So it came to pass that the newest and best ships of the navy were armed with the Dahlgren gun. The Merrimac, which was not the best of the frigates, carried twenty-four nine-inch guns on her gun deck, with fourteen eight-inch and two ten-inch pivots on her spar deck. She could throw 864 pounds of metal from her gun-deck broadside, 360 pounds from her broadside of eight-inch guns, and 200 from her ten-inch, both of which could be fired over either rail.
Mr. Hans Busk, M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge, was moved to write on page 104, in his “Navies of the World,” that “the navy of the United States has a tolerably imposing appearance upon paper,” but he concludes that a British frigate of the Diadem class, “avowedly built to cope with those of the description of the Merrimac, etc., would speedily capture her great ungainly enemy.” To fully appreciate this remarkable statement it must be known that the Diadem could fire at a broadside ten ten-inch shells, weighing in the aggregate 820 pounds, five thirty-two-pound solid shot, and two sixty-eight-pound solid shot—in all 1,116 pounds of shot to 1,424 pounds that the Merrimac’s broadside weighed.
The frigate Minnesota carried, soon after the Civil War broke out, no less than forty-two nine-inch Dahlgrens, one of eleven inches, four 100-pounder rifles, and one 150-pounder rifle. She could throw 1,861 pounds of metal at a broadside. Moreover, it was not a mere matter of weight of metal. The diameter of the American projectiles was a matter for serious consideration by the enemy, and so was the ability of the gun to stand service. The best English gun could stand a charge of twelve pounds of powder, and the best American fifteen. There was a vast difference in the smashing effect of an eleven-inch shell driven by fifteen pounds of powder and a ten-inch shell driven by twelve.
All this seems worth telling only because it shows that the ideas of armament which prevailed among the English and the Americans before the War of 1812 were still held by the two nations in 1859. Indeed, the disproportion between the Minnesota’s armament and that of the Diadem was very much greater than that between the United States and the Macedonian.
In short, all things considered, the American people had just the fleet they needed for that day to resist foreign aggression.
But while the patriot holds up his head in pride at the thought of the ships of 1859, he hesitates and stammers when he comes to tell of the men—of the personnel of the navy. It was a far cry from the sailing ships of the old days to the steam frigates of the later, but it was a farther one, and a cry over the shoulder at that, from the men who swept the seas under the once-despised gridiron flag to those who carried the American naval commissions in 1859. It was not that courage and enterprise were dead, or knowledge and skill were lacking. There were, of course, men a-plenty who were brave and tactful and energetic and learned—plenty who were to become during the war men of the widest fame. But “long years of peace, the unbroken course of seniority promotion, and the absence of any provision for retirement,” had served the officers as lying in ordinary served white oak ships. Nearly all of the captains were more than sixty years old. The commanders at the head of the list were between fifty-eight and sixty years of age. There were lieutenants more than fifty years old, and only a few of the lieutenants had known the responsibility of a separate command.
And then, “as a matter of fact,” as Professor J. R. Soley says in his work on “The Blockade and the Cruisers,” “it was no uncommon thing, in 1861, to find officers in command of steamers who had never served in steamers before, and who were far more anxious about their boilers than about their enemy.”
But that was not all nor the worst that can be said of the personnel of that day, for a sentiment—a faith—had developed and spread to a degree that now seems almost incredible, under which men who had made oath that they would always defend the Constitution of the United States came to believe that they were under obligations to draw their swords against the flag they had sworn to defend—the flag which some of them had defended with magnificent courage.
That the politicians should have been secessionists is not at all a matter of wonder. It was entirely natural. But how a Tatnall, the story of whose bravery at Vera Cruz still thrills the heart; how an Ingraham, whose quick defence of the rights of a half-fledged American in the Mediterranean is still an example to all naval officers—how these men could have placed the call of friends and neighbors and a State above the obligation of their oath to support the Constitution, is something that is now incomprehensible.
It must be granted that they were of good conscience. There was not a sordid thought in their minds—not one. Indeed, most of them felt that they were making the greatest of sacrifices for the sake of principle. But, if the writer may express his thoughts without offence, no patriot can now read of the glorious achievements of the men who in other days fought afloat for the honor of the nation, without feeling inexpressibly shocked at the thought that any man of the navy should have been found willing under any circumstances to strike at the gridiron flag.