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Now for the Contest
Coastal and Oceanic Naval Operations in the Civil War
By William H. Roberts University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2004 University of Nebraska Press
All right reserved.
Chapter One
Secession at Sea
After South Carolina seceded, President James Buchanan watched and waited while the other Deep South states followed. Although Buchanan's policy of conciliation and delay offered the only hope of preserving the Union and avoiding war, his execution of that policy appears timid and blundering.
On January 5, 1861, the steamer Star of the West left New York City for Charleston, South Carolina. She carried reinforcements and supplies for Maj. Robert Anderson's garrison, which had recently moved from Fort Moultrie to the more defensible Fort Sumter. When the vessel arrived at Charleston four days later, South Carolina troops occupying Fort Moultrie fired upon her. Unarmed and unescorted, Star of the West returned to New York without reinforcing Anderson's troops.
Other recently seceded states had already begun to join South Carolina in flexing their muscles. Alabama militiamen seized Fort Morgan at Mobile, Alabama, on the same day that Star of the West left New York. Louisiana troops took over Forts Jackson and St. Philip on the Mississippi on January 10, and Alabama and Florida units occupied Fort Barrancas and the Pensacola Navy Yard at Pensacola, Florida, on January 10. Hoping to avoid confrontation, Buchanan vacillated between the desire tostrengthen Federal positions and the desire to not alarm Southerners or precipitate an armed conflict. His weak stance and unwillingness to dismiss openly pro-secession men from his cabinet encouraged other secessionists to think he would make no forcible effort to maintain the Union. Secessionists were further emboldened by local "nonaggression pacts" like the one concluded at Pensacola at the end of January 1861 between Florida officials and Capt. William S. Walker. Walker, acting under orders from Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey, agreed not to land troops to reinforce Pensacola's Fort Pickens if Florida agreed not to attack the fort.
When Abraham Lincoln took office as president on March 4, 1861, his goal differed from Buchanan's in one crucial way: Buchanan wanted to preserve the Union without war whereas Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union. Even within Lincoln's cabinet, reasonable men differed in their opinions as to how to hold the Union together. Buchanan had done nothing to prepare the navy for conflict, but Lincoln's avowed policy of conciliation and his urgent desire not to commit an overt act of war against the new Confederacy became a handicap almost as big as Buchanan's inaction. Lincoln believed that a mild policy would hold the border states and the Upper South in the Union and encourage the seceded states of the Deep South to return. On the Southern side, Confederate leaders read Lincoln's conciliatory policy as evidence of weakness; the Northerners-materialistic, divided, and lacking honor-would back down.
Although willing to compromise on many points to restore the Union, there was one issue upon which Lincoln stood firm: the containment of slavery. The men leading the Republicans had been working toward this end since the Free Soil Party was established in 1847, before the Republican Party itself was formed. After a dozen years of effort they had fairly and squarely elected a "containment" administration. Lincoln could not and would not ask them to go back and start over-containment was nonnegotiable.
From the Southern point of view, containment was similarly nonnegotiable. Even if the Republican Party ultimately did not come out for abolition, slavery was a fragile institution that required wholehearted control and constant attention from all levels of government. Were a Republican administration to fill Federal offices in the South with men who were lukewarm to slavery, they could gradually build Southern loyalty to the Republican Party; if contained, slavery would collapse of its own weight. Southern elites perceived Lincoln's election as a direct threat to the economic, political, and social fabric of the South.
The chief actors in the new administrations were the presidents. Jefferson Davis had a long history of public service. An 1828 graduate of West Point and a veteran of seven years of frontier duty, he had returned to the army to serve as commander of a Mississippi regiment in the Mexican War. After four years as secretary of war in the Pierce administration, Davis was elected to the Senate in 1857, a seat he left when Mississippi seceded early in 1861. On February 9, 1861, Davis was elected provisional president of the Confederate States of America. Sam Houston once characterized the wealthy Davis as "cold as a lizard and ambitious as Lucifer." Recent scholarship casts Davis in a more flattering light, but it is difficult to argue with the contention that his remarkably erratic judgment of people and his resistance to changing his mind after making a decision undoubtedly hurt the fortunes of the Confederacy.
