of the United States from Savannah River to Saint Mary's River Embracing the Coast of the State of ...... 96

Figure 4: Sketch G Showing the Progress of the Survey in Section Number 7 from 1849 to 1861 with Sub Sketch of Cedar Keys ...... 97

Figure 5: Ohio River between Mound City and Cairo – 1864 ...... 103

Figure 6: Ohio River – 1865 ...... 104

Figure 7: Coast Chart Number 21 New York Bay and , New York ...... 109

Figure 8: S.E. Virginia & ...... 120

Figure 9: Cumberland Gap Region ...... 128

Figure 10: Cumberland Gap Area ...... 129

Figure 11: Confederate Fortifications on the – 1862 ...... 132

Figure 12: Military Map of South-Eastern Virginia [1864] ...... 139

Figure 13: Military Map of South-East Virginia [1864] ...... 143

Figure 14: North Carolina and [1865] ...... 144

Figure 15: Charleston Harbor Map [1863] ...... 148

Figure 16: Fort Jackson, [1862] ...... 151

Figure 17: Millikens Bend, LA & Jackson, MS [1863] ...... 153

Figure 18: Map of General Sherman's marches [1863-1865] ...... 159

Figure 19: North Carolina [1865] ...... 163

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ABSTRACT

This is a study of the strategic and tactical use of ironclad warships during the American Civil War. The project seeks to examine why the naval administration on both sides (led by Gid- eon Welles for the Union and for the Confederacy) decided to give such vessels an opportunity in combat, their reaction to early operations (such as the famous battle at Hamp- ton Roads on 8-9 March 1862), and how they learned to deploy the as the war progressed-- accounting for difficulties with terrain, fortified opposition, learning curve for personnel, and weaknesses of the weapon system technology.

The study also encompasses history of science and technology concepts such as gate- keeper theory and social construction of technology. The military gatekeepers, Union and Con- federate, had to adopt weapons that suited their strategic needs as a part of their overall objective. The Confederate’s need to maintain open ports and fend off the ’s superior numbers made superior quality of ships a viable recourse. The Union’s need to defeat the Confederate Navy, including overcoming any of the South’s technological leaps, made inclusion of ironclad warships a valid plan. However, both sides of the conflict had to deal with different socially con- structed backgrounds. The South’s agricultural heritage and lack of industrial development hin- dered its ability to build or improve naval technology at home—forcing it to look abroad for as- sistance at a time when major nations would not recognize the Confederacy’s official existence. The Union’s entrenched naval traditions and cumbersome bureaucracy slowed approval of new and often unproven technologies. The result of these forces, military and technological, was an unforgiving trial by fire for the ironclad armored in the American Civil War.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

William F. Keeler, the forty-year-old acting paymaster on the Union ironclad warship USS in 1862, wrote his wife Anna on 22 February 1862 a couple weeks before the ’s duel with the Confederacy’s ironclad CSS Virginia at (9 March 1862): “All are getting impatient & want to get alongside the Merrimac…” and on 4 March 1862 he wrote, “We are finally all ready for a start & are now only waiting for a favourable wind, not to fill our “billowing” Sails, but to give us smooth water.” Just two days later Keeler would be minding the steam, smoke, and gas filling Monitor’s engine room and observing the struggles the ship had in maneuvering. And yet after the battle, Union Assistant Secretary of the Navy , would be calling it the greatest naval conflicts on record during the American Civil War—as would naval officers, newspapers, and citizens on both sides of the engagement. But this seminal moment in naval history took a great deal of invention, risk-taking, and cooperation to arrive at. And the ironclad warship performances after Hampton Roads were not quite the encores either the Union or Confederacy were expecting.1

Humanity has long traversed the seas thanks to the power of wind propelling wooden ships. The most mechanized apparatus on these sailing ships were , and shipbuilding itself still required wood and physical labor. The human and industrial resources of the nineteenth century, however, would develop the sail-cloth and wood of the old-world into the steam and iron of the new. The nineteenth century holds a powerful place in history for both the public and the scholarly observer. The first Industrial Revolution (1720-1850) which engulfed Western and the United States is characterized by refinements in metalwork, mechanization, and steam power, and these technological developments extended beyond urban centers to the seas.2

1 William F. Keeler, Anna Elizabeth Dutton Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor: 1862: The Letters of Acting Paymaster William Frederick Keeler, U. S. Navy To his Wife, Anna, ed. by Robert W. Daly (Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute, 1964), 24-30, 39-42. CSS Virginia was formerly the U.S. naval USS Merrimack. 2I denominate Industrial Revolution because not every place in the world industrialized at the same time. William H. Roberts, Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization (: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 1. 1

The changes between the old and the new eras of naval warships are impressive. In the eighteenth century, for instance, a highly-rated warship typically boasted three masts and 60 to 100 guns. By the mid-nineteenth century, precursors to mechanized were appearing in the (1853-1856). French navies constructed armored batteries powered by steam at the command of Emperor Napoleon III (1808 – 1873). In 1855, several of these ironclad batteries successfully attacked Russian fortifications with little damage suffered in return. A short time later, France’s La Gloire and Britain’s HMS Warrior inaugurated the connection between industrial production and armored vessels in the late 1850s. However, it would take the challenges of the American Civil War (1861-1865) to bring the full weight of industrialization into combat at sea.3 And, at least as important to all of these changes, were the adaptations made by people—the creators, users, and opponents of the myriad inventions this project discusses.

The human element has always been a critical component of technological development in warfare, a point underscored during the American Civil War. Indeed, the leaders in the Union and Confederate naval administrations struggled to find practical applications of the scientific revolution then sweeping the Western world. One prominent figure in this development appeared early on in the war. On 7 March 1861, President appointed as Union secretary of the navy, an appointment that would prove crucial to the war effort. One reason Welles made such an impact on naval matters during the Civil War stemmed from his managerial style. For example, when faced with matters he did not understand, such as ironclad vessel production, Welles did not attempt to muddle through. Instead, he set up advisory boards to provide him with expert advice. In response, Confederate secretary of the navy Stephen Mallory--appointed by on 20 February 1861--understood that he faced an industrial juggernaut in the Union and thus strongly advocated for using technological innovation to defeat the Union . These changes were not confined to the upper ranks; the transformation of technology affected common sailors and soldiers as well. While soldiers were dealing with and railroads, sailors had to acquire the skills required to operate new

3Spencer C. Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), xiii, xxv; and Roberts, Civil War Ironclads, 4. “Batteries” in this usage refers to an organized group of pieces on land or on a ship. 2

inventions--steam engines and processed air in compact spaces.4 Technology left no combatant untouched.

It is this melding of man and that makes the topic of ironclad warship development so fascinating. Ironclads were weapons produced by emerging industrial societies, ironclads achieved a definable status within that society. It took teams of men to create and operate the vessels which varied how such men viewed their participation in the ironclad’s development and usage. The relationship between the , combatants, and the material role of their revolutionary weapons was on the minds of nineteenth-century participants and finds life among current historians.5 It is thus a topic of ongoing interest and the historical questions one might ask are discussed below.

Historical Problems

This project examines the evolution of the relationship between Union and Confederate naval personnel with ironclad warships. Although some experimentation had been performed in Europe, the ironclad remained a fledgling technology in the context of a prolonged military engagement. This fact generates questions about why these ships were used at all during the war. What obstacles existed to using such innovative weapons? Understanding the disposition of the Union and Confederate naval administrations in the early portion of the Civil War can be accomplished by examining documented exchanges between primary actors in the development and acceptance of new naval technology at the time: senior naval administrators, younger personnel, and inventors. Through assessment of this interchange of ideas, the project tells the story of how a relatively untried technology was given an opportunity to perform amid such high stakes as preserving the Union and defending the Confederacy. Success or failure would have drastic repercussions for the outcome of the war.

Following battle at Hampton Roads between USS Monitor and CSS Virginia, the evaluation of the men and technology in a literal trial by fire spawns more questions. How did the Union and Confederacy react to this first-ever clash between armored warships? What, if any,

4Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 2, 8, 10; and David A. Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 4-5. 5Mindell, War, Technology and Experience, 10. 3

changes to military strategy were consequently applied to operations in the Civil War’s eastern and western theaters? Were such changes effective? The best way to answer these questions is to examine the after action reports and contemporary newspapers of the era because they offer reactions to the events closest to the time of their occurrence—and from both the military and civilian points of view.

Knowing the evaluations of the sailors and their higher level commanders can be a source of insight into the performance of ironclads in combat conditions. Sea operations along the East Coast, Gulf Coast, and western rivers were opportunities for both Union and Confederate navies to experience an assortment of scenarios involving armored ships. On the rivers, the strategies necessarily influenced the land forces in joint operations, bringing forward differing attitudes towards turning river barriers into highways useful for military movement.6 This change prompts additional questions about choices of naval-only and joint operations7 with the army–and sometimes with unexpected results. This, in turn, brings up the necessity to examine proponents and detractors of the new technology. Though the events at Hampton Roads inspired vigorous opinions, the need for further testing remained. Gideon Welles and Stephen Mallory were equally encouraged that ironclads could save their governments, but men like Union Rear Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont encountered failings and delays with the ships that soured opinions on them.8 Mallory’s detractors emerged after failures on subsequent ironclads built on the Virginia model. Ships like CSS Arkansas had to be scuttled after ill-fated Confederate attacks on Baton Rouge in late 1862. Poor construction had made Arkansas prone to engine failure, while other ships suffered similar disappointments. The failures would lead to investigations into Mallory’s competence, which lasted from August 1862 through March 1863—though Mallory would be absolved of wrongdoing.9

The next set of questions guiding this study involves the responses to the putative shortcomings the respective navies observed in the technology. After the failures like Charleston

6Fletcher Pratt, Civil War on Western Waters (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1956), 8-9. 7Joint operations occur when two or more military branches are working together in a military operation. 8Roberts, Civil War Ironclads, 85-86. 9Raimondo Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy, trans. Paolo E. Coletta (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 180-2. 4

for the Union in 186310 and those on the Mississippi River for the Confederacy, the question arises about what lessons were learned. To get at this problem, it is necessary to examine field reports and design improvements. Failures could wreak havoc on the lives of combatants, inventors, and politicians alike and thus doom the new technologies. Accordingly, how were the Union and Confederate navies able to persevere in the use of ironclads after several poor performances? What significance had formed in the minds of people about these new ships that made them worth pursuing? Did a consensus develop among those involved? Friction between engineers and officers mounted after the 1863 failures of Union ships, but there were exceptions.11 Resolving this debate was key to the technology’s future.

One way to resolve the debate would be to invoke practical considerations. Union General Ulysses S. Grant, an extremely practical military , appeared to understand how to use ironclads jointly with his land units. Grant planned troop movements against Vicksburg in mid-1863 that required flanking cover provided by deep- armored ships that could sail through bombardment from Confederate batteries.12 At Mobile Bay in 1864, former Virginia commander (and now admiral) had amassed a fleet of Virginia-style ironclads to fend off the impending assault from Union naval hero Admiral David G. Farragut.13 Farragut saw the value of combined operations, perhaps from its absence at Charleston and success at Vicksburg, when communicating his needs with Union naval administration.14 Thus for some commanders, tests under fire made the call an easy one.

Yet others disagreed with Grant and Farragut. Indeed, there existed a variety of attitudes towards ironclad warships. Different methods developed for implementing General ’s on the Union side, and whether the new industrial technologies could be used extensively enough to block Confederate access to the sea. The Confederacy was eager to embrace any technical edge it could achieve over the Union, but it is a wonder how Mallory truly

10Roberts, Civil War Ironclads, 94. The 1863 failure refers to the Union Navy flotilla’s defeat on 7 April 1863 in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina under the command of Admiral Samuel F. DuPont, and various defeats the Confederacy suffered along the Mississippi River—but especially at , Louisiana and Vicksburg, Mississippi. Each of these battles will be discussed in more detail in later chapters. 11Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor, 120. 12A ship’s draft is the portion of the vessel below the . William M. Fowler, Jr., Under Two Flags: The American Navy in the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 215. 13Jack D. Coombe, Gunfire Around the Gulf: The Last Major Naval Campaigns of the Civil War (New York: Bantam Books, 1999), 154. 14Coombe, Gunfire Around the Gulf, 157. 5

could envision this tactical objective given the South’s severe shortages in industrial capacity. After ironclads seemed to prove themselves at Hampton Roads, the stresses of warfare later revealed doubts among field personnel about inadequacies of the technology. Participants in the war learned the lessons of the trials by fire to varying degrees.

Interdisciplinary Issues

While the people of the nineteenth century were observing changes in warship technology, scholars today can see this project’s reach into other fields of study. The study primarily targets the fields of military history and the history of science and technology; however, economics, political science, and international relations all play a part. None of these fields should be viewed as entirely separate, for each is an avenue to explore the other.

Particularly of interest to economic scholars would be the early iron shipping business ventures, Congressional appropriations for military projects (including the completed warships), and trade impacts during the technological transition period from sail and wood to steam and iron. Joel Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (2011) would not only be a suitable complimentary read, but include some of the early nineteenth century background on the economic conditions already in place as the events this project discusses occur. Robert Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009) may also help.15

Political scientists may find the administrative history of this project particularly intriguing. It is particularly noteworthy how Union secretary of the navy Gideon Welles’ diary has often been used as a window on the Abraham Lincoln presidential administration. The relationship between the Union and Confederate governments with their respective naval establishments could also prove enlightening. James McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (2008) and Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in

15 Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution 1700-1850 (New York: Penguin Books, 2011); and Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 6

Chief (2014) would be a worthwhile for broader pictures of the Union and Confederate administrative scenes.16

International relations and diplomacy play a pivotal role for the navy during the American Civil War on multiple levels. The geopolitical ramifications of the of the Confederacy, the Confederacy’s , and especially the foreign construction of Confederate warships are all discussed in this study to varying degrees. Additionally, the “spy game” and high level diplomatic tensions between the United States, Britain, France, and even Russia that result are more angles for diplomatic historians to examine. Howard Jones’ Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (2010) is one of the few works dedicated to the diplomatic aspect of the war.17

Civil War Naval Historiography

The War Between the States has been and remains a major subject of scholarly interest. Yet this attention had been unbalanced. Academic histories have long focused on land-based forces during the American Civil War while largely overlooking the naval component of that conflict. In addition to scholarly work, popular media and preservation work have also mostly concerned themselves with the armies of the Union and Confederacy. The balance has begun to shift, however, as the last quarter century, has seen more attention paid to the sea-going activities of this seminal conflict. This section discusses authors and works that have evolved along with military history in the last couple of decades. The Civil War in general and the naval aspect in particular have adhered to the overarching trends in historical study, especially transnational studies and interdisciplinary approaches.

Early twentieth century work on the Civil War navies tended to be narrative-approached with occasional micro-histories. Indeed, one could find a book on the entire naval history of the western theatre or a book on the entire history of the Union navy. In more recent years, works have shown more variety in scope, though some of the latest books have harkened back to the

16 James McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief (New York: Penguin Press, 2008); and James McPherson, Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin Press, 2014). 17 Jones, Howard, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 7

macroscopic view. The mid-1990s saw the arrival of works dedicated to particular ships. These books and articles used the creation of one vessel, activities of its crew, and performance of the ship to act as microcosms of the entire war. Interdisciplinary trends in history also became apparent, as some authors used single vessels as expressions of other fields, including literature, technology, and politics.

Cultural trends in history during the 1990s touched this topic as well. Scholars emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s with works telling readers about the daily lives of sailors from muster to discharge. The effect of the cultural theory also reflected a strong aversion to writing strict narratives of the entire Civil War since James McPherson’s landmark single-volume Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988) or Shelby Foote’s three-volume The Civil War (1958- 1974). Comprehensive narratives, however, did find their way back into publication.

More analytical narratives have cropped up among Civil War naval histories as they have gained popularity in scholarly historical work. Having left behind the strict battle-narratives of the early-to mid-twentieth century, military historians have found new ways to recount the stories of these ships, crews, and administrators. These authors have learned to successfully combine the histories of vessels, sailors, and high-level officers into works that do not only tell what happened –but how and why. Transnational histories, a current trend in historiography, have also gripped Civil War naval studies. The “Atlantic World” is a strong theme in transnational history, and the relationship between Britain and the United States during this time is often deemed insignificant. Nonetheless, there was a conduit between British and American technological development that is only now being explored.

Single-Vessel Studies

The category of vessel case studies includes the works on famous firsts, such as USS Monitor and CSS Hunley. Lesser known ships like CSS Albemarle are also to be found in these examinations. James T. Dekay’s Monitor: The Story of the Legendary Civil War Ironclad and the Man Whose Invention Changed the Course of History (1997), Brian Hicks’s Raising the Hunley: The Remarkable History and Recovery of the Lost Confederate (2002), and Robert G. Elliott’s Ironclad of the Roanoke: Gilbert Elliott’s Albemarle (1994) are relevant examples.

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William Marvel’s The & the Kearsarge: The Sailor’s Civil War (1996), David A. Mindell’s War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor (2000), articles by Mindell and Marshall Legan, and Jerry O. Potter’s The Sultana Tragedy (1992) represent other case studies that similarly expound on a single ship, but broaden their approach with anthropologic aspects from specific events or more diverse methods. It is useful to start with the narrower examinations to spotlight, for the reader, the major elements that appear in this historiography so he or she may recognize them in connected works.18

In Monitor: The Story of the Legendary Civil War Ironclad and the Man Whose Invention Changed the Course of History (1997), James Dekay examines how Monitor maintained a celebrity status in naval history, but has still attracted numerous misconceptions of its significance--proposing that many saw its mechanical innovations as the greatest contribution. He argues that the vessel’s performance at the (8-9 March 1862) had lasting diplomatic and political ramifications and had psychological effects on the sailors who witnessed it in action. DeKay has written a number of “popular” yet historical books on naval history, including works on “rebel raiders” that preyed on Union supply shipping. Though his motives may be myth-busting in nature, he uses an astute synthesis methodology. The author relies mostly on secondary sources, but the ones he has chosen are the landmark works from the mid-twentieth century that thoroughly establish the historiographical framework upon which more modern works rest. DeKay’s reliance on William Still’s 1971 Iron Afloat and Raimondo Luraghi’s 1996 work (discussed below) demonstrate awareness of a need to the gap in scholarship. The alert importance attributed to political impediments before and after Monitor’s combat debut among highlight increasing interest in non-combat relationships of key personalities in the war. Some intellectual and scientific history is introduced as the technical implications of Monitor’s novel components are considered along with a biography of the inventor . Inclusion of the scientific approach has been an issue in the body of

18James Tertius deKay, Monitor: The Story of the Legendary Civil War Ironclad and the Man Whose Invention Changed the Course of History (New York: Walker and Company, 1997); Brian Hicks and Schuyler Kropf, Raising the Hunley: The Remarkable History and Recovery of the Lost Confederate Submarine (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002); Robert G. Elliott, Ironclad of the Roanoke: Gilbert Elliott’s Albemarle (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Publishing Co., Inc., 1994); William Marvel, The Alabama & the Kearsarge: The Sailor’s Civil War, ed. by Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); David A. Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and Jerry O. Potter, The Sultana Tragedy: ’s Greatest Maritime Disaster (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1992). 9

works as the technical understanding of the audience has to be considered. So, DeKay’s book may be considered more of a guide to secondary synthesis in the field than a direct resource on its own.19

Brian Hicks’s Raising the Hunley (1999) was co-written with Schuyler Kropf. Both wrote for The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, and have compiled a thorough list of sources that fuel an interesting approach to connect the history with modern occurrences. Among the sources are key Civil War-era references, government records, personal and official correspondence from major figures (such as inventor Horace Hunley and commanding officer George Dixon), and modern sources from dive teams to the wreck. The authors purport that Hunley, as the first successful submarine, was a fond remembrance of Civil War veterans as well as an inspiration to future subsurface naval development. Close reading methods were applied to correspondence surrounding the battles Hunley fought around Charleston Harbor. Communications between the submarine’s inventors, crews, and a few headline Civil War personalities (Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard noteworthy among them) help present a concise account of the ship’s often suicidal deployment as well as frenetic attempts to recover the ship after its sinking in 1863. The history is used as context for the social and scientific approach as the authors conduct the reader through the recovery process of the wreck. The attention to the salvaging efforts also notes the fate of the crew. The book discusses the search for the buried remains of the earlier crews that had perished in doomed sea-trials as well as the half- dozen found still at their posts inside the ship. Hicks and Kropf essentially contribute a public history piece for the historiography. The authors not only show modern recovery of Civil War history, but demonstrate that such sentiments were shared by the public within just a few years of the war’s conclusion. The book also discusses the development of myth and attempts to dispel dishonoring ideas about the submarine’s history in the years following the war. Though the authors are not professional historians, they still serve readers with a tangible link between past and present and the effects of memory on historical artifacts. The book shows an early step in the

19James Tertius deKay, Monitor: The Story of the Legendary Civil War Ironclad and the Man Whose Invention Changed the Course of History (New York: Walker and Company, 1997), 3, 207. 10

development of submarine warfare, which still occurs today, and the almost romantic connection between man and machine.20

Robert G. Elliott’s Ironclad of the Roanoke: Gilbert Elliott’s Albemarle (1994) tackles the study of a single Confederate ironclad that operated off the North Carolina coast in 1864. The book similarly follows the approach often taken with Monitor based works in that it starts with a political examination of the relationship between the government and the ship’s architect. This is followed by a scientific approach regarding the ship’s construction and a social element to communicate on-board activity while in the field. Elliott makes comprehensive use of a number of typical Civil War sources--period newspapers such Harper’s Weekly for the national scene and local publications. Extensive archival evidence is garnered from troops in the Roanoke Island area. Other sources come from manuscripts taken from crews onboard the Albemarle and related vessels. The author invokes some of the aforementioned landmark secondary sources to shore up the historical narrative--Joseph Durkin’s biography Stephen R. Mallory: Confederate Navy Chief (1954) is among the highlights. Elliott’s book as a whole is a valuable micro-history of an ironclad from drawing board to sinking. The inclusion of the repartee between inventor and Confederate government adds to the historiography by demonstrating that such a relationship was not a Union-only feature. The narrative of battles is expected, but the inclusion of on board activities and correspondence between the crew and their relatives offers some cultural insights into the attitudes sailors had towards the effectiveness of this new technology in light of the chaos involved in their operation. Elliott’s deep exploration of the Albemarle allows the exploits of one ship and crew to speak volumes about the technical and personal challenges involved in bringing any such invention into the field.21

William Marvel’s The Alabama & the Kearsarge: The Sailor’s Civil War (1996) is edited by Gary W. Gallagher. This authorship is significant as both men are extensively involved in Civil War historical writing. Marvel has written books on Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Andersonville prison, and many others. He has won several awards—among them the Lincoln

20Brian Hicks and Schuyler Kropf, Raising the Hunley: The Remarkable History and Recovery of the Lost Confederate Submarine (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 2-3, 100. 21Robert G. Elliott, Ironclad of the Roanoke: Gilbert Elliott’s Albemarle (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Publishing Co., Inc., 1994), 31; and Joseph T. Durkin, Stephen R. Mallory: Confederate Navy Chief (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1954). 11

Prize, Douglas Southall Freeman Award, and Bell Award.22 Gary Gallagher, the John L. Nau professor in the history of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia, is author and editor of numerous works including a second work discussed later in this essay.23 In Marvel’s book on the Confederate commerce raider Alabama (with ) and the pursuing Union ship Kearsarge (eventually under Captain John Winslow), the qualities of the complete vessel study with the sailor-life component are evident as seen in the Monitor and Albemarle works.

Marvel’s book, as with the other examinations, goes into great detail about the construction and acquisition of the two vessels Alabama and Kearsarge. In addition, Marvel goes into at least as much detail about ship-board life and the effect these vessels had on the Confederate cause overall. Marvel’s thesis argues how the brazen attacks and overseas adventures of the raiders boosted Confederate belief that Union naval strength could be broken. This false confidence was given while simultaneously letting the world know of Southern cause. Stories of success on the high seas would be good news in the blockaded Confederacy. But, as Alabama’s Captain Semmes realized in June 1864 while he sailed to confront the Kearsarge in Cherbourg harbor, the Confederacy’s failure to win international support “sealed its fate.”24

Marvel’s book also contributes to the views of sailor life, especially the more miserable moments, in chapters like “Doldrums” where the taxing nature of naval service on a long dangerous voyage can been seen on the Kearsarge. Running “afoul of the bottle” (drinking) was a recurrent problem and led to desertions. The rest and relaxation angle is exemplified by displays like Semmes anchoring the Alabama off Martinique while his men entertained themselves and foraged for provisions. Marvel’s work, boasting intense use of primary sources from the military administration and shipboard personnel, uses both a military and sailor’s cultural approach. This augments the historiography with the motivations for Confederate raiding outside of the main theatres of Civil War conflict and juxtaposes them with the intersecting impetus of Union pursuit. The final defeat of Alabama is also portrayed as the end of the Confederacy’s honeymoon with British supplied ships--the Alabama itself a product of

22“William Marvel,” Houghton Mifflin Company, http://www.hmhco.com/bookstore/authors/William- Marvel/2220783 (accessed 28 January 2015). 23“Gary W. Gallagher,” University of Virginia, http://www.virginia.edu/history/user/23 (accessed 28 January 2015). 24William Marvel, The Alabama & the Kearsarge: The Sailor’s Civil War, ed. by Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 265. 12

Liverpool shipyards. This political denouement between the Confederacy and Europe is frequently considered a major factor in the outcome of the war—further reducing the possibility of international legitimacy of the Confederate States.25

Single-Vessel Studies: Broader Approaches

David A. Mindell is an extensively educated authority on military technology and ocean archaeology. Mindell, currently a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, has degrees in electrical engineering, literature, and the history of technology. Mindell’s War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor (2000) aims to study the innovative vessel by broadening the scope of examination “to include patrons, contractors, constructors, rivals, users, public imagery, and literary expressions.” This is a significant claim as Mindell uses the history of science approach to frame the human roles in Monitor’s creation in a system equally important to its mechanical components. The resulting thesis is that Monitor’s place in technical military history and its cultural significance are entwined. Mindell also argues that all persons involved with the ship were fully cognizant of their mark on history, politics, and the effects such symbols had on combat. Mindell also reestablishes awareness of predecessors to Monitor and Virginia by discussing European ironclad experiments—notably Britain’s HMS Warrior. The author, returning to the history of science approach, introduces discussion of Monitor’s symbolism and the entanglement of images with devices, symbols with causes. The distinctions one would draw are further muddled as those who viewed the Monitor in action felt the ship represented American industrial might just as much as people who constructed and fought inside the ship. Mindell mixes the cultural and scientific by arguing that constructing an invention is itself a symbol while symbol-making is also a technical achievement. Both factors combine into the term “technology.” Mindell, as with other single-ship studies, discusses the public and administrative response to the ship’s actions.26

25Marvel, The Alabama & the Kearsarge, 99, 104. 26David A. Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), ix, 10, 12, 15-16, 78, 150; and MIT, “David A. Mindell”, http://web.mit.edu/sts/people/mindell.html (accessed 28 January 2015). 13

Mindell, using personal accounts from those involved with the Monitor’s construction, implementation, and combat service, showcases the agents and relationships that brought the ship to fruition. The author, however, also utilizes a relatively recent approach by examining the sources in the context of technology’s role within society--a military society in this case. Mindell’s contribution is the realization that inventions are combinations of human and mechanical resource, of which Monitor was a landmark example.27

A few years prior to this book, an article by Mindell was published in the journal Technology and Culture. “The Clangor of that Blacksmith’s Fray” (1995) has many of the technology-in-society elements that appear later in Mindell’s book, but has an intriguing literary component that is not as emphasized later. Mindell was only a doctoral candidate at MIT at this point, but five years before his published book, he had hit upon multiple approaches to the topic of Civil War navies. Mindell’s article covers the construction of Monitor, and significantly, the effect of the ship’s environment on the engineers, crew, and public perception. His argument, similar to the one formulated later in the book, is that the relationship between man and machine can be told through a combination of evidence from direct experience and public literary expression. Monitor, while often construed as a technological revolution, can instead be seen (along with CSS Virginia) as the dawn of a new era of metal-hulled ships rather than the immediate death knell of wooden ships.28

The sources for Mindell’s article, with the extra attention paid to literature, may not add much in the way of conventional historical evidence directly to the topic. However, the literature itself may be used as evidence. The author’s piece invokes three personalities: William F. Keeler (a paymaster aboard Monitor), , and Herman Melville. Mindell uses Keeler as a detailed witness to events on the ship from construction to service. But Keeler is also valuable in that he is not well versed in engineering. Keeler’s writings are also mostly to his wife, so for the benefit of a civilian and close relative. Therefore, the article contributes at least one lower-end primary source witness (besides the larger figures of Gideon Welles and John Ericsson). Hawthorne and Melville both address the social implications of the industrialization of

27Mindell, War, Technology, and Experience, 150. 28David A. Mindell, “’The Clangor of that Blacksmith’s Fray’: Technology, War, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor,” Technology and Culture 36, no. 2 (Apr. 1995): 242-270, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3106372 (accessed 30 October 2014), 242-249. Several of these persons will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. 14

naval warfare as an end to the romantic days of sailing ships in favor of impersonal mechanical warfare. Mindell recognizes these authors’ struggle to understand the new role technology was playing in warfare. The author concludes such writers saw a reduction of human agency simultaneously with intensified experiences for those that participated. The literary approach to telling the history of a single vessel, according to Mindell, may not tote the line of the official record but remains in agreement with the historical trend to consider technology as a symbol for forthcoming change. The history of technology element in Mindell’s book, in conjunction with the literary element in this earlier article, provides the historiography with several means to question the relationship between humans and their inventions.29

Mindell uses the Monitor as a single case study to illustrate a larger question about human-technological relationships. Marshall Scott Legan’s article, “The Confederate Career of a Union Ram,” (2000) uses a similar method with the wooden side-wheeler Queen of the West to highlight how the Confederacy accomplished military objectives with substantial deficiencies in men and materiel compared to the Union. Legan was a professor of history at the University of Louisiana-Monroe and president of the Louisiana Historical Society at the time this article was published. It takes some time for Legan to get to his argument. His article is busied with construction of the originally northern ram and a lengthy narrative on Queen’s activities until its loss and capture in February 1863.30

After the capture, Legan maintains the narrative through the ships sinking a few months later. The author’s argument is not stated clearly until after the layout of Queen’s career. He puts forth that the service of Queen was an example of how the Confederacy could compensate for its insufficiencies by converting Northern equipment for Southern needs.31 The sources for this argument are not all that noteworthy. Legan is using government records, newspapers--the New Orleans Times, Richmond Examiner, and Harper’s Weekly--as well as works done on the Union Engineer Charles Ellet Jr.--a proponent of using rams on the rivers of the Western Theatre. The

29David A. Mindell, “’The Clangor of that Blacksmith’s Fray’: Technology, War, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor,” Technology and Culture 36, no. 2 (Apr. 1995): 242-270, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3106372 (accessed 30 October 2014), 245, 249, 250-252, 270. 30Marshall Scott Legan, “The Confederate Career of a Union Ram,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 41, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 277-300, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4233674 (accessed 30 October 2014), 277, 279, 286-288. 31Legan, “The Confederate Career of a Union Ram,” 299. 15

author also uses some of the major secondary sources such as those from James deKay and William Still. The article does not add evidentiary material to the historiography, but does contribute to the scholarship with a specific example of the Confederate naval strategy in tackling the Union industrial juggernaut. The work also hints at some of the resurgence in military historical narratives that was occurring in the historiography within the past decade. This will be discussed again in a later section.

Jerry O. Potter’s The Sultana Tragedy: America’s Greatest Maritime Disaster (1992) is a concentrated study on an accident involving the steamer Sultana (commanded by Captain J. Cass Mason) which typically was used for Union troop transportation. On 27 April 1865, a poor repair job on one of the ship’s resulted in an explosion that killed over 1,800 of its passengers and crew--many of who were released Union soldiers from the infamous Confederate prison camp at Andersonville. Potter’s aim in the book is to highlight a tragedy that had largely been marginalized by Civil War historians. The author argues that the turbulent events after the surrender of Lee to Grant at Appomattox and President Lincoln’s assassination are only partial explanations for why the Sultana tragedy went largely ignored. Potter argues that the disaster’s occurrence in a western river and the desensitized public attitudes after four years of war reduced news coverage at the time. He also puts forth that historians have forgotten the victims due to their unremarkable status as “…farmers, clerks, and laborers. Men who had made no mark in life.”32

Potter, unlike the other single-vessel studies, does not devote all that much material to the ship’s mechanics. In fact, his chapter on the construction is only four pages long. Most of the work is devoted to documenting the background of those ending up onboard the ship’s final voyage including prisoners, officers from Vicksburg, and crew. This cultural approach is quite useful to the historiography as Potter provides for the the reader descriptions of the lives of prisoners—among these recounting are graphic depictions of starvation and disease suffered at Andersonville prison. After a narrative of Sultana’s final trip on the Mississippi River and the accident, the book switches to a political history regarding the trial of surviving officers which shows some insight into jurisprudence of the era. Determining guilt or innocence, use of

32Jerry O. Potter, The Sultana Tragedy: America’s Greatest Maritime Disaster (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1992), 3, 18. 16

investigative commissions, and the treatment of military responsibility all get spotlighted. Potter ends his book with the rolls of passengers listed aboard Sultana at the time of its destruction. In addition to the available manifests, the author uses surviving officer records, testimony from the investigative commissions, and contemporary newspapers to bolster the narrative.33

Sailor Studies

Jerry Potter’s subject is the fate of a single ship, but he marginalizes the ship itself which has the effect of highlighting the stories of the prisoners and officers. The books discussed so far have had a compound interest in the vessel and the crew. The work on the Sultana, however, demonstrates interest in personnel taking precedence. Sailor-focused works in the Civil War navy field frequently take on a cultural approach as the relationship among the sailors is examined and thrown into comparison with their origins. Michael Bennett’s Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War (2004) is a work that exhibits a persistent trend in sailor historiography that involves examination of motivations to serve in the navies and analysis of shipboard activity. The work also demonstrates the anecdotal method that serves the cultural aspect so well.

Bennett’s book, also edited by Gary Gallagher, is a cultural history of sailors during the Civil War. The author explores the problems faced by sailors going to sea at the time of the war, their lives onboard ship, and ways in which the sailors’ daily social-cultural relationships can act as a window onto critical issues facing personnel all across the theatre of battle. Race, class, religion, and health all find their way into Bennett’s examination. Bennett’s argument is that sailors had entered the Union naval service to avoid the war, but ended up facing all of the key issues that were attributed to the conflict anyway. The alternating tedium and danger of sea service exacerbated social tensions (racial and religious for example), but required a degree of coexistence in order to survive the naval ordeal. Though the experience was severe, sailors were changed in a fundamental cultural manner whether it was in the form of remembrance or treatment of fellow men. The author uses anecdotes and other evidence gleaned from logs, correspondence onboard ship, and some secondary source framework to bring forth the typical existence of a Union sailor. Examples of the alcoholic culture are quite entertaining as sailors

33Potter, The Sultana Tragedy, 3-7, 10-11. 17

“spliced the main brace”--sailor slang for grog rationing. The work addresses problems with these sources in studies of Civil War sailors as increased movement and less prolific writing (compared to land forces) has left fewer collections of writings than historians would hope for. Bennett, however, does find that studying Union sailors is an opportunity to draw on more writings as blockade activity was especially stagnant and conducive to allowing the sailors the idle time to write. More significantly, the book studies the sailors with more intensity than officers in a true bottom-top analysis of the naval culture. The lack of concentration on a single vessel also lets Bennett draw on a broader analysis. This enables the sailors’ cultural evidence to be reasonably attributed all along the Union naval service.34

Re-engaging the Comprehensive Studies

Micro-histories on single ships and cultural studies of sailors have contributed much towards detailing the lives and times of the Civil War navies. But getting the “big picture” is still valuable for situating the narrower stories in the narrative context. The translated A History of the Confederate Navy (1996) by Raimondo Luraghi, William Still’s The Confederate Navy: The Ships, Men, and Organization (1997), and Donald L. Canney’s Lincoln’s Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization, 1861-65 (1998) mark mid-late 1990s resurgence of analytical narrative studies. These works tend to take political and economic approaches while painting in fine-tuned, yet sweeping strokes over the richness of events during the war.

Raimondo Luraghi’s A History of the Confederate Navy (1996) is translated by Paolo E. Coletta. Luraghi, a professor emeritus at the University of Genoa (Italy), constructs an incredibly sweeping examination of the Confederate navy’s creation by Stephen Mallory, development, outfitting, international effect, and performance in battle. Luraghi’s thesis is that qualitative deficiencies in the Confederacy--social, economic, and technological--were confirmations of the truth of nineteenth century warfare. Luraghi argues that the industrial revolution consigned the South to failure as their exertions could not overcome the men and material of the North. Centralized efficiency, raw materials, and a history of mechanized labor were not elements possessed to a great degree by Confederate agrarian society. The author’s work draws

34Michael J. Bennett, Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War, ed. by Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), xi, xii, 104, 210. 18

extensively from official government records and top level correspondence. Some significant secondary source material enters into the picture with works from William Still and the like. By far, Luraghi uses papers from Mallory to demonstrate the foresight and enthusiasm with which the Confederacy seized opportunities to get a leg-up on Union naval power. The author examines the Confederacy’s desperate grab for naval power with the ironclad technological developments, the Tredegar iron-works creation in Richmond, Virginia, and the limited acquisition of British ships. Luraghi spends most of the second half of his book on battles, commerce raiders, and other technical innovations like new ironclad classes and .35

Luraghi’s contribution is his thoroughness. Though the book does not pay particular attention to the cultural aspects of sailors, it delivers an incredibly detailed narrative that draws conclusions on internal politics, international relations, economics, and military affairs. The analytical-narrative approach allows Luraghi to explain the changing nature of warfare and national organization within the Confederacy, and then apply it to the way the rest of the world was adapting to the industrial revolution.

William Still’s The Confederate Navy: The Ships, Men, and Organization (1997) is actually a collection of essays by several notable historians in the field including Dr. Robert M. Browning, Jr. with the U.S. Coast Guard, Dr. Norman C. Delaney from Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, TX, Robert Holcombe from the Confederate Naval Museum in Columbus, GA, Dr. Harold Langley from the , Professor Luraghi, Dr. Maurice Melton from Andrew College in Cuthbert, GA, Dr. Royce Shingleton from Darton College in Albany, GA, and author David M. Sullivan. William Still is a retired professor of maritime history and nautical archaeology at East Carolina University. The collection of authors in the book are meant to argue that the Confederate Navy could not overcome the lack of general infrastructure, emphasis on the army, and win a significant advantage over the Union. The essays also attempt to collectively argue that the Confederacy, despite its shortcomings, made lasting technological contributions with their own ironclads, submarines, and Stephen Mallory’s visionary approach.36 The book goes on to discuss the formation of the Confederate navy, ship building, and servicing.

35Raimondo Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy, trans. Paolo E. Coletta (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 20, 41, 56, 348. 36William N. Still, Jr., ed., The Confederate Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization, 1861-65 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press/Conway Maritime Press, 1997), viii. 19

The last five essays add further depth with discussions of Confederate sailors, officers, and shipboard activities. This is a welcome addition to the historiography in light of the later work on the Union sailors discussed in Union Jacks.

Each of the authors in Still’s collection does a remarkable job of combining primary and secondary sources. Every chapter uses period correspondence (letters, diaries, reports) in conjunction with secondary source reinforcement for context. For example, the chapter on the development of the Confederate department of the navy contains letters to and from Stephen Mallory, register records from the Confederate navy department, and the biography of Mallory by Durkin. This combination of material is seen throughout the compilation, bringing personal and official evidence into the historiography. The authors use this evidence to construct the history with subtopics that allow the reader to parse the enormous volume of information across administrative, technical, and human categories.

Donald L. Canney’s Lincoln’s Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization, 1861-65 (1998) starts the text with the author’s own commentary on gaps in Civil War naval history including more work on vessel histories or joint operations with land armies. Canney’s work presents an overarching exploration of the Union Navy--examinations of personnel relationships, logistics, and original work done on naval casualties and ship losses. Canney has less of an argument than a goal with this book. He states quite overtly that inspiration of further scholarship is at least one achievement he seeks. An argument can be ferreted out in that Canney sees the naval role in the American Civil War as an aberration. The author claims that the northern navy, in 1861, was more prepared for a style engagement than , river combat, or assaulting coastal fortifications. Sustained use of any military force in the United States was a new concept as organized combat forces had long been anathema to the American public.37

Canney goes on to sort out the Union Navy’s development from top organizers down to the enlisted sailor. This is an excellent balance of classic military-history examination of the mechanics of warfare combined with the human factors--recruitment, service, and shipboard activity. Canney cogently combines contemporary regulation sources (e.g. communiqués from ordnance officers) along with statistical analysis (annual reports of the Secretary of the Navy are

37Donald L. Canney, Lincoln’s Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization, 1861-65 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press/Conway Maritime Press, 1998), vi, vii, 1. 20

particularly involved) to produce information on the often ignored details of loss in Civil War naval warfare. This presents the scholarship with multiple entry points for further study of everything from uniforms to how sailors dealt with the monotony of blockade life.

The historiographical contribution of Still’s book is enormous. Not only does it pool together a diverse crowd of authorities on the field of Civil War navies, but it provides a concisely thorough exposition of Confederate navy life down to the officer and sailor level. Taken together with comprehensive works on naval administration (as done by Luraghi and Canney) and Union sailor studies (as done by Bennett), a fairly in-depth awareness of Civil War naval life can be garnered.

Where We Are Now

The last works discussed in this essay demonstrate the current course of Civil War naval historiography. Howard J. Fuller’s Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power (2008) marks a powerful shift in historical study towards the transnational approach, as he adds an Atlantic World element with heavy emphasis on the British role in American naval development during the Civil War. William H. Roberts’s Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization (2002)--plus an earlier article, Spencer Tucker’s two works A Short History of the Civil War at Sea (2002) and Blue & Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (2006) are all complete studies of Civil War navies from either or both sides of the conflict, and apply multiple approaches to the narrative. James McPherson’s War on the Waters: The Union & Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 (2012) along with Craig Symonds two works Lincoln and His Admirals (2008) and The Civil War at Sea (2012) are also newer comprehensive studies that have subsumed more of the military, technological, administrative, and international histories that have come about on the subject of the Civil War navies.38

38Howard J. Fuller, Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power, foreword by Robert J. Schneller, Jr. (Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers, 2008); William H. Roberts, ”’The Name of Ericsson’: Political Engineering in the Union Ironclad Program, 1861-1863,” Journal of Military History 63, no. 4 (Oct. 1999); William H. Roberts, Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002; Spencer C. Tucker, A Short History of the Civil War at Sea, The American Crisis Series: Books on the Civil War Era 5 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2002); Spencer C. Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006); James M. McPherson, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 21

Fuller’s Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power (2008). A senior lecturer on war studies out of the University of Wolverhampton in the . Fuller has written several works on ironclads, but this particular volume is highly reflective of trends in historical scholarship as a whole as well as the historiography of Civil War navies. Clad in Iron brings in the British role to the story. Fuller’s basic argument is that Britain and the United States shared challenges and advances in technology during the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution, and that these changes pressured the respective naval forces to adapt differently. Fuller sees the Union response to the outbreak of war and innovation of naval technology as simultaneously interested in subduing the Confederate rebellion while staving off foreign interference. Britain, meanwhile, had to streamline its navy to maintain a competitive edge over rivals like France and this competition compelled the Admiralty to observe and learn from the American experience. To this end, Fuller uses extensive manuscript-based sources to tell the tale of the planning, assembling, and use of new naval technologies. He introduces political, economic, and even social elements to the argument.39

Fuller’s sources are extensive. He covers the mainstays--Still, Roberts, and Tucker. But Fuller’s primary sources also pull from Congressional reports, parliamentary papers from Britain, and personal papers of British and U.S. naval personnel such as Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Milne and Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren respectively. The author’s vast array of individual correspondence, government correspondence (from both sides of the Atlantic), and secondary source reinforcement bring forth reams of information to a relatively young approach taken with this topic.

