It is not meant to imply that the military talents of either admiral were confined to the particular field ascribed to him, but simply that in general they were led by circumstances to illustrate that chiefly. Nelson in his fine campaign in the Baltic evinced his profound intuitions in the science of strategy; and Farragut, as has been said, showed no mean tactical ability in the provisions made for his several battles. The dispositions to be adopted were with him the subject of very careful consideration; and before Mobile he spent hours with his flag lieutenant studying, by the aid of little wooden models, the different positions in which the ships might be placed. Afterward he had the squadron get under way several times to practice keeping close order, and changing formation and course.
Like all men who have achieved eminence, the secret of Admiral Farragut's success is to be found in natural aptitudes carefully improved, and in a corresponding opportunity for action. How much he was indebted to the latter, is evident from the fact that he had passed his sixtieth year before his great qualities were manifested to the world. He was fortunate also, as was Nelson, in the conditions which he was called to meet. Great as were the difficulties confronting each, and brilliantly as they rose to the demand made upon their energies, it may safely be said that more perfect preparation upon the part of their enemies would either have detracted from the completeness of their victories; or else, by imposing greater deliberation and more methodical execution, would have robbed their exploits of that thunderbolt character which imparts such dramatic brilliancy to the Nile and Trafalgar, to New Orleans and Mobile Bay. A modern torpedo line would not leave the gap by which Farragut first meant to profit, nor would it be crossed with the impunity he found; nor could Nelson in his day, without courting destruction, have used against a thoroughly efficient enemy the tactics that admirably suited the conditions in Aboukir Bay and off Cape Trafalgar. But these considerations do not diminish the credit of either admiral, though they help to explain the fullness of their success, and justify proceedings which under different circumstances would be unjustifiable. Rather, it may be said that, in the adaptation of their measures to the conditions opposed to them, what would otherwise invite condemnation as rashness, demands recognition as genius.
For Farragut had a natural genius for war, to which scarcely any opening had been offered before the unexpected calamity of the great civil strife burst upon the country. In estimating his military character and rightly apportioning the credit due to his great achievements, much stress must be laid upon the constant effort for professional improvement made by him from his early life. "Without the opportunity and the environment which enabled him to develop himself," writes one who knew him for over forty years, "Farragut might have gone to his rest comparatively unknown; yet among his comrades and contemporaries in the navy he would have been recognized as no ordinary man, no merely routine naval officer, who kept his watch and passed through life as easily as he could." "He told me," writes another, who first met him after his flag was flying, "that there are comparatively few men from whom one could not learn something, and that a naval officer should always be adding to his knowledge; it might enable him to be more useful some day; that it was hard to say what a naval officer might not have to do." Even after the war, when his reputation was at its height, in visiting European ports he never for a moment lost sight of this duty of professional acquirement. Not a harbor was visited that he did not observe critically its chances for defense by sea or land. "Who knows," said he, "but that my services may be needed here some day?" "Ah, Mr. Tucker," said Earl St. Vincent to his secretary when planning an attack upon Brest, "had Captain Jervis[Z] surveyed Brest when he visited it in 1774, in 1800 Lord St. Vincent would not have been in want of his information."
It was not merely in the acquisition of knowledge, commonly so called, that this practice contributed to prepare Farragut for his great mission as a naval commander-in-chief, but also in the discipline of character and in the development of natural capacities admirably suited for that position. It should not be overlooked that before the war, and now again in our own day, the idea of professional improvement in the United States Navy has fastened for its fitting subject upon the development of the material of war, to the comparative exclusion of the study of naval warfare. This naturally results from the national policy, which does not propose to put afloat a fleet in the proper sense of the word; and whose ideal is a number, more or less small, of cruisers neither fitted nor intended for combined action. Under these circumstances, the details of the internal economy of the single ship usurp in the professional mind an undue proportion of the attention which, in a rightly constituted navy, might far better be applied to the study of naval tactics, in the higher sense of that word, and of naval campaigns. Farragut could not but feel the influence of this tendency, so strongly marked in the service to which he belonged; the more so, as it is a thoroughly good tendency when not pushed to an exclusive extent. But here the habit of study, and stretching in every direction his interest in matters professional, stood him in good stead, and prepared him unconsciously for destinies that could not have been foreseen. The custom of reading had made him familiar with the biography and history of his profession, the school to which the great Napoleon recommended all who would fit themselves for high military command; and of which a recent distinguished authority has said that it may be questioned whether a formulated art of war can be said to exist, except as the embodiment of the practice of great captains illustrated in their campaigns.
From these, with his great natural aptitudes for war, Farragut quickly assimilated its leading principles, which he afterward so signally illustrated in act and embodied in maxims of his own that have already been quoted. He did not employ the terminology of the art, which, though possibly pedantic in sound, is invaluable for purposes of discussion; but he expressed its leading principles in pithy, homely phrases of his own, which showed how accurate his grasp of it was. "If once you get in a soldier's rear, he is gone," was probably in part a bit of good-natured chaff at the sister profession; but it sums up in a few words the significance and strategic importance of his course in passing the batteries of the river forts, of Port Hudson and of Mobile, and brings those brilliant actions into strict conformity with the soundest principles of war. The phrases, whose frequent repetition shows how deep a hold they had taken upon him—"The more you hurt the enemy the less he will hurt you"—"The best protection against the enemy's fire is a well-directed fire from our own guns"—sum up one of the profoundest of all military truths, easily confessed but with difficulty lived up to, and which in these days of armor protection needs to be diligently recalled as a qualifying consideration. It is, in fact, a restatement of the oft-admitted, readily-forgotten maxim that offense is the best defense. "I believe in celerity," said he, when announcing his determination soon to pass the Mississippi forts; and good reason had he to congratulate himself that this faith showed itself in his works below New Orleans, and to lament before Mobile the failure of his Government to observe the maxim which all acknowledge. "Five minutes," said Nelson, "may make the difference between victory and defeat." "False (circuitous) routes and lost moments," wrote Napoleon, "are the determining elements of naval campaigns." All admit the value of time; but with what apathetic deliberation is often watched the flight of hours which are measuring the race between two enemies!
