Excerpt from The Autobiography of George Dewey, Admiral of the Navy

BY ADMIRAL GEORGE DEWEY

Chapter IV.
BEGINNING OF THE CIVIL WAR.

After the Napoleonic wars an exhausted world knew a long period of peace, which, until the beginning of the Civil War, had been broken only by our war with Mexico in 1846, the Crimean War in 1854, and the Franco-Austrian War in 1859. This period had seen the development of steam. It had ushered in the great age of inventive genius and industrial organization in which we now live.
As Mexico had no navy our war with her had given us no naval experience of value except that of the mobility of the steam-vessels on a blockade and in cooperation with the landing of troops. In place of sails, dependent on the variability of the winds, had come a motive power equally dependable in a ten-knot breeze or a calm. Our older officers had to admit that for expeditiousness in carrying messages, in getting in and out of harbors and landing troops, steam did have the advantage over sail, and that it was a valuable auxiliary, but they still maintained that the talk about iron-clads as fighting-ships belonged to the realm of theorists and dreamers.
Later came the action at Sinope in the Crimea, of which I have already spoken, when the progressives saw their prophecies fulfilled by the success of the French floating batteries which led to the construction of the first ironclads in Europe. The naval lessons of the Franco-Austrian War were as insignificant as those of the Mexican; but at the decisive land battle of Solferino rifles in place of smoothbore cannon were used for the first time in battle. This innovation, as vital in arms as that of iron ship-building, was the first step toward the enormous range of modern guns. It remained for the Civil War to test ironclads in action, as well as the rifled gun, and also the ram. In the case of the ram the innovation was only the renewal of a form of attack of the days of the Roman galleys when the mobility of the vessel had been dependent upon the sweat of slaves. But the ram was soon to become again obsolete. It is inconceivable that with the long-range guns of later days opposing ships can ever survive long enough to come to close quarters, except when one or the other has already surrendered.
There was a saying in the sixties that the men of 1840 in our navy would have been more at home in the ships of Drake's fleet or in those of Spain's Invincible Armada than in the ironclads of the Civil War; and I think that it is also safe to say that the men brought up to service in such a vessel as the Mississippi, in which I saw my first service in the Civil War, would be more at home in the Armada than in a ship of the Dreadnought class. The inauguration of steam made naval science one of continual change and development, which it still remains.
It was borne home to the students of Annapolis in my day, as I have already indicated, that the officers of the navy, in its senior grades, should be men of progressive minds and of energetic and rapid action. Otherwise they would be quite unequal to the prompt adaptation of everything which the progress of science and industry offered for their use. At the outbreak of the Civil War our navy had no staff, and nothing like an adequate organization.
Mr. Lincoln had chosen Mr. Gideon Welles as his secretary of the navy. We are familiar with Mr. Welles's character through his very voluminous diary, which has lately been published. It has always been amazing to me how Mr. Welles was able to do so much writing and conduct the Navy Department in the midst of a great war.
He was certainly a man of prodigious industry. His lack of technical knowledge would have been a great handicap, if it had not been for the selection of an assistant secretary of the navy whose training made him an excellent substitute for a chief of staff. Gustavus V. Fox had served in the navy, but had resigned and become a most successful man of business. We cannot overestimate the value of his intelligent service to the country on meagre pay in sacrifice of private interests, for which he received hardly his fair due of honor. To him we owe the conception of the New Orleans campaign and, in part, the building of the Monitor, which took the mastery of Hampton Roads away from the Merrimac.
Upon taking up the reins of office he found a naval personnel with no retiring age limit; and a state of demoralization. Under President Buchanan, the most ordinary preparations had been neglected in face of an inevitable conflict. Our ships were scattered over the seas. Some were on the coast of Africa, some in the Far East, and some in South American waters. The excuse for this was the prevailing naval custom of the time which made the navy a disseminated force to protect our citizens in case of trouble in distant lands, and also to protect our foreign commerce, which then was wide-spread and now, unfortunately, has become almost obsolete. Now the battle-ship fleets of all nations are concentrated in home waters, and the cable keeps governments in touch with any danger-spots, which may be reached promptly with fast cruisers.