Fuller’s Clad in Iron is a transnational approach to the Civil War navy historiography. While he makes use of the typical Atlantic World participants of Britain and the United States, he also involves France in the analysis, which is rare for Anglo-American historians. Diplomatic history also finds a home with this book with incidents like the .40 The author also

2012); Craig L. Symonds, The Civil War at Sea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 39Fuller, Clad in Iron, xv; and “Dr. Howard Fuller,” University of Wolverhampton, http://www.wolverhampton.ac.uk/default.aspx?page=15678 (Accessed 28 January 2015). 40 The ‘Trent Affair’ was an incident where Confederate representatives were caught on a British ship while on a mission to negotiate for British diplomatic recognition of the Confederate States of America. For more on the Trent Affair, see Chapter 3. 22

introduces a new insight into British administrative workings while the technological revolution played out across the Atlantic. The initial British anxiety about the Monitor’s success at Hampton Roads, for example, is a relatively unexamined aspect of the effect the war had on the nineteenth century world. Civil War historians typically marginalize the British threat after the Confederacy loses at the and Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation (1862 and 1863, respectively). So, there could be issue taken with the degree of importance on the British element Fuller is implying. Time will tell. But while transnational approaches are still evolving, they are not the only way to blend the different layers of administration, invention, and society that tell the story of the Civil War navies.41

Roberts’s Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization (2002) developed in part from his doctoral dissertation from The Ohio State University in 1999. The author succinctly states his argument that the ironclad program of the Union demonstrated the aggressive attitude of the Union naval administration who expected to carry the war to the enemy. This ability is fueled by industrial capacity and skilled workers. Roberts’s approach is much heavier on the institutional elements. He examines the Union Navy’s evolution through a series of projects--Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox’s interest in organized ironclad production, the engineering schedules, mobilization in different theatres, and learning from failed operations. The relationships between key figures are an important trend that this book tackles. How Welles, Fox, Ericsson, and others in the field reacted to success and failure of naval technology is an interesting thread that has come up in the scholarship.42

Roberts, besides including an essay on sources in his book, relies on plenty of contemporary letters, reports, and records. He also uses a great deal of legal references including military depositions that were taken after the war. Many of these proceedings are in defense of costly decisions during the conflict. These postscripts of key figures during the war, such as

41Fuller, Clad in Iron, 63, 131; and James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 556-7. The battle at Antietam occurred on 17 September 1862 and was a Union victory where the Union’s Army of the Potomac under command of General George B. McClellan rebuffed an attempted northern invasion by the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia under command of General Robert E. Lee. Antietam, besides being the bloodiest single-day battle in American military history with over 22,000 casualties, has been widely considered by historians as a major blow to Confederate hopes for international legitimacy do to the seemingly unsustainable losses and the follow-up Emancipation Proclamation by Lincoln that took effect on 1 January 1863. 42Roberts, “’Irresistible ”’: Industrial Mobilization for the Union Navy, 1861-1865” (Ph.D. Diss., Ohio State University, 1999); and Roberts, Civil War Ironclads, 1. 23

Union Inspector General Alban C. Stimers, add an element of memory to the historiography. Roberts’s evidence says much for the process of bringing ironclads to bear amid industrialization. The author’s addition of the legal proceedings allows the reader to see how participants in such an intense moment in history took stock of the situation after the guns fell silent.43

Roberts, as was the case with Mindell, had published a related article several years prior to his book. The same year Roberts’s dissertation came out, an article in the Journal of Military History appeared regarding the events leading up to John Ericsson’s completion of the Monitor for the Union navy. “’The Name of Ericsson’” (1999) was a foray into the administrative relationship between the ironclad inventor and the naval leaders. The author’s work is highly interested in the motivations of the key figures involved. He references the Confederacy’s project with Merrimack/Virginia as a significant force behind the Union’s scramble for their own armored shipping. Military expediency, according to Roberts, is why Ericsson’s design was chosen. Monitor was the most creative design with exclusive use of steam power and a turret, the shallowest draft for coastal use, and the ship with the shortest construction time. Roberts’s argument is that this haste may have blinded the Union administration to potential flaws in the design while Ericsson’s initial frustrations with the government led him to block further contracts until Monitor had proven itself.44

Roberts makes exceptionally good use of Ericsson’s correspondence as well as the communications among Union naval personnel. The thorough use of the inventor’s point of view, balanced with public and private writings of the government staff, contributes a valuable amount of primary source based argument. Roberts allows Ericsson’s voice to speak up for the personal, practical, and commercial motivations that went into delivering Monitor into military hands. Roberts’s later book expounds further on these human relationships, but this article shows how Civil War naval history was already bridging diplomatic, military, and technological histories in the late 1990s. The article knocks on one other door. Roberts writes how the battle at Hampton Roads created a psychological euphoria over the success of ironclads even though the battle was inconclusive. This is a small nod to the idea of how technology, while created by people, can

43Roberts, Civil War Ironclads, 269-275. 44Roberts, “’The Name of Ericsson’,” 826-828, 832. 24

have an influence of its own accord back on humans--affecting their decisions. The works discussed earlier by David Mindell fall into a similar vein, but focus more on engineering and civilian society. Roberts, on the other hand, reinitializes the man-machine relationship with a political theme.45

Spencer Tucker, the retired holder of the John Biggs Chair of Military History at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, has published two books that show the battle- narrative approach survives as well as continuing the recent trend in examining power relationships between human elements. Tucker, in A Short History of the Civil War at Sea (2002), enters an accessible survey of key occurrences in Civil War naval history. The book is the fifth part of a multi-volume collection called The American Crisis Series which has other volumes on different aspects of the conflict. In Tucker’s contribution, he briefly introduces the subject with explanations about the effects of the Industrial Revolution on both sides of the . Onward from this, the author chronicles introduction of ironclads, key port battles, Confederate commerce raiding, and blockade action. Tucker upholds the scholarship’s argument that the Civil War began at a time of technological revolution. He goes on to state that the industrialization intensified the fighting while simultaneously being developed further by the necessities of combat. This hints at the influence of the history of technology theory, with the technology of the ironclad as an example of inventions becoming actors in history.

Tucker’s book echoes much of the secondary source synthesis method used by DeKay in his book on Monitor including some of Tucker’s early work, Still’s Confederate Navy, and Elliott’s work on Albemarle. The author also includes postwar volumes written by men who served during the conflict like work written by Admiral in 1886. This adds to the historiography with more of a renewed accessibility to the narrative than an exposition of mining new sources.46

A much more comprehensive book by Tucker came out four years later. In Blue & Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (2006), Tucker works in extensive primary and secondary literature resulting in a compound volume on Union and Confederate naval history. This later work by Tucker argues that the American navy, on both sides of the war, endured changes to strategy,

45Roberts, “’The Name of Ericsson’,” 837. 46Tucker, A Short History of the Civil War at Sea, viii, 1. 25

professionalism, technology, and administration in its adaptation to new realities of mid- nineteenth century warfare. The book maintains Tucker’s earlier assertion that the Civil War both tested and developed the technologies pouring out of factories during industrialization. The remainder of the volume simultaneously rolls out the build-up and operations of Union and Confederate navies. Tucker seems to have realized an increasing interest in personnel as his first chapter dives into the lives of commons sailors with an emphasis on the recruiting stage. The battle-narrative from A Short History reappears as operations of the blockade, ironclads, port assaults, fortification attacks, and commerce raiding all receive substantial attention. However, increased attention to the interplay of personnel is attached to the events along with mini- biographies of ship commanders, inventors, and administrative personnel. Tucker develops a classical military narrative into a complex analysis of the naval culture occurring simultaneously with the chronology.47

Tucker uses a number of the same secondary sources as his earlier book--Elliott and Still. He also uses Canney’s comprehensive work on the Union navy, Roberts’s work on industrialization and Bennett’s Union Jacks. Tucker, however, uses a few more primary sources than previous authors—the published version of letter collections from Union Rear Admiral , and several government-based sources. As with Tucker’s earlier publication, this book does not add substantially to the evidence-base for the historiography, though it does bring together an impressive array of authors. What this book does well is emphasize the personal factor. Tucker’s work retains the narrative form, but strengthens the participants’ points of view at each moment.48

James McPherson, the Pulitzer and Lincoln Prize winning author of the Civil War grand narrative Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) and a dozen other books on the subject, gave similar treatment with updated detail to the naval aspect of the war in War on the Waters: The Union & Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 (2012). McPherson argues that the Union navy’s overwhelming dominance in resources and effectiveness over the Confederate navy and its shore fortifications—much more so than in proportion to the armies—was more crucial to Union overall victory than has been previously acknowledged. McPherson lays out his supporting

47Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, xxviii. 48Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 399. This particular copy misprints “Bennett, Michael J.” as “Browning, Michael J.” Bennett is the correct name. 26

evidence from a solid array of primary sources from official documents, and personal correspondence--along with secondary works spanning the last half-century. He leads the reader from mobilization through the battle narrative in different regions of the war including the blockade and high-seas blockade running operations. He acknowledges the Confederacy’s efforts along the way, though by his own admission, the book primarily discusses the Union.49

The battle narratives are not particularly new—similar versions can be found in several of the secondary sources McPherson cites along the way. But the book’s widespread combination of engaging narrative, administrative insight, and history of technology references merge several important threads the works referenced earlier dealt with separately. McPherson discusses the Union’s administration of the blockade around the Confederacy as deftly as he does the competition to develop ironclad warships and the arguments over designs between naval personnel and inventors. War on the Waters raises the profile of the Civil War naval conflict to more than just a peripheral part of the war thanks in part to McPherson’s authority as the dean of academic Civil War historians and in the book’s combination of historical approaches that heretofore had not been drawn together quite as completely—i.e., military, technology, administration, and even international affairs. McPherson resolutely concludes that the war could not have been won by the Union without its navy’s contributions.50

Craig L. Symonds, professor of history emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy, has authored several books that collectively run the gamut of American naval history. Symonds’ Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, The U.S. Navy, and the Civil War (2009) garnered the Lincoln Prize in 2009 alongside co-winner James McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief (2008). Both books address Lincoln and the Civil War from administrative points of view, but it is Symonds’s analysis that bears interest because it is one so rarely featured in the navy.51

In Symonds’s Lincoln and His Admirals, a wealth of primary source papers, periodicals, and some edited volumes contribute to the image of a common sense president who taught himself on the job while the country tore itself apart. Symonds argues that Lincoln’s greatness

49McPherson, War on the Waters, 8-9, 11. 50McPherson, War on the Waters, 31, 44-46, 96-99, 226. 51McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). 27

was in his ability to manage advice from experienced military and political authorities like General Winfield Scott and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles while also consulting other talents like Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox and Army Quartermaster-General Montgomery C. Meigs. Symonds further asserts that Lincoln’s open mindedness to free discussion and unconventional solutions—while assuming all responsibility for the consequences upon himself—made him the consummate leader.52

The remainder of Lincoln and His Admirals targets expanded details on Lincoln’s point of view on the war regarding naval matters including the Trent Affair, and notably, the introduction of ironclad warships. Among Lincoln’s interests, according to Symonds, was new technology as demonstrated by frequent visits to tests of new guns at the during the war. Symonds recounts Lincoln’s personal support of Ericsson’s new design at a Navy Department meeting of the Ironclad Board. The account is frequently documented in the historiography, but is usually one of the few appearances Lincoln makes in books on the Civil War Navy until the recent trend to include more administrative approaches. Symonds’s conclusion is illustrative of some of the difficulty in assessing the president’s role when he acknowledges, on Lincoln’s behalf, that the war had been mainly an army war—though the navy had “played its part.” Some of the issues stem from confusion over command protocol when the army and navy were operating in the same theater as no regulations existed to control joint operations. Lincoln had to patiently cool the tensions between his own cabinet members and commanders, then step back and let them do their duties. While these actions have been well documented for the army, Symonds brings these points together for the navy. However, Symonds revisits the comprehensive narrative in his subsequent book The Civil War at Sea (2012). One could almost combine the two works as a showcase of the turn in Civil War navy historiography towards the approaches mentioned earlier—military, technology, administration, and international relations—with the Lincoln book covering the latter two and Civil War at Sea covering the former two.53

Symonds’s The Civil War at Sea (2012) is more of a secondary source synthesis than the other works discussed so far. There are plenty of primary sources, including the official records

52Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals, 4-5, 36. 53Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals, 71, 131-134, 364. 28

and correspondence, but Symonds’s own bibliographical essay in the book alludes to the improvement in treatment of the navy during the war by the academy. Symonds, in Civil War at Sea, uses operational history to highlight the technological revolution endured by the navy and argue that while Union victory did not depend on the navy—the navy did at least affect the course and length of the war. This conclusion is counter-balanced with the McPherson book in that McPherson’s War on the Waters presents the navy as more crucial to the overall Union victory—though still not dependent. However, the Symonds book more closely covers some of the narrative details on individual engagements. Both books pay heed to the technological changes in ordnance, propulsion, and armor in the years preceding the war—though the Symonds book frames this narrative succinctly.54

Civil War Naval Historiography Evolved

The evolution of Civil War naval historiography over the last couple of decades has kept in touch with trends in historical study. Micro-histories, cultural studies, interdisciplinary analytical narratives, and transnational approaches have been components of the professional scholarship since the 1980s and the Civil War has not been an exception. The vessel case studies take up the micro-historians notion of applying microcosmic elements to the larger event in which their subject exists. Works on Monitor, like those by de Kay, Mindell, and on Queen of the West by Legan, can lead the reader through Civil War military strategies as well as personal perceptions of the new industrial methods seizing warfare. The work on Hunley not only reveals trends in Confederate naval development, but links the events to memory after the war and modern times. Cultural studies of sailors’ lives mixed with vessel studies--like Potter’s, or on their own as with Bennett, provide the scholarship with opportunities to see the naval history as its participants did. Interdisciplinary narratives, like those by Luraghi, Still, and Canney, make use of political, economic, social, psychological, and statistical methodologies to demonstrate the cross-cutting relevance of military history. The renewed narratives of Roberts and Tucker take advantage of the diverse approaches to re-cast the battles as having deeper causes within the framework of the societies in which they take place.

54Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, vii, 209, 227. 29

Newer approaches, namely the history of technology (seen with Mindell) and transnational studies (seen with Fuller), are now becoming better explored. These new approaches hint at hosts of evidence that have unexplored depths. Technological and international relationships that had been marginalized are now open avenues to reexamine the context of naval action during the Civil War. Works like those by McPherson and Symonds have, in fact, taken up the challenge of melding the historical questions that the Civil War navy poses for the military, technology, administration, and international affairs.

The Project

This is a study of the reforms in naval warfare that created the conditions for reform minded personnel to develop ironclad warships, the transfer of the knowledge of ironclad warships across the Atlantic, and the strategic and tactical use of ironclad warships during the American Civil War. The project examines why the naval administration on both sides of the Civil War (led by Gideon Welles for the Union and Stephen Mallory for the Confederacy) decided to give such vessels an opportunity in combat, their reaction to early operations (particularly the famous battle at Hampton Roads on 8-9 March 1862), and how they learned to deploy the ships as the war progressed--accounting for difficulties with terrain, fortified opposition, learning curve for personnel, and weaknesses of the weapon system technology.

The study also touches on several concepts in the history of science and technology: gatekeeper theory and social construction of technology. The military gatekeepers were and are agents who selected new technology available at the time and adapted it for the needs of whatever group they represented.55 Union and Confederate “gatekeepers,” had to adopt weapons that suited their strategic needs as a part of their overall objective. The Confederacy’s need to maintain open ports and fend off the Union Navy’s superior numbers made superior quality of ships a viable recourse. The Union’s need to defeat the Confederate Navy, including overcoming

55 Miwao Matsumoto, Technology Gatekeepers for War and Peace: The British Ship Revolution and Japanese Industrialization (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 6. Matsumoto’s book is primarily about transfer of naval technology between Britain and in the aftermath of Japan’s Meiji Revolution/Restoration in the late nineteenth century. His discussions involve changing the idea of technology transfer from frequently top-down government or local industry network views to a composite version that emphasizes equal roles played by public and private sectors. 30

any of the South’s technological leaps, made inclusion of ironclad warships a valid plan. However, both sides of the conflict had to deal with different socially-constructed backgrounds. The South’s agricultural heritage and lack of industrial development hindered its ability to build or improve naval technology at home—forcing it to look abroad for assistance at a time when major nations would not recognize the Confederacy’s official existence. The Union’s entrenched naval traditions and cumbersome bureaucracy slowed approval of new and often unproven technologies.

The result of these forces, military and technological, was an unforgiving trial by fire for the ironclad armored warship in the American Civil War. However, as will become abundantly clear in the following chapters, economics and politics played important roles in the ironclad’s genesis and later use. The ironclad’s history was full of risk from inventors, businessmen, equipment, and those serving aboard. Risk regarding business and invention was something the figures in the next chapter encountered in a number of ways.

31

CHAPTER 2

IRON-HULLED SHIPPING IN BRITAIN, FRANCE, AND THE UNITED STATES, 1821-

1859

Introduction

Iron has played an important role in humanity’s technological advances since ancient times. It has provided the foundation for much of the technological achievement over the ages. Shipbuilding, one of the most significant technological endeavors, has long been an industry that incorporated metal as at least a supplementary component. The use of iron, until the First Industrial Revolution gained steam in the nineteenth century, was limited to braces for wood hulls, fittings, and ornamental accessories. Industrialization, however, permitted the reliable production of large quantities of iron sheeting, which also allowed for the construction of moldable iron frameworks in higher yields. Greater efficiency in iron working thus opened the door to a new possibility in shipbuilding--an entire made of iron.56

Necessity provided much of the motivation for moving to iron. Finding alternative building materials was of great interest to the premier navies of Western Europe, including those of the British and French, which had exhausted much of their wood supplies during centuries of intense naval activity and warfare. Additionally, European competition with American shipping was proving a challenge in the face of the United States’ plentiful timber supply and speed- focused ship designs—culminating in the clipper ship obsession of the 1840s and 1850s. Clipper ship designs offered speed (near 20 knots under ideal circumstances) and cargo capacity thanks to streamlined hulls with a steep deadrise, sharp and stern, and large sail surface areas. With so much commercial advantage at stake, the combination of steam engine developments and iron hulls would seem to be the perfect union of technologies to advance the world’s shipping industry of the world into a new era of prosperity.57

56Franklin W. Smith and Nelson Curtis, [Atlantic Works, Boston, Mass.] Wooden Ships Superseded by Iron. Cheap Iron Indispensable for the Revival of American Commerce. A Commercial Marine Essential to National Progress and Defense (Boston: A. Mudge and Son, Printers, 1869), 14, 16. The First Industrial revolution occurred approximately from the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Brass and copper were also common metals used on ships. 57George M. O’Har, “Shipbuilding and Technological Change in East Boston,” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995), 115, 142-145. David R. MacGregor, British & American Clippers: A Comparison of Their 32

But despite these anticipated advantages, the potential of iron-hulled ships to supplant wooden shipping remained contingent on a variety of factors, including the economic prospect of iron ships in commercial service, the conversion from craftsman-style construction to factory- based construction, and contractors recognizing that the adoption of iron shipping would be to their benefit. As to be expected, efforts to introduce technologies that required large-scale change made the process of reforming the ship-building industry a frustrating endeavor. Western European and American shipbuilders encountered both the ignorance and intransigence of the leading shipping and naval authorities in their respective regions. It was the force of specific personalities, as much as technological improvement, that helped determine where and when the change from wood to iron occurred.

More adventurous people, namely naval officer Charles Napier, shipbuilder and entrepreneur William Fairbairn, business magnate Isambard Brunel, and Sir Baldwin Walker of the British Admiralty, and mechanical engineer Samuel Harte Pook of the , laid the groundwork for iron-hulled shipping to be tested in the proving grounds and battlefields of the early nineteenth century. The fusion of open minds, diligent testing, and practical application would have to overcome a multitude of deep-rooted traditions before iron-hulled shipping came to both sides of the Atlantic and transferred shipbuilding’s control from the artisan to the engineer.58 Napier would be the first of these fully iron-hulled ship creators to weather the storm of criticism in the early 1800s. His efforts set the stage for other forward- looking people who would lead the way in the iron-clad revolution.

The challenges that innovators encountered during the transition from wood to iron ships were multi-faceted. Some of these transitional features were economic in nature. Until ship builders were confident that iron hulls would be economically viable, they would not commit themselves to their construction. Other difficulties were rooted in politics and convention. Key decision makers on both sides of the Atlantic sometimes made decisions based on political

Design, Construction and Performance in the 1850s (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1993), 7, 18, 22. A ship’s “deadrise” is the angle vertically from the vessel’s at the widest frame. 58Andrew Murray, Ship-Building in Iron and Wood / Robert Murray, Steam-Ship, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1863), 22; and William Armstrong Fairburn, Merchant Sail, 6 vols. (Center Lovell, ME: Fairburn Marine Educational Foundation, Inc., 1945-1955), v.5, 2954, 2960. 33

considerations and administrative habits, not technological merit. Yet necessity would also play a role here, forcing decision makers to set aside politics in favor of efficiency.

To understand the issues these early builders faced, it is useful to start by identifying the first ships recognized as iron-hulled and explore why their designers invested in them at all. Following the progression from Napier to Fairburn to Brunel will assist in showing the increasing interest—in Britain--for the new construction methods as a competitor to wooden ships and the skepticism that accompanied such a sea change in ship-building. It is noteworthy that this mixture of wonder and resistance inspired the constructors’ colleagues and the public.

These early British struggles against widespread skepticism transferred across the Atlantic to the United States. Seeing the American shipbuilders contend with similar reluctance to embrace iron-hulled ships can then be seen as more than just a reaction to the differences in building materials available—but as a comprehensive product of a socio-technological system. Covering the economic gambles of John Elgar and Otis Tufts shows a sample of the commercial obstacles facing early iron shipbuilding, while Samuel Pook proved to be an example of professionalization meeting the challenge.

Turning back to Europe, it took the force of real-world events to overcome this resistance to the use of iron. Initially, the testing of guns on experimental iron armor was not enough to overcome entrenched power in the British Admiralty, but the crisis of the Crimean War (1853- 1856) and French competition stirred the to innovate. This innovation would not have happened, however, without men open to the possibility of change. Among their ranks were the innovators Sir Baldwin Walker, Colonel Henry Dundas, and Henri Dupuy de Lôme. The appetite for technological solutions to strategic problems is a thread that runs through many of the key personnel in the story of the ironclad.

Early Iron Ship Designs

Great Britain

Debate continues over exactly who invented the first iron ship, and when. The first record of an iron hulled vessel of any kind in the Atlantic World would appear to be a 1787 canal boat

34

in England. But the first true iron ship to put to sea was the British Aaron Manby in 1821. Built at the Horseley Ironworks in Staffordshire, England (and named after Horseley’s founder) under the direction of Captain (later Admiral) Charles Napier, Aaron Manby was significant beyond the commercial trade routes it ran between England and France during its service through 1855. Aaron Manby was a true technological step forward, as it combined the increased thrust and weight bearing abilities of the steam engine (over sails), demonstrated by ’s Clermont in 1807, with the use of iron for the hull instead of wood. It was a formidable competitor to less durable wooden vessels.59

Black Charlie

But to truly understand how a ship like Aaron Manby came into existence requires us to know more about its creator. Charles John Napier, cousin to Charles James Napier (who would become a noteworthy general involved in the Peninsular Campaign of the Napoleonic Wars), was born in Falkirk, on 6 March 1786 to a retired naval officer also named Charles. The young Charles was nicknamed “Black Charlie” on account of his jet-black hair. Napier put to sea in 1800, though with reservation, as advancement in the navy had become increasingly political and opportunities abounded on land for a man with connections. Earlier generations of Napiers also had died young at sea, as had current relatives. Undaunted, Napier argued for permission to enter the navy from his father and did so on the Martin. Napier never served on the ship because he had fallen ill and Martin left without him. Napier's illness might be seen as providential, for not long thereafter it was mysteriously lost at sea in the waters between the North Sea and the Atlantic.

Later that year, Napier boarded the 74-gun HMS Renown where he excelled in his duties including combat during the Napoleonic Wars. Napier saw a great deal of action serving on a number of other —including Greyhound and Egyptienne--during Royal Navy engagements at the Nile, and in the English Channel. By 1802, Charles had earned among his fellow officers and shipmates a reputation for a short temper and implacability.

59Smith, [Atlantic Works], 8. Daniel R. Headrick, “The Tools of Imperialism: Technology and the Expansion of European Colonial Empires in the Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of Modern History 51(2) (Jun. 1979): 235. 35

Nevertheless, Napier was promoted to in November 1805 after serving on other ships in action against the French—and a year later was given his first command on the sloop- Recruit.60

Napier suffered his first severe injury at sea on Recruit while fighting the French warship Diligente near Antigua—a broken right thigh that would leave the young officer with a permanent limp. After logging several years of service, including helping the British capture of Martinique and promotion to the rank of post-captain, Charles decided to return to Scotland and attend Edinburgh University in 1809 to embark on an education in everything from history to mathematics to chemistry. Napier spent a year at Edinburgh before returning to sea in 1810, which would see him command for stretches in , the Mediterranean, and the waning engagements of the War of 1812 in the United States—where he was part of an 1814 expedition that sailed up the Potomac River and captured positions in Virginia, Washington, and . Napoleon’s short-lived escape from his exile in Elba in early 1815 prompted Napier to return to action in Europe briefly with assistance in a troop landing in Belgium. Napier’s final service against Napoleon gave way to time spent building a domestic life with his wife, Frances Elizabeth Young, and her four children from a previous marriage. Yet, Napier retained his duties with the British Admiralty, and he began a determined effort to reform the Royal Navy’s administration and shipbuilding.61 Napier would meet with mixed success—at best.

Napier's ideas along this line would ripple beyond the shores of the British Isles. Indeed, many of the topics in Napier’s correspondence with the Admiralty in the 1820s onward would echo in the debates reform-minded navy patrons would have in the halls of Congress and U.S. Naval Affairs committee meetings in the 1840s and 1850s. Napier wanted reforms to recruitment, the rank system, promotion, training, and upgrades to ship construction accompanied by improvements to supporting facilities. In letters dated as early as 1816, Charles noted that the British Navy’s underwhelming performance against the United States in the War of 1812 was a signal that change was needed.62

60Priscilla Napier, Black Charlie: A Life of Admiral Sir Charles Napier KCB 1787-1860 (Wilby Hall, Wilby, Norwich: M. Russell, 1995), 1-7. 61Ibid., 8-12, 14-15, 21-29, 33, 39. 62Charles Napier, The Navy: Its Past and Present State in a Series of Letters, ed. by William Napier (: John & Daniel A. Darling, 1851), 1. 36

Among the changes that Napier recommended was shorter time requirements for promotion--assuming the officer in question still presented acceptable skill. He expected this would foster the motivation and initiative desirable in the officer corps as well as strengthen the spirit of discipline fleet-wide. Additionally, the acceleration of the rank and promotion system would allow younger officers to take more command positions in future wars. Napier anticipated resistance from the Admiralty and ended one letter dated 1 January 1816:

It may be said, ‘We have beat all other nations under the present system—then why alter it?’ The answer is simply this: "The list has increased to such an amazing degree, that men will in future be much older when at the head of the fleets than formerly." The have opened our eyes too, and have shown us what it is to contend with a well-manned and disciplined enemy. But Black Charlie did not stop with rank and promotion reform. Napier wanted wage and living condition improvements, including pay more on par with army units, and the elimination of particularly brutal punishments--“flogging round the fleet” among them. He also campaigned for a reduction to the act of impressment and for the adoption of merit-based appointments to the Admiralty board. Napier’s recommendations to administrative reform were complemented by his push for changes to vessels designated for Royal Navy use.63 Most of this advice went unheeded at the time.

Napier's zeal for reform extend beyond personnel matters to technical ones. In fact, he saw a connection between the two realms. Napier recognized that better ships required changes to construction and armament--including getting away from traditional broadside arrangements of cannons, for example, to take advantage of fixed-mounted guns capable of pivoting. This change in hardware would also be accompanied by personnel changes. He emphasized that improved ship construction would require naval surveyors put on the for their talents—not simply as an afterthought or based on seniority. Napier recommended low level commissioners and lords not be used on the Navy Board either—especially for governance of the dockyards where an admiral directly overseeing ship equipment would be better suited. In other words, practical experience was needed to overcome politics to achieve productive reforms to

63Ibid., 2-4, 6, 9-21. “Flogging round the fleet” was a punishment during which the sailor in question would be taken by each ship in harbor, and whipped by each ship’s boatswain twelve times with a cat-o’-nine tails. 37

shipbuilding and keep the British fleet at the fore of capability. Napier pushed hard on this point for adoption of steam ships for military purposes.64

Napier also foresaw that the new technology would force changes in tactics and strategy. , Napier argued, made traditional blockading obsolete as fewer vessels would be needed to watch enemy coastlines—being able to maneuver for interception and action faster and under more varied conditions than sailing ships. But he also attacked the civilian government in Britain for wrongly thinking that steam navigation would hurt the British naval advantage while simultaneously doing little to secure the fleet’s superiority as Napier writes on 6 October 1827:

I believe it is generally thought, that the invention of steam navigation will be injurious to the interests of this country, and hurtful to our naval superiority; and the Government seem to be of that opinion, by the little attention they have bestowed on it. I am inclined to think, that so far from diminishing our naval superiority, it only required that invention to make it more triumphant than ever, and at the same time diminish the experiences of war… Black Charlie went on to target various aspects of how the current steamship models could be modified for military use—especially regarding protection from enemy fire—but the uphill battle he faced trying to persuade the Admiralty to adopt steam powered vessels paled in comparison to arguing for constructing ship hulls of iron.65

Until the launching of Aaron Manby, steamships that had been in service on internal waterways and seas around Western Europe since the early-nineteenth century had endured an assortment of problems with wooden hulls. Some of the problems were inherent in the construction of wooden-hulled ships: dry rot, pests, leaks, and flammability. These naturally occurring problems were aggravated by the presence of a steam engine, which added potential fire sources and sheer stress from the pounding of the machinery on the framework. Wooden ships were also becoming larger and more ornate to accommodate extra fuel for steam engines and passengers for profit, thus further stressing the wooden beams around the metal fittings used to brace the ship together. With so many problems besetting wooden hulls after the advent of

64Ibid., 42-45. 65Ibid., 47-53. 38

steam engines, a ship like Aaron Manby should have been a natural solution for British shipbuilders.66

One again, though, the Admiralty proved highly resistant to even common sense solutions. For example, on 25 June 1828, Napier wrote to the Admiralty with a solution to this problem he had identified. He suggested that iron-hulled ships could be the answer to the “dry- rot” problem in wooden British warships—with extra benefits including reduced repair costs and lighter vessels. Napier seemed to expect an inflexible response and sought to forestall any potential skepticism by stating that his “proposal may, perhaps, appear ridiculous.” But despite playing down his suggestion, Black Charlie’s personal experience in constructing Aaron Manby and other similar vessels informed his detailed argument:

Upwards of eight years ago, Mr. Manby, lately of Birmingham, and myself, constructed an iron steam vessel of one hundred feet long, seventeen feet broad, and eight feet deep. She was followed by four others, of one hundred and twenty feet long, eighteen feet six inches broad, and eight-feet hold. These vessels have been running ever since on the river Seine, and have never cost a sixpence for repairs; and last year the boilers and engines were taken out of the two oldest, and the iron under them was found perfectly sound, although it was impossible to apply a coating of tar, the only preservative that has been used.

Beyond this one specific argument, Napier’s letter includes additional testaments to the advantages of an iron vessel. He mentioned how the ships have run aground, endured “all weathers” at sea, and even knocked into bridges without any significant deformation of the hull. Napier conceded some disadvantages and thus offered recommendations to solve such problems. He recognized that the iron exterior should be backed by timber just in case the iron was penetrated—the timbers being easier to handle if holed. He also suggested that the iron plating above the waterline have seams filled in by cork or another non-conductive substance to ward off the metal’s expansion and contraction effects due to extreme temperatures in summer and winter. It appeared that Napier had covered all of his bases and thus had warded off the main potential objections.

But despite Napier's calm, thoughtful, and reasoned arguments in favor of the iron hull, he hit a wall of resistance, as a combination of political maneuvering, complacency, and fear stymied his efforts. A brief and blunt response to Napier on 15 July 1828 stated: “His Royal

66Headrick, “The Tools of Imperialism,” 236. Smith, [Atlantic Works], 12-17. 39

Highness has determined for the present to cease building any more experimental ships…,” although construction plans were passed along.67

Fortunately for Napier, this setback did not prove fatal to his career. The Admiralty, though ignoring Black Charlie’s pleas to develop steam frigates (France and the United States were proceeding with such inventions), had nonetheless given him command of Galatea--one of the least reputable ships serving in the fleet in 1829. But even in these less than propitious circumstances, Napier’s inventiveness continued unabated, and he fitted Galatea with easily rigged paddles that allowed the warship to traverse harbor entrances without a tow. He also continued to flood the Admiralty and Royal administration with letters, but still in vain despite Liberal party gains in the government giving him temporary hope of like-minded patrons such as Lord Althorp and Sir James Graham.68

Napier’s recommendations, though “agreed [to] in principle” by some in the administration, were not implemented—some due to concern over the “prejudices” of those that would make the changes, and the impracticality of creating a steam navy without commensurate training of sailors. Thus by the start of the 1830s, Napier was getting nowhere, as continued shifts of party power in parliament left no attention to spare on his naval reforms. The remainder of the first half of the 1830s saw Napier seeking action in a Portuguese civil war at the behest of the forces supporting Maria II, commanded by her father Dom Pedro—who named Napier an admiral in the Portuguese Navy. After Napier’s book on the war, Account of the War in Portugal (1836), was published, he returned to Britain and was reinstated in the Royal Navy as a post- captain.69

Napier continued his remarkable service to the navy with a promotion to the rank of and then seeing action in Syria in 1839, the Mediterranean in 1839, and Lebanon in 1840 after being given command of the 84-gun ship of the line HMS Powerful in 1838. Black

67Napier, The Navy, 53-55, 57. 68 The Liberal Party MPs in Britain had indeed swept into power for reforms in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, but these ended up being stricter economic practices and cost-cutting measures. In fact, Graham led the effort to pass legislation whereby the Admiralty was among the first groups targeted for auditing with the Audit Act of 1832. See Warrick Funnel, “Victorian Parsimony and the Early Champions of Modern Public Sector Audit,” Accounting History 9 (1) (2004): 28-32. 69Napier, Black Charlie, 43-50, 54-61, 75-76. The Portuguese Civil War or “Liberal Wars” lasted from 1828 to 1834, ending when Dom Miguel renounced his claim to the throne in favor of more widely-supported claim of Maria II. 40

Charlie’s service in Syria earned him a knight-hood in 1840, and his public renown led to a seat as a Liberal party MP for Marylebone in 1841. He maintained the seat while writing about his exploits in Syria, publishing History of the War in Syria in 1842. Napier continued to plead for reform even after losing his parliament seat in 1846, being promoted to rear-admiral, and gaining command of the Channel Fleet in 1847.70

Black Charlie tussled with the Admiralty for over a decade to get changes made to administration and ship construction. Napier’s frustration boiled over in a letter on 10 April 1846 to Lord Ellenborough: “I have been forty-six years in the service, and during all that time, the only improvement I see is in the size of our ships.” He complained about seeing steam frigates being built so large and heavy—approaching 1,000 tons--they suffered severe problems rolling at sea. Napier reminded the Admiralty that he had been writing on these matters—including faults in the office of the Surveyor and Admiralty board itself--for nearly two decades and was ready to furnish copies from his letter-books should his correspondence have been lost. But his hopes dwindled further when Lord Auckland died in 1849 and the Conservative party’s Sir Francis Baring—a former political opponent of Napier during a failed 1833 election in Portsmouth— succeeded Lord Auckland as First Lord of the Admiralty. On 5 April 1849, Napier was removed as commander of the Channel Fleet and passed over for command of the Mediterranean Fleet dealing with the European crises of 1848—though Black Charlie did not leave without an acerbic protest that blamed the Admiralty for excessive costs and wasteful procedures.71

Napier’s last command at sea would be of the 113-gun steamship Duke of Wellington in 1854 during the British and French engagement of the Russian and Ottoman empires in the Crimean War. Napier led the largest fleet of the Baltic Campaign which blockaded the Russian ports, kept the Russian Baltic fleet bottled up in its , and carried out coastal attacks as far north as Finland. Yet however victorious Napier had been, the Admiralty required a scapegoat for the war not being more fruitful in the public’s eye. Napier’s command was terminated at the end of 1854, though he maintained sufficient popularity to be elected MP for Southwark in 1855—campaigning for naval reforms in the House of Commons until his death on 6 November

70Ibid., 83-96, 106-109, 115. 71Napier, The Navy, 135-138. Napier, Black Charlie, 116-118. Napier sent a copy of the letter to The Times. By “rolling,” it is meant that the ship tilted side-to-side more than was acceptable. 41

1860—a mere seven weeks before the launching of Britain’s first ironclad warship, HMS Warrior. 72

The challenges that Napier had to overcome would be repeated throughout the shipbuilding industries and navies of the Atlantic world. British shipyard leaders persisted in conservative thinking, arguing that since iron objects tended to sink, an iron ship could not float at all. Ship-builders also feared rust, attracting lightning, overheating in the Sun, or shattering in the first rough sea encountered. Aaron Manby, at least, proved that these basic fears were worth reconsidering after it assumed regular duties in 1822. After Napier’s experiment proved a technological success, a few shipyards gambled on iron-ship building, while many of their competitors continuing to harbor doubts. These differing beliefs over the viability of iron-clads marked a critical divide in the ship-building industry that would persist for several years.73

More Interest On the Horizon

Among the emerging proponents of iron hulled designs were Scottish civil engineer Sir William Fairbairn (1789-1874), a student of Fairbairn named Isambard Brunel (1806-1859), and the father-son pair of William (1780-1841) and John Laird (1805-1874). Not only did these shipbuilders realize the potential of iron as a building material, they also recognized the insufficient quantity of the wood supply in Britain—due to centuries of deforestation for shipbuilding. These conditions aside, the ship-building community’s doubts regarding iron designs delayed major subsequent iron shipbuilding for over a decade after Napier’s first efforts. While caution and rigid thinking rather than a keen appreciation for the facts thus guided much of the industry during this period, Fairbairn and other like-minded people would not be deterred.74

Fairbairn, a well invested shipbuilder who had also worked on railroad locomotives and iron bridges in years past, decided to diversify his enterprise in light of a recession in Britain’s cotton industry around the 1830s. Before 1830, Fairbairn had experimented with composite hulls

72Napier, Black Charlie, 124, 128, 132-140, 150, 188, 203-208, 213, 216-217, 222-224. 73Headrick, “The Tools of Imperialism,” 237. 74O’Har, “Shipbuilding,” 115. 42

that placed iron plating over a wooden hull on ships intended for river service. In the wake of Napier’s achievements, Fairbairn tested the reverse configuration by fitting wooden planks overtop an iron hull to convince doubters by retaining some of the old construction methods. Once certain of iron’s durability, Fairbairn proceeded with full-iron designs by 1829. In 1830, he produced his first iron paddle-wheel steamship, Lord Dundas, at his Manchester shipyard.75

Fairbairn’s iron ships eventually started ferrying passengers on the Humber River during the early 1830s, and accomplishment with the ferry persuaded him to convert his shipyards completely to iron ship production by 1836. John Laird, a competing ship-builder in Liverpool, constructed the iron steamship Rainbow for the General Steam Navigation Company in Deptford, England only a year later—a notable increase in attention to iron ship-building from two major constructors.76 Isambard Brunel, an apprentice of Fairbairn, took his mentor’s enthusiasm to heart for his own shipbuilding business. Once on his own, Brunel made a name for himself with a wildly successful oak-hulled paddle steamer, Great Western, in 1838, as well as rail and bridge construction. The Great Western set a number of speed and size records for trans- Atlantic steamers, inaugurating Brunel’s “Great Western Company’s Atlantic Service.” His reputation, combined with Fairbairn’s advice, kept the Brunel abreast of technological developments, including iron hulls and--at least as important--screw propellers.77

One reason for the great importance of screw-propellers is that they used much less than paddle-wheels. The first significant propeller designs in Britain were proposed by Swedish engineer John Ericsson (1803-1889)--later of USS Monitor fame during the American Civil War. Ericsson adapted the propeller for iron ships because the rotational stress on the ship’s stern was too great for any wooden hull to sustain. On 7 July 1838, the iron steamer Robert F. Stockton was launched from Laird’s shipyard at Liverpool bound for the United States to enjoy a successful commercial career. But Ericsson’s personal antagonism toward the British Admiralty doomed his career in England, driving the engineer to the United States in 1839. An English

75Fairburn, Merchant Sail, v. 2, 1472. 76Murray, Ship-Building, 22. 77Fairburn, Merchant Sail, v. 2, p. 1473. 43

inventor, Francis P. Smith (1808-1874), had better luck convincing the Admiralty through practical experimentation.78

Brunel combined the iron hull steamer with the screw propeller to produce what some consider the first “modern” ship--Great Britain, in 1841--at his Bristol shipyard. When launched in 1843, Great Britain was the first iron screw-propelled steamer to cross the Atlantic. Great Britain was also the largest ship of its kind afloat at over 322 feet long and 3,200 tons .79 Great Britain was a tremendous, surpassing Great Western’s speed record by crossing the Atlantic in fourteen days in 1845. The ship also improved the reputation of iron hull durability. After Great Britain ran aground off the coast of Ireland in 1846, it was easily repaired and quickly put back in service under a variety of owners for passenger and cargo operations until 1886.80

Brunel’s report on Great Britain after the 1846 incident was publicized by the Times of London. He addressed the report to the directors of the Great Western Steam-Ship Company in hopes of satisfying efforts to recover investment in the vessel. Brunel emphasized the good condition of the ship despite reports that had reached him about the extent of damage:

…I was agreeably disappointed, after the reports which had reached me to find her, as a whole, and independently of the mere local damages, of which I will speak presently, perfectly sound, and as strong and as perfect in form as the day she was launched. In receiving this statement, you must bear in mind the great difference between an iron vessel and a timber-built ship. In the former, parts may be considerably damaged, or even destroyed, and the remainder may not only be untouched, but may be left unstrained and uninjured. In a timber ship this can hardly be the case. If any considerable portion of a ship's bottom is stove in, the timbers or ribs completely across the ship, and the planking longitudinally, cannot fail to be strained to a very considerable distance in both directions. You must therefore remove from your minds all impressions derived from your experience of damages sustained by timber built ships, in order to understand my statement, which is strictly correct; that, except the parts actually damaged, the extent of which is comparatively small, the ship is perfectly sound, and as good as

78John R. Spears, The Story of the American Merchant Marine (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1919), 278-79. Propellers will be discussed further in Chapter 3. 79Fairburn, Merchant Sail, v. 2, p. 1473. 80Spears, American Merchant Marine, 279-80. The Great Britain was scuttled in 1937, and later recovered in 1970 and is currently a in Bristol, England. 44

the hour when she struck. This soundness and freedom from any damage extends from about the five-feet water line to the top (with the exception of the injury sustained by the knocking away of the rudder post, and a blow under the stern); nearly the whole of the vessel is therefore sound. The principal injury is in her bottom, under the and engines. The vessel has evidently been thumping upon the rocks, and almost entirely upon this part of the bottom, from the first few days after she grounded, and at present, in all probability, her whole weight is resting on this part; yet notwithstanding this, she is perfectly straight, and has not broken or even sprung an inch in the whole length. The boilers have been forced up about 15 inches, and one of the condensers has been lifted about eight inches, breaking the air-pump. At present this is nearly the extent of damage done, all of which could easily be repaired if the vessel were in dock.81

Brunel’s interest in saving Great Britain would be upheld, though the ship would ultimately change owners. Yet demands on Brunel’s company for even larger and faster vessels resulted in the construction of Great Eastern in the late 1850s. The Eastern Steam Navigation Company wanted a ship that could make runs between England and quickly while carrying enough coal to operate without having to restock during the round-trip voyage. For example, the steamship Australian--in operation on this route at the time Brunel was given the project—spent 156 days at sea, and 56 additional days in ports primarily for coaling. Australian’s trip of 221 days was slower than other clipper ships on the same run. Brunel eagerly took on the challenge and laid the keel for the Great Eastern on 1 May 1854 at the Scott Russell & Company shipyard at Millwall-on-Thames. The ship’s enormous size made iron the only feasible building material, with approximately 8,000 tons of iron and 30,000 plates used for the hull.82 A Times' article remarked on the unique size of the construction materials being produced for Great Eastern:

The plates have been expressly rolled for the bows of the "great ship" at Millwall, and vary in size from 2 tons to 2 1/2 tons, the largest plate being 27 feet long by 4 feet 3 inches wide, and 1 1/2 inch think. ... The plates, which have been planned, are quite free from blisters and blemishes, the edges are perfect, and altogether they are an admirable specimen of what can be effected in these days of progress by enterprise, ingenuity, and skill. The difficulty in the manufacture of plates of these dimensions is in having to deal with such a large mass of iron in a welding beat, and to pass it under the rolls the requisite number of times. As far as we know, these plates, in combined size and weight, have never been approached. … The largest plate that had ever been rolled previous to those to which we allude was one exhibited at the Paris Exhibition, weighing 1 ton 6 cwt., and which elicited so many remarks. One of these plates was 5 feet wide, and 17 feet 10 inches long.

