Fort Jefferson and American Nationalism: a Research Note

Fort Jefferson and American Nationalism: A Research Note

R. W. Sutherland, Jr.

The first full view of Fort Jefferson often sparks wonder, even among knowledgeable observers of America’s many nineteenth century brick forts. For example, Third System author John Weaver seems at a loss for words when describing the fort. “Entering the sally port and walking onto the parade [of Fort Jefferson], a visitor cannot help but marvel at this incredible fort.” The author elsewhere calls Fort Jefferson “amazing.” He notes that it performs its role with a “grandeur not matched by any other fortification.”(1) But what was Fort Jefferson’s role? Why was it built on such a grand scale at so remote a site? Two broad, general, yet conflicting answers have been given across the decades of the last century. According to one, Fort Jefferson was built to protect a vulnerable and valuable coast. According to the other, the fort was built to project American nationalism. Like so many authors in the decades following Lewis’s seminal introduction to American seacoast fortifications, Weaver represents the first approach: “The mission of Fort Jefferson was purely seacoast defense. . . .”(2) By contrast, an earlier generation of writers treated Fort Jefferson as a statement of American nationalism, a projection of national aspirations in the Gulf and beyond. This answer prevailed from the last decades of the nineteenth to approximately the middle of the twentieth century. The reigning image of Fort Jefferson for writers from Mahan to Manucy was “Gibraltar of the Gulf of Mexico.”(3) The image projected nationalism by offering a parallel between the U.S. and the Gulf and Britain and the Mediterranean. These earlier writers seemed perversely to neglect the protective and defensive functions of Fort Jefferson and they left much to be said about exactly how these functions were specifically performed by the structure. New research in antebellum American nationalism suggests that each of these answers is incomplete when asserted without the other. Furthermore, both answers are parts of a larger, conceptual whole, a vision or paradigm of which Fort Jefferson is a material extension. Approaching Fort Jefferson in these terms extends the reach of coastal defense and the argument may have much to gain from readers with related and even contrary information. The research reported here begins with recent studies of “Young America” and the figures that led it to prominence in the1840s and after. Some of these figures, like Hawthorne and Melville, remain well known even today; others, like John O’Sullivan, are obscure. To varying degrees, however, all provide access to a vision of “Young America,” and they thus provide a key to how Fort Jefferson emerged from the mind of its creator and what it meant to him and to many of his contemporaries. From their point of view, projection and protection may well have seemed but two sides of a single endeavor, one facing inward and easily visible to Congress and the protected citizenry while the other faced outward to impress all those nations active in the Gulf and Caribbean basins. For Fort Jefferson, the mind that mattered most was, of course, Joseph Gilbert Totten’s, U. S. Army Chief Engineer throughout the period of most intense effort on Dry Tortugas. Fort Jefferson was his creation in all but the details of construction and in many, important details, especially the footings and embrasures, he insisted that even smaller details conform to his direction. [4] As fine an engineer and as dedicated a scientist as Totten was, Fort Jefferson, and the system of other forts built in this period, could not have been built had Totten been merely a technician. From the very beginning of his public career, Joseph Totten’s hands seemed more fully to grasp the pulse of the nation he served and he had a greater confidence in America’s future greatness than even his superiors were able to show. When Presidents Madison and Monroe persuaded a distinguished French aristocrat, who was Napoleon’s Chief of Artillery, to lead in planning a system of American coastal forts, outrage and umbrage among senior American military engineers flew around the project like hornets at a disturbed nest. [5] By contrast, J. G. Totten developed a working relationship with Simon Bernard. Bernard’s contributions were strategic and technical and his international reputation lent credibility to proposed projects that Congress could not ignore. Bernard understood Britain especially and the danger it posed to American coasts. His design skills were superior to those of any American military engineer. Totten, however, knew his country. Jamie Moore has noted that the key to Totten’s early confidence about his role rested in his “Republican principles” and the “rational freedom” that made his country unique in a world of autocratic monarchies. [6] How those principles are related to growing American nationalism in the two decades after 1830 and what shape it took in Totten’s mind as he moved from his outpost in Newport to the political heart of the Republic in Washington, D.C. is a subject on which almost everything remains to be done. At least two topics of detailed discussion are essential for progress in understanding the paradigm associated with Totten’s work and Fort Jefferson particularly. The first lends substance to the association of Totten with “Young America.” As Edward Widmer has shown, the heart of “Young America” was The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, [7] which began publication in Washington during the winter preceding Totten’s appointment as Chief Engineer. Establishing links between the thinking and work of Totten and the ideas developed in the Democratic Review ranges far beyond the scope of a research note. Suffice it to say that both were pressed into service to the nation by a new president, Martin Van Buren, and that both shared Van Buren’s concern for extending the flexible vision of the country’s destiny earlier inspired by President Jackson. The “Young America” vision continued to evolve long after Van Buren left office and it found expression in Fort Jefferson as well as many other structures. How Fort Jefferson emerged from the ethereal operation of paradigms and visions is the second topic of extended analysis and detailed discussion. The key here is to understand the importance of Cuba, for Fort Jefferson is almost as close to Havana as it is to Key West. In fact, the research reported here was conceived in nights spent at the foot of Fort Jefferson’s southeastern bastion, watching the lights of Havana wax and wane on the horizon while reflecting on former President Jefferson’s 1823 proposal to President Monroe that Cuba be added to “our system of states” as a way of securing the Gulf of Mexico for a “hemisphere of freedom.”[8] Our protection requires our projection.