At the head of the officers' list at the beginning of 1861, were seventy-eight captains. A few of them, including Farragut, then quite unknown to the public, were men of energy who were in touch with the tendency of their time. But the great majority were unfitted for active service afloat. According to the existing law there was no supplanting them with younger men. The commanders, who were next in rank to the captains, were themselves fifty-eight or sixty years of age. Upper lieutenants were usually past forty, some being as old as fifty. David D. Porter, who was later to become an admiral, was only a lieutenant. Thornton, the executive officer of the Hartford, the flag-ship of the East India Squadron at that time, later to become the famous flag-ship of Farragut in the Gulf, had been in the service thirty-four years.
Such a system was killing to ambition and enterprise. It made mere routine men to face a crisis in which energy and initiative were needed. No subordinate was expected to undertake any responsibility on his own account. So used were the junior officers—these "boys" of forty and fifty to the old captains—to being subordinate machines that their one care was to escape official censure by any action on their own account. Promotion had become so clogged that, as the secretary of the navy had already put it in 1855, the system was "neither more nor less than elevating the incompetent and then ordering the unpromoted competent to do their work."
If the men of forty and fifty were boys to those fine old veterans of the War of 1812, who had been rendered by age incapable of active command, then we young men out of Annapolis ranked as children. The first requirement, as Mr. Fox so well knew, was a complete and drastic reorganization of personnel, but not until December, 1861, was a law passed retiring all officers at the age of sixty-two, or after forty-five years of service. By this law, disregarding seniority, the President might put any captain or commander he chose in charge of a squadron with the rank of flag-officer.
The next year the grades of rear-admiral and commodore were established and the President had his authority for selection of the fit further strengthened. In this way the younger men, by virtue of their progressive training and ideas and the inevitable initiative, which youth develops in time of war, came to accept readily responsibilities which would have frightened men of fifty a few years previously. With many new ships going into commission, we were very short-handed, which accounts for the fact that I was to become executive of the Mississippi at the age of twenty-four.
Aside from the loss in numbers by retirement at the very beginning of the struggle, there was the loss due to the resignations of the officers who saw fit to follow the flags of their States and enter the Confederate service. One can only say that the latter responded to the call of duty in a period when the constitutional right to secession was sincerely held; and that many brilliant men, who must have risen to high place had they remained loyal, knew defeat and the deprivation of honor and pleasure of service in their profession in after years. They took the risk and they lost.
But not all Southern officers held the secession view. Loyalty was stronger relatively in the navy than in the army, for the reason that the naval officer felt an affection for the flag born of the sentiment of our splendid record in the War of 1812, and a realization born of his foreign cruises, that our strength before the other nations of the world, who selfishly wished to see our growing power divided, was in unity. Besides, naval life separates one from State and political associations.
It was inevitable, however, that Southern officers should feel that they would be held under suspicion by the National Government at a period when feeling ran so high. This was a contributing factor in the decision of many who hesitated long before they went over to the Confederacy. Flag-Officer Stribling, commander of the East India Squadron, was relieved simply because he was a South Carolina man, though he did not enter the service of the Confederacy after he returned home. Farragut, born in Tennessee, was one of the Southern officers who not only remained loyal, but of whose loyalty from the first there was never any question by the authorities. In his outright fashion in speaking to his Southern comrades, he left no doubt of his position, and he also warned them that they were going to have a "devil of a time" of it before they were through with their secession enterprise. It is only fair to add that they also gave us a "devil of a time."
Quite different factors entered into the war afloat and the war on shore. The South had soldiers, and it could find rifles for them. But it had few ships, and it lacked the resources with which to build more. Such a thing as offensive tactics at sea, except by the commerce-destroyers of the Alabama class, and in its harbors, except by river iron-clads, was out of the question. The offensive must be entirely on our side; the defensive was the enemy's, and splendidly and desperately he conducted it.