Abraham Lincoln was far less polished. Mostly self-educated, Lincoln served but saw no combat as a militia captain in the Black Hawk War of 1832. The young Whig lawyer served four terms in the Illinois legislature and one term as a U.S. congressman. He ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1855, and joined the new Republican Party in 1856. Lincoln gained national recognition in 1858 during his unsuccessful Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas. When the Republican Party turned away from William H. Seward for being too controversial, Lincoln became the party's compromise candidate for president in 1860. Many found him rough and uncouth, but he learned quickly on the job.
The presidents' chief subordinates were likewise quite different. Gideon Welles was Lincoln's secretary of the navy, chosen in part because of the geographic balance he gave the cabinet. The Connecticut newspaper editor, a Jacksonian Democrat turned Republican, fit the traditional mold of a secretary of the navy in that he had never been a seafarer. He did have solid experience with naval administration, having served as the chief of the Bureau of Provisions and Clothing from 1845 to 1849, and he would prove to be an astute observer, a prolific diarist, and a tireless worker. Welles would need all his energy to meet the challenges facing the Union navy.
On the Confederate side, Stephen R. Mallory faced even more daunting problems. Mallory, an attorney and customs official from Key West, had seen military service as a Florida militia officer in the Second Seminole War. His acquaintance with the navy, however, came primarily from his ten years as a senator. As a member and later chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, he obtained a good policy-level view of the navy, but his administrative abilities had not been tested. Mallory, whose appointment also reflected the perceived need for a geographically balanced cabinet, took office on February 21, 1861, one day after the Confederate States Navy Department was established.
Although Mallory's problems mirrored those of other departments of the new Confederate States government, he and his colleagues in Davis's cabinet had reasons for optimism. Northerners were divided, and Northern "mudsills," they thought, would not fight for the Union. Should Lincoln's "Black Republican" government force a war, the border states and Upper South would provide a defensible buffer zone, "Southron" valor would be irresistible, and European powers would quickly intervene to maintain their vital supply of cotton.
The "short war" idea was central to most early Confederate thinking. The North was little stronger than the South, and if the war did not last long, the South's weaknesses might not matter. But the longer the war, the more difficult the Confederacy's task would become. With few ships and seamen at the outset, Mallory faced other areas in which the Confederacy's potential strength was lacking.
Financially, the South mixed strength and weakness. The Southern economy was overwhelmingly based on the export of agricultural staples, predominantly cotton, and those exports earned much of the foreign exchange of the United States. The nation's primary capital markets remained in the Northeast, however, and the exchange earned by Southern products usually passed through Northern banks. The South's export trade would be a significant advantage if the Confederacy could take it over and keep it going, but building an army and navy from nothing would take every cent and more.
In population, the long-term balance was less favorable to the South. In 1860 the Northern states and territories boasted a population of nearly nineteen million, to three million in the slaveholding border states and nine million in the Confederacy. Of the aggregate twelve million people in all the slaveholding states, however, only eight million were free. The slaves could be a significant economic asset, but the specter of a slave rising had haunted Southerners for decades, and the departure of many white males for military service could make slavery a long-term domestic liability. When the war began, however, the size of the opposing armies was limited not by the number of men available but by the difficulties of arming, equipping, and maintaining them. Initially, those difficulties were not much greater for the Confederacy than for the Union.
The least favorable balance in the long term was industrial. The Census of 1860 counted 1,173 "manufactories," of which only 115 were in the South. The region produced about 10 percent of the country's bituminous coal, 5 percent of its refined iron and railroad rails, and none of its anthracite. The South was also woefully weak in "tools to make tools," because not one of the seventeen factories that built machinists' tools was in the Southern states. In 1861, however, very little industry on either side was actually devoted to arms or munitions; the North's ability to wage industrial war was more potential than actual. Again, a short war would favor the South, because it would take time for the North to mobilize.
The proximate cause of war turned out to be the issue that Buchanan had dodged: Federal property in the seceded states. As long as Federal troops occupied Federal forts in Confederate States territory, the Confederate claim of sovereignty was a sham. Confederate leaders wanted the forts; Lincoln, who saw that giving up the forts would be tantamount to recognizing the Confederacy as a separate nation, promised to "hold, occupy, and possess" the government's property. In early April, he authorized an expedition to reinforce and reprovision Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, and he sent Lt. John L. Worden overland to Pensacola with orders to land the reinforcements that Buchanan had sent to Fort Pickens.