2 Linking such a simple statement to the mind of Totten and then to the brick and mortar of Fort Jefferson is a more complex task than it may initially seem. The central expressive figure for “Young America” was not Hawthorne or Melville but John O’Sullivan, the little-known editor of the Democratic Review during its most formative period and a key figure in the debate and diplomacy of the 1840s and 1850s. Cuba’s importance for the security of the U. S. was a theme on which he declaimed relentlessly in every national political and governmental forum that he could find open to him. Against the background of increasingly bitter sectional differences over slavery, statehood for Cuba seems an unreal, almost ostrich-like proposal. Gain Cuba and put slavery behind us! How could reasonable people have thought it to be true? Yet, the very strangeness of such a proposal is a clue to how devout Young Americans were in affirming the nation’s distinctiveness and destiny. O’Sullivan, in fact, coined the term “manifest destiny” to inspire a concern for national unity and security that would withstand threats both from within and from without our borders. To give so abstract a term as “destiny” a firm hold on national policy, O’Sullivan adopted Cuba as the mooring point of national aspiration, the hill from which our flag would be seen by the world as we shed the squabbles between free states and slave. To this presumed moment of destiny came Chief Engineer Totten, who had forts to build out at the end of the Florida Keys and a Congress that, in 1851-1852, threatened to cut off all further funds unless Totten satisfied members who thought the vast brick ramparts a waste to taxpayers. Totten gave detailed responses to specific objections but he also invoked the vision of national destiny that remarkably matched the grandeur of scale that Fort Jefferson so impressively represented to the leaders of Cuba in nearby Havana.[9] In fact, Fort Jefferson was an essential defensive position. In all of Southern Florida, the area around Dry Tortugas was, and remains today, the only naturally protected, deep water, fleet-sized anchorage. Both the Civil War and the Spanish American War confirmed the position’s strategic importance. But the grandeur of Fort Jefferson is much more than strategic or defensive. The whole plan of American Third System fortification seems somehow fulfilled by the splendor of Fort Jefferson. Both Simon Bernard and Joseph G. Totten loom large here. National Park visitors threatened by a downpour are the only ones protected by Fort Jefferson today. But the statement made by the structure still commands attention, almost obsessively so for all too many people who imagine that a conceptual axis runs up and down along the full length of Florida through Havana to the rest of Cuba. On neither side of the Strait does clarity of thought reside for long. Key West’s most valuable real estate is a party-free zone awaiting the long projected terminal for crowds of visitors who are expected to take a fast ferry back and forth from Havana to Fort Myers. Across the Strait and along the Malecon, the long Havana avenue facing Fort Jefferson, ordinary Cubans gather to see if the widely rumored mass migration, set to begin on the 4th of July 2002, will actually happen later and grow, as expected, to become larger than the 1994 exodus.[10] American preeminence, the vision voiced so early in the scale of Fort Jefferson, thus grew and multiplied while the structure and its mission were largely abandoned to visitors, many of whom are more interested in birds than in buildings. For those who love old forts, however, the lesson is clear. Understanding what forts have to offer is often as much a matter of past visions as it is physical remains.

3 Notes 1. A Legacy in Brick and Stone: American Coastal Defense Forts of the Third System, 1816-1867, (McLean, VA: Redoubt Press, 2001), pp. 154-155, hereafter Legacy. 2. Ibid. p. 155. The feelings Weaver expresses upon seeing the Fort Jefferson are, perhaps, more consistent with the expressive view of the Fort’s mission and thus unintentionally suggest the confusion caused by an exclusive emphasis upon the Fort’s protective function. For a highly influential discussion of the “defensive tradition” represented by brick forts, see also Emanuel Raymond Lewis, Seacoast Fortifications of the United States: An Introductory History, (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1970), pp. 2-5. For others who similarly stress protection and defense, see the PhD dissertation by Russell Reed Price, American Coastal Defense: The Third System of Fortification, 1816-1867, (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2000), pp. 28-29, hereafter Price. In more general and contemporary terms, the same argument is made by Christopher D. Van Aller, The Culture of Defense, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), pp. 23-55, 143-156. As will become clear, the focus on Fort Jefferson is arbitrary. Everything said here about Fort Jefferson also applies to Fort Taylor in Key West. 3. Albert C. Manucy, “The Gibraltar of the Gulf of Mexico,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, 21(April 1943), pp. 303-331. Mahan on Naval Warfare: Selections from the Writings of Rear Admiral Alfred T. Mahan, ed. Allan Westcott (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), pp. 65-66. Such a view of Fort Jefferson is especially associated with turn of the century nationalists like Albert J. Beveridge and T. R. Roosevelt. For an overview, see Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt’s Caribbean (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 1991). 4. For the details of Totten’s instructions on the use of a tremie for depositing concrete under water and introducing lime in mixing concrete, see Totten’s many letters to Lt. Wright, engineer in residence in Dry Tortugas, throughout 1849- 1851. NA, RG 77 Ltrs. Sent & Recd. Chief Engineer. 5. Jamie W. Moore, “The Bernard Board and Coastal Defense Evolution.” The Journal of America’s Military Past, 14(June 1986), p. 4. 6. The Fortifications Board 1816-1828 and the Definition of National Security, (Charleston, SC: Citadel Monograph Series # XXI, 1981), p. 14. 7. Young America, (New York: NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 14-45. 8. Letter of Jefferson to Monroe, October 24, 1823, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (NY: G. P. Putnam’s, 1905), 12:320. 9. Price, pp. 120-125. Robert Sampson, John O’Sullivan and his Times, (Canton, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002). 10. Vanessa Bauza, “Celebrations and politics mingle on July 4th in Havana,” Sun- Sentinel July 7.2002. http://www.sun- sentinel.com/news/local/caribbean/search/sfl-hbauza07jul07.column?coll=sfla %2Dnews%2Dcaribbean.