The personal character of Admiral Farragut afforded the firm natural foundation upon which alone a great military character can be built; for while no toleration should be shown to the absurd belief that military eminence leaps fully grown into the arena, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter—that, unlike every other kind of perfection, it grows wild and owes nothing to care, to arduous study, to constant preparation—it is still true that it can be developed only upon great natural aptitudes. The distinction conveyed by a phrase of Jomini, applied to Carnot, the great war minister of the French Revolution, is one that it is well for military and naval officers to bear constantly in mind. "Carnot," he says, although a soldier by profession, "was rather a man with a natural genius for war than an [accomplished] (instruit) officer;" and to the lack of that studious preparation which marked Napoleon he attributes the mistakes which characterized some of Carnot's projects, although as a whole his career showed profound intuitions in the conduct of war. It is open to many able men to be accomplished and valuable officers; a few only—how few, the annals of the past show—receive the rare natural gifts which in their perfect combination make the great captain the highest manifestation of power attainable by human faculties.
The acquirements of the accomplished officer may enable him to see the right thing to be done under given conditions, and yet fail to lift him to the height of due performance. It is in the strength of purpose, in the power of rapid decision, of instant action, and, if need be, of strenuous endurance through a period of danger or of responsibility, when the terrifying alternatives of war are vibrating in the balance, that the power of a great captain mainly lies. It is in the courage to apply knowledge under conditions of exceptional danger; not merely to see the true direction for effort to take, but to dare to follow it, accepting all the risks and all the chances inseparable from war, facing all that defeat means in order thereby to secure victory if it may be had. It was upon these inborn moral qualities that reposed the conduct which led Farragut to fame. He had a clear eye for the true key of a military situation, a quick and accurate perception of the right thing to do at a critical moment, a firm grip upon the leading principles of war; but he might have had all these and yet miserably failed. He was a man of most determined will and character, ready to tread down or fight through any obstacles which stood in the path he saw fit to follow. Of this a conspicuous instance was given in the firmness with which he withstood the secession clamor of Norfolk, his outspoken defense of the unpopular Government measures, and the promptitude with which he left the place, sundering so many associations at the call of duty; and to this exhibition of strength of purpose, through the impression made upon Mr. Fox, was largely due his selection for command in the Gulf.
One of the greatest of naval commanders, whose experience of men extended through an unusually long and varied career—Earl St. Vincent—has declared that the true test of a man's courage is his power to bear responsibility; and Farragut's fearlessness of responsibility in order to accomplish necessary ends, while yet captain of a single ship, was the subject of admiring comment among his subordinates, who are not usually prone to recognize that quality in their commanders. "I have as much pleasure in running into port in a gale of wind," he wrote, "as ever a boy did in a feat of skill." The same characteristic was markedly shown under the weight of far greater issues in his determination to pass the river forts, in spite of remonstrances from his most able lieutenant, of cautious suggestions from other commanding officers, and with only the ambiguous instructions of the Navy Department to justify his action. It was not that the objections raised were trivial. They were of the most weighty and valid character, and in disregarding them Farragut showed not only the admirable insight which fastened upon the true military solution, but also the courage which dared to accept on his sole responsibility the immense risks of disaster which had to be taken.
The same moral force showed itself again, in combination with the most rapid decision and strength of purpose, when his ship was nearly thrown on shore under the batteries of Port Hudson; and yet more in the highest degree at that supreme moment of his life when, headed off from the path he had himself laid down, he led his fleet across the torpedo line in Mobile Bay. To the same quality must also be attributed the resolution to take his ships above Port Hudson, without orders, at the critical period of the campaign of 1863; and it is to be regretted in the interest of his renown that the merit of that fine decision, both in its military correctness and in the responsibility assumed, has not been more adequately appreciated. For the power to take these momentous decisions, Farragut was indebted to nature. He indeed justified them and his general course of action by good and sufficient reasons, but the reasons carried instant conviction to him because they struck a kindred chord in his breast. Speaking on one occasion of his gallant and accomplished fleet captain, Percival Drayton, he said: "Drayton does not know fear, and would fight the devil himself, but he believes in acting as if the enemy can never be caught unprepared; whereas I believe in judging him by ourselves, and my motto in action," he continued, quoting the celebrated words of Danton, "is, 'L'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace.'"
With all his fearlessness and determination, severity was not one of Admiral Farragut's characteristics. He was easily approachable, entering readily into conversation with all; and added much to the labors of his position as commanding officer by his great patience in listening to matters to which a subordinate might have attended. "His kindness was what most impressed me," says one officer who was a very young man when first reporting to him for duty. Another, who as a midshipman saw much of him, writes: "He had a winning smile and a most charming manner, and was jovial and talkative. If any officer or man had not spontaneous enthusiasm, he certainly infused it into him." Captain Drayton, who had many opportunities of observing, once said of him: "I did not believe any man could be great if he did not know how to say 'No,' but I see he can; for certainly here is a great man, and he is too kind-hearted to say 'No' in some cases where it should be said."