81Times of London, 29 December 1846; 7 82Fairburn, Merchant Sail, v. 2, p. 1473. This is the British or “Long” ton which 1 ton equates to 2,240 lbs. compared to the U.S. “short” ton where 1 ton equals 2,000 lbs. 45

During the recent war Mr. Beale undertook to roll plates for the Government floating batteries, which operation he duly performed to their complete satisfaction. ... It is probable that the information and experience gained by the construction of these plates enabled him to accomplish a still greater triumph in the manufacture of iron.83

Great Eastern’s size and weight slowed construction, hampered further by the lack of facilities to properly handle such a large ship—note that the Times’ article appeared three years after the ship’s keel was first laid down. Observers compared Great Eastern to the biblical Leviathan and Noah’s Ark, expecting the ship to carry 4,000 passengers in peacetime or 10,000 troops if used by the military as a transport.84 Pressure mounted from the media and investors for the colossal ship to put to sea. Brunel urged caution, stressing the unique nature of setting such a large ship on the water. After months of postponement, an abortive launch attempt on 3 November 1857 added delays and extra costs to the construction effort. Workmen on the chains lowering the aft section of the ship gave too much slack to their lines, resulting in ship lowering unevenly. The bow slipped and the stern followed, whipping around the handles of the windlasses, which flung half a dozen workmen into the air, and sending five to the hospital. Another attempt was made before the tide began to go out, but faulty hydraulics and a broken timber cradle ended the attempt for good. Disappointment in the failed launch was thoroughly noted on the day of the first attempt and for some time after. Times of London, in an effort to “save the public such a fruitless journey to Millwall,” insisted on keeping the official next attempt a secret.85

The ship was finally set afloat on 31 January 1858, but was not fully outfitted until several months later—it did not even have its engines installed as of early July 1858 nor a dock that could provide adequate services. The main shaft for the ship’s paddle engine was not put in place until just over a year after the hull was launched. The vessel’s final form weighed 22,500 tons, with a length of 680 feet, 83 feet , and 58 feet depth with a draft between 21 and 24 feet. Questions about the ship’s financial viability were publicized in the final days leading up to the ship’s start of commercial operations, though the public’s uncertainty about the ship’s seaworthiness and size seemed to have been allayed. Great Eastern, after more delays had its

83Times of London, 10 January 1857, 7. The war the article references is the Crimean War. 84Times of London, 30 April 1857, 12. 85Times of London, 30 April 1857, 12; 24 October 1857, 10; 4 November 1857, 8; 18 November 1857, 12. A windlass is a mechanical device for lifting heavy objects. It consists of a horizontal cylinder/drum, which is rotated by the turn of a crank. A ship’s draft (sometimes spelled draught) is the depth of the hull below the waterline. 46

departure date pushed to 7 September 1859, and haphazardly got through the narrow turns of the Thames River below Greenwich—but did so under its own power.

This prodigious effort took a grim personal toll, however, as Brunel died from exhaustion on 15 September 1859, only eight days after Great Eastern put to sea under her own power. Worried over the commercial failure that Great Eastern was proving to be due to lack of speed and fuel inefficiency seemed to have pushed Brunel into an early grave. Fairburn, despite his apprentice’s misgivings, emphasized that Brunel’s final product proved that it was at least possible to build an iron ship of any practical size—with no limit to hull’s dimensions and strength except those placed by the demands of operators and capacities of shipyards.86

Fairbairn, Brunel, and competitors like Laird all exhibited an interest in profiting from what they saw as advantages in the construction of iron ships—durability, size, range—even though poor speed was a significant limiting factor. Reformers in the British Admiralty had failed for decades to get official government sponsorship of such vessels even after successful demonstrations of the technology. For now, however, any effort to pursue advancement of these ships was done at each individual’s or company’s own risk. Mass consumer support was not yet convinced of iron shipping as the best mode of transport. Across the Atlantic, in the United States, the frustrations for developers of iron vessels were comparable.

The United States

In the British Isles, the dearth of wood and its poor durability spurred British shipbuilders to consider iron hulls as an alternative shipbuilding material. Unsurprisingly, alternative material usage was a common motivator for innovation during Britain’s Industrial Revolution.87 In the United States, however, wood was plentiful in the early nineteenth century. Moreover, the focus of American shipping during this period was along the coasts and on the rivers of the country’s

86Times of London, 7 July 1858, 6; 17 September 1858, 7; 15 February 1859, 5; 27 August 1859, 10; 8 September 1859, 7; and Fairburn, Merchant Sail, v. 2, p. 1473. 87Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 99-100. 47

interior, which had been the case since at least the nation’s founding in 1776. By 1820, American commerce on inland and coastal waterways exceeded the nation’s shipping on the high seas.88

Into this state of affairs sailed the first American iron steamship in 1825, Codorus. John Elgar (1784-1858) designed Codorus for operation on the stretches of the Susquehanna River. Born in York, Pennsylvania to the owner and operator of an iron manufacturing business, Elgar joined the Davis, Gartner, and Webb foundry and machine shop approximately ten years after his father’s death—by the early 1820s.89 Elgar’s iron hull seemed to be well adapted for breaching the frequent obstructions, especially sunken logs, which impeded other ships. He had five more ships in service by 1835 and was particularly encouraged by the lack of wear and tear on the ships after nine years of service.90 Despite Codorus’s able steaming along the river with its lighter and stronger hull, Pennsylvania shipbuilders failed to see the advantages of iron hulls in the absence of a more obvious demonstration of its profitability.91

American shipyards would not continue pursuing iron hull designs until the 1840s. In both the British and American cases, commercial success would be necessary for shipbuilders to overcome their fears of iron’s weaknesses. Working against the American iron shipbuilding industry was the commercial tradition of wooden ship builders, the high tariffs on imported iron, and the superfluous building of ironworks with such a plentiful supply of wood available. In 1871, a leading shipbuilder named John Roach addressed the and recounted the problems that had plagued American shipbuilding development since the early nineteenth century:

…our country, with its vast extent of territory, with our forests of timber, our immense fields of coal and iron, our great length of sea coast … has the greatest advantage over any other nation, and should become the greatest maritime power in the world. After demonstrating this fact to the world in the first seventy years of our existence as a nation, and becoming the carriers on the ocean of one-third of the commerce of the world … why has our flag disappeared from the ocean?

88Alex Roland, W. Jeffrey Bolster, and Alexander Keyssar, The Way of the Ship: America’s Maritime History Reenvisioned, 1600-2000 (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 121. 89Alexander Crosby Brown, “Autobiographical Sketch of the Formative Years of John Elgar, 1784-1858, Builder of America's First Iron Ship,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series 13(1) (Jan., 1956): 88-89. 90Fairburn, Merchant Sail, v. 2, 1474. 91Brown, “Autobiographical Sketch,” 87-88. 48

Roach’s somewhat embellished answer blamed the ten-fold cost of producing iron hulls and supplementary machinery in the United States, unlike other nations, which were devoting far greater government subsidies to private shipbuilders constructing iron vessels.92

As for American inexperience in building steamships of any kind, one Scientific American article had stated in 1848:

The great cause of unsuccess in our Atlantic steamers, is owing to our short acquaintance with the building of marine ships. Hitherto our have been built for short and comparatively unstormy voyages. The navigation of the Atlantic is quite a different affair from that of the Hudson or the Erie. … Now in England they have had the practical experience of thirty-six years in building sea-going steamers.93 Yet another Scientific American article in 1857 upheld the efficiency of iron-hulled steamers abroad that were cheaper, faster, and larger compared with American wooden sail and steam ships.94

Something would have to revolutionize the way in which American shipbuilding was done if the United States were to maintain its commercial edge. A congressional report from the U.S. State Department in issued on 4 February 1857 reported on the aggregate ocean-going trade between the United States and other countries. The report noted several areas where American shipping was being slighted—by goods not passing through official channels or by the swapping in of substandard goods--cotton instead of better linens. Nevertheless, statements persistently were filed on how far behind American shipping was in comparison to other countries. A telltale example of this inequity was at the port of Glasgow, Scotland where--for the period between 1 January and 31 March 1856--the report notes that the total value of American shipping goods was $213,918 compared to $1,003,211 for all other foreign ships in the same time frame. However, the number of ships operating was not strikingly different. Indeed, twelve American ships bearing 6,868 tons of goods arrived in Glasgow compared to thirteen vessels from other countries with 8,144 tons of goods. And yet, fifteen ships left Glasgow bound for American

92U.S. Senate, Committee on Commerce, Memorial of John Roach, Praying the Passage of an Act for the Encouragement of Iron Ship Building, and the Formation of a Line of First-Class Iron Steamships (S. Mis. Doc. 41- 20, Serial Set 1442, 11 January 1871), 1-3. Text in: ProQuest® Serial Set Digital Collection; Accessed 25 November 2013. 93“Steam Navigation of the Atlantic,” Scientific American 4(3) (7 October 1848): 21. 94“Ocean Steam Navigation,” Scientific American 12(36) (16 May 1857): 285. 49

cities with 9,033 tons of goods while only ten ships were heading to foreign ports with 6,991 tons of goods—hence an imbalance resulted.

The rest of the report breaks down different trade areas accordingly along with some analysis of their relationship with European trading partners and with the United States—usually with a localized explanation of why the European trading partners were performing better. While shipyards continued to struggle under the financial burdens of the old ownership-based capitalization models for construction, naval and factory-based developments were gaining ground on private builders. The change would come in the most fundamental way: introducing new methods of construction. Entering this picture would be New York and Boston shipyards caught in the middle of the shift from wood to iron.95

Rule of Thumb versus Precision Engineering

Tufts’s Tug

Otis Tufts (1804-1869), a inventor, saw Britain’s iron ship experiments and made them his own. In 1845, Tufts learned of the Ericsson propeller and iron steamer Robert F. Stockton. In turn, he developed the first iron double-hulled steamship, R. B. Forbes, and assigned it to tug service. This development was not an easy undertaking in Boston, where shipyards were churning out clipper ships for speedy passage along the eastern seaboard and eventually to the newly-settled west coast.96 Tufts was setting himself up for significant competition against well- established wood and sail shipbuilders--all the while trying to construct an entirely new kind of vessel with newly machined equipment, and highly skilled personnel.

Significantly, Tufts was employed by Atlantic Works (later Bethlehem Steel), one of the leading shipbuilders in Boston. Ironically, Tufts’s persistence in devoting his personal fortune into more iron ships almost bankrupted him and the company by the 1850s. It would be the

95U.S. Senate, Report of the Secretary of State, transmitting a statement from the superintendent of statistics of the commercial relations of the United States with foreign nations, for the year ending September 30, 1856 (S. Ex. Doc. 35, Serial Set 887, 4 February 1857), 10-11, 429-449. Text in: ProQuest® Serial Set Digital Collection. Accessed 20 January 2015; and O’Har, “Shipbuilding,” 63 96O’Har, “Shipbuilding,” 145. 50

production needs of the U.S. Civil War that saved Atlantic Works in the mid-century. Persuading a company profiting from the clipper ship boom to produce iron hulls was, however, quite a gamble. The conversion of wood-based shipyards to producers of iron hulls was highly uncertain. Ultimately, economic and technological realities were going to come face-to-face with tradition. The outcome of this battle would determine the future of ship building.97

Tufts represented a rare breed of shipbuilder in mid-nineteenth-century Boston. The yards of the Atlantic Works and Donald McKay, in the mid-1800s, were wholly engaged in producing the fastest wooden ships they could for the lucrative mail routes (packets) and later gold-rush journeys of the late 1840s and early 1850s. This trend would continue until the economic hurt the Boston shipyards as badly as any other industrial sector of the United States. Nevertheless, a brilliant shipbuilder could go far in the 1840s, and none showed more talent than Samuel Harte Pook (1827-1901).98

Pook’s Precision

Pook was a Boston-based naval architect who had graduated from a Portsmouth, academy as a shipwright apprentice in 1842 and was under contract to the United States Navy. Pook learned much from the other Boston-area shipbuilders, including Captain Robert B. Forbes. The still independently-operating Pook, at age 23, designed his first major clipper ship, , for New York’s A. A. and Low Company during the Gold Rush. Pook also designed ships for the Atlantic Works, including La Voyageur de la Mer for the Pasha of in 1857. However, Pook’s academy training had instilled in him a keen eye for precision engineering, mathematical calculation, and scientifically-drawn building plans. The

97O’Har, “Shipbuilding,” 12, 73-74. 98 O’Har, “Shipbuilding,” 14. The Panic of 1857 was a financial crisis brought on by land over speculation around railroad owned territories that resulted in several major railroad companies going bankrupt, loan defaults on the now nearly worthless land, and bank failures. The bank stresses were particularly damaging because of the excessive printing of paper currency ahead of the specie to support the value—and it was this in particular that hurt major industrial centers like Boston the hardest. See James L. Huston, Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 9-20. 51

young engineer’s time in Boston left him dismayed at the rule-of-thumb designs going into even the best of wooden ships—the clippers. For Pook, this needed to change.99

What drove Pook to consider iron hull designs, besides their technological , was that his carefully laid wooden hull plans were often mistreated and even stolen! Pook complained that shipbuilders took his products because they liked only the “lines” of a ship and ignored its dimensions, tonnage, and seaworthiness until the ship was literally slid into the water and floated (or sank). Iron hulls could not be designed in this haphazard fashion because precision cutting, joining, and stress evaluation were crucial for assembly. This was the key difference between using the two building materials.100

A persistent question during the wood-to-iron transition concerned whether or not existing shipyards could make the infrastructural and personnel changes necessary for factory- style iron ship production. In a post-Civil War report to Congress, former Union Inspector General Alban C. Stimers made the case that such a transition was possible:

The change is very simple. My opinion is, that when ships come to be made here, it will be found that the builders are those that have been building wooden ships. It requires only a different arrangement of materials, which is very easily learned. In fact, the art of ship-building is simple if you understand naval architecture, and that the wooden ship-builders understand. I have seen men acting as common laborers, carrying iron about, and have seen them in six months afterwards driving rivets, which is the most particular thing. If you have the head man right the labor part is easily learned … Of course the knowledge how to direct all to be done requires a labor of years; but after the plans and specifications are completed, the other parts of the work are easy.101

Although Stimers’s testimony was steeped in confidence, it belied the problem Pook had seen over a decade earlier. The advance of technology had material and cultural aspects. Shipyard owners and operators had to be willing experiment with designs, but also to adhere strictly to plans and retrain their workforce to achieve consistent output. However, it would be the economic hardships of wood-based yards being left behind that compelled them to reconsider the advantages of iron shipping.

99Fairburn, Merchant Sail, v. 5, 2953-2954. Forbes was the namesake for Otis Tufts’s iron tug. 100Ibid., 2959-2960. 101U.S. House, Committee on Causes of Reduction of American Tonnage, Select, Causes of the Reduction of American Tonnage (HRG-1869-CRT-0001 October-December 1869), p. 21. Text in: ProQuest® Congressional Hearings Digital Collection. Accessed 25 November 2013. 52

Shipbuilders, notably Donald McKay, who had built famed clipper ships such as Great Republic in 1855, found themselves with idle shipyards and machine shops in want of orders by the time iron-clad warships were a known element during the American Civil War.102 McKay was an example of the late reaction of American shipyards in general. Until the U.S. government entered the iron-hull ship business, it would have been an enormous gamble to convert a shipyard from wood to iron as Otis Tufts discovered. Tufts had recognized the value of iron ships despite poor demand for them in pre-Civil War America. Before the Union and Confederate governments realized the value of ironclads in the 1860s, the British and French navies were already experimenting with their design and construction.

Putting to Sea in Europe

An Adversarial Admiralty

As discussed above, the success of the first British iron ship was insufficient to persuade the British Admiralty to adopt the technology for Royal Navy vessels. One impediment was a stubborn Royal Navy surveyor, Sir William Symonds (1782-1856), who had been nothing more than an amateur shipwright upon his political appointment. Symonds thought more highly of his talents than those of fellow professional designers. While in office, he forced ungainly innovations on British warships, which involved enlarging them for more capacity and stability. Symonds’s innovations were immediately rendered obsolete by the advent of steam power, and he was convinced that only his designs for sailing ships were acceptable. He repeatedly stalled other innovations including propellers and iron hulls.

Eventually, the Admiralty grew displeased with Symonds, personally and professionally; his designs tended to “roll” too much and he ignored all other suggestions. Symonds was forced to resign in October 1847 by a new Tory government, and he was replaced by the highly- decorated naval officer Sir Baldwin Walker (1802-1876). Before achieving the post of Surveyor of the Navy, Walker had served in the Royal Navy since age ten. He served the British crown with distinction all over the world, including posts in , , and ; he

102Donald McKay to Gustavus Fox, East Boston, 16 April 1863, The Papers of Gideon Welles (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Photo Duplication Service, 1988), Container 7, Reel 6, 343-345. 53

also took a command in the Turkish Navy for a time in the late 1830s and early 1840s. Though he lacked technical expertise as a surveyor, Walker possessed significant practical experience as a seaman.103

Walker’s lack of technical expertise was ironically advantageous during his tenure as surveyor between 1848 and 1861. He recognized his ignorance regarding ship design and thus instituted an official separation of administration and naval architecture within the Royal Navy’s offices. Nevertheless, he was cognizant of testing done on iron plating in area proving grounds. In 1845, Colonel Henry Dundas (1871-1876) (later Major General) of the Royal Artillery at Woolwich had tested iron plating for its susceptibility to penetration and splintering due to projectile impact. He discovered that the iron did not splinter and that damage was mostly restricted to the projectiles’ point of impact. Dundas also learned the iron was more durable and less susceptible to deterioration than wood. His tests considered only plates one-half to five- eighths of an inch thick, thus they were of limited use. The British Admiralty, except for Walker taking note, utterly ignored Dundas’s experiment.104 But Walker’s interest was sufficiently piqued.

When Walker gained his surveyor post, he continued the experiments on a larger scale. In 1848, tests included firing 32-pound shells into seven-inch thick armor plating (derived from fourteen half-inch plates stacked together). These tests proved remarkably edifying, as the armor plating deflected the shots. But the immovable Admiralty would need a nudge from an old adversary to make the leap from experiment to production. During the 1850s, there had been exchanges between British and French shipbuilders regarding the promise of iron hull designs, with Aaron Manby and other iron ships already sailing across the English Channel giving the French a first-hand look at the new technology. In 1853, with the outbreak of the Crimean War, Napoleon III (1808-1873) of France sponsored the idea of encasing a warship with such an iron hull. Although Napoleon III has generally been saddled with a poor historical reputation, he could be quite open to new ideas. 105

103Murray, Ship-Building, 22. 104Murray, Ship-Building, 23. Napoleon III, infatuated with Caesar, had a trireme built and launched on the Seine on 9 March 1861. 105Ibid., 24. 54

French Floating Artillery Batteries106

The Crimean War has long been considered a pivotal factor in bringing about the “Great Reforms” in Russia under Tsar Alexander II (1818-1881). The war revealed the extent of Russia’s backwardness in its military and technological abilities relative to its Western opponents of Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire.107 The achievement of the British and French land armies notwithstanding, one of the most creative innovations was the French iron armored barge. In 1854, Britain and France implemented Napoleon III’s idea by armoring floating barges of guns. The designers installed steam engines on the barges to power their movement into place so they could shell Russian fortifications. Each barge weighed between 1,500 and 1,900 tons, carried 14 to 16 guns, and had a nine-foot draft, which was suitable for approaching forts. The French finished their barges first and used them to great effect in the bombardment of Fort Kinburn on the south shore of the Dnieper River.108

Among the observers of the French iron armored barges was the French naval architect Henri Dupuy de Lôme (1816-1885). De Lôme had visited Britain in 1842 and witnessed steamship production as well as the operation of the iron steamship Great Britain in 1845. He had already recommended that such technologies be adopted for French frigates before the Crimean War had broken out. De Lôme combined what he had learned from his observations in Britain and on the Crimea peninsula to produce the first sea-going ironclad warship, La Gloire, in 1857.109

106Batteries in this sense are an organized group of artillery pieces on land or on a ship. 107The Great Reforms that took place under the auspices of Tsar Alexander II in the 1860s were indeed a reaction to the realization of the gap between Russia and Western Europe in many areas as a result of the Russian loss during the Crimean War. The invincibility of the Russian military had been a pillar of the autocracy since the Russian victory over at Poltava in 1709. But the defeat by the British, French, and Ottoman forces in Crimea cast doubt over the Tsarist system all the way down to the existence of serfdom as sources of backwardness. In response to the latter concern, Tsar Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861, earning him the nickname “the great emancipator.” For more on the Great Reforms see: W. Bruce Lincoln, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990). 108Murray, Ship-Building, 24. Kinburn’s location is inside present-day Ukraine. 109Ibid. 55

The First Ironclad Arms Race

Between the time that the French armored barges had fired on Kinburn and the launch of La Gloire, iron-hull designs had begun circulating in Britain and France. In 1855, British civil engineer J. Scott Russell (1808-1882) had shown plans for a “shot-proof” iron vessel to the Admiralty’s Sir Baldwin Walker (1802-1876). Walker considered combining the iron battery idea into the and frigates already in service. In other words, he wanted to retrofit the existing fleet rather than build new ships entirely of iron. An 1857 Royal Navy pamphlet suggested that multi- ships have their top tiers removed and encased in iron. The retrofitted ships would bear guns similar to those carried by the French armored barges. The pamphlet, however, anticipated that ironclad designs would appear in rival navies and that gun upgrades should follow suit. The pamphlet’s recommendations were applied only partially by the Admiralty. The Royal Navy’s First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir John Pakington (1799-1880), commissioned Warrior line of warships in 1858 while expressing doubts regarding the seaworthiness of the full-iron hulls--prohibiting iron armor on the bow or stern of the vessels for fear the ship would sink under the metal’s weight.110

Though the British Admiralty was still giving grudging acceptance to ironclad design, the French government was embracing it fully. De Lôme adopted the idea in the 1857 pamphlet for La Gloire by encasing a 252-feet long wooden frame with four and a half-inch thick iron plating, backed by wood to cushion impacts and recoils, while the guns would be placed on railroad-style turntables. HMS Warrior was built from scratch to 420 feet in length with iron plating the same thickness as La Gloire and eighteen-inch thick wood planks interposed between the armor and the frame. France’s openness to ironclads posed the possibility of France vaulting ahead of Britain—at least in this area.111 The transfer of knowledge between individual officers and entrepreneurs helped spur France’s arrival at a viable military application for an iron ship and that in turn proved the most effective impetus to the British Admiralty for their development of an ironclad—more so than any proposal for reform or experiment prior. But the designs were far from perfect.

110Murray, Ship-Building, 25. Corvettes are ships slightly smaller than frigates and more lightly armed. 111Murray, Ship-Building, 26-27. 56

These hybrids of iron and wood continued to reveal the advantages of iron over wood in ship hull design. Indeed, Fairbairn and Russell continued their tests and warned hybrid shipbuilders that the wood backings could still rot. Any worries shipbuilders may have had over the loss of resistance without the wood backings could be compensated for with thicker armored plates. While there were concerns over the purity of the iron being used, the ease of repairing broken plating with new iron that was just as strong could not be discounted as a cost-saving measure.112 Greater strength, lighter weight, more flexible design, and superior durability were now on display in two of the greatest navies on Earth. Other navies thus had ready examples to look to when considering iron-clads.

Conclusion

Early nineteenth century iron ship designs combined technological experiment and commercial gamble. Charles Napier’s Aaron Manby and John Elgar’s Codorus were both intended as solutions to the technological limitations of wooden ships. Napier saw the failings of wood hulls with prolonged use of steam engines, while Elgar looked for a way to breach the obstacle-laden Susquehanna River. Napier and Elgar overcame their technical challenges, but the cost of producing more ships solely with their own capital was unfeasible with the lack of demand for iron ships among more conservative shipbuilders and operators.

All was not lost, though. In the wake of Napier and Elgar came a handful of engineers and entrepreneurs who saw the financial potential of the lighter and stronger iron hulls. Fairbairn, Brunel, Tufts, and Pook each observed and adopted the creative iron, steam, and propeller driven designs slowly emerging from industrialized yards. American and British engineers interested in developing the new vessels further were still hampered by the dominance of clipper ship commerce in the United States and political machinations within the British Admiralty. Until political and economic exigencies came to bear, the impetus behind technological advancement remained weak.

112Ibid., 28, 80. 57

Elsewhere across Europe, the contributions of open-minded officials like Baldwin, Walker, and Henri Dupuy de Lôme, and the tactical decisions on the water during the Crimean War combined with knowledge gained from experiments on iron hulls resulting in the wartime use of French armored barges. This pattern of private experiments’ production being adopted by a government for war would be repeated by the United States in the 1860s. Iron shipping would not be adopted in earnest until after the Civil War—the combination of the 1857 panic and the service of ironclads during hostilities gave American shipbuilders the proof they needed.

Convincing ship builders that iron hulls would be economically viable was necessary before they would embrace new construction. Eventually, the cyclical evolution of propulsion, ordnance, and armor would demonstrate that an alternative to sails and wood was needed. The pressure of competition and war also helped government agents across the Atlantic overcome politics and tradition in favor of efficiency and merit. The progression from Napier to Fairburn to Brunel shows the British appetite for the new construction methods over wooden ships and the tenacious skepticism that persisted despite advantages demonstrated by the experimental vessels—an intellectual conflict that spread to the public.

These early British struggles, upon reaching the United States, saw American shipbuilders agonize over similar reluctance to embrace iron-hulled ships. But American resistance was more than just difficulty due to different building materials. Covering the economic gambles of John Elgar and Otis Tufts show a sample of the complications facing early iron shipbuilding, while Samuel Pook’s experience was a bright spot in professionalization meeting the challenge of working with precision engineering techniques and machinery in a business dominated by hand-crafted work.

In Europe, the testing of guns on experimental iron armor failed to completely sway the British Admiralty, but the crisis of the Crimean War and French naval development inspired the Royal Navy to make changes. These changes would have been difficult without accommodating personnel--Sir Baldwin Walker, Colonel Henry Dundas, and Henri Dupuy de Lôme--looking for technological solutions to strategic problems. The human element should thus not be ignored.

Iron hulled ships in the early nineteenth century were the product of reform minded naval officers, ambitious businessmen, and technologically savvy inventors. Helping these people were

58

new manufacturing processes and solutions to worsening problems with wooden ships powered by steam. The vulnerability of the new ships to economic and political developments, however, underscores the social nature of technological development. Adding to the social element were the personalities who encouraged or discouraged iron ship design. Such innovations cannot fulfill their potential unless people see their advantages—be that through commercial promotion, political patronage, or any other means to catch the attention of consumers. This is a notion that will be addressed again in later chapters.

59

CHAPTER 3

STEPHEN R MALLORY’S IRONCLAD SOLUTION

Introduction Just recounting the application of naval innovations during Stephen Russell Mallory’s time as Confederate navy chief fails to do justice to the effect of and on Mallory regarding naval technological advancement. To understand how closely these technological changes were integrated into the Confederacy’s naval strategy, it is necessary to observe the means by which the knowledge attached to the new inventions was transferred across the Atlantic. How did knowledge disseminate Europe from America and who decided what knowledge would be adopted and what would be cast aside? Who made these decisions and why? If one sees the military, private contractors, and individual personnel as part of a system of “gatekeepers,” then it is possible to comprehend the choices of organizations in question—both as part of a strategic plan and in reaction to practical challenges that arose.113 Let us first turn to a discussion of the role of Mallory. Stephen Mallory, the Confederacy’s secretary of the navy during the American Civil War, directed his initial efforts during the conflict to overcoming the Confederacy’s personnel and materiel shortcomings relative to the Union.114 Burdened with this severe logistical handicap, Mallory had to create a navy from scratch. Mallory, the Democratic U.S. senator of Florida from 1851 until secession gripped the nation, received appointment as Confederate naval chief after Florida left the Union thanks to Rebel president Jefferson Davis recognizing Mallory’s sea-borne acumen. In this effort, he managed admirably, as he had learned of the revolution in naval technology regarding iron-clad warships across the Atlantic and then made it a tool of the Confederacy’s naval strategic needs: i.e., resisting a Union Navy supported by far greater resources. Mallory’s exclusive approach to shouldering the burdens of the fledgling rebel fleet,

113 Joseph T. Durkin, Stephen R. Mallory: Confederate Navy Chief (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1954); and Rodman L. Underwood, Stephen Russell Mallory: A Biography of the Confederate Navy Secretary and United States Senator (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005). Jay W. Simson, Naval Strategies of the Civil War: Confederate Innovations and Federal Opportunism (Nashville, TN: Cumberland House, 2001), 29. Comprehensive treatment of Mallory is limited to biographies written by Joseph T. Durkin and Rodman Underwood. 114 Perhaps some comparative statistics might be in order. 60

however, would also be his undoing. The energetic rebel navy leader’s demands outstripped the support of the South, which was devoted to supporting the armies.

Senator and States’ Rights Public Servant The state of Florida seceded from the Union on 10 January 1861 and became one of the first seven states of the Confederacy--following South Carolina’s lead on 20 December 1860. Jefferson Davis appointed Mallory to the post of secretary of the navy, forcing the Floridian to contend with several options for building up the virtually non-existent navy for the South. A good portion of Mallory’s strategy would concern itself with thwarting the Union blockade around the 3,600 miles of southern coastline. He would need to buy ships from abroad until the home-front shipyards could be brought up to speed. In addition, Confederate agents abroad could keep abreast of international attitudes towards potential alliances with Britain and/or France. New naval technologies, such as ironclad warships, had also caught Mallory’s eye before secession. But to acquire this technology in order to generate a competent naval service, Mallory would have to combine wily diplomacy, invention, and personality. A communication from Mallory to an agent on 17 May 1861 reveals some of what he was formulating: The views and disposition of the French Government are understood to be favorable to our cause, the recognition of our independence at an early day is expected, and it is thought that arrangements might be made with it for the transfer to our Government either directly or through some friendly intermediary of one of the armored frigates of the class of the Gloire. … France and England must be hereafter connected with us by the strong ties of mutual interests … they have such an immediate and direct interest in preventing this blockade that we look to them with confidence for such aid …

Mallory’s line of thinking, as noted above, had its origins earlier in his career.115 Stephen R. Mallory was born in 1812 at Port Au on the British possession of Trinidad to a father—Charles--working as a construction engineer out of and an Irish-émigré mother--Ellen. Stephen family moved to , Florida in 1820 where he spent time in a ship-wrecking business until his schooling began. Mallory was educated briefly in an

115 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press/Ballantine Books, 1988), 235. Simson, Naval Strategies, 36. United States Naval War Records Office, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies Printing Office, 1894-1922), Series II, v. 2, 70. [hereafter cited as ORN] 61

Alabama primary school. Upon the death of Mallory’s father, the young Stephen returned to Florida to assist his mother with a boarding house business. But soon he left to spend three years at Moravian Academy in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Afterwards, Mallory returned to his mother’s boarding business and soon met his future wife, Angela Moreno, in 1830. He would spend several years more engrossed in self-study that supplemented his work as a journalist, combatant against tribes, and law student under Judge (an expert on maritime jurisprudence). This combination of experiences inspired the young Mallory to a lifetime in the employ of government.116 Throughout his life, Mallory maintained a somewhat “chivalrous” approach to his interpersonal dealings. To discover the wellsprings of his lifetime attitude, it is useful to examine one of Mallory’s first political battles. In early 1835, the Florida Territory’s council abolished the city charter of Key West over some unresolved matters of fines and taxes. Mallory supported the repeal of the Key West charter of 1832 for its arbitrary tax of property. He favored instead a law that was more representative of the community as a whole. What irritated Mallory further, however, were the 1832 charter supporters’ efforts to discourage citizens from participating in meetings for a new charter. Mallory wanted efficiency of operation at Key West, but he wanted this done only with the approbation of the people.117 Adherence to democracy was thus one of his major motivations. Mallory’s early political interests would not drive him to seek public office immediately, not even after Florida’s admission as a slave state on 3 March 1845. He would be active as a moderate Democrat, straddling the line between the value of Florida’s position in the Union and the option of disunion over what he claimed were states’ rights issues. But an unwieldy mix of rigidity and flexibility over political issues would be Mallory’s double-edged sword as both senator and Confederate cabinet member. Equivocation would have Mallory uncommitted to the radical secessionists of an 1850 convention in Nashville, Tennessee. He preferred to work within the system as long as no express danger threatened his fellow Floridians. But as the air of the political climate thickened with controversy over what was presented as states’ rights, Mallory’s years of public service and the allure of the debate prompted him to make a bid for Congress.

116 Durkin, Stephen R. Mallory, 14-19. Mallory took part in one of the three in Florida against the Seminole tribes. Mallory’s stint in combat only lasted from 1835 to 1837, but the Seminole Wars lasted from 1816 to 1819, 1835 to 1842, and 1855 to 1858. 117Ibid., 27-28. 62

The Democratic Party controlled Florida legislature appointed Mallory to the U.S. Senate over David Yulee (a states’ right advocate, sometimes supported by Mallory, but strongly secessionist) on 15 January 1851.118

Secessionist Sympathy The junior senator demonstrated a great interest in international affairs and the domestic wants of his constituents. For example, one year Mallory supported a resolution to welcome a Hungarian war hero (against worries of entangling affiliation with Europe), and another year he supported the building of a new naval station at Key West. But the niceties of international applause and domestic public works soon gave way to the venomous debates about slavery in the 1850s. Mallory would be one of the pro-slave senators vigorously denouncing Massachusetts Senator in the discussions over the Kansas-Nebraska act and fugitive slave law in 1854.119 Mallory’s struggle to avoid extremes was put to a most severe test with the Kansas- Nebraska debates. The arguments increased in ferocity through a speech Mallory delivered, on 15 March 1858, defending slavery as benevolent and the Constitutional rights of the slave states in the face of domination by Free states. These revelations about Mallory’s politics are crucial to contemporary and modern understanding of his acquiescence to secession in 1861. His revulsion to seemingly arbitrary law or entrenched power would cause him to bristle against liberal and conservative extremes. The slavery issue vividly illustrates Mallory’s political mindset. But these examples of his tenacity are not unique. Indeed, they extended to his treatment of the U.S. Navy.120 Mallory’s local politics propelled him to the national scene, and his time as a senator would expose him to a variety of diplomatic, military, and technological developments he would revisit during his time in the Confederate cabinet. His early years in public life were therefore crucial to his wartime experience. Now let us turn to the changes in naval construction architecture that Mallory was encountering.

118 Underwood, Stephen Russell Mallory, 20-21. 119 Ibid., 29-30, 32-33. 120 Ibid., 35-38. 63

Naval Revolution As Raimondo Luraghi states so well in his A History of the Confederate Navy (1996): It is impossible to understand the substance of Confederate Naval Strategy as Secretary Mallory elaborated it unless one keeps in mind the revolutionary transformation in maritime technology that occurred toward the middle of the nineteenth century.121

The changes occurring to shipbuilding in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, though not yet integrated by the degree of professionalism of scientific knowledge seen at the end of the century, took place within a social framework of naval personnel, inventors, and entrepreneurs in Europe and the United States. This triad of entities were gatekeepers, agents who selected new technology available at the time and adapted it for the needs of whatever group they represented.122 Much of the development of armored warships in the nineteenth century was in a cycle relating to improvements in propulsion, ordnance, and armor. Screw-propelled steamships enabled more weight to be carried on a ship without losing thrust capacity—permitting heavier guns to be placed on deck and requiring improvements in armor as a defense.123 It is worth taking a brief look at the development of the screw propeller in the nineteenth century, as many of the people surrounding the invention would be connected to the creation of armored warships. Sources vary widely on who first invented the screw propeller. Joseph Ressel, an Austrian student at Vienna University, would be among the first credited with inventing a screw propeller in 1812. Ressel built a hand-operated barge which he patented on 11 February 1827 and later fitted a screw propeller with a small engine. Local authorities banned Ressel’s design, however, when a steam pipe burst during a time with heightened tensions over anarchist bombings. Captain Delisle, a French army officer, had also been considered as a possible originator of the submerged screw propeller in 1823 due to a written but unproven claim. The rest of the nineteenth century’s history of the invention of the propeller was a race from invention to patent office. John Ericsson developed his version of the propeller in 1836 after his move from Sweden

121 Raimondo, Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy, trans. by Paolo E. Coletta (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 55. 122 Ibid. See also Miwao Matsumoto, Technology Gatekeepers for War and Peace: The British Ship Revolution and Japanese Industrialization (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 6. 123 Edward Chappell, Reports Relative to Smith's Patent Screw Propeller: As Used on Board the Archimedes Steam Vessel (London: James Ridgway/Smith, Elder and Co., 1840), 17. See also Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy, 56. 64

to England. He had also developed a steam engine power plant for the Royal Navy a decade earlier, but lost out to another competitor. However, Middlesex farmer Francis Petit Smith’s patent on a screw propeller was filed on 31 May 1836--six weeks before Ericsson’s.124 Ericsson, though rebuffed in England, impressed American naval officer Robert Stockton—the latter persuading the former to immigrate to the United States.125 Due in part to Stockton’s urging, Congress awarded a construction contract to Ericsson and commissioned the resulting USS Princeton to demonstrate for key government officials in 1842 the screw propeller’s advantages. Princeton would undergo trials over the next two years, but it experienced an infamous and deadly concluding display in early 1844. Later that March, the ship was sailing up the Potomac River with President , the secretaries of state and the navy, and other administration officials on board to observe. Alas, a final round fired from a new gun--the “Peacemaker”--misfired and its resulting blast killed Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur and Secretary of the Navy Thomas W. Gilmer. Tyler had gone below deck just before the blast and was spared. This fatal incident soured the relationship between Ericsson and the U.S. government—even though the failed gun was designed by Stockton--and strained relations continued through the start of the Civil War. Luck thus played a role in who was embraced and who was passed over.126 Luck, cannot, however, explain Stockton’s success. Just who was Stockton and why was he so influential on Ericsson, Congress, and the transmission of technology across the ocean during this period? Robert F. Stockton was born on 20 August 1795 in Princeton, New to a family well steeped in politics. Stockton’s father, Richard, had been a Federalist representative and senator for —as well as the U.S. attorney for New Jersey’s district.

