James B. Eads

by Louis How

The importance of controlling the Mississippi River was well seen by the great strategist, Lincoln, who called it "the backbone of the rebellion"—"the key to the whole situation." If it could be held by the government, the Confederacy could neither move its troops up and down it, nor—thus cut in half—could it bring over from Texas and Arkansas the many men and the quantities of food greatly needed by its armies east of the river. Realizing this, the Confederacy was already beginning to fortify the Mississippi and the Ohio with its branches. To dislodge the rebels Bates proposed a fleet of gunboats. The Secretary of War, however, thinking this idea of gunboats either useless or impracticable, showed at first no interest in the plan. But at the request of the Secretary of the Navy, who realized the importance of the subject, Eads prepared a statement of his views, embodying Bates's project. In it he also suggested, besides the best kind of boats for the service, batteries, to be erected at several points. Commodore Paulding, on reading this statement, at once reported in favor of it. Suddenly, the Secretary of War, when he saw that the scheme was coming to something, claimed jurisdiction over the whole matter, but finally he agreed to order the same officer already appointed for the purpose by the Navy to go west with Eads and purchase vessels to be armed. All necessary approvals having been made, the two went to Cairo, where they examined the Benton, one of the former snag-boat fleet. Afterwards Eads proposed the strong and swift Missouri River steamboats. But neither of these suited his colleague, who at last went to Cincinnati, and buying three boats there, armed them himself: and very useful boats they were.

The gunboat scheme had been first proposed in April; it was now June, and excepting these three wooden boats, nothing seemed to have come of it. So in July the quartermaster-general advertised for bids for ironclad gunboats. In 1861 ironclads were a rather new thing. France and England had a few of them, but at the time the Merrimac was begun no ironclad had been finished in America. On August 5, when the bids were opened, that of Eads was found not only to be the lowest, but to promise the quickest work. On August 7 the contract was signed for seven gunboats to be delivered at Cairo on October 10,—sixty-four days later. This contract, it has been said, would under ordinary circumstances have been thought by most men impossible to fulfill. And the circumstances then were anything but ordinary: it was a time of great financial distress; in the border slave States the pursuits of peace were interrupted; all was in turmoil and confusion; rolling-mills, machine-shops, foundries, forges, and sawmills were all idle, and many of the mechanics had gone to the war. The timber for the boats was still growing in the forests; the iron was not yet manufactured. And so short was the time that two or three factories alone, no matter how well equipped they might be, were not to be depended upon. Yet Eads had undertaken to start up the factories, to gather the materials, and to build his boats in two months. Never were the self-reliance and the energy of the man better exhibited; but his keen business sense might have hesitated, had not his patriotism shown him that the Union needed the boats quickly.

Most of the machine-shops and foundries of Saint Louis were at once set to work night and day; and for hours at a time the telegraph wires to Pittsburg and to Cincinnati were in use. Twenty-one steam-engines and thirty-five boilers were needed. Prepared timber was brought from eight different States, and the first iron plating used in the war was rolled not only in Saint Louis and Cincinnati, but in small towns in Ohio and Kentucky. Within two weeks 4000 men were at work in places miles apart,—working by night and seven days a week. To the workmen on the hulls who should stick to the task till it was done Eads promised a "handsome bonus;" and in this way gratuitously paid out thousands of dollars. The building of this little fleet has been called "a triumph of sagacity, pluck, and executive ability unsurpassed by any exploit in the military or civil history of the times."

To be sure, the seven boats were not finished at the time called for. That they were all launched within a hundred days of the signing of the contract is amazing enough, but if they had been built after designs of Eads's own, so that he would not have been delayed by sudden changes necessitated when he found weaknesses in the plans furnished him, or when the designer changed the specifications, and if the government, harassed and driven as it then was, had been able to pay him according to its part of the contract, there is little doubt that he would have had the vessels finished in time according to his agreement. Even as it was, it was legally decided later that he was not at fault. When he entered into the contract he was a rich man; and as he was not to receive his first payment from the government for twenty days, probably only a rich man could have had the credit necessary to put so much machinery into motion. As it proved subsequently, the government was so lax in its payment, and demanded work so much more expensive than the specifications called for, that before the work was finished Eads was in a hard way financially. He had been much worried and distracted in obtaining funds: after exhausting his own fortune he had sought the aid of patriotic friends, and it was principally in order to pay them back that he made his appeal to the government. By the terms of his contract he might have delayed the work until his payments were received, and might thus have saved himself great distress and worry, but, as I have said, he realized how much the Union needed the boats. He himself said that it was "of the utmost importance that these boats should be made as effective as possible, without reference to how I was to be affected by delays, ... and that their completion should be pushed with the utmost energy, whether the government failed in its part of the bargain or not." Their rapid completion then was a proof not only of Eads's masterful energy, but of his self-sacrificing patriotism as well. Ultimately he was paid most of the money for the gunboats, and as a result of his patriotism won back the fortune he had risked; but at the time of course it hampered him intolerably to be without funds. He had, besides, other difficulties to contend with. At least one of his sub-contractors or head-workmen was a disappointed bidder for the gunboat contract, and was on a salary which ran till the boats were finished; and while Eads would not mention such a suspicion in public, he suggested in a private letter that this had been an additional cause of delay.