Our first duty was the blockade of all that immense coast-line from Hampton Roads southward to Key West and westward to the boundaries of Mexico. As the South was not a manufacturing country, it was dependent for funds on the export of cotton and on Europe for manufactured material. We had to close its ports and we had to prevent the running of the blockade wherever possible. Moreover, a blockade which was not effective did not hold in international law. Never before had any navy, and never since has any navy, attempted anything like such an immense task. That of the Japanese off Port Arthur was comparatively insignificant in the extent of coastline which had to be guarded. At the close of the war the United States, in carrying on the war and blockade, had six hundred ships in commission.
In the strategy of the campaign on land the navy played an important offensive part which is unique in naval history. President Lincoln wished the Mississippi to flow "unvexed" to the sea. Once the great river was in the possession of the federal Government, we had cut the Confederacy in two and separated its armies from the rich sources of supplies to the westward. In order to accomplish this feat, which was not finished until Vicksburg and Port Hudson were taken, a number of gunboats built for the purpose were to work their way down the river, while we of the main fighting force of the Gulf Squadron were to begin our part in working up the river, running Forts Jackson and St. Philip and laying New Orleans under our guns. After my pleasant midshipman cruise, seeing the sights of the Mediterranean, I was to witness a style of warfare as picturesque as it was hazardous and exacting in its hardships.
Cruising in the open sea on the lookout for an enemy whom you are to meet in a decisive battle is simple, indeed, compared to the experience that was to try our nerves on the Mississippi. Here was a sufficient outlet for the abundant spirits of any young lieutenant or midshipman. It was war for us for four years, a war which brought us so frequently under fire, and required such constant vigilance, that war appeared to be almost a normal state of affairs to us.
The leaders on the other side were men bred to the same traditions as we were. Officers fought officers with whom they had gone to school, and with whom they had served and had messed. The recollection of old comradeship, while softening the amenities of a civil conflict, also touched us the more deeply with the sense of its horrors and waste, and brought to its conduct something of the spirit of professional rivalry. Unlike the officers of volunteer infantry who marched South to meet strangers against whom a strong sectional feeling had been aroused, we knew our adversaries well. We were very fond of them personally. To us they had neither horns nor tails. We felt that they were fine fellows who were in the wrong, and we knew that they entertained the same feeling toward us. We did not mean that they should beat us. They did not mean that we should beat them. This accounted for the fearful stubbornness with which we fought; and future generations, who may wish that all the energy spent had not been against brothers but in a common cause against a foreign foe, can at least rejoice in the heritage of the skill and courage displayed in a struggle which has no equal in magnitude or determination, unless in the Napoleonic wars.
On May 10, 1861, I reported for duty on board the old side-wheeler Mississippi (known as a steam-frigate), on which I served until she was set on fire by the batteries of Port Hudson in March, 1863, when she perished on the river for which she was christened. It was the wonder of her funnels, spouting smoke to make her wheels move, and the sight of her guns that so impressed the Japanese, when Commodore Perry appeared off Tokio with her as his flag-ship, that they concluded the treaty which opened up Japan to Western progress. From her, Mississippi Bay, in the neighborhood of Yokohama, takes its name.
She was now assigned to the blockade of the Gulf, and her captain was T. O. Selfridge, who was in command of a steam man-of-war for the first time. As yet the blockade was hardly maintained in a rigid fashion. The old captains were so fearful of the loss of their ships that they were inclined to take few risks. A quasi-engagement near the mouths of the Mississippi took place, which was hardly more gratifying to the navy than Bull Run was to the army. The steam sloop Richmond, two sailing sloops, and a small side-wheel steamer, having entered the river, were surprised at anchor at the head of the passage just before daybreak by a ram, later known as the Manassas, which had been originally a Boston tug-boat. She rammed the Richmond and drove the Federal ships into retreat. This incident, known as "Pope's Run," from the name of the Federal commander, was pretty exasperating to the pride of service of the more energetic-minded officers of the navy.
