NOT MERELY FOR DEFENSE THE CREATION OF THE NEW AMERICAN NAVY, 1865-1914 by LAURENCE WOOD BARTLETT III Bachelor of Arts, 1973 Texas A&M University College Station, Texas Master of Arts, 2003 University of Colorado Colorado Springs, Colorado Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Liberal Arts Texas Christian University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May, 2011 Copyright by Laurence Wood Bartlett III 2011 CONTENTS CHAPTERS 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………….1 2. A NAVY SECOND TO ALL…………………………………….………24 3. THE PURPOSE OF A NAVY……………………………………..……..58 4. THE LIFEBLOOD OF MODERN WAR………………..………………..99 5. SELLING THE NEW NAVY……………………………..………………141 6. THE LIMITS OF INFLUENCE…………………………………………...171 7. CONCLUSION AND AFTERWORD…………………………………….189 REFERENCE APPENDICES………………………………………………………………..204 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………..…………………..215 VITA………………………………………………………………………….250 ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………..251 ii Chapter One “A naval superiority should be had”: Introduction The United States today possesses the world’s most powerful navy. Moreover, it is arguably more powerful than all the other navies of the world combined.1 The United States Navy maintains a worldwide presence and projects power from a global web of bases. Yet it was not always so. For the first century of its existence the nation maintained an ambivalent relationship with its navy. While expected to perform heroic deeds in times of national danger, the navy otherwise endured indifference and, at times, outright hostility from the people and government it served. Secure behind their ocean barriers and mindful of George Washington’s warning to avoid entangling alliances, most Americans heartily agreed with the national policy of isolationism, saw little need for a navy, and evinced a distinct reluctance to pay for one. In 1882 the United States ranked no better than twelfth among the world’s naval powers. Most observers, both at home and abroad, dismissed the navy’s obsolete, poorly maintained warships as little more than deathtraps. Yet by 1916 the U.S. Navy stood third behind only Great Britain and Germany and the nation, assuming its place as a world power, had committed to building a navy second to none. The period from 1882 to 1916 witnessed tremendous change in the navy, the nation’s foreign policy, and public attitudes towards both. Naval officers played key roles in affecting those changes. Many officers believed that the navy had reached a crisis point by the mid-1870s. The few dozen ships that remained had reached the end of their 1 Robert M. Gates, “A Balanced Strategy: Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2009): 28-40, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63717/Robert-m-gates/a- balanced-strategy. Gates stated that in terms of tonnage the United States battle fleet was larger than the next thirteen navies combined. service lives. Unless Congress could be moved to fund replacements, they feared the navy would soon cease to exist. In addition to their poor condition, the navy’s ships suffered from increasing obsolescence. A revolution in maritime technology began during the last decades of the nineteenth century but America, which once led the world in maritime technology, had abandoned the race. The United States had pioneered many of the new technologies, but the nation made no effort to keep up with the accelerating rate of technological change. American naval officers viewed the increasing obsolescence of the small American navy when compared to the modern, technologically advanced navies of European states with growing alarm. These new technologies had profound implications, not just for naval strategy and tactics, but for the nation’s foreign policy as well. Driven by their concerns, both professional and personal, officers called for the building of a new, larger navy. They simultaneously engaged in a fierce internal debate about missions, strategies, and ship types. From the debate a new strategy of power projection based on a battleship fleet gradually emerged. This technologically dependent strategy, many officers believed, required an imperialistic foreign policy and the acquisition of foreign bases. These officers actively worked to build public support and influence national policy to secure those ends. America’s naval history offered little support to the officers’ quest. The country’s performance at sea during the Revolutionary War provided few examples to draw upon. The rebellious colonies assembled a motley collection of privateers, state navies, and a small Continental Navy to challenge Great Britain’s Royal Navy.2 This haphazard 2 Charles O. Paullin, “The Navy of the American Revolution: Its Administration, its Policy and its Achievements” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1906), chapters 11-17; Howard I. Chappelle, The History of the American Sailing Navy: The Ships and Their Development (New York, NY: Bonanza Books, 1949), 53; James C. Bradford, “The Navies of the American Revolution,” in In Peace