Mobile, which so soon followed, was the crown of Farragut’s career, and fixes his place as the greatest of naval commanders. His daring, his consummate decision, his perfect self-reliance in situations such as never before fell to an admiral to face, and his thorough command of such, justify every praise. And in character—simplicity, kindliness, and uprightness, and in every quality which we are apt to assign to the best breeding of the sea—he was among the very first. Of but one other, so far as I have known men, can so much be said—Sampson his successor of thirty-three years after.
Farragut’s climbing aloft in the main shrouds, where his flag-lieutenant, John Crittenden Watson (who still survives him, an honored admiral), lashed him to prevent his falling; his anger with the slowing of the Brooklyn when her captain saw the monitor Tecumseh go down before him from the explosion of a mine; Farragut’s order, shouted from aloft: “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!”; the more than Sydneyan courtesy of Tunis Craven, the captain of the unfortunate Tecumseh, in stepping aside from the port of the turret and saying to the pilot: “After you, sir,” and going down with his ship; the final magnificent grappling of the Hartford, Monongahela, and Lackawanna with the ironclad Tennessee, make a story which it needs a poet to tell and which should be enshrined in the heart of every lover of complete courage and genius in action, and in no man were these more personified than in Farragut. America would seem to have lost that genius for praise in poetry of her heroes and heroic actions which has remained in full vigor in England, whose poets seem to rise ever to the occasion, even if at times soaring somewhat above it. But better the latter than none at all. Still, whether sung or not (for Brownell’s fine poem was but a taste of what should be), Mobile Bay remains one of the finest dramas ever enacted upon the salt flood of ocean.
The great bombardments of Fort Fisher on December 24th, 25th, and 27th, and again on January 11th-15th by the fleet of fifty-eight ships under Admiral Porter, during which the fort was assaulted by 2,000 seamen and marines which, though unsuccessful in itself, greatly assisted that of the army, were the last naval events of high importance of the war. During this bombardment, in which the most powerful ships of the navy assisted, 16,682 projectiles were fired, weighing 1,652,638 pounds. All of the nineteen guns on the sea face of the fort were dismounted.
On April 9th came the surrender of Lee at Appomattox, and peace.
CHAPTER XXII
The end of the “Brothers’ War” had made of the United States a nation. Our country took its place in the world, and its fleets again reached into every sea. But the lessons of the navy had not touched the dull minds which in June, 1860, had voted down the supplies of the little navy which was to expand so greatly in the four succeeding years. To such, the whole work of defeating the Confederacy appeared to be the more spectacular work of the army. The constriction of the blockade was not of the dramatic character of Gettysburg or the battles of the Wilderness. Its meaning was to filter but slowly into even the more thoughtful. Thus for years, while immense changes were going on elsewhere, we were at a standstill in naval matters, or rather slowly sinking to absolute nonentity. By 1882 the shameful condition of neglect began to be remedied. That year may be taken as the birth-year of our navy of to-day. For seven years we had to go abroad for such material—gun-forgings, shafting, and armor—as we wanted, until our naval demands forced upon our steel establishments the work of putting themselves in order. The story of this work has never been told, but the country can be assured that it was to the navy that the initial great development of steel manufacture in this country was due. In 1882 we could make only a forged iron shaft for the little Dolphin, which promptly broke on her trial trip. It was through arrangements made by the Navy Department that our steel works, beginning with Bethlehem, established modern conditions.
The story of the building of the new navy is outside the scope of this book. It suffices to say that by 1898 we had in service four battleships, the Iowa, Indiana, Oregon, and Massachusetts, of the first class; the Texas, of the second; two armored cruisers, the New York and Brooklyn; eleven protected cruisers of from 3,000 to 7,735 tons, and twenty unprotected cruisers of from 839 to 2,089 tons. We also had eight torpedo boats, a dynamite vessel, the Vesuvius, and six ships of the monitor type, from 4,000 to 6,060 tons. It was with this fleet we fought the war with Spain.
The causes of this war stretch back through generations. Their foundation was, essentially, a difference in race. The American is mainly an Anglo-Saxon, direct and practical in his way; the Spaniard an oriental, courteous, kindly in the relations of friendship and family, with much that is lovable, but impracticable, tribal in his tendencies, knowing little of the modern phases of government by a constitution, and bloodthirsty and devastating in putting down revolt or in settling political differences. An anarchic century in Spain produced like conditions in Cuba. Our proximity to Cuba and our many commercial interests there were very strong elements in the situation.
A great impetus was given to feeling for Cuba and against Spain by the explosion of the Maine in Havana Harbor about 9:30 P.M., February 15th. Two months, however, were yet to pass before war was declared, though at the last moment Spain had acceded to all our demands. While our diplomacy may thus be said to have been not entirely “correct,” President McKinley may be ruled to have been wise in cutting the Gordian knot by war, which his message of April 11, 1898, practically did in referring the whole subject to Congress. The joint resolution passed and signed on April 20th, demanding that Spain should relinquish her authority in Cuba, was of course taken as a declaration of war by Spain, and April 21st was declared by Congress a few days later as the official date of its beginning.
On the afternoon of May 21st Captain William T. Sampson, who was now in command of the North Atlantic station, and was with the flagship New York off the reef at Key West where well-nigh all the available ships in the Atlantic were collected, received a telegram announcing his assignment to the command, with the rank of rear-admiral, an advancement only possible by selection by the President in time of war. This was the first indication of actual hostilities, but it was soon followed by another ordering to blockade immediately the coast of Cuba from Cardenas to Bahia Honda (a little west of Havana). Gathering during the night outside the reef (distant six miles from Key West) all the ships ready to move, the fleet early next morning was on its way, and by evening was off Havana, the searchlights of which were sweeping the sea in expectancy of the American fleet. Powerfully armed as were its batteries, they were, curiously enough, so disposed that they were open to attack from the southwest, with little possibility of return. It was Sampson’s eager wish to make this attack at once, and a battle-order had been drawn in anticipation of war, early in April, but the Navy Department in a letter of April 6th set its face so decidedly against the attempt, that Sampson had to yield. The department from the view of the necessity of preserving the fleet to meet Cervera was justified, but Sampson’s view, as later analysis of the situation showed, was correct. Had action been allowed, Havana would have been ours, without loss, on April 23d.