The Mississippi saw only the dreary monotony of blockading without any fighting until Flag-Officer David G. Farragut arrived off Ship Island in February, 1862, to begin the campaign which was to lay New Orleans under our guns. From the day that he took command the atmosphere in the neighborhood of Ship Island, which was our important naval base for the Gulf, seemed to be surcharged with his energy. When Mr. Fox had proposed the attack on New Orleans, the most wealthy and populous city of the Confederacy, Mr. Lincoln had said: "Go ahead, but avoid a disaster"; by which he meant, no doubt, that in case of failure he did not want to see a loss which would be a serious blow to Northern prestige.
After a canvass of all the captains in the navy, Farragut, on the recommendation of Mr. Fox and of Porter, had been chosen for this enterprise, which was to make his reputation. Though there is truth in the saying, "Young men for war, and old men for counsel," it does not always hold. Farragut was not one of the captains whose initiative had been weakened by age. The only criticism ever offered of him was that possibly he had too much of it. But that proved a very winning fault for him. He was sixty; which I, at least, ought not to consider too old, as I myself was sixty, or within two years of statutory retiring age, at the outbreak of the Spanish War.
In the late seventies, when there seemed no hope of our ever having a modern navy, and many officers were talking of voluntary retirement, I always answered:
"Not until the law makes me. While you are on the active list there is a chance for action."
Farragut has always been my ideal of the naval officer, urbane, decisive, indomitable. Whenever I have been in a difficult situation, or in the midst of such a confusion of details that the simple and right thing to do seemed hazy, I have often asked myself, "What would Farragut do?" In the course of the preparations for Manila Bay I often asked myself this question, and I confess that I was thinking of him the night that we entered the Bay, and with the conviction that I was doing precisely what he would have done. Valuable as the training of Annapolis was, it was poor schooling beside that of serving under Farragut in time of war.
Commander Melancthon Smith succeeded Captain Selfridge in command of the Mississippi, before the advance on New Orleans. By this time the six officers who were senior to me had all gone to other ships. With their departure I ranked next to the captain and became executive officer.
I was very young for the post, but fortunately looked rather old for my years. Indeed, I remember being asked one day, when there was a question about seniority for a court-martial, whether or not I was older than another lieutenant, who was in fact my senior by ten years. When Farragut explained to Captain Smith that there was complaint on the part of some officers on the navy list about my holding a position higher than theirs, the captain said:
"Dewey is doing all right. I don't want a stranger here."
Farragut, who was fond of the captain, answered:
"Then we will let him stay."
For many trying months I was about as close to Smith officially as it is possible for one man to be to another, and I learned to know and enjoy all his qualities. His was a pronounced character, absolutely fearless, with something of Farragut's grim determination in the midst of battle. He smoked continually, lighting one cigar with the butt of another, whether shells were bursting around him or he was lounging on deck.
In action he became most energetic; but in the periods between action he was inclined to leave all detail to his executive. His hobby, except in the matter of cigars, was temperance. I recollect that he saw me take a glass of champagne that was offered to me when I was in the house of a Union officer after the troops had taken New Orleans. He was puffing at a cigar as usual.
"Dewey, do you drink champagne?" he asked.
I had not tasted any for months, and very hard months they had been.
"Yes, I do when it is as good as this. I don't very often get a chance, these days," I answered.
"If I had known that," he said, very soberly, "I do not think that I should have had so much confidence in you."
However, he made a report after the loss of our ship that indicated that he still thought pretty well of me; and on his death after the war, when he had reached the rank of rear-admiral, he left me his epaulets and cocked hat.
He was also quite as religious as Farragut, who had unswerving belief in Providence as he had faith in the righteousness of the Union cause. One of the stories that went the rounds about Farragut was that once after he had said grace at dinner in his cabin he followed his amen with an outburst of "It's hot as hell here!" The time was midsummer on the Mississippi.