124 Edwyn Gray, Nineteenth-Century Torpedoes and Their Inventors (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004), 64-66. The anarchist bombings were frequent occurrences due to heightened revolutionary activity across Europe— particularly due to anti-monarchy movements in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Russia, and 125 R. John Brockmann, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, 1795-1866: Protean Man for a Protean Nation (Amherst, New York: Cambria Press, 2009), 96-99. 126 Bern Anderson, By Sea and By River: The Naval History of the Civil War. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 7- 8; and Craig L. Symonds, The Civil War at Sea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5. 65

Figure 1 - Explosion of the "Peace-maker" on board the USS Princeton127

Robert’s grandfather, also Richard, had been a judge and signer of the Declaration of Independence. The young Robert, second son of nine children, seemed destined for a life in the legal service like so much of his family until memoirs of the late Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson— published shortly after Nelson’s 1805 death—reached the young Stockton as he began his studies at Princeton in 1811. Inspired by Nelson’s adventures, chivalry, and compassion for his subordinates, Stockton left Princeton to study mathematics and navigation in 1810, shortly after President recreated the U.S. Navy. Robert went to study with his uncle by marriage, Reverend Andrew Hunter, who Adams happened to appoint as the primary instructor of midshipmen in Washington City. At age sixteen, Stockton received his ’s commission on 1 September 1811 and served first aboard USS President under Commodore John Rodgers in February 1812—the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain began four months later.128 Stockton would see action at sea and ashore during the War of 1812, as the young midshipman was frequently placed in high-risk battle stations aboard ship when President was in pursuit of enemy ships such as HMS Belvidera and HMS Plantagenet during the war’s early engagements. Though these chases amounted to little, Stockton’s courageous carrying out of his

127 Princeton, Naval History & Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship- histories/danfs/p/princeton-i.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). 128 Brockmann, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, 7-9, 16. 66

duties mightily impressed his superiors, especially Rodgers. Stockton would have a chance to prove his mettle on land when, in 1814, Britain’s naval forces under Admiral Sir George Cockburn sailed up with a fleet threatening Washington and Baltimore with the army of General Robert Ross—one result of which was the U.S. secretary of the navy ordering select seamen (among them Rodgers and his crew) to be trained as infantrymen. Rodgers, Stockton, and company were unable to help in the case of the attack on Washington, but they helped prevent an outflanking maneuver by Cockburn’s forces during the bombardment of Fort McHenry at Baltimore. Stockton’s efforts in disrupting Cockburn’s logistics—contributing to the British withdrawal—earned Rodgers’ praise in his reports and Stockton a promotion to lieutenant on 9 December 1814. At age nineteen, Stockton requested and was permitted to continue serving with Commodore Rodgers aboard USS Guerriere as she prepared to tackle the next foreign policy challenge for the United States after the War of 1812—the Barbary States of Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers. Stockton would quickly be transferred to USS Spitfire under Alexander J. Dallas on 9 May 1815, and during action as part of Commodore Stephen Decatur’s fleet in the Mediterranean on 19 June, he displayed his characteristic zeal by leading a party to capture the Algerian Estedio—giving him a taste of naval glory. Stockton would pass through several other commands--spending some time on USS Erie where he was first lieutenant over midshipman (later Admiral) Samuel Francis DuPont.129 Stockton’s first independent command would come aboard USS Erie on 22 July 1819 when Commodore Charles Stewart of the Mediterranean had Stockton convey four suspended captains and one suspended lieutenant home for trial. But during the relative peace of the 1820s, the ambitious lieutenant struggled to find a command once back at home in Princeton on furlough. Stockton pleaded for a command from then Secretary of the Navy Smith Thomson, who was compelled to turn Stockton down owing to the traditions of rank and seniority. A year later, however, family connections prevailed in linking Stockton to the American Colonization Society—the movement to transport freed American slaves to an African homeland.130

129 Brockmann, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, 16-18, 20-27. This victory was tempered by the fact that Robert’s younger brother, Horatio—who had followed him into the service as a midshipman, was dying of illness aboard Guerriere. DuPont would be a significant naval commander during the American Civil War, and play a contentious role in the use of ironclad warships in combat 130 Brockmann, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, 35-38. Stockton’s trip home during his first command on Erie with these prisoners was eventful to say the least. Erie, en route home, paralleled the African coast for a time to indulge 67

The political leverage of the colonization movement was enough to earn Stockton command of the USS Alligator on 14 February 1821—still under construction in the then under control of Commandant Isaac Hull. Though Stockton technically applied for a command outside of the navy’s jurisdiction, he was given orders with Congressional backing to head for the coast of Africa to suppress the slave trade, capture pirates, look for suitable places for future settlement, and find areas that could be navigated by warships for prospective missions against the slave-trade. Stockton’s orders, regarding freed slaves, mentioned offering only “transportation,” giving him considerable room to proceed creatively. Stockton’s “creative disobedience” worked favorably in negotiating colonized land for the American Colonization Society in West Africa in late 1821, but resulted in Commodore James Biddle (in charge of the West Indian Squadron) relieving Stockton of command when Stockton pursued pirates into Spanish-controlled Cuban territorial waters.131 Stockton had been in command of Alligator for only sixteen months when Biddle relieved him of duty, and it would be four years before the ambitious lieutenant would experience any meaningful change in fortunes. After his marriage to Maria Potter on 4 March 1823, Stockton was assigned to survey naval facilities in harbors at Charleston, Savannah, and Brunswick, Georgia on 8 November 1826. Stockton performed the survey until 8 April 1828, thereafter extended his leave and refusing command offers other than accepting a promotion to commandant in June 1830. He would not accept another command until 1838 as captain aboard USS Ohio.132 In the intervening years, Stockton would pursue life in business world that provided civic and political gains to his advantage.

Stockton on his pursuit of slave ships. Erie approached the unidentified ship and received no identification from the latter after repeated hails—Stockton all the while refusing to identify Erie to the . Even Stockton’s captive captains recommended Stockton identify himself to the target to avoid an incident, but Stockton refused to do anything except furnish the captains with arms in case of a boarding action. Eventually, Stockton’s threatening to board the target slaver ship convinced its crew to identify the ship as a Spanish frigate twice Erie’s strength of crew and guns. Erie withdrew without further incident. For more on the American Colonization Society see: Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2005). 131 Brockmann, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, 43-44, 58-61. The West-African land in question would become known as Liberia. 132 Brockmann, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, 64-66, 69. By the time Stockton had taken command of Ohio, he had already gotten a taste for politics at the Democratic Party nominating convention for congress—running as the delegate from Somerset County, New Jersey. Stockton was caught up in the tide of public servants leaving the old guard of and leftover Federalists for ’s wing of Democrats. This pattern of following principle—not party—would drive Stockton into the Whig Party later, back to the Democratic Party, into the American “Know-Nothing” Party, and back to the Democrats. Stockton was also severely conflicted when it came to the slavery question—being from a family of slaveholders, blaming the British for forcing the slave trade on 68

Failing at first at some agricultural ventures, Stockton turned to his family’s work in Princeton on the and Raritan Canal in 1830. The canal, to pass through New Jersey, would contend with rival interests from the Stevens family of Hoboken, which focused attention on railroad building. Robert met the Stevens brothers (Robert Livingston and John) in New York and came to an agreement in January 1830 resulting in the Delaware and Raritan Canal Company receiving its charter in February 1830, while the Stevens’ Camden and Amboy Railroad receiving its a month later. But the canal continually lost out financially to the railroad, forcing the companies to merge and Stockton to publically proclaim that the canal’s purpose was to serve the public good despite the financial challenges. -Undeterred by his lackluster performance in business, Stockton was emboldened on other fronts--especially politics. In 1833, he narrowly lost a bid for appointment to one of New Jersey’s Senate seats. In May 1840, he was merely fined for violently obstructing a canal competitor’s ferryboat. But it was Stockton’s maintenance of his relationship with the Navy in 1836 and 1837 that proved most auspicious.133 Matthew Perry, a former shipmate of Stockton on USS President, as well as an officer familiar with the campaigns in Liberia, West Africa, and the , had remained in continual naval service throughout the 1830s—becoming commander of the Navy Yard in New York. In 1833, Perry used his influence as yard commander to pool young officers into the Naval Lyceum—an attempt to improve professionalization and education among the officer corps. The Lyceum’s official publication in July 1836, Naval Magazine, carried an article predicting the prominence of steamships in future naval engagements—remarking that England and France had leapt ahead in this technology, but that Robert L. Stevens could help America catch up. Stevens had drawn up plans for steamships with propellers in 1805 and consulted with the Navy Board of Commissioners on steamships in 1834 on how to create steam warships. Stockton, already partners with the Stevens family in New Jersey and a member of the Lyceum, would be dispatched for England in 1837 for corporate fundraising purposes.134 The joint company Stockton had worked to found in New Jersey wanted Robert to represent their interests in London in the wake of the 1837 panic that resulted from the financial troubles of the Second Bank of the United States. Stockton was to seek out a loan of $1 million

the American colonies, and struggling to reconcile free institutions with emancipation of slaves in need of civilizing.—See: Ibid., 74-77. 133 Brockmann, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, 77-85, 88-91. 134 Brockmann, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, 91-93. 69

from London investors at the Bank of England and in this he succeeded. But while spending time negotiating the bank loans, Stockton was introduced to Swedish engineer John Ericsson by U.S. consul Francis B. Ogden. Ericsson was in England to demonstrate a tug boat operated by steam engine and propeller for the British admiralty—which refused to accept the design. Stockton was allowed to ride aboard the tug, Francis B. Ogden, and recognized it immediately as what the Lyceum’s publication was predicting. Stockton recognized the commercial and military advantages of the steam engine and screw propeller over paddle-wheels and sails—reporting the commercial applications to the Journal of the Franklin Institute and naval advantages to the Lyceum’s Naval Magazine after his return to the U.S. in November 1837.135 The advantages of a screw propeller propulsion as opposed to sail or paddle wheel steam propulsion systems were observed in official reports in Britain and the United States in the early 1840s. Propellers would clearly not depend on weather or wind patterns to operate properly. In the single-screw model, the propeller would be placed at the end of the stern just before the rudder. The propeller then could generate thrust through a centrally located shaft and give the ship much greater maneuverability. The propeller model also kept most of the machinery below the water line, leaving a clearer view for gunners while reducing exposure to enemy gunnery. This was more advantageous than relatively cumbersome masts or paddle wheels that were easy targets—however it was also possible to operate a ship with both a steam powered propeller and sails.136 Steam-driven propellers were not the only naval technology gaining in sophistication. Ordnance was also undergoing a rapid development in the early-mid nineteenth century. Henry A. Wise, Whig Representative from Virginia and chair of the House Naval Affairs committee,

135 Brockmann, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, 93-94, 96-99. 136 Chappell, Reports Relative to Smith's Patent Screw Propeller, 5-6, 11-12. U.S. House. Committee on Naval Affairs. Communication of Lieutenant Hunter, of the U. S. Navy, on the proper model of a war steamer. (27 H. Doc. 189, 26 February 1843), 1-7. Text from: Congressional Documents, Available from: ProQuest Congressional; Accessed: 10 December 2013. In twin-screw models, the propellers could be placed on the stern on either side of the rudder and provide additional steering capability in addition to a redundant propulsion system. In other words, one propeller could be stationary while the other turned to push one side of the ship towards the opposite direction. If one propeller was disabled in the twin-screw model, the other could continue propelling the ship. An early side- wheeled iron-hulled ship had been designed by naval constructor Samuel Hart in 1842 and commissioned as the USS Michigan in 1844, operating on the Great Lakes in the 1850s and seeing limited action (but not direct ship-to- ship combat) in the Civil War against Confederate moves in the Great Lakes region. Michigan was re-commissioned as the Wolverine in 1905 and decommissioned in 1912, ultimately being repurposed and sold for scrap by 1949— See: Michigan, Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship- histories/danfs/m/michigan-i.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). 70

authored a report on 7 July 1841 that made specific references to improving American naval ordnance in comparison to Europe as well as a practical approach to testing and funding such a project: That in communication of the Secretary of the Navy, accompanying the President's message, the attention of Congress is called to the state of navy ordnance and ordnance stores. ... From a report of the Board of Navy Commissioners it would seem that so great a deficiency exists in this particular that, for all purposes of naval warfare, the country is entirely destitute of anything like an adequate supply. … Your committee are further of opinion that, at this period of scientific experiment and discovery, the Navy Department should be clothed with power to test the value of such improvements as have been, or may hereafter be, made in naval ordnance and construction.

George E. Badger, then secretary of the navy, had written to Congress on 29 June 1841 and Wise added Badger’s letter to the report. Badger commented that, There has been no period of the world in which the inventive faculties of our race have been so actively or more successfully employed than the present, and no country more distinguished by honorable discoveries than our own. Many have been brought to the notice of the Department with fair promises of success, and with just claims at least to a careful trial, while the means of the discoverers are often inadequate to bear the expenses of the trial; and it is in nearly all cases desirable that some reserve should be used in giving publicity to a projected improvement until its value shall have been tested. It would seem to me, therefore, wise to entrust to some department of the Government the means of ascertaining, by a judicious course of experiments, the true character of such discoveries and improvements as shall seem to promise success, and as (if successful) will materially aid the public service.

Ordnance advancement would have profound consequences for ship construction.137 France would play a role in this area. In 1823, French general Henri-Joseph Paixhan developed a gun that could fire powder-filled shells that exploded after impact with the help of a fuse lit by the initial charge—these would become known as bombshells. Naval guns, prior to this point, relied on black powder to propel solid metal cannonballs—called shot. Solid shot could gradually weaken or take down rigging—disabling a ship with damage to its rudder or hampering movement on deck with debris. Splinters from shot hitting wood also were a danger to the crew. But a hit by a bombshell could blow enough of a hole into the hull to sink a ship with a single shot. Manufacturers of the improved gun casings and projectiles further advanced ordnance by inside the barrels of guns—allowing fired to hold its trajectory

137 U.S. House. Committee on Naval Affairs. Appropriations for naval ordnance and stores. (27 H. Rpt. 2, 7 July 1841), 1-2. Text from: Committee Reports. Available from: ProQuest Congressional; Accessed: 5 December 2013. 71

more reliably and permitting better aim along with greater range. Gun crews that once had to wait until within 100 yards to open fire now could fire effectively at approximately 2,000 yards.138 More powerful ordnance and powder requirements also meant more pressure on gun barrels. John A. Dahlgren, a U.S. navy lieutenant before the war, applied the lessons of the “Peacemaker” explosion of 1844 and created a gun designed to be stronger at the high-pressure points in the barrel—resulting in guns shaped wider at the breach and muzzle. Dahlgrens, as the guns became named, were the Navy standard during the Civil War—with 9-inch barrels the most common, though 8-inch, 11-inch, 15-inch, and 20-inch guns were forged. Ordnance specialist Robert P. Parrott, working at Cold Spring Foundry near the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, came up with another solution—fastening iron bands around the areas of a gun barrel most in need of strength during the forging process. Parrott guns came in a 10-inch rifled form for navy use. Thomas J. Rodman, an 1841West Point graduate, worked on barrel strengthening by altering the forging process itself—cooling the hollow iron tube with water to strengthen the gun from the inside out. Rodman guns came in 6-inch, 8-inch, and 10-inch forms.139 The improvements to naval guns would continue through the secession crisis in the 1850s, pressuring key military and civilian figures to advocate for reform throughout the U.S. Navy. The challenge faced by these reformers was how to improve the U.S. Navy to compete with significantly larger European fleets—such as Britain’s and France’s, while contending with the entrenched methods of personnel organization. This latter challenge would . . .

Rifts of Reform Mallory would be designated as chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee in spring 1853 owing to his technical maritime experiences as both a wrecker and to his legal studies with Judge Marvin. A bill to improve the American navy surfaced in summer 1854. Mallory, his knowledge of the shipping industry displayed in full force, used the British, French, and Russian fleets as benchmarks. The young senator recommended several technological improvements –screw propellers, better ordnance, steam engines, and upgraded dock facilities.

138 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 12-14. 139 Ibid., 14-15. The 20-inch Dahlgren was never actually used. Naval guns throughout this era had been referred to by the weight of the projectile they fired. But with the drastic increase in gun size, newer guns were referenced by the diameter of the bore. More of the “Peacemaker” incident will be explained later in this chapter. 72

Mallory’s report, on 18 May 1854, emphasized new tactics being necessary with propeller-based engines protected from direct enemy fire. He noted how, despite past ships being able to sustain hundreds of shots and remain victorious, a few shots of the new explosive shell variety could disable or destroy a ship easily. Mallory cited experiments done by France where twelve explosive shells were fired at a warship and did critical damage—likely doing more destruction if fired at the ship’s waterline. He pointed out the French conclusion that just a couple of shells exploding in an enemy vessel’s gun battery would create enough damage to force a surrender and/or to inflict massive casualties.140 Mallory complained about severe disparities between American naval forces and the other major powers—especially in terms of commerce protection. The British, in 1853, had 588 effective guns for every 100,000 tons of commercial shipping. Similarly, the French had 1,063 guns and the Russians had 2,466 guns. Conversely, the United States had only 97 guns on warships for every 100,000 tons of commerce on the seas. And the best American steamer was the side-wheeler Mississippi—Mallory pointed out that side-wheelers were deemed unfit for combat by a British board of engineers. The navies of major European powers had faster ships, better guns, more training facilities for sailors, and the American fleet had to catch up. Even as secession loomed, Mallory was fervently pushing in a report on 31 January 1859 for a substantial naval buildup in light of European naval expansion.141 Mallory’s alertness to international progress and access in the Naval Affairs committee also alerted him to armored ironclad batteries that had been used in the Crimean War by the British and French to moderate success against Russia. Robert Livingston Stevens had been tasked with defending against a hypothetical British attack and designed an ironclad battery for that very purpose. Francis Mallory, a Whig representative for Virginia, issued a report for the House Naval Affairs Committee on 15 March 1842 which included comments on harbor defenses and Stevens’ plans for his armored battery. The American military’s focus on coastal defense against European powers was a persistent feature of nineteenth-century U.S. policymaking. The coastal focus, coupled with Britain’s build-up of naval steamers capable of

140 Underwood, Stephen Russell Mallory, 54, 58. U.S. Senate. Committee on Naval Affairs. Organization of the Navy. (33 S. Rpt. 271, 18 May 1854), 2-3. Text from: Committee Reports. Available from: ProQuest Congressional; Accessed: 12 November 2013. 141 Ibid., 3-6; U.S. Senate. Committee on Naval Affairs. Recommendation of Secretary of Navy for construction of naval vessels. (35 S.rpt. 363, 31 January 1859), 1-2. Text from: Committee Reports. Available from: ProQuest Congressional; Accessed: 12 November 2013. 73

trans-oceanic voyages, underscored the lack of a fleet versatile enough to contend with generally larger and better armed European warships while simultaneously protecting ports and inlets accessible only by smaller vessels. Francis Mallory’s report included references to the success of land-based fortifications when the enemy forces could be properly anticipated and lured into firing range and at the same time could protect home fleets from superior adversaries; however, maritime areas too wide to be adequately covered by land-based positions required a floating defense.142 Francis Mallory’s recommendation for an armored battery stemmed from the need for such weapons to be large, rendering them difficult to maneuver, and hence in need of better protection. Thick wooden bulwarks would offer resistance to solid shot, but not to explosive bombshells. Robert Stevens’ plan for the “shot and shell proof” battery or vessel accommodated ideas about armoring in accordance with established experiments, maneuvering the warship with a submerged steam propulsion system, and intent for the ship to protect harbors like New York— also serving as a deterrent to attack.143 A board of naval personnel witnessed the gunnery experiments Stevens referred to on 8 July 1841—continuing into August 1841. The 1841 report references earlier experiments in the United States during the War of 1812 performed by Robert Stevens’ father, John Stevens. The elder Stevens also proposed a ship to defend New York harbor by equipping the vessel with steam propulsion and protecting it with inclined iron armor around the hull. Robert Stevens, in a letter on 13 August 1841, concluded that the iron armor on a target would need to be “one-half or two-thirds the diameter of the ball”—so a four and one-half inch to six inch thick armor plate could resist or deflect a nine inch shell. Wood, by comparison, would have to be sixteen times thicker than an iron armor plate to protect against solid shot. Four inches of wrought iron plate would equal five feet, four inches of oak.144 The difference between wrought iron and wood were stark.

142 U.S. House. Committee on Naval Affairs. Harbor Defence. (27 H. Rpt. 448, 15 March 1842), 1-6, 9-10. Text from: Committee Reports. Available from: ProQuest Congressional; Accessed: 14 February 2014. Brian McAllister Linn, The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 12-13. Francis Mallory (1807-1860, no relation to Stephen Mallory) was Virginia’s Whig representative in the U.S. House from 1837 to 1839 and 1840 to 1843. He also served in the U.S. Navy from 1822 to 1828. 143 U.S. House. Committee on Naval Affairs. Harbor Defence. (27 H. Rpt.448, 15 March 1842), 10-12. The bombshells Francis Mallory mentions were fired from a French developed naval gun the “Paixhan,” developed by General Henri-Joseph Paixhans in 1823. 144 Entry 502. File Designation BR - Armor and Armament, General; Navy Records Collection of the Office of Naval Records and Library Subject Files, 1775-1910, Record Group 45; National Archives and Records 74

Democratic Senator from New Jersey, Robert F. Stockton, delivered a report to the Senate Naval Affairs committee on 16 March 1852, not long before Mallory’s appointment. Stockton, in his comments, recounted the process by which Stevens’s “ball and proof” ship was to have been constructed starting a decade earlier. Stevens signed a ship construction contract on 10 February 1843 with Abel P. Upshur, then secretary of the navy. The ship was “’to be shot and ball proof against the artillery now in use on board vessels-of-war.’” But “” was continually delayed. Among the challenges Stevens faced were having to create a new capable of building the ship, acquiring enough material, and repeated interruptions in payments for sub-contracts from successive navy secretaries--David Henshaw, John Y. Mason, and William B. Preston. Frequently, the reason for the delay was the respective secretary’s requirement for more thorough or updated construction plans. Stockton, in Stevens’ defense, explicitly states, Whatever delay took place in performance of this contract, was indispensable to its faithful and successful execution. The necessity for these delays was not, it is believed, properly appreciated by the Navy Department. The experiments necessary to test the quality of the materials, and demonstrate the details of the plan, involved the consumption of much time. The experiments necessary to establish and improve the character of the propeller which was finally adopted, also required much time.

He brought up the repeated contract extensions for the ill-fated USS Princeton which likewise was an experimental ship. One aspect of Stockton’s Princeton example that bears noting was the list of features he mentioned as new. Princeton, and likewise Stevens’s ship if it had been completed, would need a new dock, machining equipment, tools, pumps, and personnel capable of working in such a newly-outfitted shop. These requirements certainly harken back to the gatekeeper model as Stevens’s armored warship idea was repeatedly deflected by naval administrations unable or unwilling to make the adjustments required to build the new vessel.145 In this instance, the Navy could not reconcile potential tactical improvements with the delays and costs of acquiring material, upgrading construction techniques, and training personnel.

Administration at Washington, D.C. The principle U.S. Navy officers on hand were Commodore (later admiral) Stewart, Commodore Matthew Perry, and Captain (later admiral) Silas Stringham along with U.S. Army officers Colonel (later general) Joseph Gilbert Totten, Colonel (later general) , and Colonel Andrew Talcott (who later joined the Confederacy). 145 U.S. Senate. Committee on Naval Affairs. Construction of war steamer by Robert L. Stevens. (32 S. Rpt. 129, 16 March 1852), 1-3. Text from: Committee Reports. Available from: ProQuest Congressional; Accessed: 12 November 2013. “Ball and bomb” refer to types of ammunition in use with naval guns at the time. “Ball,” also known as “solid shot,” describes a solid—usually iron—projectile without explosive charges. “Bomb” is short for “bombshell.” Shells are projectiles capable of carrying filler material including earth and explosives. 75

The upgrade bills, despite Stockton’s pleas and Mallory’s ardor, would pass in more limited forms. Stevens and the proposed bill for his armored battery died in 1856 though experiments continued through 1856 until 1862 by Stevens’ brothers Edwin and John at their workshop in Hoboken, New Jersey. Stephen Mallory, though failing to push the invention to completion, would not forget its potential.146 Naval reform extended beyond technological innovation, however. Congress’s moves to improve naval administration found Mallory as the champion of the Naval Retiring Board. Lists of expendable and aging officers were formed so they could be discharged to make room for a younger merit based group to move up. This new procedure pitted Mallory against a host of aging and stubborn officers, notably then Lieutenant , the superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Maury had been crippled in an accident in 1839 which restricted him from normal active duties, but it gave him time to develop an impressive academic career in oceanography. The initial list of officers to be released in 1855 was made public and included Maury’s name. A few political fights saved Maury’s career, but they left a permanent rift between him and Mallory which would continue past secession (both men siding with the Confederacy). This incident also served to prejudice Mallory in favor of young, daring officers over experienced personnel with a few exceptions like Franklin Buchanan (eventual commander of CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads in 1862 and CSS Tennessee at Mobile Bay in 1864).147 Mallory would never get the chance to implement the naval reforms on the American fleet. Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency as a Republican and South Carolina’s secession in 1860 excited Floridian residents. Florida seceded on 10 January 1861 and Mallory resigned his senate seat effective 21 January. Rebels in Florida then agreed to not make any assault on the Federal garrison at in Pensacola Harbor in hopes of a peaceful secession. Some minor fighting occurred at Pickens, but nothing serious owing to a quick “truce” struck by Mallory and members of the Lincoln administration. Mallory would have his character

146 “Armor and Armament,” NARA at Washington, D.C. Simson, Naval Strategies, 28. John C. Stevens died in 1857, but Edwin lived until 1868. Edwin, in 1861, built USS Naugatuck based on the Stevens Battery design as a U.S. Revenue Service steamer with intent to have her serve in the Union Navy. But Naugatuck’s gun burst in action at Drewry’s Bluff on the on 15 May 1862 and it was relegated back to the Revenue Cutter Service before ultimately be turned back over to Stevens’s private ownership as the merchant vessel Argus. See: Naugatuck, Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship- histories/danfs/n/naugatuck-i.html (accessed 25 January 2015). 147 Simson, Naval Strategies, 26-27. 76

frequently besmirched by his prevention of rebel forces taking Pickens early. But the Confederacy would still get its unwanted war with the shots fired at on 12 April 1861.148

How to Build a Navy – for Rebels The Confederacy had over 189 potential ports and harbors to guard along the Atlantic coast, Gulf coast, and internal rivers. The Rebel’s choice for secretary of the navy would have to continually deal with a material shortfall compared to the Union when guarding so much territory—even if the Union was the aggressor. Thanks to a brief stint as interim secretary of the navy, rebel President Jefferson Davis knew just enough about naval affairs to recognize Mallory as the right man for the job. Mallory and Davis had known each other for some time before the war and he was never overly critical of Davis’ command style, but the army-focused president often made plans bolstering the army at the expense of the navy. Davis, for example, sent future Confederate commerce raider extraordinaire Raphael Semmes (of CSS Alabama fame) on an expedition to buy army munitions from northern proprietors--before the firing on Sumter! Nevertheless, Mallory’s appointment as secretary on 4 March 1861 allowed for little delay. And though Davis was preoccupied with land operations, he recognized Mallory’s zeal and this fostered a fairly congenial atmosphere within the cabinet.149 Mallory would be one of the few Confederate cabinet members to retain his post uninterrupted throughout the war, and used this free hand to innovate what maritime defenses he could. Mallory’s enthusiasm for the rebel cause was evident at the time the capital of the Confederacy moved from Montgomery, Alabama to Richmond, Virginia on 31 May 1861. Mallory, not yet departed from Montgomery, wrote his children on 15 June 1861: I send … an account of the late fight at Bethel Church, where the Virginia [and] N. Carolina troops gave the N. York Zouaves and others of Old Abe’s men, “particular lessy.” … you will see how well and bravely our men fought. They fought thus because their cause is just. [And] God will not permit Old Abe’s men to succeed against us.

Mallory’s ebullience would prove a useful asset in his work with the non-existent Confederate navy.

148 Underwood, Stephen Russell Mallory, 70-73. 149 ORN, Series IV, v. 2, 1027; ORN, Series IV, v. 1, 106-107; and Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy, 9. 77

The first hurdle to surmount, as with many a government, was money: how do you fund your plans? The Confederate navy’s financial problems were hampered by the poorly-supported treasurer, Christopher G. Memminger. At issue were deficiencies in physical capital and lack of credit. The South possessed a mere one-third of the total specie in the United States at the time of secession. The only mobile physical wealth the South could barter with was its agriculture. This limitation was an insufficient response to the problem funding, especially considering the dependency of cotton sales on the world market and the lack of official recognition of the Confederacy, which made loans on credit unthinkable. The sole solution was to sell cotton at whatever market price was offered to start at least a minimal cash flow. To make matters worse, Confederate inflation skyrocketed with the states’ rights mantra inhibiting taxation and heavy dependence on loans.150 Although the entire Confederacy was affected, the impact of the South’s financial woes was substantial for Mallory’s navy. His $2 million request for ships from Britain was slashed to $600,000. These were just 1861 figures. For the entirety of the war, the Confederacy, spent approximately $2 billion on the army compared to $107 million on the navy –approximately a 20-fold difference. Personnel were affected no less. The total personnel figures for the Confederate navy barely exceeded 5,000 men at any given time (peaking in 1864). This compared to the Union navy starting with double those figures in 1861 and growing exponentially thereafter. Mallory confronted an almost insurmountable task. If he were to have any chance at overcoming the Union’s material superiority, especially in sheer numbers of vessels, he needed to get more bang for his buck. This meant acquiring ironclads. Having espoused the value of armor over wood in the late 1850s, Mallory would wager that the Confederacy could beat the Union to this technological terror of the seas. If Mallory could bring the new armed ships to bear on the blockade, the Union advantage in wooden vessels might be neutralized.151 To this end, Mallory had to get a handle on some ready-made ships or at least places that could manufacture them before the Confederate works at Tredegar (Richmond) or shipyards at

150 S. R. Mallory to Attie, 15 June 1864, Stephen Russell Mallory, Papers. (Southern Historical Collection. University of North Carolina Manuscripts Department, Chapel Hill); and Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy, 18-20. 151 Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy , 22; and William N. Still, Jr., ed. The Confederate Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization, 1861-65 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press/Conway Maritime Press, 1997), 31-32. 78

Gosport (Portsmouth) were ready. The Confederacy sent agents abroad, especially to France and England. The most notable of these were former naval officer James D. Bulloch and serving officer Lieutenant James H. North. Bulloch was tasked with procuring high-seas (for blockade breaking) from Liverpool, such as CSS Fingal. North’s primary objective was to acquire ironclads. Both faced serious difficulties due to the financial shortfalls and a lack of time. North, abroad in late 1861, sent to Mallory: Most gladly I would obey the instructions therein contained, if I only had it within my power. You must not forget that I am here without one dollar to carry out your orders, and the people of these parts are as keen after money as any people I ever saw in my life… I am sorry to say that the general impression out here is that, if I had millions at my command, I could not carry out your views, as both France and England are anxious to get all the ironclad ships they can. … It takes a long time to get up or build one of these ships. The Warrior they have been building nearly two years, and I think it will take a month or two to finish her.

The British Warrior was a response to France’s La Gloire, which was built by order of Napoleon III. Both countries entered into an arms-race of sorts, ramping up production but not tactical development. By the time the world had gotten glimpses of the European ironclads, neither side had figured out how to overcome the severe draft and maneuvering problems. North’s report, however, revealed two serious considerations which Bulloch would deal with in more detail.152 Not only did Bulloch echo North’s consternation over funds, but he let Mallory know about the political situation. In a lengthy report on 13 August 1861, Bulloch gave the Confederacy a dose of reality: The Queen’s neutrality proclamation is more than embarrassing; it is almost an exclusive barrier against shipments to the South. English shipowners, partly from dread of the consequences and partly from loyalty, very generally decline taking anything contraband of war as freight, and to induce any person in furnishing or forwarding supplies for the Confederate States, requires so much secret negotiation and the employment of so many middlemen, that the very maneuvering necessary to complete an arrangement seems to excite and direct suspicion.153

Bulloch’s report also alluded to agent activities being leaked to newspapers. This revelation is especially noteworthy considering the leaked news of the construction of CSS Virginia was what jumpstarted the Union ironclad program to develop USS Monitor. An article in the New York

152 ORN, Series II, v. 2, 67-69, 87; and Howard J. Fuller, Clad in Iron: The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power. Foreword by Robert J. Schneller, Jr. (Westport, Conn: Praeger Publishers, 2008), 3-4. 153 ORN, Series II, v. 2, 83-84. 79

Times on 17 August 1861 regarding the arrest of a Thomas S. Serrell of New Orleans, found the agent with almost $200,000 from cotton sales to Liverpool in exchange for additional plans for blockade breaking.154 The agents abroad, at best, would bring a trickle of blockade raiders through. And if the unreliable supply was not enough, the Trent Affair in November 1861 made an international alliance even more complicated for the entire Confederacy. Even though the Trent Affair had the Union releasing seized Confederate agents, the British were not likely to risk a war with the North over the South’s cotton that could be acquired elsewhere. If Mallory were to succeed, he would have to tackle the problem with the pitiful infrastructure of the South.155 By war’s end, the Confederacy would produce approximately 130 ships –several of them of an advanced nature in the ironclad vein. Though this was only twenty percent of the Union’s vessel count, it was enough to just barely stave off a complete bludgeoning by Northern sea power for four years. The hampering of management by the Confederacy’s inadequacies made this seem an unlikely occurrence, and yet it happened. If President Davis had no support to lend, if the agents abroad were blocked at almost every turn, if money was extremely tight, how would Mallory achieve victory? No longer stuck in Montgomery, Mallory came across a crucial telegram upon arrival in Richmond on 3 June 1861. It was from Captain to General Robert E. Lee out of Norfolk on 30 May 1861. It read: “We have the Merrimack up and just pulling her in the dry dock.”156

154 “Arrest of a Secession Agent.; Seizure of $200,000 in Bank of England Notes,” New York Times (New York: H. J. Raymond & Co., 1857-), 17 August 1861, 1. 155 Still, The Confederate Navy, 37; and Spencer C. Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 71-72. The Trent Affair was a diplomatic incident that began on, 8 November 1861 when USS San Jacinto under the command of Union Captain , intercepted the British ship RMS Trent and captured two Confederate agents--James Mason and . The Rebel representatives were on the way to France and Britain to achieve recognition of Confederate independence and funding with the South’s cotton trade as leverage. Members of the Lincoln administration, especially Secretary of State William H. Seward, threatened war with Britain, and the British government demanded an apology over the violation of neutrality rights on the high seas and the release of the Confederate agents. Britain even went so far as to bolster army units in in and naval forces across the Atlantic. However, the Lincoln administration relented and set Mason and Slidell free in January 1862—saying Wilkes acted without orders. Mason and Slidell did eventually reach Britain, but failed in their goal of achieving diplomatic recognition. See: James McPherson, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 44-46. 156 ORN, Series I, v. 5, 801. 80

Enter the CSS Virginia Merrimac was one of several ships scuttled in the Norfolk shipyard when the Union abandoned it after secession and the firing on Sumter in April 1861. Mallory employed Lieutenant John M. Brooke (also developer of the “Brooke ” naval gun) for the task of using the steam power plant and remaining hull of Merrimac towards a domestically built ironclad. Brooke teamed up with naval construction engineer John L. Porter to come up with the slope- sided iron shell that would be placed overtop the wooden keel –with the addition of new guns and ram on the bow.157 In charge of a contract for $172,523 to convert Merrimac into an ironclad, Brooke instructed subordinates to set up a target simulating Merrimac’s hull at Jamestown Island on the Virginia coast in late August 1861 for tests to start that September. The section was twelve feet square by twenty-seven inches thick and covered in iron plate three inches thick inclined thirty- six degrees and gun tests were to begin with only essential personnel in attendance. Brooke’s test firings began with an eight-inch on 31 August 1861. The initial shot broke through the iron plates enough to dent the wood five inches. Tests continued on 2 September 1861 with a variety of guns and ammunition in use. The first shot of this early September test to hit the target at the seam between two plates and broke through to the point of slightly splintering the wood backing. Brooke observed that the broken plates failed in part due to breaks in the bolts fastening them in the first place. Parts of the fired ball even ended up inside the bolt’s vacant hole. A later shot on the target hit the iron plate in the center resulting in grazing across the plate and minor damage to the bolt. But this dead-center hit on a plate also resulted in negligible internal damage, and slight movement out of wooden plank backing. A third shot also struck on a seam with some penetration into the wood backing. The fourth test shot hit at the top edge of the target, breaking the iron plates and chipping the bolts—but no penetration to the wood was noted.158

157 R. Thomas Campbell, Gray Thunder: Exploits of the (Shippensburg, PA: Burd Street Press, 1996), 20-26. 158 John M. Brooke, Ironclads and Big Guns of the Confederacy: The Journal of John M. Brooke, ed. by George M. Brooke, Jr. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 32-37. The target’s construction was started on 28 August 1861 and completed on 31 August 1861. The Confederacy had lost batteries at Cape Hatteras to the Union Navy at this time as well, and paranoia about information leaks was increasing for Brooke as he did not even want the target’s carpenters around for tests. Brooke’s concerns reinforced his strategy to focus on inland waterway operations in order to accelerate shipbuilding while the Union Navy had to account for ships that could go on the high seas. were larger caliber, (not rifled) cannons capable of firing solid shot or shell ammunition. 81

Brooke used different types of ammunition for the sixth through ninth shots of the 2 September 1861 test on a simulated ironclad Merrimac target. Shot six moved away from solid ball shot to ten pound shells. The shell hit just off center on iron plate, but broke through due in part to weakening from the earlier tests. The shell broke into pieces with minor penetration— Brooke directly noted that shell was less effective than solid shot at this point. Shot seven was the same type as the sixth shot, hitting the right side of the target, and denting the plate without significant damage to the bolts. An eight shot with an eight pound shell missed the target. The ninth shot with an eight pound shell inflicted a deep dent in the plate, but was eased off by a grease covering on the iron. Brooke then took a few shots with a rifled gun with even less effect than shells.159 Overall, the targeted hull received a variety of ordnance, enough to judge its robustness. Brooke concluded that the most vulnerable position on Merrimac’s iron hull would be when it presented its bow or quarter as a target and planned for gun ports at those locations; with this information in hand, he was eager to begin plating of the ship and arming the vessel with guns either manufactured by Southern ironworks or modified from pieces salvaged from abandoned Union posts. But insufficient capacities undercut the new ship’s full potential. Brooke’s design called for almost 1,000 tons of iron plate to come from for the encasing of the ship. But no mill in the South could produce the recommended four-inch thick variety of plate, forcing plans to cut back to a two-inch thick plate –Tredegar at the time was producing only one-inch thick plates! Brooke, by 2 November 1861, was informed by Tredegar’s foreman that the rolling mill had successfully created two-inch thick plates—and some of the new plates were already being fitted to Merrimac.160 Despite this progress, the retooling of Tredegar, combined with poorly designed and overburdened rail lines, produced a number of delays. Additional stoppages resulted in the rechristened CSS Virginia launching on 17 February 1862 –eight months after initial planning. Captain Franklin Buchanan and Lieutenant Catesby ap R. Jones were designated to operate the ship that same February.161

159 Ibid., 36-37. 160 Ibid., 37-38. Brooke also determined that the most an 8-inch solid shot could do was break three inches of iron plate and dent wood backing up to six inches. R. Thomas Campbell, Gray Thunder: Exploits of the Confederate States, 20-26. Brooke, Ironclads and Big Guns of the Confederacy, 44. 161 R. Thomas Campbell, Gray Thunder: Exploits of the Confederate States Navy, 20-26. The “ap” in Jones’ name is from a Welsh naming convention meaning “son of.” 82

The completion of Virginia was quite a coup for Mallory, but his enthusiasm once again had gotten the best of him. Lacking much of the administrative infrastructure enjoyed by his Northern counterparts, Mallory had no control over the flow of information. Brooke wrote a letter to the Mobile Register in Alabama, in August 1861, accusing the paper of being a tool of the Lincoln administration when it published a few details regarding the unfinished Merrimac on 11 August 1861. Brooke’s letter emphasizes how the newspaper article and notices would attract Northern attention to the Confederate Navy’s use of the armored ship as some combination of harbor defender, blockade , and attacker against cities. Harper’s Weekly rather splendidly broke the story on Merrimac/Virginia months before her launch, complete with an artist rendering in November 1861:

Figure 2: Harper's Weekly rendering of Rebel ironclad Merrimac on 2 November 1861

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Virginia would also not have long to wait to endure her first trial by fire. Mallory was eager to put the ship to use on the blockade around the Virginia coast and free up the ships of the James River fleet to protect Richmond as General Joseph E. Johnston fell back from Union General George B. McClellan’s sluggish Peninsular Campaign.162 The ensuing battle of Hampton Roads (8-9 March 1862) seemingly validated Mallory’s vote of confidence in ironclad technology and his strategy for breaking the Union blockade. Until the John Ericsson-designed ironclad USS Monitor spoiled Virginia’s operation on the second day, the latter had succeeded in destroying two substantial Union blockaders (Cumberland and Congress), disabling a third (Minnesota), while itself suffering minimal damage. But while Virginia and CSS Virginia were getting all the attention, problems for the Confederacy were creeping up off the North Carolina coast and New Orleans.163

North Carolina and New Orleans Lack of planning for North Carolina naval defense was a contentious issue in official circles starting at least in September 1861: Fort Macon has not one practical gunner; has only forty reliable fuzes, no rifled , no ordnance officer, and only raw troops, without proper supplies. It must fall. It should be supplied at once with a competent naval officer. …

This griping combined with confusion over the command structure of key batteries and installations to render the strategic point at Roanoke Island highly vulnerable. The Confederate navy attempted to make up these shortfalls, but between the blockade and river defenses, the numbers of ships deployed was never quite sufficient. Nevertheless, the Confederate newspapers blasted Mallory as being negligent about the whole affair. Roanoke Island fell in February 1862, but a much more disconcerting failure would occur at New Orleans, which held much greater strategic value.164 Mallory had made at least some strides in protecting the financially vital port of New Orleans during and after the events at Hampton Roads. But inconsistent intelligence on likely

162 John M. Brooke, Ironclads and Big Guns of the Confederacy: The Journal of John M. Brooke, ed. by George M. Brooke, Jr. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 29-30. The editor notes that this letter was “unsent.” “The Merrimac” and “Rebel Steamer,” Harper’s Weekly (New York: Harper’s Magazine Co., 1857-1976), 2 November 1861; and Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 158 163 Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 164. 164 ORN, Series I, v. 6, 721; and Durkin, Stephen R. Mallory, 191-192. 84

avenues of attack on the city siphoned off naval commitments (that were) needed elsewhere. Confederate reports suggested the attack on the city would be primarily over land or from northern rivers, and that Mobile Bay was a more likely target in spring 1862. Mallory, preoccupied with Virginia and with the October 1861 intelligence report in hand, refused to install a defense squadron to the south of New Orleans. In fact, Mallory diverted more ships to guard against the predicted attack from the northern streams and the continual threat on the Virginia coast. To Mallory’s dismay, the city fell to the naval guns of Admiral David Glasgow Farragut in late April 1862. Mallory was so distraught by the loss of New Orleans that he wrote his wife a depressing letter on 11 May 1862: I do not know how you discovered that the naval losses on the Mississippi affected me; but the fact is ... that they almost killed me, and I am ashamed to say that I have lain awake night after night with my heart depressed and sore, and my eyes filled with tears, in thinking over them. Our men fought splendidly, and merited by their gallantry the victory they had not the force to achieve.

