Matthew Fontaine Maury, the Pathfinder of the Seas

by Charles Lee Lewis

There were many others besides Maury who considered that Mallory’s administration of the Navy Department was inefficient. This is clearly shown by the fact that, on August 27, 1862, the Confederate Congress ordered a joint special committee of both houses to investigate the affairs of this department of the government. Its investigations extended from September 4, 1862 until March 24, 1863, and developed a great deal of evidence of inefficient management; but Mallory was too strong politically to be ousted from his position. Another severe critic of the Secretary of the Navy is Pollard who, in remarking on the great energy which the North from the beginning of the war displayed in naval preparations, declared, “The Confederate government showed a singular apathy with respect to any work of defense. The Confederate Congress had made large appropriations for the construction of gunboats on the Mississippi waters; there was the best navy-yard on the continent opposite Norfolk; there were valuable armories with their machinery at Richmond; and although the Confederate government was very far from competing with the naval resources of the enemy, yet there is no doubt, with the means and appliances at hand, it might have created a considerable fleet. In no respect was the improvidence of the government more forcibly illustrated than in the administration of its naval affairs; or its unfortunate choice of ministers more signally displayed than in the selection for Secretary of the Navy of Mr. Mallory of Florida, a notoriously weak man who was slow and blundering in his office and a butt in Congress for his ignorance of the river geography of the country”.[15]

Soon after the moving of the Confederate capital to Richmond, Maury began to feel himself out of sympathy with the Southern political leaders. A week or so after the battle of Manassas he wrote that he had wished an offer of peace to be made after that victory, but that the politicians who had become generals wanted to increase their military reputation and had opposed such a step. He went so far as to draw up a peace message which he showed to the Governor of Virginia and other influential men. But it bore no fruit. “My peace message”, he declared, “is to go, I understand, after the next great victory. May it come soon!” He did not have a very high opinion of Davis’s statesmanship in those early months of the war, but considered him haughty and self-willed, and surrounded by shallow men whom he was using to further his own future re-election. He was particularly incensed with the inability of the administration to appreciate the importance of a navy, and he feared that, by ignoring this service, they would permit Virginia to be degraded. There was talk, he declared, of making New Orleans or Charleston the money capital, and that the government was run on the theory that the Confederacy belonged to Cottondom and that Cotton meant to rule.

Maury’s strongest censures of Mallory and Davis were made during the November following the publication of his “Ben Bow” articles, which became so distasteful to Mallory and so alarming to his political ease of mind that he began to wish that Maury was entirely out of the country. Only a few days after the appearance of the first of these articles, he informed its author that he was to go to Cuba to purchase arms and other war materials, and said to him that in his judgment he could be better spared than any other officer in either army or navy. This intention was not, however, carried into effect; but Mallory continued to trifle with Maury and to prevent him from rendering any worthy service to the South.

At about this time, Maury received from the Grand Duke Constantine an invitation to come to Russia and make his home there under the patronage of that government. The letter, which was brought to Richmond under a flag of truce by the Russian minister, was as follows: “The news of your having left a service which is so much indebted to your great and successful labors has made a very painful impression on me and my companions-in-arms. Your indefatigable researches have unveiled the great laws which rule the winds and currents of the ocean, and have placed your name amongst those which will ever be mentioned with feelings of gratitude and respect, not only by professional men, but by all those who pride themselves in the great and noble attainments of the human race. That your name is well-known in Russia I need scarcely add, and though ‘barbarians’, as we are still sometimes called, we have been taught to honor in your person disinterested and eminent services to science and mankind. Sincerely deploring the inactivity into which the present political whirlpool in your country has plunged you, I deem myself called upon to invite you to take up your residence in this country, where you may in peace continue your favorite and useful occupations.

“Your position here will be a perfectly independent one; you will be bound by no conditions or engagements; and you will always be at liberty to steer home across the ocean in the event of your not preferring to cast anchor in our remote corner of the Baltic.

“As regards your material welfare, I beg to assure you that everything will be done by me to make your new home comfortable and agreeable; whilst at the same time, the necessary means will be offered you to enable you to continue your scientific pursuits in the way you have been accustomed to. I shall now be awaiting your reply, hoping to have the pleasure of seeing here so distinguished an officer, whose personal acquaintance it has always been my desire to make, and whom Russia will be proud to welcome on her soil”.

This invitation, coming at a time when Maury was being thwarted in his efforts to serve the Confederacy, must have been a great temptation. But he did not hesitate in declining the offer; he had cast his lot with Virginia and through her with the Confederacy. One of his daughters relates how he came to Fredericksburg to tell his wife and children of the offer and its rejection. There were two letters. “One was from His Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke Constantine, Grand Admiral of Russia”, she wrote, “and one from Baron Stoeckle, Russian Ambassador in Washington, telling him how and by what route he was to travel to Russia, where he was to go for passports, money, advice, and information. My father was now fifty-seven years old. Every maritime nation of Europe had given him evidences of their appreciation of the benefits that their commerce had received from the use of his Wind and Current Charts and Sailing Directions. He read that correspondence to us in my mother’s bedroom, all of us gathered around him, before the wood fire, the young ones leaning against him looking into his face with eager questioning eyes as he read that princely offer, and told us he would not go”.

In his courteous reply to this generous invitation, Maury wrote that it was only his stern sense of duty that enabled him to withstand such inducements as none but the most magnanimous of princes could offer,—the hospitalities of a great and powerful Empire, with the Grand Admiral of its fleets for patron and friend. He assured the Grand Duke that he was grateful for the offer of a home on the banks of the Neva, where, in the midst of books and surrounded by his family and friends, he would be free from anxiety as to the future and have the most princely means and facilities for prosecuting those studies and continuing those philosophical labors in which he had taken so much delight in former years in Washington. He then reviewed the recent events that had taken place in the United States, and explained why he had followed the fortunes of Virginia. “The path of duty and of honor”, he wrote in closing, “is therefore plain. By following it with the devotion and loyalty of a true sailor I shall, I am persuaded, have the glorious and proud recompense that is contained in the ‘well done’ of the Grand Admiral and his noble companions-in-arms. When the invader is expelled, and as soon thereafter as the State will grant me leave, I promise myself the pleasure of a trip across the Atlantic, and shall hasten to Russia that I may there in person, on the banks of the Neva, have the honor and the pleasure of expressing to her Grand Admiral the sentiments of respect and esteem with which his oft-repeated acts of kindness, and the generous encouragement that he has afforded me in the pursuits of science have inspired his—Obedient servant, M. F. Maury, Commander, C. S. Navy”.

In this decision, Maury acted like another great scientist, Louis Pasteur who, when he was offered a professorship in Italy in 1871 during the Commune, would not leave France but said, “I should consider myself a criminal deserving a penalty for desertion if I left my country in her unhappiness to seek a better paid position than she can give me”.

In March, 1862, Maury began to take a hand in the foreign affairs of the Confederacy. At this time he submitted to Colonel Orr, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, a paper setting forth the basis of a treaty with France. About a week later he wrote a long letter to Captain De Le Marche, Depot de la Marine, Paris, stating the commercial reasons why France ought to recognize the Confederacy; and these reasons were presented to President Davis for his consideration. In April, the French minister, accompanied by the Prussian envoy to the United States, came to Richmond under a flag of truce to pay in person his respects to Maury, and to deliver to him an invitation from Emperor Napoleon to come to France to reside.