In the course of the preparations for taking New Orleans, when every man Jack of us was hard at it from sunrise to sunset, there was, naturally, some profanity. The men swore over their exasperating task, and I have no doubt that, as the director of their efforts, I may have sworn. One day, when we had a particularly trying job on hand, the captain appeared on deck from his cabin, where he had been overhearing the flow of sailor language. He looked as if he had borne about all he could. He told me to have all the crew lay aft. I ordered them aft. Then he said:
"Hereafter, any officer caught swearing will be put under suspension, and any man caught swearing will be put in double irons."
Having delivered this ultimatum he returned to his cabin. There was an end of swearing on the Mississippi from that minute. Profanity in the navy, particularly on the part of officers, was a relic of the days of rations of grog and boarding with the cutlass. An oath by an officer in giving a command, however exasperated he is, has ceased to be a means of expressing emphasis. The crew of the Mississippi found that they could work just as well without swearing.
And how we did work! Many of the junior officers were volunteers from the mercantile marine, not yet familiar with naval customs, and many of the men were practically raw recruits yet untrained. In fact, a leavening of experienced naval officers had more or less to act as teachers for the greatly increased personnel in the midst of active war conditions.
The Pensacola and our ship, the Mississippi, were the heaviest draught vessels that had attempted to go up the river. On account of our heavy gun-power it was most important that we should take part in the forthcoming battle of New Orleans. Farragut already had the rest of the fleet in the river waiting for us to get over the bar of the Southwest Pass when we came in from the blockade. We lightened ship by removing most of our spars and rigging and by emptying our bunkers. With our boats we took a day's supply of coal from the collier each day. Under a full head of steam, and assisted by the use of anchors and by tow-lines from the steamers of the mortar flotilla, both the Mississippi and the Pensacola worked their way through a foot of mud over the bar.
But the forty-gun frigate Colorado had to remain outside. Her crew was largely distributed among other ships. Her captain, Theodorus Bailey, a most gallant old officer, did not want to miss being in the forthcoming engagement. Farragut told him that he might go on board any ship he chose and such ship should lead in the attack, a suggestion which, of course, had to reckon with a welcome from the commanding officer of the ship chosen. No naval captain wants another man who ranks him on board, particularly during an action.
Captain Smith expressed himself very candidly to this effect when Captain Bailey concluded that he should like to go on board the Mississippi, and Farragut decided to put Captain Bailey as a divisional commander on board the Cayuga, one of the gunboats which was to lead the first division. Thus Captain Bailey had a better assignment than he anticipated, while all the captains of the larger vessels were equally pleased at the arrangement.
Between us and New Orleans were the two strong forts, St. Philip and Jackson, facing each other at a strategic point across a bend in the river where the channel was narrow; and above them was an obstruction of chain-booms and anchored hulks, which we must pass through. Once we had cleared a way through the obstruction we had to face the Confederate River Defense Squadron.
David D. Porter, now advanced to the rank of commander, had brought from the North a mortar flotilla of which great things were expected. It was thought that the mortars might reduce the forts by their heavy bombardment, or a least silence their guns while the fleet made its passage. There were twenty of the mortar schooners, each mounting a thirteen-inch mortar. Porter put them in position close to the wooded bank of the river, quite hidden from the forts, and disguised them by securing tree branches to their masts.
On the 18th, the day after we were over the bar, he opened fire. By carefully weighing the powder and measuring the angle excellent practice was made. All night long, at regular intervals of about ten minutes, a mortar shell would rise, its loop in the air outlined by the burning fuse, and drop into the forts. It must have been pretty hard for the gunners of the forts to get any sleep. We, with the fleet, were too busy to sleep much, but we were soon so accustomed to the noise, and so dog-tired when we had a chance to rest, that we could have slept in an inferno.
