Besides the legislative incapacity just mentioned, and the equally inept legislation which for ten years or more had quarrelled over carrying slavery into impossible regions, our administrative departments were absurdly inefficient and, in the case of the War Department, corrupt, in that the Secretary of War had steadily been distributing arms, such as they were, in the South. Never did the government of a great country go to war under such conditions of ineptitude as did ours. Buchanan’s effort to reinforce Fort Sumter had come to grief through the folly of General Scott, who had caused the change from the heavily armed war-steamer, Brooklyn, lying at Fort Monroe, to the merchant steamer, Star of the West. Had the Brooklyn gone, as was intended, the Confederates would not have dared to fire upon her. Had they done so, the raw militia which had never before fired a cannon would have been driven from their improvised battery, and Charleston harbor would have been ours permanently. It was the same when Mr. Lincoln made the second effort and the Powhatan was diverted to Pensacola through the officiousness of the Secretary of State, who meddled with affairs with which he had nothing to do and caused orders to be sent to the Powhatan without the knowledge of the Secretary of the Navy.
Our officers from the South resigned by scores, and our Southern navy yards, Norfolk and Pensacola, left under the command of aged officers, were surrendered with enormous loss, particularly in cannon, many hundreds of which thus went to arm the Southern batteries on the coast and more particularly on the Mississippi. The following ships were burned and scuttled at Norfolk on April 20, 1861: the Pennsylvania, 120; Columbus, 74; Delaware, 74; Raritan, 44; Columbia, 44; Merrimac, 40; Germantown, 20; Plymouth, 20, and Dolphin, 10. All but the Merrimac were sailing ships and thus, with this exception, no great loss. General Scott, weakened by age, was still commander-in-chief, and failed to man the Southern forts, which, properly, should have been done in the first days of secession, and every port of the South thus held by the Federal Government. In such case there could have been no war. As it was, a few militia marched in and took possession against what was only, in most cases, a sergeant-in-charge. Never was any government so thoroughly inefficient, and it was the inefficiency of years of ineptitude, not of a day.
But the South occupied every fort and began war. To the trained strategist the action to be taken so far as the navy was concerned was simple: to blockade every port and to occupy the Mississippi. The former would cut off the importation of military supplies, in which the South was terribly deficient; the latter would cut the Confederacy in twain and isolate the great food supply of her armies. The former of course to be effective was a matter of ships, and it took time to supply these; the latter could and should have been done at once, before the defences of the Mississippi were thoroughly established and organized as they were to be.
The magnitude of the work of blockade is evident in the fact “that there were 185 harbor and river openings in the Confederate coastline.... This coastline extended from Alexandria, Virginia, to the Mexican port of Matamoros, which lies forty miles up the Rio Grande. The Continental line so measured was 3,549 miles long.”[49] Our few ships were scattered over the world. There were but three instantly available. During the war these were increased to 600 by building and by purchasing everything which could steam and carry a gun, down to ferry-boats. We improvised a great navy—of a kind. It could not, however, until our ironclad fleet of turreted vessels were built, have stood for a moment before a great regular force. Fortunately, foreign complications were avoided and we had to do with a government which itself had to improvise such vessels as it could or get them from England and France, and the former was full willing until she came herself to the verge of war on that account. She launched the Alabama and Shenandoah which, though officered by Southerners, were manned by Englishmen, and built blockade runners by the hundreds, which kept the Confederacy alive.
By great good fortune the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, himself a civilian of fine mind and good hard sense, though with no initiative and with no knowledge of war, was supplemented by an Assistant-Secretary, Gustavus V. Fox, a former officer of the navy, of strong character and great energy. He was to become practically a chief-of-staff. There had been no plan of operations, no laying down of a broad scheme such as, had there been any real organization of the services, there would have been by a general staff. Congress has resisted such an organization in the navy to this day. Even the Civil War has not been able to teach it the wisdom of this. Thus, admits Mr. Welles himself, “but for some redeeming successes at Hatteras and Port Royal the whole belligerent operations of 1861 would have been pronounced weak and imbecile failures.”
The work of strengthening the blockade was carried on with great energy. By building and purchasing every available steam vessel in the country which could carry a gun, there were by December, 1864, 559 steam vessels in the service, carrying 3,760 guns and about 51,000 men. Fortunately there had been enough freedom from prejudice to accept the plans of Ericsson for building the Monitor, which appeared in the very nick of time, to save our wooden fleet from total destruction in Hampton Roads by the Virginia, so much better known under her original name of the Merrimac, which had been one of the frigates so ignominiously sunk at Norfolk on the surrender of that yard, raised, and with immense energy converted by the Confederates into a formidable ironclad. The story of the Monitor’s battle, on March 9, 1862, under Worden; his almost fatal wounding; and the continuance of the fight to victory by Dana Greene, her young first lieutenant, a mere boy, is among the stories which will last forever.[50]
Hatteras inlet had been taken and occupied on August 28, 1861; Port Royal on November 7th.
There was one man at least, David D. Porter, yet only a lieutenant at the age of forty-nine, who, when blockading, July, 1861, the passes of the river in the Powhatan, saw the importance and feasibility of occupying the Mississippi. Porter, north again in November, brought the subject before the Navy Department, and urged as commander of the expedition his adopted brother, Farragut, senior to Porter in age by thirteen years, and far his superior in rank.
Farragut had left Norfolk declaring, it is reported, at a meeting of Southern naval officers, some of whom were bound to him by his marriage to a Norfolk wife: “Gentlemen, I would see every man of you damned before I would raise my arm against the flag.”[51] The expression is not exactly in consonance with Farragut’s calm and restrained nature, but it fits so well with his later one from the shrouds of the Hartford in Mobile Bay, that it may be taken as true. In any case, Farragut left Norfolk on April 18th, with his wife and son, Loyall. He found Baltimore, on his arrival there in the Bay Line steamer, in possession of the mob which had attacked the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment passing through that morning, April 19th. He went to Hastings-on-the-Hudson and awaited orders.
Every Southern officer was then suspected, and it required Porter’s utmost powers to convince the Secretary of the Navy that Farragut was the man for the great effort which was to be made. On Porter’s going to Hastings, he found Farragut thoroughly in accord with the plan and eager for the work. He reached Washington on December 12, 1861, and on January 9, 1862, was appointed commander-in-chief of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, with his flag in the Hartford, a sister ship to the Brooklyn, each carrying twenty-two 9-inch smooth-bore guns and two 20-pounder rifles. It is far from the least of Porter’s services to his country that he should have been the instrument of this selection.