Repeated complaints about administrative confusion, overlap, and contradiction surrounded the rebel fiasco at New Orleans. Inefficient management of resources, poorly planned joint operations, and the war and navy departments’ poor command and control contributed to disaster.165 The Confederacy’s problems conducting war had been laid bare.166 The Confederate Congress was furious, and Mallory would be fending off a host of political opponents enraged at the failures in North Carolina and New Orleans (despite a saving grace rebuff of Union forces at Drewry’s Bluff in May 1862). The rebel Congress launched the investigation into the Mallory’s naval administration in August 1862. Mallory, not standing in the investigation’s way as a means to exonerate him, appealed to his wife. He expressed to her that he had no regrets about his conduct of naval affairs that he had “…nothing to apologize for...” and had “revolutionized the naval warfare of the world.” Mallory indeed had much to his credit with the mixed success of commerce raiding, successful defenses of Virginia rivers, Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, and Mobile Bay, and the invention of CSS Virginia. Were the

165 United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 70 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901), Series I, v. 53, 707-708, v. 6, 761; and Durkin, Stephen R. Mallory, 204-206, 209-210; and Mallory to his wife, 11 May 1862, Mallory, Papers. 166 These problems included the Confederacy’s coordination of policy, strategy, and operations, the design and execution of operations, and the organization of its military forces. 85

losses of New Orleans, the rest of the North Carolina coast, and western river access really enough to doom him?167 The proceedings of the investigation primarily queried about the loss of New Orleans, asking if all possible means to defend the city were taken by the Confederate Navy. The committee also interrogated Mallory supporters on the secretary being too slow to purchase ironclads, and in poor communication with purchasing agents for vital supplies. The Navy Department refuted the overall accusations of mismanagement by appealing to a lack of evidence. The Navy’s response noted the different persons or offices in charge of each failed step, none of which could be blamed on the Navy itself with its given authority.168 Mallory would be ultimately exonerated by the investigative committee, but he was acutely aware of the deficiencies that led to the Confederacy’s downfall. Mallory was frustrated by Jefferson Davis’s interference in military administration which magnified command and control problems due to Davis’s disconnect with his own cabinet. Davis received a reprieve from Mallory with the secretary citing the president’s seeing the larger war strategy. But even Mallory admitted that the more Davis dived into daily military planning, the more mistakes were made.169 Davis was simply ill-equipped to deal the complexities of conducting large-scale industrial war.

Conclusion Mallory had converted his maritime upbringing, self-taught devotion to public service, and democratic ideals into a promising career as a U.S. senator from Florida. The meshing of his youthful ideals with the festering sectional controversy in the 1850s led the moderate man into a dilemma. Was he to protect his constituents from the dangers of civil war or protect their rights from the perceived tyranny of and abolitionists? Florida’s secession made Mallory’s mind up for him as he sided with his home. Mallory stepped up to public service again when the rebellious states then turned to him for leadership in naval matters. The investigations into Mallory in 1862 had accused him of lack of enthusiasm for readying defenses of key ports. But one would not recognize that quality in the man who saw the value of ironclad warships half a decade before they were used. Mallory had pressed for ships from Britain, from France, and

167 Durkin, Stephen R. Mallory, 224-227; Mallory to his wife, 31 August 1862, Mallory, Papers. 168 ORN, Series II, v. 1, 432-434, 725, 739. 169 Durkin, Stephen R. Mallory, 248-249. 86

from the discarded remnants of the North’s naval hulks at the bottom of the South’s ports – anything he could get! Perhaps Mallory simply took on too much. He knew going into the war that finances were a problem. Tight purse strings, stingy foreign dealers, and the political risk to other nations of recognizing Confederate legitimacy made the economic situation untenable. Mallory’s hope lay in acquiring the best ships he could with what little men and materiel he could gather. Ships like Virginia were precisely what the secretary had in mind, but even that proved a fleeting success as port after port fell under the pressure of the Union blockade. The fall of Roanoke Island and New Orleans turned the Confederate government against Mallory for failures due to its own scarcity of supply and leadership. In the end, Mallory set a remarkable example for innovation and management with a dearth of support. The Confederate secretary of the navy created a fleet with nearly worthless money, no significant ship in possession at the start, and a government preoccupied with the army. He managed a rebel navy with a fraction of the offices, ships, and men of the Union Navy –struggling to fend off the latter with mixed results for almost four years. Of course, Union successes and failures need to be taken into consideration alongside Confederate performances. But for Mallory’s part, he was given the job of creating a respectable navy for the Confederacy, and accomplished that much for at least a while. Mallory’s innovative ideas during his tenure as Confederate secretary of the Navy combined awareness of the technological changes sweeping through the industrialized navies of the world with the needs of Confederate defensive strategies. The acquired knowledge of steam powered screw-propeller propulsion, more damaging ordnance, and advances in armor had already begun trickling across the Atlantic over a decade and a half before the Civil War. But the scant attention paid to the developments in Britain and France was ratcheted up to mass production due to the conflict embroiling the United States.

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CHAPTER 4

WELLES’S WAY AND THE UNION IRONCLAD PROGRAM

Introduction The Union Navy’s ironclad program emerged from several factors at work before and during the Civil War. Leading the way would be Gideon Welles, the U.S. secretary of the navy during the war. Welles would be joined by a host of assistants, inventors, rival politicians, and the capricious fortunes of war—especially one putting a revolutionary new warship to the test. Welles, born in Glastonbury, Connecticut, developed into a methodically shrewd administrator who took on several challenging private and public jobs before joining the cabinet of President Abraham Lincoln in 1861. Although Welles is best known for his service as the Navy’s most senior official during the Civil War, his career until then had little to do with maritime service. Editor and owner of the Hartford Times, Welles served in the Connecticut legislature for eight years, functioned as Connecticut state comptroller for three terms, and even took a turn as Hart- ford’s postmaster. Welles had no naval service until he was appointed to the Navy Bureau of Provisions and Clothing in 1846, where he gained valuable administrative skills and forged im- portant personal connections. Though Welles tried to regain political office in 1850, he failed in this attempt and thus remained a journalist devoted to abolition of slavery until Lincoln’s elec- tion and his elevation to the cabinet. He was truly a man who wore many professional hats.170 At the time of Welles’s appointment as secretary of the navy on 7 March 1861, the Union Navy was poorly supplied, inadequately staffed, and scattered at posts throughout the world, though still better off than the non-existent Confederate Navy. Welles had to summon personal affiliations, vast resources, and new technologies to impose the blockade of the Confederacy en- visioned in General Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan.”171 It is difficult to imagine how “Father Neptune” could have gathered the unwieldy Union war machine in an organized fashion without

170 Welles, Naval History & Heritage Command. http://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship- histories/danfs/w/welles-i.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). 171 The “Anaconda Plan” was nickname given to the overall Union strategy to defeat the Confedercy by exhaustion. The Union armies would invade on land and river routes while the Union navy’s blockade would cut off port access—effectively starving the Confederacy into submission. The “anaconda” name was actually a derisive term at first by several factions wanting a more aggressive attack on the Confederacy rather than the slower approach proposed by Scott. 88

considerable assistance.172 Thanks to his personal and professional experience, Welles was able to build a state-of-the-art, robust naval force amid the novel challenges of nineteenth-century na- val technology, as well as imparting that technology to an obstinate Army which resisted change. Similar to what Stephen Mallory faced in the Confederacy, Welles had to manage the Union Navy amid a swarm of design improvements affecting warship construction across the At- lantic. But unlike Mallory, the Union navy chief was not as immersed in the details of naval technological change in the years leading up to the war. Accordingly, Welles would need some- one who at least possessed greater awareness of the shifts in warship design on a practical level. Welles was partnered with an able and open minded assistant, Gustavus V. Fox. Having served as a naval officer prior to his appointment as Union assistant secretary of the navy, Fox was am- ply aware and very eager to adopt new naval technology—especially ironclads. In certain re- spects, the two men were a study in contrast. Welles was organized, but blunt; Fox was energetic and affable. Despite these differences, the two Union naval leaders combined their talents to negate any advantage the new armored warships would provide the Confederacy against the North’s blockade. Seizing the opportunity afforded by industrial advances in Britain and the United States, Welles and Fox advanced American naval technology to satisfy the operational needs of the “Anaconda Plan” and catch up to European naval capacities. Together, Welles and Fox com- plemented each others’ strengths and weaknesses, and were thus greater than the sum of their parts. Welles and Fox had additional help from inventors like John Ericsson and James Eads— men who had been working on advancing maritime or industrial technology many years before the Civil War would give their inventions such focused purpose. Once the war began, Welles put his political and organizational talents on display again with the Ironclad Board—putting to use what Congressional funds he could get for what was then an experimental weapon. The result was a sensible contract bidding process that met the navy’s needs with Monitor—a relatively cheap, quickly built ironclad warship to defend the blockade. Whether working with other bu- reaus, politicians, his own personnel, or new technology, Welles maintained a culture of organi- zational open-mindedness for the most part, and that served the Union Navy well.

172 “Father Neptune” was Lincoln’s nickname for Welles. 89

Invariably, however, there are exceptions. The Union’s ironclad production would be- come fixated on Monitor variants almost exclusively despite its flaws--even long-serving navy personnel would be blamed for failure to succeed with ironclads as the new ships became seen as saviors of their causes North and South by the public and military. In the Confederacy, shortages of men and material led to instances where construction teams could barely complete ironclads in time for the vessels to be of any use in combat, resulting in many being scuttled to prevent them from falling into Union hands. Understanding the people involved in these decisions can contrib- ute to fathoming how these choices were made.

The World of Welles Unlike many around him, Welles was a renaissance man. The free-thinking, rational, cal- culating mind of a self-reputed “nonconformist in religious matters” emerged from a lineage that made inroads into every facet of New England life. Welles’s father, Samuel, split his time be- tween a moderately successful shipping business and representing Glastonbury, Connecticut in the state legislature at the turn of the century. A supporter of the Episcopalian Church and staunch Jeffersonian, Samuel Welles, had also been captain of a militia, a farmer, and small shop owner by the time he married Anne Hale in 1784. Hale’s own father, Gideon Hale, was a justice of the peace and member of the Connecticut General Assembly like Samuel. But the senior Hale had distinction derived from connections to the French Army during the Revolutionary War. Gideon’s wealth would be employed to boost Samuel’s business and prestige in New England. Samuel’s sense of business and political pragmatism, combined with Hale’s financial backing, would translate eventually to the fourth child born to the Welles family on 1 July 1802.173 Samuel Welles’s unbridled Anglophobia (due to his own father dying shortly after a three-year stint in a British prison) imbued the Welles family with a strong streak of nationalism and support of as a champion of the common man. But the 1807 Jeffersonian embargo of British and French trade forced the elder Welles to sell off his shipping business and take up land-based investments. Samuel’s shift also focused his attention on his family, which included a listless Gideon. This indolence had its limits, though. Indeed, Samuel noticed Gid- eon’s industriousness when it came to learning, seeing the young student quickly consume the

173 John Niven, Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 5-6. Anne Welles would die, from lingering complications, within ten years of giving birth to a fifth child. 90

simple curriculum of the local school. However, Gideon endured a series of traumas at home, in- cluding the death of his mother Anne and brother Samuel Jr., which would compel his father to send him to learn away from home.174 This sojourn would be auspicious. It was in Hartford, Connecticut in 1825 that young Gideon further journalism and poli- tics, starting with writing editorials for the Hartford Times and Weekly Advertiser. Through his paper’s contacts, Welles became acquainted with the Hartford Times’ editor, John M. Niles. The two men often argued about the state of law and politics in America, helping to shape Welles’s opinions of government. Most significant was convincing Welles that public opinion was the true “cornerstone of American democracy.” He learned that political policy could have emotional and edifying qualities.175 Welles, in fact, espoused such lessons learned in his own letter in a June 1835 issue of the Hartford Times that announced he was ending his tenure as editor: A sincere and honest devotion to the democratic cause and an attachment and regard for Andrew Jackson … whose election I supported in 1824, were the causes, which, primarily induced me to take the station that I am now about to relinquish. … The Times, under my charge, was the first paper east of the Hudson which espoused the cause of Andrew Jackson, I mention it with pride, although for years it has been to me the cause of unceasing and unmerited abuse.176

The arrival of Andrew Jackson on the American political scene saw Welles solidly sup- port the Jacksonian Democrats as the successors to Jefferson’s common man platform. His sup- port of Jackson in the largely pro-Whig region of Connecticut won him few friends at home, as the supporters of John Quincy Adams railed against pro-Jackson speeches by Niles and Welles at conventions. One critical opinion in American Mercury in June 1828 referred to a pro-Jackson attendee like Welles as an “arch dissembler” and called the meetings a “farce” and the conven- tion itself the “house that Jack built.”177 But Welles garnered enough recognition by the Demo- cratic Party to award him selection as Comptroller of Connecticut in 1835. A May 1835 Patriot and Democrat article remarks on Welles’s election by considering him:

174 Ibid., 8-9. 175 Ibid., 21, 26. 176 “To the Readers of the Times,” Hartford Times (15 June 1835). 177 “Jackson Hartford Convention,” American Mercury 44 (2294) (17 June 1828). “Jack” of course referring to Andrew Jackson. The Whig political party in the United States was active from 1833 until 1854 when it dissolved, largely into the newly forming Republican Party. For most of the Whig Party’s lifespan, it focused on policies opposed specifically to President Andrew Jackson of the Democratic Party. Whigs supported internal infrastructural improvements, banking protections and tariffs to promote domestic manufacturing, and appealed mostly to the business and planter class--as opposed to the farmer or worker class. See: Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the 91

Well qualified, by ability and integrity of character, to fill this honorable and responsible station. As the editor of the Hartford Times, he has stood firmly in the foremost ranks of the great battle of Democracy. … Meantime, the storm of Federal vengeance has been poured out upon his head, and he has been made the object of the most malignant and unceasing personal and political abuse.178

Welles’s strong Democratic ties and patronage continued to provide for him with his appoint- ment to postmaster of Hartford in 1836.179 Postmaster was a prime job for raising political pro- files, paying high salaries with light workloads, and giving Welles time to solidify Democratic support in the region despite strong pro-Whig opposition.180 Welles stayed in contact with Jack- son and and made use of the Hartford Times as a Democratic mouthpiece.181 Overall, Welles relationship with the Democratic Party was mutually beneficial. Welles’s fortunes would eventually shift, as his loyalty to the Democratic Party would suffer many challenges, but few further rewards. By the time of the presidency of James K. Polk in 1845, the efficiency of military departments in managing supplies was being questioned with a looming war with over the status of Texas. Polk wanted senior officers out in the field and not over burdening bureaucracy in Washington. Welles’s political support and business ex- perience made him a prime candidate for the Naval Bureau of Provisions and Clothing in 1846.182 One New Hampshire article in April 1846 included remarks on Welles’s appointment such as, “A more honest, capable, and faithful officer will not be found in any of the bureaus,” but added there was resistance to the appointment of a civilian to a military bureau typically op- erated by a naval captain.183 Nevertheless, Welles impressed then Secretaries of the Navy and John Mason with the simplification and accuracy of the supply management system he enacted. Dur- ing the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), one of Welles’s most prescient changes was to centralize naval agent purchasing under the Bureau’s control. Agents would be used only for

American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 178 “Mr. Gideon Welles; Comptroller; State; Senate; Wednesday; House of Representatives; Hartford Times,” Patriot and Eagle [published as Patriot and Democrat] 1(12) (23 May 1835). 179 “Democratic Meeting,” Hartford Times (25 January 1836). 180 “Connecticut Courant. Hartford, November 19,” Connecticut Courant 72(3748) (19 November 1836). 181 “Great Democratic Celebration,” Hartford Times (11 July 1840). 182 “Commodore William B. Shubrick; Bureau; Provision; Clothing; Navy Department; Mr. Gideon Welles; Hartford,” Morning News 2(83) (14 February 1846). 183 “Appointment of Mr. Welles,” New-Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette 12(605) (30 April 1846). 92

market reports, advertising of bids, and negotiations with contractors. Some of these early ad- ministrative reforms can be seen in congressional reports for the secretary of the navy. In an 18 November 1846 report, Welles focused on mismanagement of congressional appropriations whereby funds resulting from condemnations were diverted to the treasury instead of navy cloth- ing. He advocated, in the same report, the importance of maintaining tight control over quality and quantity of supplies: Constant vigilance is necessary in order to have at every point a sufficient supply of every article requisite for the subsistence and clothing of the seamen, and yet not accumulate at times, and especially on foreign and distant stations, an excess.

Welles also oversaw the use of open market bidding for supplies—a key feature of defraying costs for Union military acquisitions later during the Civil War. Mixing efficiency with oversight can be noted in a 10 November 1848 bureau report: It would be advantageous, in many respects, were there greater promptness and system in the adjustment of the property accounts. In the transactions of the bureau there is involved a vast variety of detail, arising from the settlement of a large number of accounts ... All these accounts, particularly those of pursers, require the most careful and scrutinizing examination...

Welles was particularly keen on eliminating excess in the way of sales and appropriations made for the Navy when it was a larger force than in 1848. Streamlining purchases for needs on a case- by-case basis and buying clothing at minimum cost with a ten percent mark-up upon resale to sailors was a way to reduce expenses for seamen and the government.184 A good example of Welles’s care as bureau chief can be observed in the rejection of a pe- tition for relief of damages for a breach of contract by a beef and pork supplier named John Bald- win. Baldwin had been delayed in delivering provisions to naval yards at Charleston, South Car- olina, Brooklyn, New York, and Gosport (Norfolk, Virginia) in a contract dated from August 1845. The Federal government held off buying provisions on the open market to give Baldwin time to fulfill his obligation. But because Baldwin’s deliveries were still delayed, the government sued for recovery of losses as it was forced to buy supplies at higher prices later in 1846 and

184 U.S. Senate, Report from the Bureau of Provisions and Clothing (S. Doc. 29-1/7, 7 December 1846), 561-564. Text from: Congressional Documents. Available from: ProQuest® Congressional; Accessed 25 November 2013. U.S. House, Report from the Bureau of Provisions and Clothing (H. Ex. Doc. 30-1/8, Serial Set 537, 4 December 1848), 891-893. Text in: ProQuest® Serial Set Digital Collection; Accessed 25 November 2013. John Mason was the Secretary of the Navy from 26 March 1844 – 4 March 1845 and 10 September 1846 – 4 March 1849. George Bancroft was Secretary of the Navy from 11 March 1845 – 9 September 1846. 93

1847. Baldwin petitioned for relief of the above suit. Welles’s report on 28 April 1848, however, commented how Baldwin knew that his contract terms placed cost of delays on the contractor. Welles’s thrift and political acumen seemed to combine in this instance and the bureau settled for a reduced liability to be levied on Baldwin.185 This episode serves as a demonstration of Welles’s pragmatism when balancing the needs of the navy, private contractors, and maintaining the rela- tionship of both for future work. Welles would serve in the bureau until the end of the Polk administration in 1849 when the Whig Party pushed for power again with Zachary Taylor as president.186 But his time in Washington also made him privy to talk of his colleagues about a Southern conspiracy to sur- round the Northern states with slave states and promote ’s allowance for slavery in the face of ardently abolitionist Republicans—issues that alarmed Welles as seen in an Octo- ber 1856 letter in the Columbian Register: The slavery question in new territories has always been an exciting one, and dan- gerous to the peace and union of the States. …The north, (or a portion of the north) has repeatedly attempted to seize these territories for itself. It has contrived slavery restriction clauses and Wilmot provisos, in order to limit the right of [sovereignty] … The south has resisted. It has claimed the territories belong to all the States. … It now only remains for the government to protect, when needful, all parties; to see that the doctrine of non-interference is carried out in good faith.187

The free-soil debate, barring slavery from new United States territories, steered Welles away from his traditional Democratic support to Van Buren’s free-soil movement in 1848, and the Republican Party in 1854, effectively turning the “fathers of the Democratic Party in Con- necticut” into Republican organizers in opposition to “those having charge of Government…per- verting the Constitution and using it merely for enlarging the boundaries of slavery,” as a Febru- ary 1856 New York Herald-Tribune article stated.188 Welles’s public expressions not only drasti- cally changed his political fortunes, but show his awareness of prevailing trends—the slavery and states’ rights claims of the South—and ability to apply that knowledge into a plan of action.

185 U.S. Senate, Petition of John Baldwin (30 S. Rpt. 160, 29 May 1848), 1-5. Text from: Committee Reports. Available from: ProQuest Congressional; Accessed 25 November 2013. 186 “Removal of Gideon Welles,” New-Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette 3(111) (5 July 1849). 187 “To an 'Eminent Divine, distinguished for his conservatism and devotion to the Union," Columbian Register 45(2292) (25 October 1856). 188 “Organization of the Republican Party,” New York Herald-Tribune 15(4628) (18 February 1856). 94

During the 1860 Republican Convention in Chicago, Welles developed an antipathy to the leading presidential candidate, William Seward, whom Welles accused of distorting the his- tory of the Jacksonian Democrats (Seward repeatedly linked pro-slavery actions to Jackson in- stead of the Whig administrations they occurred in). This behavior drove Welles into a meeting with Abraham Lincoln where Lincoln’s Midwestern wit, popular sovereignty views, and knowl- edgeable history displayed in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 appealed to Welles’s inter- ests. Welles initially supported Salmon P. Chase as Republican candidate. But he threw his sup- port behind Lincoln by the third ballot of the Convention and was present in the delegation that informed Lincoln of his nomination.189 Welles’s Jeffersonian and Jacksonian politics may have been what most aligned him with the Lincoln administration’s platform when it formed in 1860, but it was his run as editor of the Hartford Times and chief of the Bureau of Provisions and Clothing that provided the most practi- cal experiences he would apply as secretary of the Union Navy. Welles’s combination of politi- cal alertness and military administration were about to be put to a severe test.

Fighting over Forts Lincoln’s election as president on 6 November 1860, and South Carolina’s secession from the Union on 20 December, put at risk all Federal posts within the rebel state’s borders. While lame duck President James Buchanan avoided confrontation, Southern militias seized forts throughout the rebellious Deep South including Forts Moultrie and Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Major Robert Anderson was forced to abandon Moultrie for Sumter with orders to avoid fighting except in self-defense, but he was awaiting relief. Aging General Winfield Scott, still general-in- chief of the Army, proposed a reinforcement plan for Sumter on 30 December. Buchanan ap- proved the plan, but the supply ship Star of the West was rebuffed by Rebel action on 9 and 12 January 1861. Also on the minds of the Union administration were the forts at Pensacola, Flor- ida, including Fort Pickens, which was a gatekeeper for Pensacola’s harbor and was too under- manned to put up a fight.190

189 Republican National Convention, Proceedings of the Republican National Convention, Held At Chicago, May 16, 17 and 18, 1860 (Albany, New York: Weed, Parsons, and Company, Printers, 1860), 117. 190 OR, Series I, v. 1, 100, 114; and Richard S. West, Jr., Mr. Lincoln’s Navy (New York: Longmans, Green and Company, 1957), 1-4, 7-8. 95

Figure 3: Sketch of the Atlantic Coast of the United States from Savannah River to Saint Mary's River Embracing the Coast of the State of Georgia

96

Figure 4: Sketch G Showing the Progress of the Survey in Section Number 7 from 1849 to 1861 with Sub Sketch of Cedar Keys

This bleak situation with Union forts in sight of Confederate guns was what Lincoln and Welles rode into upon Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861.191 Shrewdness, practicality, and frugality were traits Lincoln and Welles shared. And as Lincoln impressed Welles during the Republican Convention, Welles sufficiently impressed his future boss to earn an invitation to his cabinet. Despite his lack of maritime experience, Welles had significant qualifications for the position of secretary of the navy. Welles had proven his fi- nancial prudence in the few years he worked in the Bureau of Provisions and Clothing, showed political loyalty as a New England Democrat and later Republican, and his experience as a jour- nalist gave Welles a good sense of public opinion.192 The initial plans surrounding the support of Maj. Anderson at Fort Sumter provide a pointed example of the competitive dynamic in which Welles partook as a member of the Lin- coln cabinet. Welles initially agreed with the rest of the cabinet, except Postmaster , that reinforcing Sumter was “impracticable” considering Star of the West’s experience.

191 “Sketch of the Atlantic Coast of the United States from Savannah River to Saint Mary's River Embracing the Coast of the State of Georgia” and “Sketch G Showing the Progress of the Survey in Section Number 7 from 1849 to 1861 with Sub Sketch of Cedar Keys” Images from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection, 1861 http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 192 West, Mr. Lincoln’s Navy, 15-16. 97

Secretary of State William Seward offered the alternative of reinforcing the less precarious and less visible Fort Pickens so as to avoid the publicity of the Union striking first with a mission to Sumter. Blair, along with soon to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus V. Fox, proposed an attempt to merely relieve Maj. Anderson’s garrison –not reinforce it.193 Fox stole into Fort Sumter in late March and ascertained Anderson’s needs. Welles and Fox hatched a plan on 30 March to send a with the supplies that included one of the more powerful steam frigates available, Powhatan, to be ready by 6 April 1861 for the relief of Sum- ter. The very next day Welles received a letter from Lincoln detailing orders for a Pensacola re- lief mission instead. Lincoln protested that he had not issued such an order, but admitted that Seward was handling some paperwork for him on a particularly busy day.194 Welles issued new orders with Lincoln’s acknowledgment on 5 April to ensure that Powhatan fleet was to head to Charleston, South Carolina though the fleet had already set sail to Fort Pickens with Seward’s order.195 Fox personally accompanied the relief expedition to Sumter anyway, but Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard had advance warning of the attempt and bid Ander- son evacuate Sumter to no avail.196 Fox reached the coast off Charleston Harbor on 12 April with a war-ready Rebel force against him, and without Powhatan to support him. At 4:30 a.m., the shooting started.197 This was a rough start for the Lincoln administration on many fronts—not the least of which was the start of the Civil War with the Confederacy’s firing on Fort Sumter. Discord among Lincoln’s own cabinet members would also be a frequent occurrence, especially when it came to distribution of military resources and jurisdiction. But perhaps most practically demon- strated of the problems for the Union thanks to the fight at Fort Sumter were material resources scattered in various ports and postings across the country and world that needed repurposing for war.

193 Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles: Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, 3. 194 Ibid., 16-17. 195 Ibid., 22-25. 196 OR, Series I, v. 1, 301. 197 West, Mr. Lincoln’s Navy, 26. 98

How to Build a Navy . . . for Yankees The state of the U.S. Navy at the time of Lincoln’s inauguration was inadequate to satisfy General Winfield Scott’s 19 April 1861 call for a blockade of the South’s long, vulnerable coast- line. In early 1861, the Union Navy was comprised of only 42 active ships on duty posts stretch- ing from New York to Japan. Twenty-nine more ships existed, but were held up by servicing in shipyards. There were thirty usable steam warships, but many had only one operable gun.198 With the Confederacy’s inadequate infrastructure, implementing the blockade would work even if only the seven major Southern ports were blocked.199 Welles proceeded to purchase merchant steamships and enlist crews--directly controlling acquisition and implementation of resources with guidance from his experience managing the Navy’s supplies during his days as a bureau chief.200 In 1842, Congress passed legislation that created five bureaus within the Navy Depart- ment: Yards and Docks; Construction; Equipment and Repairs; Provisions and Clothing; Ord- nance and Hydrography; and Medicine and Surgery. Each bureau’s chief reported to the secre- tary of the navy.201 Welles combined the 1842 Navy organizing law and his reforms of the Bu- reau of Provisions and Clothing to generate the initial strategy that formed the Union Navy. His time as a bureau chief, when streamlining acquisitions and preventing abuse of purchasing power were important qualities, guided the development of naval procurement during this period. Who would be using these new acquisitions in the field? Welles expressed regret at the loss of officers and the outright depression that filled the Navy Department due to secession: When I took charge of the navy Department, I found great demoralization and defection among the naval officers. It was difficult to ascertain who (among those that lingered about Washington) could and who were not be trusted. Some … had already sent in their resig- nations. Others, it was well understood, were prepared to do so as soon as a blow was struck. Some were hesitating, undecided what step to take. Barron, Buchanan, Maury, Por- ter, and Magruder … each and all were (during that unhappy winter) courted and caressed by the Secessionists.202

198 William H. Roberts, Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 10-11. 199 ORN, Series I, v. 4, 156. 200 Roberts, Civil War Ironclads, 11. 201 U.S. House, Committee on Naval Affairs, Reorganization -- Navy United States. Letter from the Secretary of the Navy, transmitting the information called for by the resolution of the House of Representatives of the 18th instant, in relation to the reorganization of the navy (H. Doc. 27-167, 30 March 1842), 1-7. Text from: Congressional Documents. Available from: ProQuest® Congressional; Accessed 25 November 2013. 202 Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 19. The officers Welles refers to are Samuel Barron, Franklin Buchanan, John B. Magruder, Matthew F. Maury, and David D. Porter. All of these men except Porter would join the Confederacy. 99

Welles did have several able officers under his charge, including Assistant Secretary Gustavus Fox (himself a retired naval officer from 1838 to 1852), Captain (later admiral) Samuel F. Du Pont, the still loyal Commander (later admiral) David D. Porter, Captain (later admiral) David G. Farragut, Captain (later admiral) Andrew H. Foote, and Bureau of Ordnance chief Commander (later admiral) John A. Dahlgren.203 These men would later prove to be quite useful to Welles. But in addition to these above named men, Welles working with Fox may be one of the most important team efforts of the Civil War. They shared pragmatic views of how to run busi- nesses and the Navy, and both had extensive administrative know-how, which included Fox’s business experience stemming from operation of a textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Fox also had considerable maritime experience commanding steam ships for the mail service. Fox also had his own lineage of influential relatives, including being related to Postmaster Montgom- ery Blair. Where the two differed was in approachability. Welles’s well known taciturn nature did not serve him well when it came to coaxing funds and favors from others in Washington. Conversely, newly-minted Assistant Secretary Fox, as of 8 May 1861, was more affable. Beyond that, Fox had one other important asset, and that was he had experienced and touted the latest na- val technologies.204 Welles and Fox did their best to fulfill the needs of the blockade, including ramped up purchasing of steam ships and screw-propelled vessels.205 Early talk of iron-clad steamers, also called floating batteries, was already on Welles’s mind after learning of early experiments in Britain and France with HMS Warrior and La Gloire respectively. Yet Welles recognized his own ignorance about the technology: Much attention has been given within the last few years to the subject of floating batteries, or iron-clad steamers. Other governments, and particularly France and England, have made it a special object in connexion [sic] with naval improvements; and the ingenuity and in- ventive faculties of our own countrymen have also been stimulated by recent occurrences toward the construction of this class of vessels. … I would, however, recommend the ap- pointment of a proper and competent board to inquire into and report in regard to a measure so important; … It is nearly twenty years since a gentlemen of New Jersey, possessing wealth and talent, projected the construction of a floating battery …206

203 West, Mr. Lincoln’s Navy, 48-50. 204 Ibid., 50-51. 205 U.S. Senate. Report of the Secretary of the Navy (S. Ex. Doc. 37-1/3, Serial Set 1112, 4 July 1861), 88-91. Text in: ProQuest® Serial Set Digital Collection; Accessed 25 November 2013 206 Ibid., 96. 100

News of a new naval project from the Confederacy forced the technology into the naval plans of the Union. When Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory had the abandoned USS Merrimack dredged up in Norfolk and converted to the ironclad ram CSS Virginia, the publicly- leaked news sent the Union administration into a panic.207 Pressure on the Union war-time lead- ers, however, was already coming from the Western Theatre of operations, where fighting was worsening even though the Eastern Theater quieted after summer 1861. Ironclads were already being introduced into the combat zones of the Western Theater ahead of the Eastern Theater, though their full potential was as yet unknown prior to autumn 1861. The Union and Confederate navies, it seemed, were going to see these privately developed warships adapted for military use and put to the test in both theaters of the war.

James B. Eads and the City-Class Ironclads The Western Theatre of operations during the Civil War traversed roughly between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River east-to-west and between the Ohio River and north-to-south. North-south rivers—especially the Mississippi, Tennessee, and Cumberland rivers—dominated this part of the landscape (and still do), serving as avenues of ad- vance for the Union forces into the South. The dominance of the Union Navy on these rivers was a boon to the armies logistically, and the armies were easily defended, as firepower was usually more than a match for anything the Confederacy could bring to bear on the shoreline. As the war on the western rivers began, a great deal of confusion resulted from the com- mand structure. Military operations on inland waterways were traditionally under control of the army, while the navy’s jurisdiction stopped at the tidal boundary on coastlines. Army control over territory where the navy operated squadrons was cumbersome, as no protocol for following orders between the two branches had been established. Indeed, joint operations was then a work in progress. Commander John Rodgers faced this nebulous situation when Welles dispatched him to Missouri to organize a western river fleet in August 1861. Though Rodgers’ prior gunboat acquisitions were delegated from Welles to the War Department, the advanced nature of ironclad construction compelled Welles to send naval constructor Samuel Pook out to meet Rodgers and

207 “The Merrimac,” Harper’s Weekly (New York: Harper’s Magazine Co., 1857-1976), 2 November 1861. 101

civil engineer James B. Eads so they could design an iron-clad gunboat suitable for the river war.208 Eads signed his $530,000-per-ship contract issued by Quartermaster-General Montgom- ery C. Meigs on 7 August 1861. Pook and Eads designed a casemated ironclad with thirteen guns per ship, three of which would be bow facing. Each ship would carry approximately 122 tons of iron armor two and half inches thick—bringing each to a total of 512 tons--and drew six feet of water. Each of the ships would also be propelled by steam-powered paddle wheels. Propellers were deemed impractical given the variable and potentially shallow depth of the Mississippi River, in which the new would primarily operate and the risk of submerged propeller blades becoming jammed in the river bottom. Promising a sixty-five day construction schedule, Eads built four of the seven ships in his contract at the Carondelet Shipyard near St. Louis, the last three were built at Mound City, Illinois on the Ohio River. All seven were named after cities on the river—grouping the ships as the City-class gunboats. Rodgers, however, ran afoul of the western army commander, Brigadier General John C. Fremont, over acquisition of an additional converted ironclads that Rodgers thought were too large and old to operate effectively. Welles eventually made peace with Fremont by replacing Rodgers with Captain Andrew H. Foote on 30 August 1861.209 With the design and construction of the City-class ironclads established, all that remained was to deploy the vessels in a useful role in conjunction with the army.

208 Craig L. Symonds, The Civil War at Sea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 110-114; and ORN, Series I, v. 22, 284-285. Born in 1812 in Maryland, Rodgers would later command the Union ironclads Monitor and Weehawken--reaching the ranks of Captain and Commodore by the end of the war and rear admiral after the war in 1869 overseeing the U.S. Asiatic fleet. He died in 1882 while serving as Superintendent of the U.S. Naval Observatory. 209 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 114-115; and OR, Series III, v. 2, 792, 814-817, 832. For full contract specifications on the City-class gunboats see OR, Series III, v. 2, 817-832. The seven City-class ships were Carondelet, Louisville, Pittsburg, St. Louis, Cairo, Cincinnati, and Mound City. Casemated iron-clads are ships made of wood and then covered over the top, sides, and exposed machinery by iron plate shingles. Rodgers took issue with the fact that the extra acquired ships, including Benton and Essex (Eastport was also this type of vessel when acquired on 7 February 1862), were too long (over 200 feet long) to operate effectively in the river and weighed over 1,000 tons each and were converted from poorly conditioned salvage vessels. Rodgers, promoted to captain, would head to the blue-water service in time to join Samuel F. Du Pont’s 7 November 1861 attack on Port Royal, South Carolina--see OR, Series III, v. 2, 756. Eads also got into trouble for Benton. Eads had tried to sell the wrecker ship Submarine No. 7 to government purchasers before it was converted into the iron-clad gunboat Benton and apparently without authorization from the quartermaster office. Eads repeatedly proclaimed his innocence and requested he be paid for Benton’s construction. Eads, through correspondence with attorney-general , learned that quartermaster-general Montgomery C. Meigs could not pay him for Benton without drawing funds from the contract that funded the seven City-class ironclads already under construction--see Barton Able to James B. Eads, 30 September 1861; [Illinois and St. Louis Bridge Co.], [?] October 1861; James B. Eads to Brigadier General M.C. Meigs, 9 October 1861; James B. Eads to Brigadier General M.C. Meigs, 29 October 1861; James B. Eads to Attorney General Edward Bates, 10 November 1861; and Edward Bates to James B. Eads, 2 December 1861, James 102

Eads proposed to the Union Navy that the fleet of City-class gunboats operate out of Cairo, Illinois. In Eads’s report of 29 April 1861, he recognized the need for command of the riv- ers and railways, both of which Cairo held a commanding position. The city was the southern- most locale in the state, and overlooked both the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. In addition to the river access, Cairo was also a major stop for the Central Railroad of Illinois, combining the ad- vantages of two modes of transport vital for war-time logistics. Eads estimated that 50,000 men could be accommodated along with munitions, provisions, and any other implements of war. Eads’s primary concern was protecting the city and commerce on the Mississippi River side:

Figure 5: Ohio River between Mound City and Cairo – 1864

He determined that a floating battery would be necessary to protect river-borne trade.210 Eads’s ships represented a proposal that demonstrated strategic vision and a tactical response highly suitable for controlling traffic on the western rivers—a major component of General Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan.”

Buchanan Eads Collection, 1776-1974 (bulk 1861-1896), Missouri History Museum Archives, St. Louis. Box 1, Folders 1-2. [hereafter cited as Eads Collection] 210 ORN, Series I, v. 22, 278; “Ohio River between Mound City and Cairo – 1864” and “Ohio River – 1865” Images from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection, 1861 http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 103

Figure 6: Ohio River – 1865

Eads’s work on the seven City-class ironclads was certified as completed on 15 January 1862, though the Federal government refused payment because the ships were delivered well af- ter the six-month contract period. Attorney General Edward Bates mitigated the situation on Eads’s behalf throughout 1862, and the payment situation was resolved by December after the City-class ships had already been deployed in the Western theatre. In fact, the performance of Eads’s ships elevated his status in the eyes of government officials, who then began consulting him on matters concerning ironclads throughout the war. The Union naval administration, with

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the Western theatre squadrons on the way to being better equipped, remained vexed on how to defend the Eastern seaboard against Confederate raiders and pursue the war against the ports and rivers of the South.211 While private contracting was making the most of opportunities for inno- vation and profit in the Western theatre, far more was going to be required of them towards war aims of the government. The Eads City-class ironclads would see action late in 1861, but the navy and army mud- dling through acquisition of the City-class ironclads was a good example of how joint operations would fair in the Western Theater in the absence of official protocols.212 Eads’s private contract- ing with Pook for warships offered innovation and resources for construction of the new vessels that would prove advantageous and specifically designed for control of river traffic during the war over an adversary who depended on those internal waterways for its livelihood. But leaving matters in the hands of private contractors alone with such little supervision, however, would be insufficient to meet the Union Navy’s needs back east. To solve this problem necessitated keen administrative organizing, funding, flexibility with accepting ideas, and the ability to match con- tract needs with military needs.

The Ironclad Board Welles and Fox needed a ship that could repel vessels like Virginia in the coastal ports that dotted the Confederacy, but the Eads’s City-class gunboats out of St. Louis had unprotected steam engines that tended to leak. This problem would limit their usefulness in the rougher wa- ters along the coastline.213 Congress authorized $1.5 million for the formation of the special board to investigate and acquire armored ships on 3 August 1861. By 7 August, Welles crafted an advertisement for proposals for ironclad warships with shallow drafts that could be built more quickly than the types developed in Europe. He also handpicked the members of the board, in- stalling Commodore , Commodore , and Commander Charles H.

211 Frank P. Blair, Jr. to James B. Eads, 6 January 1862; A. W. Pennick, R. N. Stembel, Jas. R. McGee, 15 January 1862; James B. Eads to Brigadier General M.C. Meigs, 27 January 1862; Edward Bates to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, 5 March 1862; Geo. Harrington to Edward Bates, 20 December 1862; and Edward Bates to James B. Eads, 21 December 1862, Eads Collection, Box 1, Folders 2-3. 212 The City-class ironclads’ performance is discussed in greater detail below. 213 Spencer C. Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 118. 105

Davis.214 Paulding was a commander of the Washington Navy Yard, Smith was chief of the Bu- reau of Yards and Docks, and Davis had been secretary of related committees that left him knowledgeable about the strategic challenge ahead.215 Welles now seemingly had the support he needed to push his plans through. The Ironclad Board received over a dozen proposals initially, only two of which would be accepted for construction. Cornelius S. Bushnell, a railroad executive and shipbuilder, spon- soring Samuel Pook’s Galena with an overall conventional broadside design and wrought iron strips interlocked over the hull. Yet the Galena design exhibited questionable stability that re- quired time to work out. shipbuilders Merrick & Sons proposed a second design. This second model was based on European ironclads that draped plated iron over a hull with a high , included sail rigging for propulsion, and broadside batteries. The second design would take nine months to build.216 But the Board questioned the second design’s seaworthiness as well. Bushnell sought out Swedish inventor John Ericsson, who had spent his days since the Princeton accident designing commercial ships and other inventions, to confirm Galena’s design elements. But during the meeting, Ericsson had shown and impressed Bushnell with the detailed plans for the as yet unnamed ironclad that would become Monitor. The only way to gain Erics- son’s ship notice was to garner the approval of Welles and the Ironclad Board. Bushnell went personally to Welles, who was closing up family affairs in Hartford in preparation for the move to Washington, and he impressed the secretary with Ericsson’s ingenuity. On 13 September 1861, with Lincoln, Fox, and the Board present, Bushnell presented Ericsson’s design. Welles and Lincoln were both intrigued by the mechanical arts, and the novelty of the floating turreted battery won their approbation.

