The Hero of Manila: Dewey on the Mississippi and the Pacific

by Rossiter Johnson

CHAPTER X.

IN TIME OF PEACE.

Commodore Thatcher, in his report of the attacks on Fort Fisher, paid the highest compliment to Lieutenant Dewey, and that officer, for his meritorious services in those actions, was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Commander. The next year (1866) he was sent to the European station, on the Kearsarge, the famous ship that fought a duel with the Alabama one Sunday in June, 1864, off the harbor of Cherbourg, and sent her antagonist to the bottom.

Early in 1867 he was ordered to duty at the Portsmouth (New Hampshire) navy yard; and in that city he met Miss Susie Goodwin, daughter of Ichabod Goodwin, the "War Governor" of New Hampshire. In the autumn of that year Commander Dewey and Miss Goodwin were married.

After service in the Colorado, the flagship of the European squadron, he was detailed as an instructor at the Naval Academy, where he spent two years. In 1872 Mrs. Dewey died in Newport, and the same year he was made commander of the Narragansett and sent to the Pacific Coast Survey, on which he spent four years. Then he was lighthouse inspector and secretary of the Lighthouse Board till 1882, when he was assigned to the command of the Juniata in the Asiatic squadron. The fact that he spent two years there was probably one of the reasons that caused the administration to choose him for a much more important mission in those waters sixteen years later. In 1884 he received his commission as captain and was assigned to the command of the Dolphin. This was a new steel vessel, one of the four that formed the original "White Squadron," marking a significant turning-point in naval architecture.

The next year Captain Dewey was in command of the Pensacola, flagship of the European squadron; and in 1889 he was promoted to the rank of commodore and made chief of the Bureau of Equipment and Recruiting at Washington. In 1893 he became a member of the Lighthouse Board, and in 1896 President of the Board of Inspection and Survey.

Such is the record of an eminent naval officer in time of peace. But though the record is brief and makes a very simple story, the services that it represents were long and important. From the firing of the last gun in the civil war to the first in the war with Spain, a period of thirty-three years—the life of a generation—had elapsed. In that interval naval architecture, naval gunnery, and naval tactics underwent a greater change than any that they had seen since the days of Antony and Cleopatra. If George Dewey had stepped out of the naval service when the smoke rolled away after the battle of Fort Fisher, in 1865, he could not have been the man to win a victory that astonished the world in 1898. The maxim "In time of peace prepare for war" never was better observed than by the United States Government in its construction and treatment of the new navy in the eighties and the nineties; and it recognized the vital point when it secured the highest possible development of gun power by furnishing the man behind the gun with plenty of ammunition, however costly, for constant target practice, and established prizes for good shots. The idea of a modern torpedo boat darting at a great cruiser and with one charge of a high explosive sending her to the bottom is a terror, but the terror is transferred to the other deck when the torpedo boat finds herself met with a shower of balls, every one having great penetrating power and aimed with deadly precision. It is said that the credit for the system of target practice belongs primarily to Dewey's classmate and lifelong friend, Rear-Admiral Francis M. Bunce.

In those years of peace George Dewey gained many friends and admirers by his evident ability, his modest firmness of character, his kindly courtesy, and his wide range of interest. In one respect he resembles General Grant. A brother officer says of him: "I have known him fairly well for twenty years, and I have never heard him swear or brag."