and War: 2 collection fared about as well as expected against the world’s dominant sea power. Attempts to meet the Royal Navy in combat usually ended disastrously. One noted naval historian termed America’s fleet actions “strategically insignificant, tactically inept, and politically divisive.”3 The Royal Navy ultimately swept the seas, sinking or capturing most of the American ships and rendering the survivors impotent by blockading them within their ports. Commerce raiding, on the other hand, met with considerable success. American raiders captured needed supplies, drove up shipping and insurance rates in England and weakened popular support for the war among the English population. This success, when juxtaposed with the failure of the Continental Navy’s ship-to-ship actions, helped cement commerce raiding as the nation’s preferred wartime naval strategy for more than a century. Given the disparity in forces and resources available to the combatants, commerce raiding offered the only viable strategy for the young nation. While the nation readily acknowledged the commerce raiding lesson, similar lessons about the important role sea power played in the war’s opening and closing campaigns seemingly passed unnoticed in the flush of victory. In its opening campaign, the British Army, transported by the Royal Navy, conducted a series of amphibious flanking movements that easily forced General George Washington to abandon New York and inflicted grievous losses on the Continental Army. Washington’s great victory at Yorktown similarly rested, in large part, on the ability of the French fleet to seize Interpretations of American Naval History, 1775-1984, ed. Kenneth J. Hagan (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984), 3-24. Eleven of the thirteen colonies (later states) established some form of naval force during the war. Prior to the creation of the Continental Navy, the Continental Army briefly operated a small squadron. 3 Kenneth J. Hagan, This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1991), 6. Hagan displays a noticeable bias in favor of a guerre de course strategy. For more balanced assessments of the Continental Navy see Harold and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power, 1776-1918 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1990 reprint of the 1966 edition), 24-33; E.B. Potter and Chester W. Nimitz, eds., Sea Power: A Naval History (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1960), 85-86, 97. 3 temporary control of Chesapeake Bay and prevent the Royal Navy from rescuing General Cornwallis and his army. Unable either to resupply or to evacuate, Cornwallis surrendered, effectively ending the war. In both cases command of the sea laid the foundation for victory on land. The much maligned Continental Navy suffered dissolution following the war. After disposing of its last naval vessel in 1785 the nation did without a navy for more than a decade. The modern American navy can trace its roots to 1797, when the young nation, tired of ongoing attacks on American shipping and unwilling to continue paying tribute, launched three frigates to combat the Barbary pirates. Though the navy would never again cease to exist, it remained, with the important exception of the Civil War, small and poorly funded until late in the nineteenth century. The War of 1812 seemed to reinforce the lessons learned in the Revolutionary War. Great Britain still possessed crushing naval superiority. Although the heavy American frigates won a few ship-to-ship duels, there were simply too few of them to affect the outcome. Commerce raiding again seemed to hold the most promise. Indeed, the frigate Essex single-handedly destroyed the British whaling fleet in the Pacific, a blow from which it never recovered.4 Nevertheless, the naval war ended, as had the previous contest, with the American navy’s ships sunk, captured, or blockaded. By the latter half of the nineteenth century the constraints which had so hampered America’s naval efforts in its two wars with Great Britain earlier during the nineteenth century no longer applied. The United States had the ability to build a world-class navy 4 Wade G. Dudley, Splintering the Wooden Wall: The British Blockade of the United States, 1812- 1815 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003), 111; E. B. Potter and Chester W. Nimitz, eds., Sea Power: A Naval History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1960), 214. 4 but lacked the political will to do so. Most citizens saw the chance of war as vanishingly remote. Isolated from European intrigues and following a foreign policy that was neither aggressive nor expansionistic, the United States had little to fear and pursued a strictly defensive naval policy of harbor defense and commerce raiding. Advocates of commerce raiding, the traditional strategy of the weaker naval power, accepted American naval inferiority as a given. This traditional strategic worldview began to change during the 1880s. Advocates of a strong navy could, and did, point to one of the nation’s founding fathers for justification.