From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life

by A. T. Mahan

VIII

INCIDENTS OF WAR AND BLOCKADE SERVICE—CONTINUED

1863–1865

The Pocahontas came North for repairs in the late summer of 1862, and after a brief leave I was ordered to the Naval Academy. Under the stress of the war, this had been broken out from its regular seat at Annapolis and transferred for the moment to Newport. All the arrangements were temporary and extemporized. The principal establishment, housing the three older classes, was in a building in the town formerly known as the Atlantic Hotel; while the new entries, who were very numerous, were quartered on two sailing-frigates, moored head and stern in the inner harbor, off Goat Island. This duplex arrangement necessitated a double set of officers, not easy to be had with war going on; the more so that the original corps had been depleted by the resignations of Southern men. The embarrassment arising from the immediate scantness of officers led naturally, if perhaps somewhat irreflectively, to a great number of admissions to the Naval Academy, disregardful of past experience with the '41 Date, and of the future, when room at the top would be lacking to take in all these youngsters as captains and admirals. Thus was constituted the "hump," as it came to be called, which, like a tumor on the body, engaged at a later day the attention of many professional practitioners. As it would not absorb, and as the rough-and-ready methods by which civil life and the survival of the fittest deal with such conditions could not be applied, it had to be dissipated; a process ultimately carried out with indifferent success. While it lasted it caused many a heartache from postponement. As one of the sufferers said, when hearing the matter discussed, "I don't know about this or that. All I know is that I have been a lieutenant for twenty years." Owing to the slimness of the service in the lower grades they became lieutenants young; but there they stuck. Every boom is followed by such reaction, and for a military service war is a boom. Expansion sets in; and when contraction follows somebody is squeezed. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars there were over eight hundred post-captains in the British navy. What could peace do for them?

Eight pleasant months I spent on shore at the Academy, and then was again whisked off to sea, there to remain for substantially all the rest of the war. Although already prominent as a fashionable watering-place, Newport then was very far from its present development; but in winter it had a settled and pleasant, if small, society. At this time I met the widow of Captain Lawrence of the Chesapeake, who survived until two years later. She was already failing, and not prematurely; for it was then, 1862–63, the fiftieth year since her husband fell. She lived with a sister, also the widow of an officer, and was frequently visited by her granddaughter, the child of Lawrence's daughter, a singularly beautiful girl. I remember her pointing to me a picture of the defeat of the Peacock, by the Hornet, under her grandfather's command; on which, she laughingly said, she had been brought up. This meeting had for me not only the usual interest which a link with the distant past supplies, but a certain special association; for my grandmother, then recently dead, had known several of Lawrence's contemporaries in the navy, and my recollection is that she told me she had seen him leaving his wife at their doorstep, when departing to take command of the Chesapeake.

When the summer of 1863 drew nigh, the question of the usual practice cruise came up. I have before stated the two opinions: one favoring a regular ocean voyage, with its customary routine and accidents of weather; the other more disposed to contracted cruising in our own waters, anchoring at night, and by day following a formulated programme of varied practical exercises. For this year both plans were adopted. There were two practice-ships, one of which was to remain between Narragansett and Gardiner's Bay, in Long Island. I was ordered as first lieutenant of the other, which was to go to Europe. The advisability of this step for a sailing-ship was on this occasion doubly questioned, for the Alabama had already begun her career. In fact, one of the officers then stationed at the school had been recently captured by her, when making a passage to Panama in a mail-steamer. I remember his telling me, with glee, that when the Alabama fired a shot in the direction of the packet, called, I think, the Ariel, a number of the passengers took refuge behind the bulkheads of the upper-deck saloons, which, being of light pine, afforded as much protection as the air, with the additional risk of splinters. He hoped to escape observation, but the Confederate boarding-officer had been a classmate of his, and spotted him at once. Being paroled, he was for the time shut off from war service, and was sent to the Academy. He was a singular man, by name Tecumseh Steece, and looked with a certain disdain upon the navy as a profession. In his opinion, it was for him only a stepping-stone to some great future, rather undefined. At bottom a very honest fellow, with a sense of duty which while a midshipman had led him to persist defiantly in a very unpopular—though very proper—course of action, he yet seemed to see no impropriety in utterly neglecting professional acquirement, rather boasting of his ignorance. The result was that, having been detailed for the European cruise, he was subsequently detached; I think from doubt of his fitness for the deck of a sailing-vessel. While at the Academy at this time, he took a first step in his proposed career by writing a pamphlet, the title and scope of which I now forget; but unluckily, by a slip of the pen, he wrote on the first page, "We judge the known by the unknown." This, being speedily detected, raised a laugh, and I fear prevented most from further exploration of a somewhat misty thesis. He was rather chummy with me, and tried mildly to persuade me that I also should stand poised on the navy for a flight into the empyrean; but, if fain to soar, which I do not think I was, like Raleigh, I feared a fall. For himself, poor fellow, weighted by his aspirations, he said to me, "I don't fear death, I fear life;" and death caught him early, in 1864, in the shape of yellow-fever. One of his idiosyncrasies was a faith in coffee as a panacea; and I heard that while sickening he deluged himself with that beverage, to what profit let physicians say.