214 U.S. House, Committee on Naval Affairs, Operations of armored vessels in service of United States. (H. Ex. Doc. 38-69, Serial Set 1193, 11 April 1864), 1-2. Text in: ProQuest® Serial Set Digital Collection; Accessed 25 November 2013. 215 Roberts, Civil War Ironclads, 14. 216 U.S. House, Committee on Naval Affairs, Operations of armored vessels in service of United States. (H. Ex. Doc. 38-69, Serial Set 1193, 11 April 1864), 5-7. Text in: ProQuest® Serial Set Digital Collection; Accessed 25 November 2013. A vessel’s draft is the depth of the hull sitting in the water. A vessel’s freeboard is the distance between the waterline and the top deck. The Merrick & Sons design would later be realized in USS New Ironsides— a 4,120-ton screw-propelled frigate with twenty guns, and iron plate armor of variable thickness. USS Galena-- proposed with six guns, two and a half inch thick iron plate armor, and weighing 950 tons--would also eventually see action--see also Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 36-37; McPherson, War on the Waters, 98. 106

But Paulding, Smith, and Davis resisted. Welles, ever the champion of the labors of the common man, suggested that Ericsson personally argue for the ship. The often temperamental inventor agreed, and successfully argued his case over the next couple of days. Lincoln was so impressed he even attended the Ironclad Board meeting in person and supported Ericsson by say- ing, “’All I can say is what the girl said when she stuck her foot in the stocking: It strikes me there’s something in it.” The contract would be awarded by October 1861—though with much reservation. Doubters focused on the most innovative features of the Monitor, especially the tur- ret and the small target area presented by the low freeboard, as threatening to sink the ship until it successfully put to sea in January 1862. The Ironclad Board would not go easy on Ericsson ei- ther. Commodore Smith was especially intrusive, sending changes and recommendations to Er- icsson that delayed Monitor’s commissioning to 25 February 1862.217 William Frederick Keeler was the forty-year-old acting assistant paymaster on USS Mon- itor in 1862. Keeler’s position was created as part of a volunteer reserve force just for the war, giving him authority equivalent to that of a lieutenant. Born in Utica, New York on 9 June 1821, Keeler had dealings in business with property in La Salle, Illinois as part of the Illinois-Michigan canal endeavor in the early 1840s. In 1846, he met and married Anna Elizabeth Dutton, the daughter of a well-known lawyer and state legislator. He participated, unsuccessfully, in the 1849 California gold rush along with international ventures in related to interest in a tea business, Brown, Ketchum and Company. By 1853, William had resumed his attempts at busi- ness ownership in La Salle, leading him to become senior partner of Keeler, Bennigin, and Com- pany in 1857, a shop that fortuitously introduced Keeler to the latest iron works and steam ma- chinery among other innovations. On 17 December 1861, Illinois Republican Congressman Owen Lovejoy appointed Keeler as an acting paymaster and clerk, and Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles ordered Keeler to Brooklyn, New York on 4 January 1862 ahead of Moni- tor’s launch.218

217 John Ericsson, John Ericsson Collection, 1831-1893, New-York Historical Society, Manuscript Department, New York. Box 1, Folder 4, Item 1. [NHSC-Ericsson]; Niven, Gideon Welles, 366-369; and Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 24-25. The contract payment was for $275,000, and as with each of the naval contracts, owed back to the government if the inventor failed to deliver the product on time or up to specifications—not an easy to define task considering Monitor was experimental ship. Monitor was officially launched on 30 January 1862--see also ORN, Series I, v. 6, 515. 218 William F. Keeler, Anna Elizabeth Dutton Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor: 1862: The Letters of Acting Paymaster William Frederick Keeler, U. S. Navy To his Wife, Anna, ed. by Robert W. Daly (Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute, 1964), xi-xvi. William and Anna marry on 5 October 1846. After Monitor sank on 30 December 1862, Keeler spent his time reconstructing records and settling related financial accounts for those 107

Keeler’s first impressions about his assignment to Monitor were vague at best as he con- veys to his wife Anna from Brooklyn on 9 February 1862: “I have not yet seen my iron home & know nothing more about it than what I hear from others, but I conclude it is a novel looking craft. The impression prevails here that our destination is the Potomac & our business will be to dust the rebel batteries off its banks—at any rate if the boat proves a success we shall see much if not more service than any vessel yet fitted out from here.” But some of Monitor’s features were clear enough for Keeler to notice, such as the majority of the vessel’s hull being located below the water line, thus protecting the ship’s steam boilers. When Keeler finally saw Monitor and wrote to his wife on 13 February 1862, he betrayed a surprising degree of ignorance about new naval technology, accompanied by a presumptuous confidence: “Yesterday I saw my iron home for the first time … There isn’t even danger enough to give us any glory—thick heavy plates & bars of iron on all sides above & below with two of the largest sized Columbiads in the tower. …. Not a man is exposed in action, our boilers & our entire machinery are completely & effectu- ally protected. Two guns still larger than those we have are making to throw 300 lb. balls. When we get those I think we could cope with the English Warrior….” Monitor’s guns were 11-inch Dahlgrens, a new advance over the usual 9-inch naval guns in use elsewhere, and Monitor was hardly sea-worthy enough to meet HMS Warrior—the latter of which was sea-going. Monitor, as February 1862 rolled on, was still in its dock at Greenpoint, New York near Brooklyn for more outfitting—but Keeler was beginning to note the increasing numbers of visitors it was getting.219

aboard. Keeler finished out the war serving on the blockade ship Florida from 7 February 1863 onward—earning a post-war monthly pension due to a wound suffered during action against shore batteries in 1864. William moved to Florida in November 1869, hiding his history with the Union navy, working as a semi-retired functionary for various offices in Mayport when he was not spending time as an all-purpose repairman or gardener. Keeler died from heart disease on 27 February 1886. Lovejoy had been given the rank of colonel in the on 20 September 1861 as part of the Western Department’s headquarters staff in St. Louis, Missouri—as an aide-de-camp specifically— politicians were frequently granted ranks other than general along with administrative duties in exchange for favors, see: U.S. House, Select Committee on Government Contracts, Government Contracts (37 H. Rpt. 2, 17 December 1861), 612. Text from: Committee Reports, Available from: ProQuest Congressional, Accessed: 29 September 2014. 219 Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor, 8-12, 15. Monitor only had a draft (length of a ship’s hull below the water line) of 10 feet, 6 inches while Warrior had a draft of 23 feet. Monitor was 179 feet in length while Warrior was 380 feet long. Monitor displaced 987 tons while Warrior displaced 6,110 tons. Monitor had two guns in a turret while Warrior had forty guns mostly on broadsides. Monitor had a crew of 49, Warrior had a crew of 704. For more on HMS Warrior, see Chapter 2. 108

Figure 7: Coast Chart Number 21 New York Bay and Harbor, New York220

Writing his wife Anna on 22 February 1862, Keeler had been noting his close watch of Monitor’s taking on of stores, but how the day had been made more exciting by the hundreds of extra visitors. Keeler noted the numerous ladies that visited to wish the crew well—biding Anna “don’t’ get jealous”—and notably an editor from Scientific American who was accompanied by a

220 “Coast Chart Number 21 New York Bay and Harbor, New York.” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection, 1861 http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 109

sketch artist. Keeler’s “excitement” would be checked somewhat by the reality of Monitor’s sometimes woeful handling abilities. An attempt to steam Monitor from New York towards Hampton Roads ended abruptly on 27 February in the midst of a raging snow storm as the choppy seas made the ship un-steerable, forcing inventor John Ericsson to modify the rudder controls. Keeler’s letter to Anna on 28 February 1862 reveals the incident on the day before, but suggests the crew was still eager to take the ship into battle: “All are getting impatient & want to get alongside the Merrimac…” Monitor’s handling abilities were a hindrance even into early March as Keeler wrote Anna on 4 March 1862, “We are finally all ready for a start & are now only waiting for a favourable wind, not to fill our “billowing” Sails, but to give us smooth wa- ter.” For the most part, Keeler seemed to find Monitor comfortable and well fitted—at Ericsson’s expense--except for some poor lighting and sound conditions. When Monitor was finally at sea, that comfort was not a constant.221 Monitor had put to sea 6 March 1862, initially meeting smooth seas. But on 7 March, in- creasing wave motion in the sea off Sandy Hook caused seawater to flood the ship’s smoke pipes, which were only six feet high. At approximately 4pm, Keeler found the engineering crews succumbing to smoke inhalation and saw the lower decks full of steam, gas, and smoke billow- ing from the engine room. Keeler concluded that the water coming from the sea had wet the belts that operated the fans responsible for piping in outside air under normal operations, thereby loos- ening the belt, preventing the furnaces from receiving air, and resulting in a build-up of gas min- gled with steam that ran into the smoke pipes and fires. The crew rigged some old sail cloth to use as an awning and keep out the water. Recalling some of his education on steam and mechani- cal devices from business dealings earlier, Keeler managed the engine room until the over- whelmed engine crew could resume duty.222 Monitor’s crew’s preparations were as timely as could be given the situation they were about to steam into at Hampton Roads. The crew, as shown through Keeler, was at least lightly aware of their significance to the history of naval in- novation even if that sense was a bit embittered by the unpleasant conditions onboard at times. What happened in the ensuing few days, however, would change the world.

221 Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor, 15-16, 18-19, 21, 24-25. CSS Virginia (formerly Merrimack) was also delayed from reaching Hampton Roads by the same coastal storm. “Stores” are another term for supplies. 222 Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor, 27-30. 110

Reactions to the Battle of Hampton Roads With the Lincoln administration fearing the Virginia would steam up the Potomac at any moment, Welles fully endorsed Ericsson’s Monitor as it made its date with the Virginia on 9 March 1862.223 On the previous day, 8 March, in the first encounter between iron-armored and steam-powered wooden warships, Confederate ironclad Virginia had destroyed USS Cumber- land, set ablaze USS Congress, and forced USS Minnesota to run aground. The Union ironclad Monitor, with its then unique combination of iron armor, steam powered screw-propeller, and revolving , was then tasked to stop Virginia from finishing the job. To that end, the Er- icsson invention was towed into the area overnight. On 9 March 1862, Monitor and Virginia had their climatic duel in Hampton Roads in what was one of the best documented and pivotal naval engagements in the history of warfare. But the battle had far greater significance and differences in how the outcome was interpreted—even right there on the deck of Monitor fresh from repel- ling Virginia. The crews, Union and Confederate, were torn between being impressed by the ironclads living up to their defensive claims and fear of the havoc they could wreak among the many wooden ships still in service.224 Confederate Major H. Ashton Ramsay, an engineer on USS Merrimac before the war and Virginia’s chief engineer during Hampton Roads, remarked on the construction of Virginia, not- ing that Merrimac had already been a hybrid of sail and steam; and adding an iron plate made it something entirely new. Ramsay granted the change was slow and not well understood by most in the Confederate administration. But this new sturdy construction gave Virginia the tactical ability to wreak great destruction, as its commanding officer, Commodore Franklin Bu- chanan, noticed when he asked Ramsay if his engines could survive the ironclad the Union blockade ship Cumberland at Hampton Roads. As Ramsay watched the approach to Cum- berland and Congress, he remarked that those Union ships would have sunk most any other op- ponent. But the Union shots simply deflected or rolled off harmlessly from the Virginia’s iron plate armor. Even after Virginia rammed Cumberland and was continually fired upon by Con- gress, the Rebel ironclad weathered the storm well while Cumberland was thoroughly impaled and sinking as Virginia pulled away. Ramsay was dually aware of the carnage in and out of the ironclad:

223 Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 64-65. 224 ORN, Series I, v. 7, 1-10; and McPherson, War on the Waters, 96-105. 111

The Cumberland began to sink slowly, bow first, but continued to fight desperately for the forty minutes that elapsed after her doom was sealed, while we were en- gaged with both the Cumberland and the Congress, being right between them. We had left our cast-iron beak in the side of the Cumberland. Like the wasp, we could sting but once, leaving it in the wound. Our smoke-stack was riddled, our flag was shot down several times, and was fi- nally secured to a rent in the stack. On our gun-deck the men were fighting like demons. There was no thought or time for the wounded and dying as they tugged away at their guns, training and sighting their pieces while the orders rang out, "Sponge, load, fire!" "The muzzle of our gun has been shot away," cried one of the gunners. "No matter, keep on loading and firing--do the best you can with it," replied Lieutenant Jones. "Keep away from the side ports, don't lean against the shield, look out for the sharpshooters," rang the warnings. Some of our men who failed to heed them and leaned against the shield were stunned and carried below, bleeding at the ears. All were full of courage and worked with a will... This gives some faint notion of the scene passing behind our grim iron casement, which to the beholders without seemed a machine of destruction. Human hearts were beating and bleeding there. Human lives were being sacrificed. Pain, death, wounds, glory--that was the sum of it. On the doomed ship Cumberland the battle raged with equal fury. The sanded deck was red and slipper with blood. Delirium seized the crew. They stripped to their trousers, kicked off hteir shoes, tied handkerchiefs about their heads, and fought and cheered as their ship sank beneath their feet. Then the order came, "All save who can." There was a scramble for the spar-deck and a rush overboard. The ship listed. The after pivot-gun broke loose and rushed down the decline like a furious animal, rolling over a man as it bounded overboard, leaving a mass of mangled flesh on deck.

The Congress faired at least as poorly, being set ablaze by Virginia’s shots after confusion over the Union ship raising a white flag while USS Minnesota and support vessels came on scene— earning some vivid imagery from Ramsay, though not as extensively. Some of these perceptions would be familiar territory in any war. But it was the one-sided nature of the ironclad—the fact that the new ship was so overwhelmingly superior to its wooden opponents—that perhaps ampli- fied the imagery.225 Monitor Paymaster William Keeler recalled all the doubts about Monitor before it steamed out of Brooklyn; the ship being called a “silly experiment” and an “iron coffin.” And the crew had no combat preparation on the guns before the battle of Hampton Roads. But Keeler

225 , Samuel Dana Greene, H. Ashton Ramsay, and Eugene Winslow Watson, The Monitor and the Merrimac; Both Sides of the Story (New York: Harper, 1912), 25-28, 30-32, 36-41, 45-47. 112

noted that all who served aboard Monitor volunteered to do so, knowing the ship was entirely ex- perimental. Monitor performed successfully at Hampton Roads, but the aftermath is another story. Gustavus Fox, assistant secretary of the Union Navy, had been observing the battle-- along with thousands of other spectators--between Monitor and Virginia, which lasted from just past 8 am on 9 March 1862 to just past noon that same day. From Keeler’s observations in his letters dated on 9 March, Fox and other observers were ready to heap on praise that Monitor and its crew were “deliverers” from the unchecked destruction of the Rebel ironclad. Keeler recalls Fox saying, “Well, gentlemen, you don’t look as though you were just through one of the great naval conflicts on record.” But Virginia had still wreaked plenty of havoc—destroying USS Cumberland and setting USS Congress ablaze. Perhaps it was the witnessing of Congress finally explode the night of 9 March, but Keeler’s opinion of Monitor’s victory was not as enthusiastic as others, yet he still recognized the achievement:

I think we get more credit for the mere fight than we deserve, any one could fight behind an impenetrable armour—many have fought as well behind wooden walls or behind none at all. The credit, if any is due, is in daring to undertake the trip & go into the fight, in an untried experiment & in our unprepared condition.

By 11 March, Monitor had been detailed to protect Fort Monroe, which allowed the crew some time ashore with no imminent naval threats. Keeler writes to Anna that Monitor “is on every one’s tongue & and the expressions of gratitude & joy embarrassed us they are so numerous.” Hero worship came from the public—a man offered Keeler the right to draw on his $2,000 insur- ance policy. More praise came from other officers, such as the commander of Fort Monroe, Ma- jor General John Ellis Wool.226 Monitor and Virginia would never encounter each other again, despite several false alarms, but their one encounter continued to fuel support for iron-clad war- ship production. Even though only rumors of Virginia’s appearance abounded, that was enough to keep Monitor’s crew on alert and ready to launch at a moment’s notice for several days after the battle at Hampton Roads. Keeler wrote on 13 March, off Sewell’s Point, “We are being furnished with every possible instrument of destruction which it is supposed can be of service to us, Shot, shell, shrapnel, hand grenades, & wrought iron shot, which we now have permission to use, besides

226 Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor, 39-42. 113

Enfield rifles with Sword & plenty of small arms.” Keeler seemed swept up in the grav- ity of the moment as the continued writing, “We have gained a reputation we do not aim to lose. … We were also visited by … any quantity of foreign nobles, counts, &c who are serving in our army. Among them quite a number of Swedes, who being countrymen of Capt. Ericsson’s natu- rally feel a pride in his invention & its triumphant success. Yesterday on our return from our search for the Merrimac we passed along close to Newport News. The whole army came out to see us, thousands & thousands lined to the shore, covered the vessels at the docks, & filled the rigging. Their cheers resembled one continuous roar.” Plainly, Keeler was observing a great deal of fanfare over what amounted to a tactical draw—though certainly a momentous technological shift in naval warfare. Keeler, however, was critical of how newspapers were recounting the events at Hampton Roads—accusing the reports of being false, ridiculous, with few being even somewhat correct. 227 Among the newspapers covering Hampton Roads as it happened were , Harper’s Weekly, and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. An article in the New York Times dated 10 March 1862, replete with grandiose descriptions—at first--made the battle sound on par with something out of ancient Greek myth, citing Aristotle and comparing Virginia (called Merrimac in the article) to a “marine monster” while Monitor was a “knight in mail” come to save the day. But while the article went on at length about the almost “fairy tale” timing of Monitor’s arrival to drive off Virginia, the unnamed journalist clearly had an eye for the real- istic implications of what had occurred in Hampton Roads: And this reminds us that we must not, in the contemplation of the merely aesthetic aspects of the battle of Hampton Roads, lose sight of the practical import of this brilliant affair. The Merrimac is undoubtedly a most formidable engine of war, and previously to the construction of Ericsson's iron-clad Battery, we had nothing in our navy that could begin to stand before her. The stories of her inefficiency and failure, that the Richmond journals have published at various times, were probably in great measure intended as a mask; the work on her has been done by Northern mechanics, and is no doubt well done. The rebels have thrown their whole re- sources into her, and, in despair of obtaining a navy of their own, thought to send out an engine of war that would utterly destroy ours. The vision was not altogether baseless. If they had been only a month earlier with the Merrimac, it is hard to set limits to what the might have done.

227 Keeler, Aboard the USS Monitor, 46-47, 50. 114

As with Keeler, this journalist displayed reverence for the technological achievement put on dis- play by the battle—but he was also aware that these ships ultimately served the purposes of the war, and that carried great risk in combat.228 Harper’s Weekly had on-scene reports from Hampton Roads as well. The Harper’s Weekly accounts of the battle from 8-9 March 1862 were fairly straight forward narrations of vessel specifications and tactical occurrences. Though there were other articles in the 22 March 1862 issue that heaped on praise for the performance of Monitor and its crew: The Monitor was handled with unsurpassed skill, decision, and coolness, for which all praise should be given her officers. She has come up to the expectations that were formed of her, and has proved herself impregnable to the heaviest shot at close quarters. Lieutenant Worden, who handled the Monitor so skillfully, is in Washington, in the hands of a surgeon.

The latter article, praising Worden, also acknowledged the Confederate crew on Virginia (Merri- mac and Virginia in the article) was just as “jubilant” about the battle’s outcome. Still, recogni- tion of the ironclad’s significance to the immediate battle was apparent in limiting Virginia’s at- tack on the wooden Union fleet.229 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, the periodical men- tioned by Monitor Paymaster William Keeler, had yet another take on the battle. The Frank Leslie version of the Battle of Hampton Roads was a mix of narrative and em- bellishment—calling Monitor a “marine monster” and “deliverer” from Merrimac as then “com- menced the most extraordinary naval contest known to history; the first battle between iron-clad steamers ever fought, and one in which all the appliances of modern skill were brought in con- flict.” The Frank Leslie editors appreciated the significance of the battle, and recognized an ap- petite in their readers to know more: “Our readers will perceive that we give to-day a series of sketches of the greatest possible interest; those of the great naval combat in Hampton Roads is of remarkable importance. Frank Leslie has now regularly engaged Artists and Correspondents.” Surely, there was more to this than selling newspapers—yet despite Keeler’s critique and the pa- per’s enthusiasm, an article in the following week’s run hit the issue of the battle’s significance quite squarely.230

228 “The Battle of Hampton Roads,” New York Times (New York: H. J. Raymond & Co., 1857-), 10 March 1862. 229 “The Naval Combat in the Chesapeake,” “Lieutenant Worden, U.S.N.,” Harper’s Weekly (New York: Harper’s Magazine Co., 1857-1976), 22 March 1862. 230 “The Naval Battle in Hampton Roads,” “A Deliverer,” “Our Unparalleled Success,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper (New York: Frank Leslie, 1855-1891), 22 March 1862. 115

Frank Leslie’s paper ran an issue on 29 March 1862 with the front page plastered with images of Lieutenant John Worden, John Ericsson, and a story dedicated to the build up to, and significance of, Hampton Roads. The article includes, notably, attention to the fact that ironclads had been in the works for many years earlier with questionable value until “their capabilities were ever brought to the test” as they were on the 8th and 9th of March 1862. The article de- scribes at length about the superiority of the Monitor type over the Merrimac in maneuverability, vulnerabilities, and ability to fire. In any case, the civilian observers were now very much aware of the naval revolution that had been brewing for the past few decades across the Atlantic, even if they did not understand the details of the trial by fire that had only just begun.231 The Confederacy viewed Hampton Roads as a great victory, as Virginia had dealt a se- vere blow to the Union blockade in the James River area by eliminating two major ships—Cum- berland and Congress—and deterring Union army and navy operations from moving with impu- nity in the James River region. The crew of Virginia was lauded as had been the crew of Moni- tor. Franklin Buchanan, Virginia’s commanding officer—wounded in the battle by a rifle bullet from a sailor on Congress on 8 March 1862 before giving temporary command to Catesby ap Jones, was promoted to admiral (the only one the Confederacy would ever have). Jones was pro- moted to the rank of commander. Confederate secretary of the navy Stephen Mallory wrote di- rectly to Jones to praise his actions during the battle, the Confederate Congress passed an address of thanks onto the officers and crew of Virginia, and the ship itself steamed into Norfolk to a he- roes’ welcome. Among the Southern newspapers taking in the public account of the battle were the Richmond Examiner, Macon Telegraph, and Daily True Delta.232 The Confederacy was com- parably alert to the momentous feats of iron-clad warship design—the promise, and the danger. Public observers in the Confederacy were just as aware of the ironclad duel’s significance for warfare as their northern counterparts as evidenced in the article in the Daily Richmond Ex- aminer on 11 March 1862: The most important movements that ever occurred on this continent are now going on before our eyes. The brilliant and astonishing success of the Virginia in the waters of Hampton Roads opens a new chapter in naval warfare, and marks a new era which the South is engaged in.

231 “The ‘Monitor’,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 29 March 1862. 232 OR, Series I, v. II, Part I, 13; and Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy, 142, 145-146. The reason for choosing these papers is primarily spreading coverage as they represent three distinct and populated areas of the Confederacy in areas near where ironclads would have operated—Richmond, Virginia, Macon, Georgia, and New Orleans, Louisiana respectively. 116

This lauding continued elsewhere in the issue of the same date, with a very different view of the outcome than was observed by the Union public—the author considering the James River block- ade lifted, celebrating the destruction of Cumberland and Congress, and noting that Minnesota and Monitor were disabled along with high casualties overall without Virginia suffering much damage other than briefly running aground. A further account in the Examiner’s 12 March 1862 issue stressed the abilities of the ironclad Virginia over wooden opponents with the author writ- ing, “The collision of the Virginia with the Cumberland is said to have produced no more dis- turbance in the motion of the former vessel than if her iron cleaver had been cutting its way through a sheet of writing paper.” This article was accompanied by yet more praise from Confed- erate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory.233 In Macon, Georgia, the news about Hampton Roads was heard by telegraph almost as quickly as it was in Virginia and celebrated with the same fanfare in the Macon Daily Telegraph. The initial report in Macon read similarly to that in Richmond, proclaiming a great victory for the Confederacy followed by details of the battle. The next day, however, saw a considerably more detailed set of articles devoted to the battle and Monitor, though the articles’ authors usu- ally referred to the Union ship as the “Ericsson Battery.” The articles consistently portrayed the battle as one in which Virginia decimated the Union blockaders and dealt severe blows to Moni- tor, causing it to flee while Virginia departed relatively unscathed: The Erricsson iron battery appeared in Hampton Roads this morning, and had a fierce engagement with the Virginia, which continued for hours. The latter ran into the Erricsson, damaging her considerably. A later article reads: The Erricsson engaged the Virginia at a distance of thirty or forty yards; the Vir- ginia ran aground, when the Erricsson took advantage of this and poured shot after shot into her with no effect. After getting off, the Virginia ran into the Erricsson with her bow, when the Erricsson fled.

The promotion of the ironclad warship as a weapon of salvation was being spread far afield from the location of the battle off the coast of Virginia.234

233 “Hampton Roads; Movements; Engaged,” and “James River Blockade Opened. Two Yankee First Class Frigates Destroyed. The Hated Cumberland Sunk” Daily Richmond Examiner (Richmond, Va.: William Lloyd and Co., 1861- .), 11 March 1862; and “The Late Naval Battle,” Daily Richmond Examiner, 12 March 1862. 234 “Grand Naval Victory,” Macon Daily Telegraph (Macon, Ga.: J. Clisby, 1860-1864), 10 March 1862. "The Great Erricsson, Battery Damaged," The Virginia Runs the Ericcsson," and "The Erricsson Battery," Macon Daily Telegraph, 11 March 1862. 117

Farther away from the battle geographically, the Daily True Delta in New Orleans re- ceived word of the battle in Hampton Roads by telegraph on 12 March 1862--publishing some basic narrative elements of the battle in one article and a slightly more detailed account similar to the Richmond and Macon papers in a second article. The latter article, like the other two papers, had the similar tone of an overwhelming Confederate victory with the “Ericsson Battery” made to flee: The enemy's loss in killed and wounded is very great ... The Erricson engaged the Virginia at a distance of 30 or 40 yards. The Virginia ran aground, and the Ericsson took advantage of this, and poured shot after shot upon her with no effect. After getting off the Virginia ran into the Ericsson with her prow and she fled. Many of the enemy's gunboats were sunk and disabled. ... The enemy's loss on both days is estimated from six to twelve hundred.

A much more extensive article appeared in the Daily True Delta on 18 March 1862, including a repetition of the account of the hero’s welcome Virginia’s crew received upon returning to Nor- folk. But the article’s author was plainly impressed by the distinct advantage the iron-clad Vir- ginia had in defenses over the wooden Cumberland, Congress, Minnesota, and other targets: The Minnesota got aground when within a mile or two of Newport News Point. There she stuck unable to get off, while the Confederate steamers and Jamestown peppered her with their batteries, while the Virginia was attending to the shore batteries at Newport News. The frigate St. Lawrence then came up to the assistance of the Minnesota, and she also got aground, and a , supposed to be the Roanoke, put off from Old Point with the same intention, it is supposed; but seeing the sad havoc which the Virginia was playing with the Fed- eral vessels, she put pack to Old Point. … Having completely riddled the Minnesota and disabled the St. Lawrence and Mon- itor, besides as stated above, destroying several of the enemy's gunboats--in a word, having accomplished all that they designed, and having no more, material to work upon, our noble vessels left the scene of their triumphs and returned to the yard, where they await another opportunity of displaying their prowess. … On our side the loss was indeed small, and when we consider the storm of shell to which at times they were subjected, we can but wonder while we rejoice that a few of them suffered injury.

But perhaps most reflective of the public mood, and in a vein that paralleled what was occurring in the Union public sphere after Hampton Roads, was the article in the Daily True Delta on 1 April 1862: The following paragraphs, from Augusta (Ga.) Constitutionalist, will be perused with intense interest by thousands of our readers. If this vessel performs one-half that is claimed for her, then farewell to "wooden navies." We have had exhibited to us skeleton drawings, and had given to us a description of a ram, the construction

118

of one or more of which will shortly be commenced at a Confederate port, which will prove nearly as much superior to the Virginia--superior as she is--as that mon- ster is to a wooden ship.

The article continues discussing iron-clad invulnerability to shot and inflicting terror upon the Union navy. But the same sensational enthusiasm seen in the public and papers of the North was present in the South—generated from the same battle!235 Ultimately, the pivotal duel between Monitor and Virginia at Hampton Roads ended in a tactical draw, but it was only the beginning of a frantic monitor building program that enveloped the Union Navy and frustrating scramble to construct clones of Virginia for the Confederate Navy. Both the Union and Confederacy had help and hindrances, administratively and materi- ally, that steered their course in developing ironclad warships henceforth.

Stevens’ Battery, Galena, and Warning Signs The Stevens’ battery, as discussed in Chapter 3, was a never-realized plan for an iron- clad warship almost a decade before Monitor was even on the drawing board. A New York Times article on 11 March 1862 refocused attention on Congress cancelling the Stevens’ Battery project before it was ever completed. The article essentially accused the government of passing up the chance to gain access to a superior iron-clad warship well in advance of Virginia (Merrimac in the article). An accompanying article further defended the Stevens’ Battery against its detractors, especially arguments against its seaworthiness and failure to allow adequate trials. The article emphasized the government had already invested half-a-million dollars in the ship—substantially less than European ironclads. Edwin and John Stevens even agreed to use their own funds to complete the vessel, if upon proving itself, the Union Navy agreed to pay for the ship. The result was Naugatuck, taken in by the Revenue Service under the Treasury Department and then lent to the Union Navy. Naugatuck would remain in operation within the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron from 2 April until 26 May 1862 when it would participate in combat engagements in- cluding battles at Sewell’s Point and Drewry’s Bluff.236

235 “Telegraphed to the True Delta from Richmond,” and “Important from Richmond the Great Naval Victory,” Daily True Delta (New Orleans, La.: M.G. Davis and John Maginnis, 1849-1866), 12 March 1862; “The Great Naval Victory,” Daily True Delta, 18 March 1862; and “The Blockade to be Raised,” Daily True Delta, 1 April 1862. 236 “Iron-clad Vessels,” New York Times, 11 March 1862; “The Stevens Battery,” New York Times, 11 March 1862; and Naugatuck, Naval History & Heritage Command. http://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship- 119

Other designs delayed or passed over by the Union’s Ironclad Board also soon saw ac- tion. Commander John Rodgers would take the ironclad USS Galena ahead of several other gun- boats in a squadron that included Monitor in a failed attempt to attack up the James River to- wards Richmond near Drewry’s Bluff on 15 May 1862:

Figure 8: S.E. Virginia & Fort Monroe

Galena was blocked from passing by obstacles in the river including driven pilings, sunken hulks full of stones, and cribs all at a narrow point in the river near Fort Darling, which sat 200 feet high on the bluff. Galena fired on the fort from 600 yards away and took concentrated fire back, as Monitor posed no threat since it could not elevate its guns.237 The exchange lasted for five hours and Galena was struck forty-three times, suffering seventeen killed and seven wounded, including some from sharpshooter fire on the riverbank. Monitor had been only hit three times with no casualties. In contrast, the Confederate forces in the fort suffered only fifteen casualties.

histories/danfs/n/naugatuck-i.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). Naugatuck was returned to the Treasury Department in late 1862 and repurposed several times by private owners until being sold for scrap after the war. 237 “S.E. Virginia & Fort Monroe.” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection, 1861 http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). Cribs in this instance refer to box-like structures made from wooden beams. 120

The media that had treated the Union Navy like darlings after Hampton Roads were bitter after Drewry’s Bluff, lamenting that the naval forces in New Orleans had been successful, but had failed to take Richmond. If the navy could overcome obstacles in the Mississippi River, why not the James River? Much of the blame fell on Commodore Louis M. Goldsborough—from both the media and the navy—for being too coarse in personal relations and incompetent to handle an active command any longer. Goldsborough was relieved of part of the and those ships were formed into the James River Flotilla under command of Charles Wilkes on 6 July 1862. The rest of the North Atlantic Squadron was put under command of acting rear ad- miral Samuel Phillips Lee (a Virginian and cousin of Robert E. Lee), who had served under Far- ragut in the New Orleans and early Vicksburg campaigns.238The pendulum had now shifted. Perhaps Galena’s performance at Drewry’s Bluff should have been a warning that iron- clads were not the miracle weapon some had proclaimed. Nevertheless, the Union and Confeder- acy had seen what ironclads could do. Indeed, the havoc they could wreak on wooden ships left a lasting image for military and civilian audiences on both sides of the conflict. As both naval ad- ministrations gathered resources to construct more of these new ships, their struggles in combat would test the efficacy of those commanded to wield them.

“Ironclad Fever” The drama of Hampton Roads on 8-9 March 1862 and the battle’s implications for up- ending wood and sail naval warfare prompted a frenetic pace of production for ironclads. Both Union and Confederate forces recognized the change, as even Confederate nautical expert Mat- thew Fontaine Maury—once dedicated to building a wooden steam gunboat fleet for the South— realized that Virginia had effectively neutralized the ships of the old world given the ironclad’s performance against Cumberland, Congress, and Minnesota. This realization also took the form of fear among many Union naval officers serving aboard other ships, wary of the mere mention of a Confederate ironclad ram in the vicinity, this despite Monitor having successfully driven off Virginia. Trepidations aside, the Union and Confederacy—both confident of their vessels’ per- formance at Hampton Roads—embarked on vigorous efforts to build more ironclads.239

238 McPherson, War on the Waters, 109-111. For more on the Ironclad Board, see Chapter 4. 239 McPherson, War on the Waters, 105-106; and Symonds, Civil War at Sea, 33. 121

To this end, Congress added $10 million to the appropriations for ironclad warship acqui- sitions after Monitor’s debut in March 1862. Ericsson was already at work improving Monitor’s design into an upgraded Passaic-class of ironclads, named after the town of Passaic, New Jersey, where significant metal-work was produced. Among Passaic’s improvements were an additional 30 feet of length (200 feet total), thicker armor (11 inches around the turret), carriages for the largest guns available (two 15-inch Dahlgrens), a “smoke-box” to divert gun muzzle smoke from filling the ship’s turret as it had done on Monitor, and moving of the pilothouse from the bow to the top of the turret. Ten Passaic-class monitors in all were built over the course of the war, but they still suffered vulnerabilities inherent to the Monitor’s basic design. Specifically, they were still relatively unseaworthy, hence unfit for blockade duty. With only two guns, the Passaic-class ships could fire only once every five to seven minutes, thus they could not maintain bombardments on shore installations alone long enough to force an enemy to abandon their post. However, Welles had still asked Ericsson for an even larger class of ironclad: the Canonicus-class, named after a Narragansett chief. Ericsson designed Canonicus-class ships to be 225 feet long, also with two 15-inch Dahlgren guns. In the waning years of the war, other versions of Monitor were turned out, including five double-turreted monitors seaworthy enough to steam into the open ocean, two of which saw service in 1864, Onondaga and Monadnock. A few river-going double-turreted monitors were also built. One triple-turreted monitor was con- structed, USS Roanoke, but was too impractical to use as anything other than a guard ship. In- cluding all variants, the Union constructed eighty-four ironclads, sixty-four of which were moni- tors.240 The ironclad “fever” extended to the carte-blanche the Union Navy extended to Monitor inventor John Ericsson. The bane to the navy after the 1844 accident aboard USS Princeton, Er- icsson now held great prestige, and all naval contractors were forced to use his engineering plans instead of their own specifications if they wanted a government contract. Assistant Secretary Fox, Inspector Alban C. Stimers, and Ericsson were convinced that any deficiencies in Monitor’s ability to achieve objectives were merely technological challenges that could be overcome in the

240 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 34-35. The ten Passaic-class monitors were Camanche, Catskill, Lehigh, Montauk, Nahant, Nantucket, Passaic, Patapsco, Sangamon, and Weehawken. The nine Canonicus-class ships were Canonicus, Catawba, Mahopac, Manayunk/Ajax, Manhattan, Oneota, Saugus, Tecumseh, and Tippecanoe/Wyandotte. 122

next class of ship. Accordingly, this remained their focus, and all related shipyards and work- shops had to follow suit. The shipyards complained about the delays this created by having to wait for Ericsson’s plans and approval to reach them, but the multiple-site process for the parts of each monitor led to numerous spare parts being made available in what became an impressive display of a modernized industrial production system.241 The Confederacy similarly had a sudden conversion to ironclad production, such that it could manage even with the severe material deficiencies it suffered compared to the Union—es- pecially when it came to iron plate production. Union blockade pressure on Norfolk and the Un- ion occupation of New Orleans deprived the Confederacy of two major shipbuilding yards. In response, Confederate Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory was able to move construction to loca- tions elsewhere along the James River closer to Richmond, Virginia; Columbus, Georgia along the Chattahoochee River; Selma, Alabama on the Alabama River; and Shreveport, Louisiana along the Red River. The Confederacy would produce eighteen ironclad warships in autumn 1862, and start fifty such vessels by the end of the war—though complete and commission only twenty-two of them. And Virginia’s success at Hampton Roads loomed large, as all Confederate ironclads were of a similar casemate design. It is important to note, however, that Virginia’s performance was not the sole factor in the South’s choice of ironclad design. The lack of Confederate facilities to produce iron plate in other shapes and quantity necessary for another configuration of vessel se- verely limited construction options for Southern shipbuilders.242 For these reasons, the iron plate and engine production situation in the Confederacy was dire. Mallory had to settle for 1-inch thick armor plating on Southern ironclad warships rather than the recommended 3-inch plates since there were no foundries available to produce the thicker iron. But even the 1-inch plates were in short supply, resulting in a few ironclads being constructed out of rails pulled from railroads. Added to the armoring problems was the Confed- eracy’s inadequate production of steam engines powerful enough to propel ironclad warships

241 Roberts, Civil War Ironclads, 33; and Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 35-36. For more on the 1844 accident involving USS Princeton, see Chapter 3. 242 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 36. 123

through water, leaving many of its vessels underpowered or as nothing more than floating batter- ies with no engine at all! As mentioned earlier, much of the problem also stemmed from limited help from the Confederate government. But all was not lost; there was some civilian help.243 Throughout the war, especially through 1864, a number of Ladies’ Associations tasked themselves with fundraising for the ironclads to demonstrate their loyalty to the Confederate cause. One of these associations partially funded CSS Virginia II—a small clone of Virginia— out of Richmond, while groups in Charleston and Savannah helped fund CSS Palmetto State and CSS Georgia respectively. The combined efforts of the Confederate government, private citi- zens, and Southern naval crews produced several ironclad warship squadrons that put up fair re- sistance against the Union Navy at the key Atlantic and Gulf ports as well as the western river network. However, the Union’s numerical and technological dominance proved too much for the South’s stalling for time and international recognition strategy. Moreover, the South’s original naval strategy of using its control of forts aided by a handful of ships to stave off attack was out- dated before the war began. Upgrades to ship armaments and steam propulsion had already made newer warships better capable of handling shore fortifications. The addition of ironclad armor narrowed the gap even further.244 Despite the great enthusiasm many people the Union and Confederacy had for building ironclad warships it failed to erase the impressions these ships were leaving on public and per- sonnel regarding their destructiveness. As mentioned earlier, crews at Hampton Roads were firsthand witnesses to the new era of naval destruction wrought by ironclad warfare upon seeing CSS Virginia decimate the Union blockade ships. Sailors on USS Monitor also saw some of the aftermath as well as the destructive power of their own ship against Virginia. Confederate per- sonnel and public had their own views of the toll these new ships were taking on lives and liveli- hood. How large the destructive power of ironclads loomed in the planning of engagements, for Union and Confederate naval departments, contributed a great deal to the South’s handling of the blockade, the Union’s conduct toward Confederate coastal installations, and the position the in- ventors of these ships occupied in public perceptions. But continued threats from the Virginia threatened General George B. McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign and stressed a need for

243 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 36. 244 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 36-38. 124

Welles’s Navy Department to cooperate with the Army after years of such cooperation being no- tably absent.

The Army-Navy “Game” Personalities often play a large role in the planning and conduct of war, as they can lead to close cooperation or mutual antagonism. Overcoming clashing personalities is never easy. In this instance, Welles’s introduction to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton at the start of the war boded ill for Army-Navy cooperation at the grand-strategic level. Welles met Stanton in January 1862, and had been offended by Stanton’s coarse language, especially in regards to Lincoln. When Stanton was designated secretary of war, replacing the corrupt , Welles was wary of Stanton’s close ties with William Seward. The two men would first be brought to- gether over the joint Army-Navy operation to take New Orleans in early 1862 when Captain Da- vid G. Farragut’s fleet would command the Mississippi River while General would use the fleet to ferry his troops to occupy the city. Welles described his first meeting with Stanton: When introduced to Mr. Stanton, I met him frankly, friendly, and sincerely, as an associate and colleague, with whom I was to hold intimate personal and official relations in a re- sponsible position, and in a trying period. There was, however, no immediate cordiality between us, but there was formal courtesy. I was at that time furiously attacked by many newspapers and active partisans … Mr. Stanton may have received unfavorable impres- sions from them.

This tension between Stanton and Welles augured poorly for future cooperation.245 From this inauspicious beginning cooperation between Welles and Stanton varied from operation to operation. At New Orleans, Stanton’s support of the amphibious assault was enthu- siastic. But with Virginia’s threat, Stanton was bitter and resentful that a mere two-gun ship like Monitor was the best Welles could bring to bear. The panicked Stanton coaxed Lincoln into ap- proving an operation to obstruct the Potomac River, even though Welles had worked with Gen- eral George B. McClellan to keep that river clear for navigation. Welles remained resentful of the incident for some time. He deemed Stanton fond of power and a man who “took pleasure in

245 Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 55, 57-58, 60. Farragut was the at the time of the battle and promoted to Rear Admiral on 16 July 1862. 125

being ungracious and rough towards those who were under his control, and when he thought his bearish manner would terrify or humiliate those who were subject to him.”246 Welles continued to rebuke Stanton for considering the Navy secondary and subject to the Army’s control. It is little wonder that later joint operations occurred only after extensive failures of either branch to effect a victory. Attempts to retake Charleston Harbor in the spring of 1863 were designed by Welles and Fox to be Navy-only operations. Welles wanted to demon- strate how a fleet of ironclads could defeat fortifications without Army assistance. However, the 7 April 1863 Navy only battle was a failure, and a subsequent combined Army-Navy assault was planned starting in May 1863. But even a successful joint operation met with bitterness in admin- istrative circles. The fall of Vicksburg, arranged between General Ulysses S. Grant and Admiral David D. Porter in early-mid 1863, brought jubilation to the Navy Department upon Porter’s re- port to Welles. But Welles wrote, “I am told, however, that Stanton is excessively angry because Admiral Porter heralded the news to me in advance of General Grant to the War Department.”247 Even in victory, relations between the two men remained frosty. Welles kept relations between the Navy and Army on as business-like a footing as much as was possible. He employed his political wiles as expertly as possible, going directly to Lin- coln for any affairs of the Navy or events that might overlap with the Army. Welles also had As- sistant Secretary Fox and Admiral Dahlgren to charm Lincoln when Welles’s reticence failed to sway the president on one matter or another. Administrative friction aside, cooperation between the Army and Navy in the field did occur frequently—as did taking advantage of the new tech- nology of ironclads before the duel between Monitor and Virginia in Hampton Roads.248 Person- ality differences thus failed to halt all progress.