The naval aspects of the Sumter expedition and the competing expedition to Pickens remain murky. Gustavus Vasa Fox, a former naval officer turned businessman, had proposed the expedition to reinforce and reprovision Sumter. After Fox reconnoitered Charleston in person in late March, Lincoln approved the plan, which would involve several small vessels covered by the warships Powhatan, Pawnee, and Pocahontas and the revenue cutter Harriet Lane. Seward, now secretary of state, may have had his own informal agreements with Southern authorities, and he supported the Pensacola expedition over the Charleston effort. Taking advantage of Lincoln's trust and the president's heavy workload during the early days of his administration, Seward bypassed the secretary of the navy to have Lt. David D. Porter placed in command of the steamer Powhatan and to have that powerful ship diverted from Charleston to Pensacola.
Welles was not the man to allow such interference to pass unchallenged. He believed strongly that cabinet officers should consult freely with each other but should not try to run each other's departments. When he discovered Seward's meddling, he insisted upon an immediate meeting with Lincoln.
At the meeting on April 6, Seward admitted that he should not have interfered, and he sent a telegram to Porter instructing him to return the Powhatan to her regular commanding officer. Whether by accident or design, though, Seward signed his own name to the telegram. Porter, claiming that his original orders had come from the president and that therefore only the president could countermand them, refused to turn over the ship and steamed off for Pensacola. Porter's willful action crippled the Charleston expedition before it began.
The expedition had another major problem. Despite Welles's attempts to maintain operational secrecy, the Confederates knew all about it. Seward had maintained unofficial but close contact with representatives of the Confederate government and may have deliberately informed them, either directly or through an intermediary, but official Washington was so notoriously leaky that there was no real need to construct any conspiracies. The Confederate government had plenty of warning and plenty of time to consider what to do.
Hoping to engage the fence-sitting Upper South as well as to wrest the fort from the Union, Confederate authorities ordered Gen. Pierre G.T. Beauregard, commanding at Charleston, to demand Fort Sumter's evacuation. Beauregard did so on April 11, 1861. When Major Anderson refused his demand, Confederate forces began to shell Fort Sumter on April 12. The fort surrendered after a day's bombardment while Fox's relief force, weakened by the diversion of the Powhatan, stood impotently off the harbor.
On April 15, Lincoln's call for seventy-five thousand volunteers showed that he meant what he said about using force to hold the Union together. The prospect of coercion triggered the departure of the states of the Upper South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas), albeit with substantial Unionist minorities. War had begun, and the time for naval temporizing had passed.
The nation's naval potential vastly exceeded its strength, but in 1861 both were divided unequally between the combatants. Almost all of the U.S. Navy's enlisted personnel remained with the Union, and the North's pool of merchant seamen was six times the size of that of the South and the border states combined. Officers were less unevenly divided, and a substantial minority "went South" during the secession crisis or soon after war began. Others sought distant assignments, hoping to wait out the crisis without having to commit themselves decisively. When war began in April, a combination of administrative inexperience, uncertainty, and the disloyalty, opportunism, or confusion of some officers hobbled the U.S. Navy Department's ability to act.
The loss of the Gosport (Norfolk) Navy Yard provides a prime example. Fearing that the state of Virginia would secede, in early April Welles dispatched officers to take charge of the steam frigate Merrimack, then under repair at the Gosport yard. Chief Engineer Benjamin Franklin Isherwood performed near-miracles to reassemble Merrimack's engines, but Commodore Charles F. McCauley, the shipyard's aged and vacillating commandant, negated his efforts. McCauley, a veteran of the War of 1812, was confused by the pace of events. Deterred by the counsel of his junior officers, many of whom were Confederate sympathizers, and fearing to precipitate violence, McCauley would not allow the repaired Merrimack to depart.
Welles sent Capt. Hiram Paulding to relieve McCauley, but by the time Paulding reached the shipyard, Virginia state troops were massing nearby. Paulding and his men burned and destroyed what they could, but their time was short and the destruction far from complete. When the Confederates captured the yard on April 20, 1861, they got not only the salvageable Merrimack and the yard's drydock and shops but also more than 760 heavy cannon and 140 tons of powder for them. Captured cannon from Norfolk armed many of the coastal defenses the Confederacy built during the first year of the war.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Now for the Contest by William H. Roberts Copyright © 2004 by University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission.
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