Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

find some way of forcing the Federal navy to loosen its grip, the Civil War spread outward from land to sea, and from there around the world.

In 1861, the U.S. Navy carried 1,500 officers and about 7,500 sailors on its active list; the cream of the fleet were the six big 5,000-ton steam frigates, Niagara, Roanoke, Colorado, Merrimack, Minnesota, and Wabash, launched in 1855 and carrying batteries of up to forty 9-inch, 10-inch, and 11-inch smoothbore cannon (and with room for some specialty armament as well, such as the Minnesota’s 150-pound Parrott rifle and the Niagara’s twelve 12-inch shell guns). Following the steam frigates were the twelve steam sloops of 1857 and 1858, the biggest of which—Hartford, Brooklyn, and Richmond—displaced 2,500 tons and carried sixteen to twenty 9-inch guns.41

None of these ships, however, had been designed for blockade duty. As it was, the outbreak of the war found all of the frigates in various navy yards undergoing all sorts of refitting and overhaul. One of them, the Merrimack, suffered from chronic engine trouble and was in dry dock for machinery repairs at Gosport Navy Yard at Norfolk when Virginia passed its secession ordinance. Despite the entreaties of Benjamin Isherwood, an army engineer sent expressly to Norfolk to get the Merrimack out of danger, the commandant of the yard ordered the steam frigate burned and scuttled to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Rebels. As with the ships, there was also some question about the reliability of the navy’s officers. Although only 237 of the navy’s officer corps resigned and went South at the beginning of the war, Federal admiral Samuel F. Du Pont was keenly aware of the fact that “not a single officer” in his South Atlantic Blockading Squadron in 1862 had “voted for Lincoln.” At the same time, Du Pont was also aware that “there is not a proslavery man among them,” and the officers who had some chance ashore to see the remains of the slave system for themselves experienced great awakenings. The aristocratic Du Pont, whose home was in the border slave state of Delaware, confessed that he had “been a sturdy conservative on this question, defended it over the world, argued for it as patriarchal in its tendencies… that the condition of the slaves was far in advance of the race in Africa.” Nevertheless, he was horrified by the conditions he found on the coastal plantations. Having seen “the institution ‘de pres,’” Du Pont wrote feelingly to a friend in Philadelphia, “may God forgive me for the words I have uttered in its defense as intertwined in our Constitution.”42

In terms of both ships and personnel, the federal government clearly was going to have to find ways to improvise a navy, as much for the blockade as to maintain the navy’s high-seas profile. That the government did, in fact, manage to improvise such a navy was largely due to Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy, an ex-Democrat and former naval bureau chief. Welles and his assistant secretary, Gustavus Fox, realized from the beginning that it was much more important to put ships of any size or description outside a Southern port as soon as possible to make the blockade visible than to wait until a specially designed blockading fleet could be built. So Welles chartered one of almost everything that would float, armed them in makeshift fashion, and sent them off to pound a beat outside Southern rivers and harbors. As early as May 11, 1861, Welles had the frigate Niagara stationed outside Charleston harbor. By January 1862 Welles had organized four blockading squadrons, two along the Gulf and two along the Atlantic, to guard the Confederate coastline; and by the end of the war he would have bought, borrowed, deployed, or built over 600 warships, merchantman, steamboats, and ordinary tugs and turned them into a blockading fleet.43

The principal objective of the blockade was to prevent any shipping, Southern or otherwise, from entering or leaving the Confederacy. That meant, for much of the time, that blockade duty was an incessant string of empty, passive and depressingly boring days, waiting for the possible blockade-runner to appear over the horizon. “Dull! Dull! Dull! is the day,” wrote the surgeon of the Federal blockader Fernandina in his diary. “Nothing to do.” On top of the boredom, sailors had to endure many of the same routine annoyances and bad food that soldiers onshore suffered. The Fernandina’s unhappy surgeon explained that “‘a life on the ocean wave’ is not a very pleasant one unless a person is fond of feasting every day on salt junk and hard tack, reading papers a month after they are published, hearing from home once a month, etc., etc.” Add to the boredom and discomfort the fierce Southern heat, and it quickly became apparent that blockade duty was anything but romantic. One sailor stationed off Wilmington, North Carolina, explained in his diary how adventurous blockade duty really was.

I told her [his mother] she could get a fair idea of our “adventures” if she would go on the roof of the house, on a hot summer day, and talk to half a dozen hotel hallboys, who are generally far more intelligent and agreeable than the average “acting officer.” Then descend to the attic and drink some tepid water, full of iron rust. Then go on to the roof again and repeat this “adventurous process” at intervals, until she has tired out and go to bed, with every thing shut down tight, so as not to show a light. Adventure! Bah! The blockade is the wrong place for it.44

Yet for all its discomforts, blockade duty was still preferred over service on the inland rivers or on foreign stations, chiefly because blockade duty offered the prospect of prize money to any ship’s crew that captured a merchantman trying to run the blockade. The USS Magnolia bagged a blockade-runner named Memphis in 1863, and when the Memphis was sold off as a prize, the crew divided