Ironclads and the Army in Action The Eastern-Theater was relatively quiet in autumn 1861, but the Western Theater was seeing plenty of fighting, especially throughout the network of rivers—none more important to Union War strategy than the Mississippi. Inland rivers, as mentioned earlier, were under the ju-

246 Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 61, 63, 66-68. 247 Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, 69, 236-237, 276-277, 309, 365. Operations in and around Charleston Harbor and Vicksburg will be discussed further in Chapter 5. 248 Niven, Gideon Welles, 402-403. 126

risdiction of the army and not the navy. The Union blockade of the Confederacy’s coasts at- tacked the South’s economic ties to the outside world, but controlling river traffic simultaneously would divide Confederate forces—especially eastern armies from supplies--while providing the Union military avenues of advance. Both Union and Confederate navies created riverine forces with ironclads in their fleets.249 In August 1861, the Union placed the Eads City-class under control of the army unit commanded by Brigadier General John C. Fremont, even though Captain Andrew H. Foote was the local na- val officer operating the ships. Two months later, the Confederacy contracted for four ironclad warships—two at Memphis and two at New Orleans. Each of the Confederate ironclads would be casemate designs, 100 feet longer than the City-class ships; but shortages in materials and la- bor made completing the contracts on time a challenge for the South. Originally, the Confederate Navy Department expected the Memphis ironclads Tennessee and Arkansas as well as the New Orleans ironclads Louisiana and Mississippi all to be complete by Christmas 1861—a month faster than the Eads warships. But none of the Confederate warships were ready even by the fol- lowing spring! The Confederate contractor for the Memphis ships, John T. Shirley, had requested one hundred laborers, but he received fewer than a dozen from Major General . Polk continued to starve Shirley of workers and set his army units defensively as part of Confed- erate General ’s lines—Johnston’s force ran from the Mississippi River to the Cumberland Gap. To overcome Johnston’s Confederate positions, Union Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant was about to learn precisely the value of joint operations—including the utility of ironclads.250 In autumn 1861, Grant could not directly attack Johnston’s forces at their westernmost anchor at Columbus, Kentucky, a high and dry point along the Mississippi River between Cairo, Illinois and Vicksburg, Mississippi. But he had other targets in mind. Confederate General Polk, risking pushing Kentucky from neutral into Union hands, occupied the border state and con- structed Confederate fortifications elsewhere along the overall defensive line, including Fort

249 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 107-108, 110, 116. “Western Theater” in this case means the area roughly encompassed by the Appalachian Mountains, Mississippi River, Ohio River, and Gulf of Mexico. 250 ORN, Series II, v. I, 780; and Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 116-118. The Union’s western riverine fleet would be placed under direct control of the navy in the form of the Mississippi Squadron in October 1862—though no formal protocol was established for working between army and navy. Polk was a subordinate of Albert Sidney Johnston—overall commander of the Confederacy’s western armies from summer 1861 until his death at the on 6 April 1862. Polk himself would die in action on 14 June 1864 during the .

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Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River—both forts were lo- cated in the state of Tennessee just south of the Kentucky state line. Johnston also moved his per- sonal headquarters to Bowling Green, Kentucky. The result of these changes was an over- stretched Confederate defensive line along the rivers that left several vulnerable targets for Un- ion forces to attack.

Figure 9: Cumberland Gap Region251

On 9 November 1861, Grant decided to attack a weaker Confederate position on the Mis- sissippi River at Belmont, Missouri by loading Union troops on the timberclads Lexington and Tyler and landing a few miles north of the city. However, Grant’s troops were too inexperienced and Polk was able to dispatch reinforcements in time to force Grant into retreat—Lexington and Tyler needing to maintain a bombardment on pursuing Confederate forces to prevent a complete

251 Derived from “Lloyd's Map of the Southern States Showing all the Railroads Their Stations and Distances also the Counties Towns Villages Harbors Rivers and Forts” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection, 1861 http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 128

rout. Ever the offensive-minded commander, Grant would use this lesson of joint operations with naval vessels again despite the disaster at Belmont.252 General Grant’s next target would be Fort Henry on the east bank of the Tennessee River. Fort Henry had two significant points of vulnerability: it was low on the river’s flood plain and vulnerable from the rear:

Figure 10: Cumberland Gap Area

This meant that the fort was open to attack from both gunboats and land armies at the same time. Grant decided to implement the new City-class ironclads for this operation—having four of them take on the bombardment of the fort with three timberclads in reserve while Grant’s army marched on Fort Henry from behind. The new Union western theater commander, Major General Henry W. Halleck, agreed after some persistent arguing, soon leading to the first major fight be- tween ironclads and fortifications. By 5 February 1862, Captain Foote’s thirteen steamers had

252 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 117-118. Border States were states that retained the institution of slavery, but did not secede from the Union. Timberclads were steamships that had their outer hulls and machinery protected with extra layers of wooden planks. 129

gradually moved all of Grant’s troops into position a few miles downriver from Fort Henry. On 6 February, City-class ironclads Carondelet, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Essex opened fire on Fort Henry in the morning. The Confederate fort’s commander, Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman, was already enduring problems with heavy rains flooding the fort’s parade ground and raising the river to the point that any gunboat could fire directly into the fort without the gun crews hav- ing to elevate the guns. Tilghman sent some of his troops away to the more defensible Fort Do- nelson on the Cumberland River, a few miles east. At Fort Henry, the Confederate guns shot at City-class ironclads with generally little effect—shells deflected off the armor though the im- pacts gave sailors inside a jolt. There were some exceptions. Using a 10-inch Columbiad from Fort Henry, the Rebels managed to penetrate the armor of Essex’s boiler area, causing the boiler to explode, killing ten sailors, and scalding many more. However, the Confederates broke the Columbiad soon after this shot while reloading it—meaning another success was not to be had, as their next biggest ordnance also burst and all remaining guns were too small to penetrate the ironclads’ armor. Realizing the fight had becoming one-sided, Tilghman surrendered to Foote. Foote accepted the surrender on behalf of the Navy and turned over control of Fort Henry to Grant who arrived with his troops an hour later while Foote and his gunboats left to take control of the Memphis-Clarksville-Louisville Railroad bridge over the Tennessee River—effectively severing the link between Johnston’s force at Bowling Green and Polk’s force at Columbus.253 Grant’s and Foote’s success at Fort Henry demonstrated what a joint army-navy opera- tion could do—overwhelm a fortified defensive position from water and land simultaneously. It also gave a sample of the advantages of having ironclad gunboats in one’s arsenal. The Confed- erate leadership was certainly impressed. Johnston wrote to then Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin on 8 February 1862: The slight resistance at Fort Henry indicates that the best open earthworks are not reliable to meet successfully a vigorous attack of ironclad gunboats, and, although now supported by a considerable force, I think the gunboats of the enemy will probably take Fort Donelson without the necessity of employing their land force in cooperation, as seems to have been done at Fort Henry.254

253 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 118, 120-121. Derived from “Lloyd's Map of the Southern States Showing all the Railroads Their Stations and Distances also the Counties Towns Villages Harbors Rivers and Forts” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection, 1861 http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 254 ORN, Series I, v. 22, p. 563. 130

The consequences for Fort Donelson would be delayed by cautious urgings from Halleck, who wanted Grant to consolidate his victory at Fort Henry. Geographical realities also delayed the at- tack on Fort Donelson. Fort Donelson was only twelve miles east of Fort Henry, but Foote’s flo- tilla had to sail over one hundred miles along the Tennessee, Ohio, and Cumberland Rivers to reach Fort Donelson, keeping his gunboats, especially Essex, in repair while underway. Foote de- cided to dispatch only Carondelet to Fort Donelson directly while the rest of the fleet headed to Cairo for repairs, sending Halleck and even Grant into a panic, urging Foote to rush getting the gunboats back into action.255 The operation to take Fort Donelson began with Carondelet testing the fort’s defenses on 13 February 1862. The Union ironclad managed to eliminate one Confederate gun and officer, but the cannons on Donelson were better mounted than at Fort Henry and the 10-inch Columbiad at Donelson managed to fire a penetrating shot into Carondelet that wounded several crewmen. Carondelet’s captain, Henry Walke, ordered his ship to move downriver to continue a relatively useless long-range artillery bombardment with the fort until the remaining gunboats arrived over- night. The following day, Grant met Foote on St. Louis, convinced that the ironclads could defeat Donelson’s batteries as they had previously at Fort Henry. Foote was less optimistic, considering Donelson’s superior construction, but continued the operation. Later, on 14 February, the four City-class ironclads and two of the timberclads approached Fort Donelson but the higher placed Confederate guns were able to hit the few unarmored overhead areas of the ironclad steamers in- cluding one shot that struck through the pilothouse of St. Louis--killing the pilot, wounding Foote in the ankle, and crippling the vessel. Louisville also was crippled by another barrage, leaving the Confederate gunners to focus fire on Carondelet and Pittsburg. The Confederate guns had suc- cessfully repulsed the City-class flotilla, and it took Grant’s army (along with some blundering by the Confederate forces under Brigadier Generals John Floyd and Gideon Pillow) to subdue the fort.256 Though the Union Army was more responsible for the fall of Fort Donelson than the navy when compared to Fort Henry, the two campaigns remain examples of victory being

255 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 123-124. 256 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 124-125. 131

achieved with joint operations and thoughtful implementation of new technology such as iron- clad warships. This was exemplified by the battle for Island No. 10, sixty miles south of Colum- bus, Kentucky. Island No. 10 was so numbered because of its location among other islands along the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers at Cairo, Missouri—a tight turn of the Mississippi with shore fortifications and Confederate gunboats under command of Commander George N. Hollins:

Figure 11: Confederate Fortifications on the Mississippi River – 1862

Union army forces under command of Major General John Pope could not easily cross the river to attack Confederate forces that had evacuated from Columbus to Island No. 10 after the fall of Fort Henry. Above Island No. 10 lay a swampy lake that would impede land-based crossings by Union troops. Below Island No. 10, Pope would require Foote’s ironclad fleet to contend with Hollins’s gunboats and the Confederate shore fortifications. Foote was even more alarmed at this prospect than at Fort Donelson. The river’s southward flow meant disabled ships would drift

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deeper into Confederate territory. Nevertheless, Foote probed rebel defenses first by using boats to shell rebel positions, ultimately effecting damage but not a surrender. Foote also tried finding a path to bypass the island to no avail. Foote settled instead on a more daring, but direct approach—having the City-class ironclads Carondelet and Pittsburg run past the rebel guns on the nights of 4 and 5 April 1862 to link with John Pope’s forces at New , Missouri. The two ironclads escorted Pope’s army to the rear of Island No. 10’s defenses and into an over- whelming Union victory—capturing 6,000 Confederate men. The battle for Island No. 10 was a powerful display of Union army and navy joint opera- tions at work—including the advantages of armored ships. The Confederacy was as alarmed as the Union was jubilant—especially as construction still lagged behind on the only rebel ironclads in the upper Mississippi, CSS Arkansas and CSS Tennessee. Confederate navy secretary Stephen Mallory ordered the ironclads be moved farther south. Arkansas managed to be launched down the Mississippi and up the Yazoo to finish construction, but Tennessee was not complete enough to be moved.257

Conclusion The life and career of Gideon Welles contain the exploits of a man who from childhood took on a deliberate and forthright personality. Welles’s father imbued his son with practicality, business-sense, and provided opportunities to expand his frontiers. When the young Gideon was brought back down to Earth by crushing family tragedies and an uninspired study of the law, he found escape in journalism. This refuge turned out to be a blessing, as he gained public exposure and political acumen through news-writing, giving voice to his Jeffersonian and Jacksonian ide- als of common-man ingenuity. Welles found friends among the hierarchy of the Democratic Party who provided career paths that enabled him to gain administrative skill and financial prow- ess which gifted him with an enduring reputation. When Welles switched to the Republican Party over the issue of slavery’s abolition, his passion for principle drew him into the Lincoln camp and cabinet.

257 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 127-130; and ORN, Series II, v. 1, 781-783. “Confederate Fortifications on the Mississippi River – 1862,” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection, 1861 http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 133

Upon the start of the Civil War, Welles’s savvy nature made him a timely fit for the of- fice of the secretary of the navy. Aware of the graft that often permeates a government, Welles did his best to control the men and materiel under the Navy’s command. Welles had proven his financial prudence in the Bureau of Provisions and Clothing, political loyalty as a New England Democrat and later Republican when his morals demanded it, and his experience as a journalist gave Welles insight into public opinion. The secretary was open minded and curious enough to permit introduction of the ironclad warship both when recommended to him and required of him. His discretion permitted him to sway his subordinates and persuade the Lincoln administration to elevate the Navy’s role in the war. Welles made deft use of deputies like Gustavus Fox and John Dahlgren when more energy was required for an argument. And even when Welles was faced with the sometimes manic behavior of the Army, he kept his feelings hidden and pressed home the Navy’s goals. Welles was able to provide for and manage the Union Navy due to pragmatic business experience, exposure to public opinion through journalism, and an intellectual curiosity that he had possessed all his life. Welles’s delegation of duties to more technologically knowledgeable personnel such as Gustavus Fox, the members of the Ironclad Board, plus inventors like Erics- son, Eads, and Bushnell, encouraged creation of new classes of warships. The new warships met the Union’s strategic needs—controlling the Western rivers as avenues of advancement, and strengthening the blockade throughout the Eastern waters. It should be understood, however, that the men who created the ironclads for the Union Navy were able to do so because the revolutionary naval technology travelled across the globe with European inventors, the knowledge of ironclad warships’ advantages was absorbed by key personnel within the Union naval administration, and Welles exercised a level of control condu- cive to organizing the new vessels within the Union’s strategic and operational framework. The difficulty in learning to use the ironclad warship in the field was evident in battles other than Hampton Roads. Trials by fire were the only test available to Union commanders like Andrew Foote when he used the City-class ironclads in the Western rivers along with Ulysses Grant’s joint operations. The same can be said for the Confederacy’s frustrating countermoves when construction shortcomings led to scuttling their ironclads. And there was the new level of destruction the ironclads were starting to bring to the battlefield, decimating ships and crews that were top of the line mere months earlier while shrugging off return fire and earning monstrous

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names in the public press. Nevertheless, the lessons hard learned at Forts Henry and Donelson or at Island No. 10 did little to temper the fervor born from Hampton Roads. The frenzy over iron- clads had gripped both Union and Confederate naval administrations tightly, and to some these miracle ships might still win the on their own. But, the war thundered on.

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CHAPTER 5

IRONCLADS AND THE OPERATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

Introduction The Union and Confederate navies took the length of the Civil War to fully grasp the strategic and operational capabilities, as well as the limitations, of the new naval innovation that was the ironclad armored warship. Both North and South had to contend with a variety of design obstacles, not the least of which was how to maneuver the steam-powered iron vessels along coasts and in rivers and harbors dominating the naval theatre. First impressions can often be mis- taken. The 8-9 March 1862 battle of Hampton Roads that featured the duel between USS Moni- tor and CSS Virginia sent both Union and Confederate administrations into an ironclad frenzy. Within a year, both vessels would be eliminated—and not by ordnance. The coast of the Caroli- nas that claimed Monitor and the James River that spelled Virginia’s doom were only two of many treacherous maritime environments that influenced the course of the naval war. Hampton Roads, Charleston Harbor, the Mississippi River, and the Roanoke River were locations that could as easily help or hinder battle plans.258 The challenges natural hazards presented during the Civil War were as important to naval technological progress as the actions of governments, inventors, and sailors. The environment’s

258 For further reading on the relationship between the environment and warfare, there are several works that either deal with the subject of environment and war in a comprehensive sense or deal with the topic more narrowly such as meteorologists developing their profession in specific wars. The effect of the military on the environment is explored in an edited series of essays, Charles E. Closmann, ed., War and the Environment: Military Destruction in the Modern Age (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2009). The essays in the Closmann work cover a broad period from the 1789 version of the American military through a variety of national armies in World War II. Closmann’s multifaceted definition of “environment” is particularly useful, as he goes beyond just climate and includes landscape, life-forms, water, soil, and even human communities. The book also references a Civil War aspect with Lisa M. Brady’s essay on General William T. Sherman’s 1864-1865 marches from Georgia through the Carolinas. Marcus Hall’s essay on malaria in the Second World War is another look at the effects of disease on soldiers and a bit on the role of geography in regards to exposure. Another work that takes on the view of the military’s influence on the environment (not merely the environment as an obstacle) is Edmund Russell and Richard Tucker, Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2004). Russell and Tucker seek to increase the visibility of the environment as a factor in war beyond the calculations of weather and terrain for battle plans. Most of the essays deal with the impact of a military force on the landscape or the depletion of resources such as the massive demand of lumber from forests by naval constructors in the nineteenth century. But the effectiveness of industrial war is rightfully pointed out in the case of the U.S. Civil War where use of the Union’s industrial might to exhaust the South was a successful element to Northern victory. Of course the World Wars of the twentieth century draw on far greater resources from all over the Earth, as mechanization in particular is expanded. 136

ability to change history has been well documented in conflicts of the twentieth century; how- ever, less precise data collection methods limit what can be done for nineteenth century wars and earlier beyond qualitative description. This study attempts to show just how closely military per- sonnel integrated natural conditions into their plans and that even the latest weapons technology was no less at the mercy of the physical environment.

Rushing into Battle European military and technological developments came to the attention of the American military establishment in the decade preceding the Civil War. The mid-1850s saw Florida Sena- tor Stephen R. Mallory apply the Crimean War’s lessons--on the effectiveness of iron-armored naval weapons platforms against land fortifications--to a bill to improve the U.S. Navy.259 Dur- ing a speech before Congress on 18 May 1854, Mallory recommended several technological im- provements in support of what would become the Naval Reform Act of 1855—e.g., screw pro- pellers, better ordnance, steam engines, and upgraded dock facilities. Mallory contextualized his recommendations with the superior numerical advantages held by British and French navies over their Russian counterparts.260 He also saw potential in Robert L. Stevens’ failed ironclad battery design from 1842.261 Mallory’s technological improvement suggestions met with mixed results, being defeated by initial voting, and partially accepted in principle later without sufficient fund- ing.262 Resigning his seat in Congress upon Florida’s secession in 1861, Mallory took his ideas to his new post as Confederate secretary of the navy. The Confederacy’s dearth of naval re- sources—ships and shipbuilding facilities--and Mallory’s eye for innovation contributed to the strategy of acquiring ironclads to thwart the ensuing Union blockade.263 USS Merrimack was one of several ships scuttled in the shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia, when the Union abandoned it after “Old Dominion” seceded in response to President Lincoln’s

259 Andrew Murray and Robert Murray, Ship-Building in Iron and Wood. Steam-Ships. 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, Scotland: Adam and Charles Black, 1863), Ship-Building, 24. Kinburn’s location is inside present-day Ukraine. 260 U.S. Senate. Committee on Naval Affairs. The Committee on Naval Affairs having under consideration the navy, and having carefully examined the means of improving it, report. (33 S. Rpt. 271, 18 May 1854). Text from: Committee Reports. Available from: ProQuest Congressional; Accessed: 25 November 2013. 261 Stevens was a steamship builder and president of the Camden and Amboy Railroad. 262 Rodman L. Underwood, Stephen Russell Mallory: A Biography of the Confederate Navy Secretary and United States Senator (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005), 54-59. Batteries in this sense are an organized group of artillery pieces on land or on a ship. 263 Spencer C. Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 10- 11. 137

calling for volunteers to fight Confederate forces after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861. Mallory ordered the steam power plant and the remainder of Merrimack’s hull to be raised and refitted with a slope-sided iron shell that would be placed overtop the wooden keel. Captain Franklin Buchanan and Lieutenant Catesby ap R. Jones would both later command the rechris- tened CSS Virginia.264 Virginia’s design limitations were significant considering its operational environment off the coast of its namesake state. The weight of the iron armor on the wooden hull pushed its draft to twenty-two feet--rendering the ship unable to travel too far up the James River—as part of the resistance to Union General George B. McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign and the defense of the region between Norfolk and Richmond.265 This problem would place strict limits on military op- erations. The James River’s depth was fifteen feet not long after moving westward from Chesa- peake Bay through Hampton Roads. Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Mallory decided that, for the Confederate navy to provide adequate support, Virginia had to break through the Union blockade and command the river routes that the Union could use for reinforcements.266 Unfortunately for Mallory, the surprise Virginia might have wrought was reduced when bureau- cratic leaks allowed news of the vessel to reach Union hands. Harper’s Weekly revealed the crea- tion of the Rebel ironclad, complete with an artist’s rendering in a November 1861 issue.267 As a result, Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gusta- vus Fox breathed new life into the Ironclad Board that would serve as the entry point of armored warship designs.268

264 R. Thomas Campbell, Gray Thunder: Exploits of the Confederate States Navy (Shippensburg, PA: Burd Street Press, 1996), 20-26. Buchanan had been in naval service since 1815 for the U.S. Navy until the Southern States’ secession in 1861. He later became the only full admiral of the Confederate Navy. For more on Buchanan see: Craig Symonds, Confederate Admiral: The Life and Wars of Franklin Buchanan (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999). Jones had served as an officer in the U.S. Navy since 1836, and ironically, had been working on developing weapons and served as ordnance officer on USS Merrimack when it entered service in 1856. The “ap” in Jones’ name is from a Welsh naming convention meaning “son of.” For more on Jones see: “Jones, Catesby ap R.,” Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-people/j/-ones- catesby-ap-r.html (Accessed 25 January 2015) 265 Virginia, Naval History and Heritage Command. http://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship- histories/confederate_ships/virginia.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). McClellan was then overall Union Army commander. 266 ORN, Series I, v. 7 761. Lee’s command of defense preparations oversaw the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia until June 1862 when he took command of the Army of Northern Virginia from Joseph E. Johnston. 267 “The Merrimac,” Harper’s Weekly 5(123) (2 November 1861), 689, 699. 268 Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 2. Welles was a long time journalist and politician from Connecticut—see: John Niven, Gideon Welles; Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Fox had been in 138

Figure 12: Military Map of South-Eastern Virginia [1864] 269

In August 1861, the Union Navy advertised for relatively shallow draft ironclad vessel designs that could be built quickly. Of the seventeen designs received by the Ironclad Board, Swedish-born inventor John Ericsson’s model could be built fastest and with the shallowest draft.270 The resulting USS Monitor had an attractive ten-foot draft, undermined somewhat by an extremely low eighteen inch freeboard.271 Monitor, like Virginia, would have its fate sealed par- tially by its design.

U.S. naval service since 1838 though had exited officially in 1856—see: Ari Hoogenboom, Gustavus Vasa Fox of the Union Navy: A Biography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 269 “Military Map of South-Eastern Virginia [1864],” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 270 William H. Roberts, Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 14-15. 271 Monitor, Naval History & Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship- histories/danfs/m/monitor-i.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). See also William Marvel, ed., The Monitor Chronicles; One Sailor’s Account – Today’s Campaign to Recover the Civil War Wreck (New York: The Mariners’ Museum/Simon & Schuster, 2000), 14. A ship’s freeboard is the distance between the waterline and the upper deck. See: David A. Mindell, Iron Coffin: War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 41. 139

Military exigencies created pressure for results in both the case of Mallory’s push for construction of Virginia and the Welles-Fox team playing catch up with Monitor. As a result of this haste, flaws in these ironclads unknown or overlooked at inception, would be tested to the limit once put to sea for combat duty. Both ship’s crews would find out the coastal waters and inland rivers of the mid-Atlantic were at least as formidable as an enemy ship’s broadside.

Stormy Seas for a Serene Battle The Confederate States’ topography rendered it especially vulnerable to amphibious at- tack. Throughout the first summer of the war, the commanders of the various Union blockading squadrons reported on the numerous rivers, inlets, and bays that dotted the South’s coastline. These waterways provided avenues of attack into the Confederate interior, and the major South- ern ports would also be more easily targeted. The Union blockading crews’ advantages included the latest U.S. Coast Survey maps for some areas, well protected anchorages, and shielded areas for repair work, coaling stations, and more open bays and ports for maneuver. These geographic benefits for the Union applied to both the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the Confederacy.272 The South’s strategic weakness was evident during Union General George B. McClel- lan’s abortive Peninsular Campaign against Richmond in 1862. Alexander D. Bache, head of the U.S. Coast Survey, recommended using sea power, combined with army offensives, against the inadequately protected Confederate coasts.273 Union Rear Admiral Louis M. Goldsborough—in U.S. naval service since 1812 and commander of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the war--responded favorably to Bache’s recommendation by gaining permission from Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles to bring several old and frigates, USS Cumberland and USS Congress among them, into Hampton Roads in order to maintain control of the James River.274 Confederate Captain Franklin Buchanan on Virginia recognized the risk to Richmond and planned to use his ironclad to destroy the wooden sailing ships blockading the mouth of the river before the expected arrival of Monitor.275

272 ORN, Series I, v. 12, 195-199; v. 16, 628-630. 273 ORN, Series I, v. 12, 195-199. 274 ORN, Series I, v. 6, 437. For more on Goldsborough see: Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 275 Luraghi, Confederate Navy, 137. 140

Both Virginia and Monitor would endure high seas before their meeting on 9 March 1862. Buchanan originally planned to attack from late 6 March into 7 March. High winds and seas, which almost sank Monitor, as well as Virginia’s large turning radius and deep draft, pre- vented Virginia’s movement down the James River.276 At least Virginia was within striking dis- tance of the Union blockading fleet around the Chesapeake Bay. En route to Hampton Roads, Monitor came close to sinking several times. Commanded by Lieutenant John L. Worden, the ship had already suffered severe maneuvering problems in the East River during sea trials in New York.277 Worden started the ship’s journey south from New York Harbor under tow on 6 March. Monitor was particularly prone to leaks due to design flaws--visual slits in the pilothouse, unreliable air-intake vents, and gaps between the top deck and hull. Poor sailing conditions con- tinued until Monitor’s tow reached calmer waters on 8 March.278

Scuttled and Sunk Finding reliable weather data from the Civil War fields of operation is difficult; instru- ments were rudimentary, observation times inconsistent, and record keeping poor. Moreover, of the records that had existed, particularly Confederate records, untold numbers were either lost or destroyed. Fortunately, shipboard observations, combined with land-based observations from the Union Army and Smithsonian Institution, provides some usable information.279 Precipitation rec- ords from coastal observing stations in Maryland and Virginia indicate March 1862 was fairly rainy compared with March 1861. These areas also tend to show further increases in rainfall for March 1863 within climatological means.280 With significant rainfall indicative of deteriorating

276 Ibid., 139. 277 ORN, Series I, v. 6, 670. Worden had been in U.S. naval service since 1834 and would eventually be promoted to Rear Admiral after the war—see: “Worden, John L.,” Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-people/w/worden-john-l.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). 278 Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 168-69. The gaps between the raft (top deck) and hull of monitors was a result of an unreliable seal formed by brackets, rivets, and vertical braces. 279 For more on the history of weather forecasting see, for example, Charles C. Bates and John F. Fuller, America’s Weather Warriors 1814-1895 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1986), which traces the development of modern meteorology from the nineteenth century through the early 1980s, with a special emphasis on World War II. The portions on the nineteenth century briefly highlight the role of the U.S. Army Surgeon General in weather forecasting in regards to health of soldiers prior to the U.S. Civil War and Matthew F. Maury’s efforts with maritime meteorology that contributed to the success of the Hydrographical Office. For a more twentieth century focused work on the history of meteorology, see Kristine C. Harper, Weather By the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 280 “Maryland Rain-fall,” Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 60 - Meteorological Project Records, 1849- 1875, and related records from 1820, Box 15, Folder 3, p. 11. 141

weather conditions, poor handling ships like Monitor and Virginia could expect worse maneu- verability. The weather around the mid-Atlantic coast and the strategic importance of the James River and Chesapeake Bay greatly affected how the first duel between ironclad warships played out. Rough waters stalled Virginia’s attack by two days, long enough for Monitor to reach Hampton Roads and prevent Virginia from completely ransacking the Union’s blockade. The continued importance of the region to the war effort, however, kept the two vessels operating in the mid-Atlantic area –unwittingly exposing the ships to environmental dangers that would prove more fatal than combat. Retreating to Richmond in late spring 1862, Confederate forces drew in Union vessels-- Monitor with them--up the James River. Virginia, commanded by , hoped to sim- ultaneously cover rebel land forces near Richmond and seize enemy ships attempting to make a run past Norfolk. Assured by local river pilots that a shallower draft would allow Virginia to move up the James within four miles of Richmond, Tattnall reduced its draft to eighteen feet by removing equipment. Tattnall’s attempt still fell short. The pilots’ excuse for the inability of Vir- ginia to steam father up-river was that it could be done with an easterly wind, not with the west- erly wind blowing for the past two days.281 Tattnall lacked the sort of coast survey map details afforded to Union naval commanders, there- fore he had to rely on the pilots’ knowledge, regardless of its accuracy. For even as Virginia reached Sewell’s Point, the James River depths would not have much exceeded eighteen feet been still shallower farther inland. Tattnall was faced with resurgent Union vessels sailing past Norfolk, the abandonment of Confederate positions at Sewell’s Point, the abandonment of Con- federate forces on , and the inability to steam any farther up the James. Conse- quently, Virginia was trapped between Union forces and the James River. Tattnall decided to abandon ship on Craney Island and scuttled the vessel on 11 May 1862.282 .

281 ORN, Series I, v. 7, 335-337. Tattnall had been a U.S. naval officer since 1812 until his resignation during Southern Secession in 1861. 282 ORN, Series I, v. 7, 335-337. 142

Figure 13: Military Map of South-East Virginia [1864]283

After the Virginia threat had passed and the Peninsular Campaign had been abandoned, Monitor was redirected to assist in assaults on the Confederate port at Wilmington, North Caro- lina, and defenses on the Cape Fear River. Commanded by Captain John P. Bankhead, Monitor departed Beaufort, North Carolina, under tow on 29 December 1862, with light south-westerly winds. The next day, shifting winds and rising swells presaged a storm that forced water into the ship faster than its pumps could compensate.284 The crew evacuated, leaving sixteen men who drowned when they were unable to reach rescue boats from the accompanying tug.285 The ill-tempered weather encountered by Monitor and Virginia before and after Hampton Roads offers an odd frame for the battle of 9 March that occurred under calm conditions. It is clear that both ships’ crews struggled with operating their vessels when faced with anything other than ideal weather, thus reducing their offensive effectiveness significantly.

283 “Military Map of South-Eastern Virginia [1864],” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 284 ORN, Series I, v. 8, 347-349. Bankhead had served in the U.S. Navy since 1838—see: “John Payne Bankhead,” Mariner’s Museum, http://www.marinersmuseum.org/uss-monitor-center/monitor-history/ (Accessed: 25 January 2015). 285 Marvel, Monitor Chronicles, 231. 143

Figure 14: North Carolina and South Carolina [1865]286

It is equally clear that the marine environment limited the scope that each ship could operate within, and therefore reduced their threat within the Virginia and North Carolina theatres. For an- other examination of how weather and location affected ironclad operations during combat, the April 1863 operation of Union Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont against the port of Charleston is one place to turn.

Anchors Aweigh Charleston Harbor in South Carolina presented problems similar to those at Hampton Roads but with an added psychological element. The port at Charleston was a major strategic ob- jective for the Union blockade trying to sever the Confederacy’s links to the outside world. In March 1863, a month before Du Pont’s attack, a letter from Union Assistant Secretary of the

286 ORN, Series I, v. 7, 341-342. “North Carolina and South Carolina [1865],” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 144

Navy Fox to Du Pont informed him that “trade was greater between Charleston and foreign ports [than] it had ever been before since the city was in existence.”287 Fox’s insistence on taking the port, or at least destroying Forts Sumter and Moultrie for the glory of the Navy, combined the overt martial underpinnings of an operation with the national trauma that had been inflicted there with the opening of the Civil War. Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles concurred in the desire for revenge as he wrote Du Pont in late 1862 that “…there is no city so culpable, or against which there is such intense animosity…” in regards to Charleston’s role in deepening se- cession and the war.288 Strategy and revenge may have been the primary factors motivating the Union admin- istration, but Du Pont had to contend with the reality facing him on the water. In a 27 December 1862 letter to his wife, Du Pont revealed awareness of public pressure on the administration to avenge the Union upon Charleston. He additionally observed a disparity between the needs of the Charleston operation and the overestimated ability of ironclad ships he considered an “exper- iment” with the Navy’s administration.289 Having eight ironclads at his disposal, the admiral would be facing three hundred guns of Charleston’s forts, batteries, and ships with just thirty-two guns on the Union ships. Of equally pressing concern were the harbor conditions. In addition to a series of defensive obstacles placed by the rebels in the murky harbor waters, the Union ships had to contend with dangers from grounding in “shallow, devious channels, with the most rapid tides known … we have no compasses, no lead, limited vision and, if the smoke hangs, scarcely any.”290 The physical environment would thus be an actor in its own right. Du Pont performed experiments of his own with ironclads he had received at his Port Royal command in January 1863. Reading his captains’ reports, he noted that the ironclads were particularly vulnerable to submerged obstructions in shallow water. The blockages were fre- quently stacked timbers tied together with iron strips and an attached . Du Pont also took

287 Samuel Francis Du Pont, Samuel Francis Du Pont: A Selection From His Civil War Letters, ed. by John D. Hayes, 2 vols. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press/Eleutherian Mills Historical Society, 1969), v. 2, 487. Du Pont had been in U.S. naval service since 1815 and had distinguished himself in Civil War service with the capture of Port Royal, South Carolina on 7 November 1861. 288 Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles: Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, 3 vols., ed. by Howard K. Beale (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1960), v. 1, 264. 289 Du Pont, v. 2, 324. 290 Ibid., 533-534. A lead, in nautical terms, refers to the weighted object at the end of a rope used for water depth soundings. 145

note of the ironclads’ poor seaworthiness, remarking that “the weather must be narrowly watched.”291 In the week leading up to the attack, Du Pont was alerted to the importance of the tidal situation in Charleston. The tidal planning was partially a lesson learned from Josiah Tattnall— CSS Virginia’s final captain--who was poorly informed by pilots about water depth when the Virginia was trapped on the James River. Local harbor pilots who deserted the Confederacy in- formed Du Pont that his fleet of ironclads could not cross Charleston bar until the highest tide of 3 April 1863, or the next highest tide two days later. After that, the attack would have to be de- layed two more weeks, which would give the Confederate forces too much time to build up their defenses.292 The unease over increased defenses was not an idle one. Torpedoes (mines) with over a ton of powder had been sunk, by Confederate engineers, in the main channel a mile from Fort Sumter.293 Only hindsight can really show if a commander was prepared enough for an en- suing battle. It is interesting to think back to Keeler and the rest of the crew of Monitor on such a highly experimental ship entering Hampton Roads just a year earlier to take on a single opposing ship compared to DuPont and a flotilla of ironclads that included several ships based on Monitor trying to take on a harbor full of fortified positions. But as is the case with any battle, individual circumstances vary greatly.

Tempestuous Tides In most battles, the actual attack diverges from the initial plan. Du Pont’s concept of bat- tle, as discussed among his captains on 4 April, involved the fleet sailing up the ship channel past Morris Island without returning fire and attacking Fort Sumter when within firing range. The Un- ion fleet would then move northwest of Sumter at a range of 800 yards and then fire at the fort’s main entrance. After destroying Sumter, they would attack Morris Island.294 Du Pont’s fleet could not attack on 4 April because a “continuous gale” caused waves to break too high for the towed ironclads to approach the bar crossing. High winds, which sent waves crashing over most ships’ decks on 5 April, kept the fleet pinned down. The weather

291 Du Pont, v. 2, 358, 387-88. The experiments were limited operations by USS Montauk under Commander John L. Worden’s command against Fort McAllister, Georgia. Civil War “torpedoes” were actually mines. 292 Ibid., 523-525. 293 United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 70 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880-1901), Series I, v. 14, 950-52. 294 ORN, Series I, v. 14, 8-9. 146

abated enough on the 6th for the ships to cross the bar until poor visibility prompted the U.S. Coast Survey to warn against a run on the forts. Additionally, the harbor pilots recommended at- tacking during ebb tide because the objects on shore, the best navigational aids available in their location, were more visible with lower water. Low tide would, therefore, simultaneously allow ships’ personnel to use shore-objects as reference points for position and also improve ship han- dling.295 At noon on 7 April 1863, local pilots declared the tides acceptable and Du Pont started the attack. Obstructions strewn along a line between Forts Moultrie and Sumter blocked the lead ship and confused the battle orders. The flagship New Ironsides was forced to anchor several times to avoid running aground or into other ironclads. The Union fleet managed to reach firing range on Fort Sumter while the fleet was under fire themselves from batteries in a half dozen di- rections. Unable to get New Ironsides within 1,000 yards of Sumter, Du Pont abandoned the op- eration at 4:30 PM.296 The after-action reports reveal the detrimental harbor conditions. Captain John L. Worden on Montauk remarked how a “flood tide” had forced the ships too close to the obstructions, compelling the fleet to turn into the waves with subsequent poor steering ability. Severe maneuvering difficulties hampered what fire the ships could bring to bear while under fire.297 The effects of the tides on handling the ironclads had caused concerns before the attack. Crews maneuvering the ships under combat conditions in the choppy waters between the forts endured magnified ship-handing problems. For months, Du Pont had harbored serious reserva- tions about the rate and volume of fire the ironclads could deliver to an enemy stronghold. The admiral’s concerns became a stark reality as the weather delayed his attack and the difficulties of operating the ships in the harbor’s shifting tides diminished their offensive capabilities.298 Du Pont’s failure at Charleston was blamed by the naval administration on his lack of enthusiasm for the operation. Still, the admiral’s inexperience with the vessels in an unfavorable environment should not be discounted.

295 Du Pont, v. 2, 544-46, 550-551, 551 n.2. 296 Du Pont, v. 3, 33. 297 ORN, Series I, v. 14, 13-14. 298 Du Pont, v. 3, 35. 147

Figure 15: Charleston Harbor Map [1863]299

299 “Charleston Harbor Map [1863],” “General Map of Charleston Harbor Rebel Defences and Obstructions [1865].” Images from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 148

Admiral Du Pont was relieved of command of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron on 3 June 1863 while still regretting the absence of a joint Army-Navy force with which to attack Charleston. Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren, formerly in charge of the Navy’s ordnance bureau, replaced Du Pont and led a joint-force attack of the harbor starting in July 1863 that lasted through early 1865.300 Du Pont’s fiasco at Charleston, though begun by administrative politics couched in strate- gic goals, was finally ended when the Union fleet quickly became overwhelmed by the harsh conditions of Charleston Harbor. Unlike the commanders entering the battle at Hampton Roads, Du Pont had his own observations to guide him as to the poor performance of ironclads in rough water and against land-based fortifications. Yet Du Pont’s observations are discounted by the Union naval administration dwelling on the few tactical advantages the new warships had dis- played thus far. Du Pont cannot be held blameless for following orders when he could have in- sisted on a joint attack force. The resulting disconnect between policy, strategy, and the perfor- mance limits of a new weapon led to failure. Yet, between Charleston and the end of the war significant joint-force operations occurred elsewhere. Joint Army-Navy operations demonstrated that time and tides were at least as important as armor and artillery during operations on the lower Mississippi River and against the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

The Mighty Mississippi The Union’s in April 1862 was accomplished with significant differences in resources, planning, and environment when compared to the circumstances of Du Pont’s failed raid on Charleston. New Orleans was an essential target within General Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan;” Union control of the city and the Mississippi River would sever the Confederacy from its western-most territory. Sitting approximately 85 miles upriver of the mouth of the Mississippi, the city served as a gateway to the South’s main passage for troop and supply transports. Because it exported much of the South’s cotton crop, New Orleans was also a key to the Confederacy’s political-economic survival. The “energetic, ‘hands-on’” Union Admi-

300 Dahlgren had been in U.S. naval service since 1826. See “Dahlgren, John A.” Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/bios/dahlgren-john-a.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). 149

ral David G. Farragut brought seventeen (non-ironclad) ships bearing 192 guns and General Ben- jamin F. Butler’s 13,000 man force to occupy the city.301 Farragut, a fifty-one year veteran of the Navy, combined his sternness and experience into his command of the Western Gulf Blockading Squadron.302 The Confederacy misgauged the Union threat and planned almost exclusively for a north- ern land-based attack on New Orleans. The Rebel’s river flotilla in the area, under overall com- mand of Commander George Hollins, amounted to a collection of converted tugs, poorly com- manded gunboats, and several ironclad rams based on Virginia’s design that were still under con- struction. The only operational surface threat to Farragut was the former icebreaker and tugboat Enoch Train, which had been converted to the ironclad ram, CSS Manassas—besting the City- class ironclads to completion by a few months. Manassas sank USS Richmond near Head of Passes in the Mississippi River delta on 12 October 1861. Richmond was salvaged by the Union navy, but the delays were mounting for Farragut’s command when he took control in February 1862. The reduced Union presence also meant that the mouth of the river had not been dredged since the war’s beginning, thus allowing silt to build up on the sand bars and slowing down the passing of the remainder of Farragut’s fleet until April 1862.303 The disorganized Confederate group was complemented by an equally disorganized com- mand of land-based defenses along the Mississippi River at Plaquemine Bend under General Mansfield Lovell and General Johnson K. Duncan. Fort St. Philip and Fort Jackson overlooked either side of the southern channel—north and south respectively--of the river between the mouth and the city. However, Lovell had command of overall defense of New Orleans while Duncan commanded the forts. In addition to the overlapping defensive commands, the forts had suffered flooding from high water in the Mississippi River. Fort Jackson was a few hundred yards from the levee on the Mississippi’s west bank with Fort St. Philip on the east bank of the river another half mile upstream.

301 Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 190-191. Farragut had been in the U.S. Navy since 1810. See “Farragut, David Glasgow,” Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/bios/farragut- davidg.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). 302 ORN, Series I, v. 18, 7. 303 Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 193; and Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 130-131. Eads, as explained in Chapter 4, launched his City-class ships in January 1862. 150

Figure 16: Fort Jackson, Louisiana [1862]

Confederate engineers worked constantly to stop the flooding and bolster the stones, bricks, and mortar of the two forts. But the deteriorating environmental conditions worsened the poor perfor- mance of inexperienced and inconsistently led gunners.304 Confederate defensive blunders offset difficulties encountered by Farragut’s fleet after operations proceeded on the lower Mississippi on 16 April 1862. The Union ships had to repeat- edly contend with hazardous sandbars and river obstructions while repeated firing overwhelmed the Confederate forts on 18 April in accordance with Commander David D. Porter’s plan to use ship-based mortars to reduce the masonry forts to rubble. Farragut had his ships fire on the two forts for five days until he chanced evading their guns at night on 24 April 1862—maneuvering past heavy chains, sunken ships, fire rafts, and gun fire—not to mention that Farragut potentially had several Confederate ironclads to contend with as well. Only CSS Manassas was actually

304 Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 193; and Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 132-133. “Fort Jackson, Louisiana [1862],” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 151

ready to get underway for the Confederacy. Of the other potential Confederate naval threats, CSS Louisiana had been equipped with armor and guns but no ability to steer, and CSS Mississippi had only its framework completed.305 The Confederate naval commanders, with so little to work with, improvised defenses around causing what damage they could to Union forces without leav- ing them too much in the way of valuable supplies to reuse against the South. The desperate last defenses fell to Commander John K. Mitchell who had taken over lo- cal command of Manassas and Louisiana as Hollins had moved upriver for another engagement, but Mitchell still only had control over a few other small gunboats from the Louisiana navy or the Confederate Army—none of which were a match for Farragut’s warships. Under immediate command of Lieutenant Alexander F. Warley, Manassas attempted and failed to ram USS Pen- sacola and instead struck a slight blow to USS Mississippi, inflicting only moderate damage. Warley used what little momentum was left in Manassas to ram the Union ship Brooklyn to little effect due to chains and sandbags around Brooklyn’s hull and the feeble engine power left in Ma- nassas. Warley ordered the half-wrecked Manassas run aground and set it on fire after abandon- ing ship. Louisiana was also a threat, even though un-maneuverable, its guns acted like towable battery—though the tactic limited the number the ship could bring to bear from sixteen down to six—once again far too little to stop more than a dozen Union warships that had already passed upriver. Rebel soldiers finally surrendered on 28 April, and General Butler occupied the city by 1 May. Both Louisiana and Mississippi were scuttled by the Confederates at the end of the battle. The most affluent city in the Confederacy had been defeated by the Union in a mere two weeks. The ease of New Orleans’ capture had much to do with Rebel incompetence, but the strategic significance of the Union navy seizing the opportunity was no less profound. The whole of the lower Mississippi River was effectively open to the Union fleet except for one formidable stronghold, Vicksburg, 230 miles northwest of New Orleans along the Mississippi River near the junction with the Yazoo River.306:

305 Gary D. Joiner, Mr. Lincoln’s Brown Water Navy: The Mississippi Squadron (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007), 79-81; and Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 134-135 306 Joiner, Mr. Lincoln’s Brown Water Navy, 79-81; and Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 134-135. 152

Figure 17: Millikens Bend, LA & Jackson, MS [1863]307

The fight for the rest of the river would bring the Eads City-class ironclads back into the strategic picture in a significant manner, but the river’s geography would also become a factor.