The decision that one of the practice-ships should go to Europe had, I think, been determined by the officer who was to have commanded the Macedonian, the vessel chosen for that purpose. She was not the one of that name captured in 1812 by the United States,—the only one of our frigate captures brought into port,—but a successor to the title. Before she went into commission, the first commander was detached to service at the front; but no change was made in her destination, even if any misgivings were felt. One of my fellow-officers at the Academy, who was not going, remarked to me pleasantly that, if we fell in with the Alabama, she would work round us like a cooper round a cask; an encouraging simile to one who has looked upon that cheerful and much one-sided performance. We were all too young—I, the senior lieutenant, was but twenty-two—and too light-hearted to be troubled with forebodings; and, indeed, there was in reason no adequate inducement for the Confederate cruiser to alter her existing plans in order to take the Macedonian. Had we come fairly in her way, to gobble a large percentage of the Naval Academy might have been a fairly humorous practical joke; but it could have been no more. I remember Mr. Schuyler Colfax, afterwards Vice-President, then I think a member of the House, being on board, and mentioning the subject to me. "After all," he said, "I suppose it would scarcely do for one of our vessels to be deterred from a cruise by regard for a Confederate cruiser." Considering the disparity of advantage, due to steam, I should say this would scarcely be a working theory, in naval life or in private. Our military insignificance was our sufficient protection. During my cruise in the Congress, a ship much heavier every way than the Macedonian, the commander of one of our corvettes, substantially of the Alabama class, said to our captain, "I suppose, if I fell in with you as an enemy, I ought to attack you." "Well," replied the other, "if you didn't, you should pray not to have me on your court-martial."

The officer originally designated to command the Macedonian had been very greatly concerned about the midshipmen's provisions: the quality of which they should be, and the room to be kept for their stowage. I wonder would his soul have been greatly vexed had he accompanied me the first evening out, as I inspected the steerage while they were at supper? "What!" shouted one of them to a servant, as I passed. "What! No milk?" The mingled consternation, bereavement, and indignation which struggled for full expression in the words beggar description. I can see his face and hear his tones to this day. Laughable to comedy; yet to a philosophizing turn of mind what an epitome of life! Do we not at every corner of experience meet the princess who felt the three hard peas under the fifty feather-beds? Sydney Smith's friend, who had everything else life could give, but realized only the disappointing view out of one of his windows? We might dispense with Hague Conferences. War is going to cease because people adequately civilized will not endure hardness. Whether in the end we shall have cause to rejoice in the double event remains to be seen. The Asiatic can endure.

Among the Macedonian's lieutenants was the late Admiral Sampson. We had also for deck officers two who had but just graduated; one of them a young Frenchman belonging to the royal house of Orléans, who had been permitted to take the course at our naval school, I presume with a view on his part to possible contingencies recalling the monarchy to France. Under Louis Philippe, a member of the family had been prominent in the French navy, as the Prince de Joinville; and had commanded the squadron which brought back the body of Napoleon from St. Helena. The representative with us was a very good-tempered, amiable, unpresuming man, too young as yet to be formed in character. As messmates we were, of course, all on terms of cordial equality, and one of our number used frequently to greet him with effusion as "You old King." He spoke English easily, though scarcely fluently, and with occasional eccentricity of idiom. At the Academy, before graduation, he took his turn with others of his class as officer of the day, one of whose duties was to keep a journal of happenings. I chanced once to inspect this book, and found over his signature an entry which began, "The weather was a dirty one."