Every day gained was vital to Farragut. One day might make the difference of having to face either one or both of the new Confederate ironclads being rushed to completion with feverish haste. As so frequently happened, his celerity served him well.
After crossing the bar the vessels had to be prepared for the river work before them. They were trimmed by the head, so that if they grounded it would be forward. In the swift current of the river, if we grounded aft the ship would at once turn with her head downstream. Where feasible, guns were mounted on the poops and forecastle, and howitzers in the tops, with iron bulwarks to protect the gun crews. Farragut believed in plenty of armament. From him we have that multum in parvo of tactics: "The best protection against an enemy's fire is a well-directed fire of your own." But heavy gun-power in relation to tonnage was a principle with our navy from its inception.
It was an oddly assorted fleet that had been mobilized for the battle of New Orleans. A year had now elapsed since Sumter had been fired upon, and most of that time had been spent in getting ready for war, rather than in making war. As both sides were equally unprepared, the nation scarcely realized the effect of unpreparedness. How bitterly we would have realized it against a foe ready in all respects for conflict! It was not a matter of building a navy according to any deliberate and well-conceived plan, but of providing such material as we could in haste with the resources of the times, having in mind that we were in the midst of a revolution in naval warfare, when any enterprising development like the Monitor or the ram might upset all calculations.
First, Farragut had the big screw sloops Hartford, Pensacola, Richmond, and Brooklyn; then the side-wheeler Mississippi; the screw corvettes Oneida, Varuna, and Iroquois; nine screw gunboats of five hundred tons, which were known as the "ninety-day gunboats," because, with characteristic American enterprise in a crisis, they had been turned out by our ship-yards in ninety days. In addition was the mortar flotilla, not to mention ferry-boats and many other craft that did service of one sort or another. Farragut was always on the move, overseeing everything in person, breathing an air of confidence and imparting a spirit of efficiency. In those days he went from ship to ship, rowed by sailors, but later he had a steam tender.
There was hardly a night that the flag-ship did not signal to send boats to tow fire-rafts. These fire-rafts were one of the pleasantries of the enemy to try our nerves. In connection with the luminous flight of the mortar shells, they offered us quite all the spectacular display that we were able to appreciate. A fire-raft floating down with the current at five knots an hour, flaming high with its tar and resin, would illuminate the river from bank to bank; and if it could have rested alongside a ship for even a few minutes it must inevitably have set the ship on fire. Launches used to throw grapnels into the rafts, and other boats, forming line, would tow them to the shore, where they would burn themselves out.
On the night of the 20th of April occurred one of those brilliant exploits of daring courage so common in the Civil War that they became merely incidents of its progress. Any one of them in a smaller war, when public attention is not diverted over a vast scene of activity, would have won permanent fame. Lieutenant Caldwell, commanding one of the ninety-day gunboats, the Itasca, and Lieutenant Crosby, commanding another, the Pinola, undertook the duty of cutting the obstruction across the river above the forts. Until there was a way through this, the whole fleet would be held helpless under the fire of the forts; while turning for retreat in the swift current would have meant confusion.
During a heavy bombardment from the mortars they slipped upstream under cover of the bank. At times so rapid were Porter's gunners in their work that there were nine shells in the air at once. His object, of course, was to keep down the fire of the forts as much as possible in case the Itasca and the Pinola were discovered. They were discovered, but not until they had reached the obstruction.
As they had taken out their masts it was difficult for the gunners in the uncertain light to distinguish the gunboats from the anchored hulks that had been used in making the obstruction complete. Laboring under fire, the gunboats succeeded in a task which took them hours, and which would have been suicidal had the forts possessed a modern searchlight. It was concluded in dramatic fashion. After Caldwell, in the course of his and Crosby's manoeuvring, had got above the obstruction, with a full head of steam and the current to assist him, he rammed a stretch of chain, which snapped and left a space broad enough for any vessel of the fleet to pass through.

All new material copyright © 2003 by Brian M. Thomsen