Batteries on a Bluff Under pressure from Gideon Welles to push his forces to link with a fleet of City-class ironclads based in Memphis under the command of Flag Officer Captain Charles H. Davis, Far- ragut ordered ships upriver to gain the surrender of cities and posts along the banks. Farragut personally arrived in Baton Rouge on 10 May 1862. Davis had already arrived in Memphis on 9

307 “Millikens Bend, LA & Jackson, MS [1863],” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 153

May, and on 10 May he had dispatched the City-class ironclad Cincinnati to reconnoiter the de- fensive situation of the Confederate fleet and fortifications around Fort Pillow. Cincinnati was ambushed by six Confederate rams, and three of them—CSS General Bragg, CSS , CSS Sumter--collided with it well before any Union ships could render assistance. Cincinatti’s captain, Roger Stembel, had the ship steer to the river bank where it sank into the mud below. Another City-class ironclad, USS Mound City, was rammed by CSS Van Dorn, forcing a second Union ironclad to run aground to prevent a total loss. Both Union vessels were salvaged and re- paired, but the humiliating defeat prompted Gideon Welles to reinforce Davis’s fleet with a num- ber of army-controlled unarmed rams; all were the creation of bridge building entrepreneur Charles W. Ellet, Jr. 308 Ellet’s opportunity to showcase his rams would be brief. Generals Pope, Grant, and Buell had rallied their armies in preparation for an attack on Confederate forces under command of General Beauregard at Corinth, Mississippi, forcing the rebels to retreat from the area including Fort Pillow on 4 June 1862. Fort Pillow’s abandonment and subsequent occupation by Union gunboats meant Memphis was vulnerable to a Union assault as well, leading to a battle on 5-6 June 1862. Several Confederate rams had steamed into the river after Fort Pillow’s evacuation, and with their intentions unclear, Union flag officer Davis had not yet decided to send his flotilla downriver to meet them. The rebel ships opened fire, and Ellet hastily ordered the unarmed rams under his direct control downriver without confirming if Davis’s ships were following. Ellet, aboard Queen of the West and his brother aboard Monarch, surprised everyone else with the charge and was in the middle of the Confederate squadron as the Union squadron was lagging behind. Queen of the West struck the Confederate ram Lovell in the side while the rebel ship General Beauregard struck Queen of the West. Monarch rammed CSS General Price which ran aground and partially hit Queen of the West again. Monarch rammed General Beauregard just before Davis’s ships arrived on the scene and began shelling the rebel ships. When the battle was over, two rebel rams had been sunk and four had been captured—but Charles Ellet had been mortally wounded. The Union victory forced Memphis’s residents to evacuate and scuttle yet an- other uncompleted ironclad—Tennessee. As of mid-1862, the biggest threats remaining to Union

308 ORN, Series I, v. 23, 196; Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 136-137; and Joiner, Mr. Lincoln’s Brown Water Navy, 82. Davis, serving in the U.S. navy since 1823, was in Memphis with an ironclad ram fleet on account of replacing the wounded Andrew H. Foote in mid-April 1862. Ellet was given an army commission and rank of colonel by Union Secretary of War , but the Ellet ram flotilla and Davis command did not share signal codes. 154

forces along the Mississippi River were Confederate fortifications at Vicksburg, Mississippi and the Confederate ironclad Arkansas.309 The Confederate Navy Department ordered Lieutenant Isaac N. Brown to take command of Arkansas, still half-finished but able to sail, moored south of Memphis up the Yazoo River. Brown used over two hundred soldiers, working between June and July 1862, to complete the armor, guns, and equipment of the ironclad before the river levels dropped too far to allow float- ing of the ship. Preparing Arkansas included two 8-inch Columbiads in the bow, two rifled 32- pound guns in the stern, and three rifled guns on each broadside—two of which were 6.4 inch Brooke rifles. But Arkansas’s armor was another matter, as it was made up of poorly performing converted railroad rails. The Confederate commander at Vicksburg, Major General Earl Van Dorn, worried about the continuing Union advances along the Mississippi River, urged Brown to get Arkansas back down the Yazoo River and Mississippi to bolster Vicksburg’s protection. Brown complied. 310 Farragut’s ships, meanwhile, had been moving up the Mississippi to meet Davis’s flotilla near Vicksburg- which was made even easier after the city of Natchez, Mississippi fell to Com- mander J. S. Palmer without a fight on 18 May.311 But river conditions were hampering the Un- ion maneuvers. Farragut’s warships were meant for the open sea, not river action. Compounding the maneuvering problems for the Union was the topography of the river’s banks. Heavily forti- fied Vicksburg sat on bluffs 290 feet above the water. As Commander David D. Porter pointed out, the bluffs put the guns of the city out of the Union Navy’s reach, and the river’s hairpin turns made ships slow moving targets. Commander Samuel P. Lee attempted to elicit the Rebels’ surrender only to receive this sarcastic reply from Vicksburg Colonel James L. Autrey: “I have to state that Mississippians don’t know, and refuse to learn, how to surrender to an enemy. If Com- modore Farragut or Brigadier-General Butler can teach them, let them come and try.”312 Lee re- ceived similar responses from the city’s mayor and defense force commander. Lee went on to

309 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 137-138. 310 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 138-139. The metal in the rails were not of the proper thickness or metal quality of the plates that should have been used. 311 ORN, Series I, v. 18, 491. 312 ORN, Series I, v. 18, 492. Samuel Phillips Lee began his U.S. naval service in 1825. He was promoted to acting- Rear Admiral for command purposes during the war, reverting to Captain afterwards. He eventually was promoted to Rear-Admiral in 1870. He was also third-cousin to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. See: “Lee, Samuel Phillips,” Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us- people/l/lee-samuel-phillips.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). 155

warn the residents of Vicksburg to evacuate non-combatants because he could not guarantee the safety of the city when the Union commenced bombardment.313 The Union threat turned out to be moot. There was no way for the Union guns to elevate their fire over the bluffs. Farragut attempted to bombard Vicksburg with additional ships on 26 June, but he failed. He then proposed to steam quickly past Vicksburg’s guns toward his rendez- vous in Memphis. For Farragut’s run to work better, he had the army attempt to cut a canal through the De Soto peninsula on the Louisiana side of the river to bypass Vicksburg’s river-fac- ing guns. The canal was begun by employing 3,000 Union troops under Brigadier General Thomas Williams along with approximately 1,000 slaves from surrounding plantations.314 Two problems arose that Farragut had been well aware of. The river level was still dropping—a nor- mal trend for summertime in the area--which simultaneously made Farragut’s fleet more difficult to steer and loosed disease-bearing mosquitoes upon the soldiers and captured slaves digging the trench. The canal was never completed.315 Farragut’s run by the Vicksburg batteries on 28 June 1862 was a failure. The Union fleet, needing more ironclads and army assistance, was scattered along the river.316 The fleet was taking heavy fire from Rebel batteries upon the bluff that were too high to attack. Farragut informed Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles that Vicksburg could not be taken by the navy alone. A joint force was the only solution. The Union fleet was chased out of the area by the Confederate ironclad ram Arkansas in July. On 15 July 1862, a fully operational Arkansas sent three of Davis’s union ships running: the City-class ironclad Carondelet, the timberclad Tyler, and the Ellet ram Queen of the West. Arkansas managed to disable Carondelet’s steering, sending the ironclad drifting ashore, while the rebel ram pursued the other two ships. Arkansas chased the two fleeing Union ships right through the anchorage of the Farragut-Davis fleets, exchanging fire the entire time, until Arkan- sas arrived safely within Vicksburg’s defenses. Davis had his mortar boats attempt to destroy Ar- kansas from afar for days with no success. On 22 July, Davis dispatched three ships to ram Ar- kansas, but most of the attempts missed and only Queen of the West managed to make contact, and even then insufficiently so. With the Mississippi’s water level continuing to drop, Farragut had to withdraw to New Orleans on 5 August while Davis sailed his gunboats upriver to Helena,

313 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 139; and ORN, Series I, v. 18, 493 314 ORN, Series I, v. 18, 582. 315 Joiner, Mr. Lincoln’s Brown Water Navy, 83-84. 316 ORN, Series I, v. 18, 522, 590. 156

Arkansas. But also on 5 August, Arkansas was ordered by Van Dorn downriver to take part in Major General John C. Breckinridge’s attack on Baton Rouge. Preparing to meet the Union iron- clad gunboat Essex on the way, Arkansas suffered engine failure and ran aground upstream from Baton Rouge. Arkansas, like all three of its sister ships, was scuttled.317 Gunboats, even ironclad, could not handle operations on the river alone. A more robust, joint operation would be neces- sary to accomplish victory.

Another River Run by the Batteries The Union Navy’s solo-role in the was temporarily suspended when the Lincoln administration reconsidered its strategy to take on the Confederacy’s fortifications on the Mississippi River. Poor operational coordination between army and navy units and disjointed command even between coastal and river naval commands resulted in ineffective piecemeal at- tacks. The split control of Union warships on the Mississippi was remedied by the arrival of newly promoted Acting Rear Admiral David D. Porter, who had temporarily been reinforcing eastern naval forces in Hampton Roads. Porter, who was promoted suddenly from commander to admiral in a single stroke, took command of the Mississippi Squadron in Cairo, Illinois on 15 October 1862. Porter assumed direct control of all Union ships on the river, most notably the for- merly army-controlled Ellet rams, with approval of the Lincoln administration on 7 November 1862. Porter would team up with Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman to tackle the Confederate fortifications at Vicksburg.318 The plans for a renewed joint-force attack to overcome Vicksburg’s defenses originated in December 1862. Union General William T. Sherman’s letter to Porter on 8 December advised him of the strategy: Grant’s force would act as a decoy to Vicksburg’s north and east, moving southward from Tallahatchie, Mississippi towards Vicksburg’s main land-based defenses, while Porter’s fleet of ten ironclads and three transports carried Sherman’s 32,000-man army down the

317 Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 139-141; and Joiner, Mr. Lincoln’s Brown Water Navy, 84-87. 318 ORN, Series I, v. 24, 522-524; Joiner, Mr. Lincoln’s Brown Water Navy, 89; Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 141; and Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 212-213. Symonds attributes Porter’s rapid rise in rank to his friendship with Union Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox. Porter had been in U.S. naval service since 1829. He would be promoted to Rear-Admiral during the Civil War and Vice-Admiral in 1866. See: Porter, Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/danfs/p/porter-i.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). 157

river from Memphis to launch a surprise amphibious attack that would march from Helena, Ar- kansas.319 This attack with diversion was the only way, it seemed, to overcome the bluffs and meandering river that shielded the Confederate city. Grant’s first attempt at the joint force strategy failed. Porter had started the naval portion of the plan, running into delays immediately, as his ironclads proved too cumbersome and large to pass the torpedoes (mines) in the river. The ironclad USS Cairo was sunk by two mines in the Yazoo tributary on 12 December 1862. Porter was undeterred by the time taken to remove the mines. He used crewmen to cut the wires holding the explosives in place. The plan encountered a problem when Grant’s forces came under attack on 20 December and he was forced to withdraw without getting word to Sherman. Porter’s fleet successfully cleared the river obstructions and carried Sherman’s army to a position six miles north of Vicksburg by 26 December, and pro- vided cover fire while Sherman launched attacks 27-29 December. Sherman’s attack was doomed without Grant’s force distracting the main rebel defenders, and Union forces retreated as 1863 began. The joint attack failed, at least teaching Grant that the river was a better route to Vicksburg than over land.320 Sporadic fighting persisted through March 1863 with Grant and Porter still looking for a way to attack Vicksburg without facing the guns on its heights. Grant’s first step was to destroy a flood-prevention levee on the Yazoo on 2 February, which caused the Yazoo River to rise and ease passage of a flotilla departing Helena, Arkansas under the command of Lieutenant Com- mander Watson Smith. The Union ironclad-led force was to attempt passage from Helena to Haynes’s Bluff and used City-class ironclads Chillicothe and Baron de Kalb along with the flag- ship gunboat Rattler, half a dozen other gunboats, and auxiliary transports with 6,000 troops un- der command of Brigadier General Leonard F. Ross. Persistent poor handling in the river made the ironclads easy targets for Confederate defenses on the isolated river bends. Admiral was enjoying slightly more success leaving Port Hudson, Louisiana. From 14-27 March, Porter, with Sherman’s troops, crept along Steele’s Bayou to where the Yazoo joined the Mississippi River northeast of Vicksburg.321

319 ORN, Series I, v. 23, 539-540. 320 ORN, Series I, v. 23, 544; Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 142-143; and Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 216-219. Cairo would be raised in the 1960s. 321 Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 227-229 158

The region’s topography hampered Porter; flooding frequently obscured obstacles on the flood plain and overhanging trees continually plagued the heavy naval vessels, slowing their ad- vance to four miles per day instead of the expected ten miles per day:

Figure 18: Map of General Sherman's marches [1863-1865]322

Porter describes the passage in a letter to Gideon Welles on 26 March 1863: We started up Steeles Bayou, which at low stages of water is nothing but a ditch, following it for about 80 miles. This part of the route was perfectly practicable; the creek, though very nar-row, having ~ fathoms of water in it. Black Bayou seemed to oppose our further progress, but on a closer examination we found that by removing the trees we could heave

322 Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 227-229. “Map of General Sherman's marches [1863-1865],” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 159

the vessels around the bends, which were very short and left us not a foot to spare ... On the 14th … the expedition went along finely until it reached Black Bayou, a place about 4 miles long leading into Deer Creek. Here the crews of the vessels had to go to work to clear the way, pulling up trees by the roots or pushing them over with the ironclads, and cutting away the branches above. It was terrible work, but in twenty-four hours we succeeded in getting through these 4 miles and found our-selves in Deer Creek, where we were told there would be no more difficulties General Sherman had arrived up with a small portion of his com-mand, and as he had only 12 miles to march to Rolling Fork (where we would meet with no further diffi- culties), while I had to go 32 miles by water, I determined to push on. I found the channel much narrower than I expected, filled with small willows, through which we could scarce make our way, and the branches much overhanging. Still we made at first about a mile an hour, being assured by the pilot that we would find it better as we advanced it certainly could not get worse…. The labor of clearing out these obstructions was very great, but there is nothing that cannot be overcome by perseverance. The character of the American sailors for endur- ance was particularly manifested on this occasion, as they worked night and day, without eating or sleeping, until the labor was accomplished. … After working all night and clear- ing out the obstructions, which were terrible, we succeeded in getting within 800 yards of the end of this troublesome creek.323

Grant, Sherman, and Porter met again after these ineffective expeditions. By late March, the trio determined their best plan would be a variation Grant’s original idea. Grant modified the plan to avoid a direct attack on Vicksburg’s north side and move his force down the west bank of the Mississippi River to New Carthage on the Louisiana side of the River—approximately twenty miles southwest of Vicksburg--while Porter ran his ships southward past Vicksburg and then ferried Grant’s army across the river to Grand Gulf, Mississippi, which was approximately thirty miles south of Vicksburg on the eastern bank of the river. The difficult, flooded terrain prompted Grant to leave first on 29 March. Porter got underway from Milliken’s Bend—approxi- mately twenty miles northwest of Vicksburg along the river--with a half dozen ironclads on 16 April at 7 p.m. after ordering his vessels to divert their steam exhaust, turn off deck lights, and reinforce stern sections to be taken to muffle the ships’ sounds, decrease their visibility to Rebel defenses, and protect vital machinery respectively.324 The Union fleet was discovered during the nighttime run past Vicksburg, but succeeded in using the cover of darkness and heavy return fire to slip the ships one-by-one past the batteries with no fatalities and only twelve wounded. On 29 April, Porter’s fleet conducted the ferrying

323 ORN, Series I, v. 24, 474-477 324 ORN, Series I, v. 24, 552-555; and Symonds, The Civil War at Sea, 142-143. “Millikens Bend, LA & Jackson, MS [1863],” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 160

operation to Grand Gulf while simultaneously shelling Rebel defenses for six hours, firing over 1,000 rounds and suffering modest casualties. The ferrying operation was a success, and subse- quent transports continued through 1 May, allowing both the Navy and Army to take fortifica- tions on the Red River—a river branching from Texas eastward into the Mississippi River in Louisiana around the southwestern portion of Mississippi’s state border--and Port Gibson--ap- proximately five miles east of Grand Gulf. When Grant settled into the at the end of May, Porter’s squadron continued to follow up attacks with logistical support and cover fire until Vicksburg’s surrender on 4 July 1863.325 The naval operations at New Orleans, throughout the lower Mississippi, and those di- rected at Vicksburg demonstrated how the river environment both helped and hindered Union and Confederate forces. Farragut took advantage of Union resources to outmaneuver flooded forts near New Orleans, while Rebel defenders at Vicksburg watched Union ironclads make themselves hapless targets in the tight turns of the meandering Mississippi. Grant and Porter learned how to use the river as a highway and not a barrier--contributing to a timely Union vic- tory. The Vicksburg campaign demonstrated the complex role environment, technology, and manpower play in theatre-wide engagements. For a more intimate example, the experience of the CSS Albemarle on the Roanoke River in North Carolina is worth inspection.

Ransacking the Roanoke By mid-1863, Confederate ports were in crisis. Norfolk and Charleston were effectively blockaded or under heavy attack, and New Orleans was under Union control along with most of the Mississippi River. Wilmington, North Carolina continued to resist the Union thanks to heavy concentrations of fortifications and mines at the port. Several iron-clad rams were also completed and being laid down on site. Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory remained pre- occupied with the coastal river access points. Cities on the Neuse, Tar, and Roanoke rivers had all been taken with Union ventures upriver. Mallory, therefore, ordered three new ironclads con- structed, one for each river. Gilbert Elliott’s CSS Albemarle would be the ironclad ram to defend the Roanoke.326

325 Tucker, Blue & Gray Navies, 230-235. 326 Luraghi, Confederate Navy, 275. 161

Constructing Albemarle was a frustrating affair owing to deficiencies in materials and en- vironmental-based complications. The agrarian-focused Confederacy’s inadequate iron produc- tion compelled the conversion of unused rail tracks to iron plating to make up for the shortfall. Albemarle’s overseer, James W. Cooke, negotiated with the Rebel North Carolina government to send their stockpiles of railroad iron to the Tredegar Iron Works in Rich- mond, Virginia, for conversion. Albemarle’s construction site was also problematic. Cooke had chosen a spot at Edward’s Ferry, North Carolina, while it had no shipyard, the land was just high enough above the river to avoid freshets near the coast. The ship was then built from scratch, as local blacksmiths and other workers threw together three sawmills needed to provide the lumber for the ship’s substructure. When Albemarle was ready to launch on 3 October 1863, an unex- pectedly high tide enabled its crew to push and drag the hull into the river.327 Cooke took com- mand of the ironclad in January 1864, overseeing its fitting out and operation.328 Albemarle was finally ready for action and commissioned on 17 April 1864. The finished ship was approximately 158 feet long, 35 feet wide, and had a nine-foot draft. The Roanoke River’s topography—low water level, narrow portions near Halifax, North Carolina, and possible hidden shoals--forced Cooke to improvise a new steering method for the cumbersome hull. The ship tended to drift stern-first downstream because of the twists and turns in the river current, so Cooke had a series of chains attached to the bow that could be manually tugged to steer it in the desired direction.329 Albemarle’s first duty was to clear the Roanoke of Union ships under command of Com- mander Charles W. Flusser so Confederate forces under command of Brigadier General Robert F. Hoke could dislodge Union forces under the command of Brigadier General Henry W. Wes- sells from the city of Plymouth, North Carolina:

327 Ibid., 277-78. A “freshet” is the overflow of a small stream from temporary heavy rainfall or snow melt. Cooke had been U.S. naval service since 1828, resigning in 1861 with the secession of North Carolina. See “Cooke, James Wallace,” Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us- people/c/cooke-james-wallace.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). 328 ORN., Series I, v. 9, 799-800. 329 Robert G. Elliott, Ironclad of the Roanoke: Gilbert Elliott’s Albemarle (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Publishing Co., Inc., 1994), 164, 167. 162

Figure 19: North Carolina [1865]

The river near Plymouth was only two hundred yards wide, so the Union paddle-wheel steamers Miami and Southfield under command of Cmdr. Flusser attempted to trap Albemarle between them with lashed-together chains and spars. Unfortunately for Flusser, the 376-ton Rebel iron- clad was at an angle when approaching the Union trap and grazed Miami’s port side before strik- ing Southfield’s starboard bow with a ram. Southfield sank immediately, dragging Albemarle down with its ram still trapped inside. Southfield hit the river bottom and rolled over enough for Albemarle to break free. Meanwhile, Miami poured broadsides into the trapped Albemarle only to have the shots bounce off the iron hull and send some exploding back; one of them killed Flusser.330

330 ORN, Series I, v. 9, 657. Spars, in nautical terms, are poles used for various tasks often as masts or booms. Flusser had been in U.S. naval service since 1847. See “Navy Officers: 1798-1900 (F),” Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/organization-and-administration/historical- 163

With Southfield sunk and Miami retreating, Albemarle ruled the Roanoke River for the remainder of the summer. On 5 May 1864, Albemarle had been on escort duty in Albemarle Sound when it was attacked near Sandy Point—approximately ten miles ENE of Plymouth along the Sound. Albemarle had been spotted by a Union naval squadron under command of Captain Melancton Smith, leaving the Rebel ironclad outnumbered seven-to-one and under heavy fire most of the way back to the mouth of the Roanoke River--accompanied by the steamer CSS Bombshell and troop transport CSS Cotton Plant. The Union fleet under Captain Smith at- tempted to subdue Albemarle with three steamers, though the former was handily defeated ex- cept for managing to capture the softer target Bombshell. Albemarle had been damaged when be- ing rammed by USS Sassacus and taking shots to its smoke stack. One iron plate that had torn loose was dragging from Albemarle’s bow into the water, making the ship difficult to steer as it returned to Plymouth.331 None of these Union attacks were crippling enough to put Albemarle completely out of commission. And as long as Albemarle remained a capable warship, the Union fleet could not operate freely along the Roanoke. Despite its wounds, Albemarle remained the dominant power on the Roanoke River until October 1864. As in earlier situations, the river’s features would prove the vessel’s undoing. With the rest of the Union fleet unable to proceed in the river as long as Albemarle was present, a plan to destroy the frustrating ironclad was hatched by Lieutenant Commander William B. Cush- ing. Borrowing an idea from the Confederacy’s own frequent use of torpedo-tipped rams, Cush- ing arranged for a pair of steam barges to be fitted with spars tipped with explosives. The South’s paucity of manpower forced them to leave Albemarle sparsely guarded while it was docked at night near Plymouth. The best defense for the Rebel ship consisted of logs floating in the water nearby. Cushing knew this, and he surmised that the river water would soak and slime the logs, which would make them slippery enough for his barges to glide over (one-way) and close with Albemarle under the cover of darkness.332

leadership/navy-and-marine-corps-officers-1775-1900/navy-officers-1798-1900-f.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). “North Carolina [1865],” Image from NOAA's Office of Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection http://historicalcharts.noaa.gov (Accessed 17 March 2015). 331 Elliott, Ironclad of the Roanoke, 194-210. Smith had been in U.S. naval service since 1826, eventually being promoted to Rear-Admiral after the war—in 1870. See: “Navy Officers: 1798-1900 (S),” Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/organization-and-administration/historical- leadership/navy-and-marine-corps-officers-1775-1900/navy-officers-1798-1900-s.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). 332 Luraghi, Confederate Navy, 330. Cushing had been in and out of naval service since 1857, achieving the rank of Commander in 1872. See: “Cushing, William Barker,” Naval History and Heritage Command, 164

On 27 October 1864, Cushing enacted this plan on a rainy, foggy night. His approaching barge was spotted and fired upon, but the lights the Confederates used to shine on Cushing in- stead gave the Union force a clear view of their target. Union personnel jumped into the water after the barge passed over the logs as planned and detonated spar torpedoes within fifteen-to- thirty feet of Albemarle’s hull. With a hole torn in the Confederate ironclad’s hull, it sank imme- diately in eight feet of water as the Union force swam to safety.333 Thus ended the most signifi- cant Rebel threat on the Roanoke River, after which Union forces retook Plymouth. Albemarle is an excellent case study for understanding the environmental effects on a weapon system from creation to destruction. Cooke’s decision on where to build the ship de- pended on the disposition of the Roanoke River, the Confederacy’s defense of inland and coastal waterways of North Carolina near Wilmington and Plymouth was managed by Albemarle’s abil- ity to deter Union naval squadrons, and Cushing’s knowledge of river obstructions helped him devise a Union countermeasure to the ironclad.

Conclusion The naval operations at Hampton Roads and Charleston Harbor, and on the Mississippi and Roanoke Rivers are instances where the physical environment played a crucial role in a mili- tary encounter. Even slightly poor weather off the mid-Atlantic coast delayed Virginia’s attack on the Union blockade long enough for Monitor to come to the Union fleet’s rescue. Personnel and administration misunderstanding about river conditions later rendered Virginia unusable, and its destruction permitted Monitor to be dispatched to other ports. Engineering snafus then spelled Monitor’s end, thanks to a single storm off the North Carolina coast. Monitor and Virginia were unable to sink one another when brought together partly as a result of weather delays. Instead, the two ships were separately doomed by natural elements. In Charleston, an admiral wary of an ironclad’s ability to perform in foul weather was proved amply correct when compelled to attack heavily defended fortifications in rough harbor waters. Though the vessels in Charleston were damaged or sunk by gunfire, the ships’ poor han-

http://www.history.navy.mil/our-collections/photography/us-people/c/cushing-william-barker.html (Accessed 25 January 2015). Spars, in nautical terms, is a pole usually made of wood or metal. 333 ORN., Series I, v. 10, 611-612. Spar torpedoes were mines fitted on the ends of poles on the bow of barges in this case. 165

dling amid changing tides made them more susceptible to attack than able to deliver fire them- selves. Nature had at least as important a role in aborting Du Pont’s attack as did apathy among Navy leaders. The strategic importance of New Orleans and the Mississippi River compelled Union forces to combat the river itself as well as Confederate defenses. The river’s floods weakened Confederate fortifications on the lower river, but the topography upstream at Vicksburg made that city virtually impregnable. Even when the Union leaders developed the joint Army-Navy as- sault, the flood plains of the Mississippi doomed multiple expeditions to fail until Grant, Sher- man, and Porter gambled on one more daring run on the Rebel batteries at Vicksburg. The Con- federate sentinel on the Mississippi would be defeated by the Union’s pursuit of the river as an avenue of approach and not just an obstacle, despite frustrations with ship-handling. Albemarle served as one of the last Confederate naval successes on the Roanoke River. The ship’s activities kept open Albemarle Sound and city of Plymouth for several months longer than most other Southern waterways. Albemarle’s dominance of the North Carolina waters made it a highly desired target. And the conditions of the river the Rebel ship defended impeded the ship’s own defense. There are numerous factors that come into play during a military operation. Weather, ge- ography, and tactics are high on the list of crucial elements on the battlefield. Understanding the operational environment and how subordinates and technology will behave is essential whether it is a field commander trying to avoid his army being bogged down in the mud, or an admiral try- ing to keep his ships afloat. Wartime situations are complex and fluid. The examples of Monitor, Virginia, Charleston Harbor, and the Mississippi and Roanoke rivers show that the environment permitted action at one moment and stopped it the next. In the Civil War—and every other con- flict that involves navies—maritime conditions are no less important to the ultimate success of the fleet than are men and materiel.

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CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION

The history of the ironclad armored warship reveals a story of conflicting motives, uses, and personal ambitions as it progressed from the drawing board to battlefield. Once these new weapons of war entered the fight, their performance confirmed or repudiated their apparent value and encouraged or quieted critics. In other words, the war’s demands on military officials helped give these weapons an opportunity to perform, showcasing their benefits and their limitations. The success or failure of the weapons’ performance then led to easier or more difficult ac- ceptance. Iron shipping, decades before the Civil War, had many attributes that could have solved problems plaguing wooden shipping such as rotting, splintering, and size limitation. But the fact that even in 1830s-1840s Britain saw the new ships become vulnerable to economic and political developments underscores the conflicting agendas underlying their the technological develop- ment. Composing this social element were the personalities who encouraged or discouraged iron ship design. Innovation cannot fulfill potential unless people see their commercial, political, mil- itary, and military advantages. Charles Napier’s Aaron Manby and John Elgar’s Codorus were both solutions to the technological limitations of wooden ships. Fairbairn, Brunel, Tufts, and Pook were either entrepreneurs or designers with sufficient patronage who adapted iron hulled designs for commercial and military purposes. Iron-hull manufacturing American and British en- gineers, however, were still hampered by the dominance of clipper ship commerce in the United States and political machinations within the British Admiralty during the early nineteenth cen- tury. Absent a greater degree of political and economic urgency, motivation for technological ad- vancement remained weak. In Europe, this urgency would come in the guise of the Crimean War. Reform-minded officials like Baldwin, Walker, and Henri Dupuy de Lôme extended knowledge gained from ear- lier experiments on iron hulls with field use during wartime via French armored barges. Wartime emergencies speeding forward the ironclad’s development would reoccur in the United States in the 1860s, though iron shipping would not be adopted in earnest until after the Civil War. The

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combination of the 1857 panic and the service of ironclads during hostilities gave American shipbuilders the proof they needed. In the U.S. Navy before the Civil War began and the Union after secession, friction arose over the dismissal of sail power and wooden fleets in favor of total conversion to the screw-pro- pelled ironclad warship. The U.S. Navy dealt with similar entrenched politics and stalled reforms as innovators across the Atlantic had encountered with the British Admiralty in the 1830s and 1850s. Monitor and Virginia hold special places in naval lore because, until their duel in Hamp- ton Roads, politics held their very existence in the balance. The naval administrations in both na- vies had only vague ideas of what iron-hulled ships could do against wooden fleets much less against one another. Complaints regarding their ability to maneuver, perform against land instal- lations, or be produced in a timely fashion chafed against the persistence of the ships’ inventors like John Ericsson. To many officers and some in the public, the ironclads remained just a nov- elty compared to the battle hardened wooden ships that proudly sailed the seas for the whole of naval history up to that point. Well renowned naval officers like Captain David Dixon Porter and Admiral David Glasgow Farragut initially shared this attitude, but they learned better first-hand. Once the ironclad proved itself to its crews and the rest of the navy, it imposed a new way of ar- ranging naval forces since this new weapon was virtually impregnable against conventional gun- nery, becoming the navy’s strongest hand as the war progressed. Thus, the ironclad not only dealt with stormy seas throughout its introduction, but unsettled the age-old traditions of naval combat as the United States entered the industrial age and wars with nations abroad, views that were abundantly clear even to the public. The Confederate Navy faced its own set of challenges. While the Union dallied with the new inventions presented before it, the Confederacy was almost force-fed the inventions by Mal- lory. Without the ability to compete on traditional terms, he grasped at straws in an effort to come up with enough ships and production facilities to face the industrially potent Union. Mal- lory had to compensate for lack of numbers by using mission-specific designs. Though some may charge the industrial capacity of the Union as the reason for victory, seeing the Union’s mere potential on paper prompted Mallory to desperately dredge up resources from abroad and the handful of industrial locales in the Confederacy. In the case of Confederate ironclads, though the Virginia certainly confirmed the useful- ness of iron armor, Mallory and company were already receptive the new type of shipping in

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hopes to offset the numerous wooden ships of the line at the Union’s disposal. With a few iron- clads ready to go or ready for production in England, and some iron production underway in the Confederacy, Mallory was eager for their implementation into the Confederate fleet to harness yet another advantage in the fight against the invading North. Mallory had pressed for ships from Britain, from France, and from the discarded remnants of the North’s naval hulks at the bottom of the South’s ports –anything he could get! Perhaps Mallory simply took on too much. He knew going into the war that the South was in risky financial territory. Tight restrictions, wary foreign merchants, and the risk of alienation or war to other nations for recognizing Confederate legiti- macy made the South’s economic situation hazardous. Mallory’s hope lay in acquiring the best ships he could with what little men and materiel he could scrounge up. Ships like Virginia were precisely what the secretary needed; but even that proved temporary as port after port fell under the pressure of the Union blockade. In the South, the ironclad encountered more resistance from fundamental problems in production capacity rather than personal or political hindrances from the navy personnel. Mal- lory set a remarkable example for innovation and management with paltry support. The Confed- erate secretary of the navy created a fleet with a precarious economy, no significant warships in the navy’s possession at the war’s start, and a government far more dedicated to the army. He managed a rebel navy with a fraction of the resources of the Union navy, holding on as best as possible for four years. Of course, Union successes and failures need to be taken into considera- tion alongside Confederate performances. But for Mallory’s part, he accomplished the task of creating a seaworthy Confederate navy from nothing—even if only for a short time Ironically, it was the quick adoption and production of the first Confederate ironclad--the afore- mentioned Virginia--that frightened the Union navy sufficiently to put aside political infighting and allow Ericsson to build his Monitor. Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles’s was amply open minded, and accepted the reformers’ recommendations that led to the introduction of the ironclad warship and controlled to the point he could use his discretion to sway his subordinates, and persuade the Lincoln admin- istration to elevate the Navy’s role in the war. Gideon Welles’s business experience permitted him to manage the Union Navy and gauge public opinion through his many experiences with journalism. Welles’s delegation of technical duties to Gustavus Fox, the members of the Ironclad

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Board, and inventors like Ericsson, Eads, and Bushnell, accelerated creation of new vessels, al- beit of limited varieties. The new warships met the Union’s main strategic and operational re- quirements—i.e., controlling the Western rivers’ avenues of advancement and reinforcing the blockade. The men who introduced ironclads to the Union Navy were able to do so because of the naval technology transferring across the Atlantic with European inventors, the knowledge of ironclad warships’ advantages gained by personnel in the Union naval administration, and Gid- eon Welles’s openness to organizing the new vessels within the Union’s war plans. The diffi- culty in learning to use the ironclad warship in the field was evident in battles including and after Hampton Roads. Trials by fire were often the only test available to Union commanders like An- drew Foote when he used the City-class ironclads in the Western rivers along with Ulysses Grant’s joint operations; the same can be said for the Confederacy’s frustrating countermoves when construction shortcomings led to scuttling their ironclads. And there was the higher degree of destruction the ironclads were bringing to the battlefield—decimating ships and crews that were top of the line mere months earlier while shrugging off return fire and garnering fearsome and mythic descriptions in the press. But hard learned lessons at battles like Forts Henry and Do- nelson or at Island No. 10 did little to temper the fervor born from Hampton Roads. The frenzy over ironclads had gripped both Union and Confederate naval administrations tightly, and per- sisted for many throughout the war. Still, there are numerous factors that come into play during a military operation. Weather, geography, and tactics are high on the list of crucial elements on the battlefield. Understanding the operational environment and how subordinates and technology will behave is essential whether it is a general trying to avoid his army being bogged down in the mud, or an admiral try- ing to keep his ships afloat. Wartime situations are complex and fluid, subject to “fog and fric- tion”—difficulties in perception and movement. The examples of Monitor, Virginia, Charleston Harbor, and the Mississippi and Roanoke rivers show that the environment permitted action at one moment and stopped it the next. In the Civil War—and every other that involves navies— maritime conditions are no less important to the ultimate success of the fleet than are men and materiel.

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The naval operations at Hampton Roads and Charleston Harbor, and on the Mississippi and Roanoke Rivers are instances where the physical environment played a crucial role in a mili- tary encounter. Even slightly poor weather off the mid-Atlantic coast delayed Virginia’s attack on the Union blockade long enough for Monitor to come to the Union fleet’s rescue. Misunder- standing about river conditions later rendered Virginia unusable, and its destruction permitted Monitor to be dispatched to other ports. Engineering snafus then spelled Monitor’s end thanks to a single storm off the North Carolina coast. Monitor and Virginia were unable to sink one an- other when brought together partly as a result of weather delays. Instead, the two ships were sep- arately doomed by natural elements. In Charleston, Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont, doubtful of an ironclad’s ability to perform in foul weather, was proved amply correct when compelled to attack heavily defended fortifications in rough harbor waters. Though the vessels in Charleston were damaged or sunk primarily by gunfire, the ships’ poor handling amid changing tides made them more susceptible to attack and also reducing their ability to deliver fire. The strategic importance of New Orleans and the Mississippi River drove Union forces to fight the river itself as well as Confederate defenders. The river’s floods chipped away at the Confederate fortifications on the lower river, but the topography upstream at Vicksburg made the city difficult to breach. Even when the Union leaders developed the combined Army-Navy as- sault, the flood plains of the Mississippi doomed multiple expeditions to fail until Union forces under Ulysses Grant, William T. Sherman, and David D. Porter gambled on one more daring run on the Rebel batteries at Vicksburg. The last major Confederate defensive point on the Missis- sippi would be defeated by the Union’s pursuit of the river as an avenue of approach--not just an obstacle. CSS Albemarle served as one of the last Confederate naval successes on the Roanoke River. The rebel ironclad kept open Albemarle Sound and city of Plymouth, North Carolina for several months longer than most other Southern waterways. Albemarle’s dominance of the North Carolina waters made it a highly desired target, though the river’s conditions ultimately ham- pered the vessel’s own defense. Beyond the roles of the individual person and the physical environment, this study has also touched on several concepts in the history of science and technology, such as gatekeeper theory and social construction of technology. The military gatekeepers, Union and Confederate,

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had to adopt weapons that suited their strategic and operational needs as a part of their overall objective: their war plans. The Confederacy’s defense of its numerous ports and extensive coast- line, the opposition of the far numerically superior Union Navy, and the limited domestic re- sources of the agrarian Southern economy made pursuing fewer but superior quality ships the most attractive option. The Union’s need to defeat the Confederate Navy within the scope of Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan,” with special focus in maintaining the coastal and riverine blockade, made inclusion of ironclad warships a valid plan when opposed by a ship that so out- classed the blockaders, CSS Virginia. The South’s agricultural heritage and lack of industrial de- velopment hindered its ability to build or improve naval technology at home, forcing it to look abroad for assistance at a time when major nations would not recognize the Confederacy’s offi- cial existence. The Union’s entrenched naval traditions and cumbersome bureaucracy slowed ap- proval of new and often unproven technologies. But, as discussed earlier, individual personali- ties—Mallory and Welles respectively—made the decision to proceed with the new ships over detractors’ complaints. The legacies of these inventions are worth examining as much as the history of their in- troduction. Can one think of the modern navy without propeller-based metal hulled warship? These inventions may have come along without the Civil War, but it is the war that provided a faster and more effective method of experimenting than may have been available otherwise. It is important to note that once the war ended and forces were reunited, the U.S. Navy did not enter a golden age of ship design based on the inventions during the war. A good portion of the Navy was “mothballed” as reconstruction got underway and some measure of isolationism was in- stilled while the country recovered. Rekindled imperialist and nationalist ambitions at the turn of the twentieth century would see the need for a revitalized Navy per the observations of famous naval scholars like Alfred Thayer Mahan. The “splendid little war” against Spain in 1898 saw the steel-based metal-hulled of the American Navy annihilate the wood-based fleet of the declining and the advent of the was not far behind. What does this all mean for us in the twenty-first century? In ensuing wars, especially World War II, the demands on the U. S. Navy on two oceans put it into a similar situation. Its need to defend Britain and recover from its damage at the hands of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor compelled it to rapidly improve and depend on devices such as RADAR and to over- come the obstacles presented by the German and Japanese fleets. The attack also accelerated

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adoption of the -based navy. Though the early twenty-first century has not seen any naval conflict on the scale seen in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, the U.S. military es- tablishment in general--including the Navy--seem eager for any new gadget that can continue to improve performance. Though ironclad warships had their own specific effects on the course of the Civil War, their lessons remain relevant. Slow recognition of new advances in technology and how they in- tegrate into combat situations are a dangerous case of ignorance. Yet it is those very same com- bat situations that teach the military and civilians the hard lessons of what works and what fails miserably in the ultimate test of combat. To ignore the advantages of new inventions while someone else makes full use of them is a mistake, but to leap into the realm of new technology without understanding its effects can be just as perilous. The ironclad armored warship had diffi- culties being implemented to be sure, and leaders in the civilian and military establishment strug- gled to understand the role the vessel would play in time of war. But the rigors of the American Civil War forced some measure of respect to be earned by these weapons from those who came to depend on them.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Gregory Stern received his B.A. in history from the University of Virginia in 2003, and had the privilege to have Dr. Gary Gallagher as his undergraduate advisor for his history major. Gregory's time at U.Va. kindled his interest in Civil War history and military history in general. He also studied anthropology that sparked his study of the history of science and technology. From 2003 to 2005, at James Madison University, Gregory wrote his M.A. thesis on “Civil War Naval Technology.” At JMU, under the guidance of Dr. P. David Dillard, he was fortunate to attend and present at his first professional history conference (Ohio Valley) in 2004.

Dr. Dillard pointed Gregory in the direction of his current doctoral history program at Florida State University, where he studies under the guidance of Dr. Michael Creswell. Thanks to Dr. Creswell, Dr. Kristine Harper, and Dr. Ronald Doel, Gregory has become more immersed in the theories of military history and science/technology history. Gregory has continued to participate in professional opportunities—including book reviews, an encyclopedia article contribution, presenting at the Society for Military History conference at Arlington, Va. in May 2012, and the honor of being a West Point Summer Seminar fellow in June 2012. He also has presented on additional topics of naval history at the McMullen Naval History Symposium in September 2015.

In Fall 2012, Gregory was privileged to be the first recipient of the Mark Grimsley Social Media Fellowship where he worked for the Society for Military History as the operator of the Society’s official Twitter account—as a part of the Social Media Team—for a two year term. Gregory went on to become chair of the Society’s Facebook/Twitter Management Team. Gregory also has continued working in digital history as the first Envisioning History/Naval Order of the United States Fellow as of Spring 2015.

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