After all, the seven boats had been launched and were ready to be put into commission by Flag-Officer Foote, before he had more than one third of the necessary crews ready for them.

These seven, the Saint Louis (afterwards De Kalb), the Cairo, Carondelet, Cincinnati, Louisville, Mound City, and Pittsburg, were all alike. The Saint Louis, as Eads wrote to Lincoln, when he sent him a photograph of her, "was the first ironclad built in America.... She was the first armored vessel against which the fire of a hostile battery was directed on this continent; and, so far as I can ascertain, she was the first ironclad that ever engaged a naval force in the world." In reading the descriptions of them, and in reading in the naval histories of their undeniable faults, it must be remembered that Eads "had no part in the modeling of these boats, and is therefore relieved of all responsibility as to their imperfections." They were 175 feet long, 51½ feet beam. Their flat sides sloped upward and inward at an angle of about 35°, and the front and rear casemates corresponded with the sides, the stern-wheel being entirely covered by the rear casemate. It was a large paddle-wheel, placed forward of the stern so as to be protected. The whole thing was like a tremendous uncovered box, with its sides sloping up and in, and containing the battery, the machinery, and the paddle-wheel, while the smoke-stacks and the conical pilot-house stuck up out of the top. Captain Mahan says that they looked like gigantic turtles. Underneath the water, they were simply like flat-bottomed scows. As they were intended always to fight bows on, they were built with that in view. In front they were accordingly armored two and a half inches over two feet of solid oak. The only other armor they carried was abreast of the boiler and engines. The stern, therefore, and the greater part of the sides were decidedly vulnerable. Their armament consisted of three guns forward, four on each broadside, and two at the stern.

When Eads was given a chance to alter a boat from his own designs, he made it a much better one than these. It was a boat ordered by General Fremont in September, 1861, in excess of the government appropriation for the river fleet. This was the same snag-boat which three months before had been suggested for alteration by Eads, and refused by the army's agent. In this case, as in so many afterwards when Eads knew himself to be right, he stuck persistently to his own opinion; and out of the heavy old boat, despised and objected to by so many persons, he fashioned the "old war-horse," the Benton, which, slow as she was, Spears, the naval historian, calls the most powerful warship afloat at that date. As a snag-boat, formerly used by Eads, she had "had two hulls so joined and strengthened that she could get the largest kind of a cottonwood tree between them, hoist it out of the mud, and drag it clear of the channel." These hulls were now joined together; and while the boat was armored on the same general plan as the seven contract gunboats, she was so much more completely iron clad as to avoid the danger that they were exposed to of having their boilers burst and great damage and death caused thereby. Her tonnage was twice that of the others; her size about 200 by 75 feet. She was entirely iron clad. In her gun-deck casemate the twenty inches of timber under the plating had "its grain running up from the water instead of horizontally, by which means [wrote Eads] a ball will strike, as it were, with the grain, and then be more readily deflected. On the same principle that a minie ball will penetrate five inches of oak, crossing the grain, while it will not enter one inch if fired at the end of the timber." This detail illustrates the care and interest with which Eads built his boats.

The eight of them, Captain Mahan says, "formed the backbone of the river fleet throughout the war," and "may be fairly called the ships of the line of battle on the Western waters." He speaks also of their "very important services." This is milder praise than has been given them. Commander Stembel said that he had heard them called equal to 5000 men each; Boynton, the naval historian, goes so far as to say that the permanent occupation of the South was rendered possible by the ironclad navy of the Western waters. Though the naval battles in the Atlantic were perhaps more brilliant, he says, none, unless that between the Merrimac and the Monitor, had more important results. Eads has been called as potent as a great general in clearing the upper Mississippi. He did not, to be sure, build the entire gunboat fleet, but he did build, as Captain Mahan says, the backbone of it; and that the praises for that fleet, which I have quoted, are not altogether extravagant, is further shown by the comments of Mr. John Fiske. He says, "While it was seldom that they ["these formidable gunboats">[ could capture fortified places without the aid of a land force, at the same time this combination of strength with speed made them an auxiliary without which the greater operations of the war could hardly have been undertaken."

These eight boats figured in many a fight on the great river and its branches. They "were ever where danger was." A month and more before the Merrimac and the Monitor were finished, the important capture of Fort Henry "was a victory exclusively for the gunboats." It was the Carondelet that ran the gauntlet past Island Number 10, a feat as full of romance and daring as any that the Civil War tells us of. And these things were done with vessels still unpaid for and the personal property of their builder. Their usefulness was a great satisfaction to Eads, and he rejoiced, as he wrote to Foote, with "the prideful pleasure of the poor armorer who forged the sword that in gallant hands struck down the foe."

When the Benton left her dock for Cairo, Foote requested Eads to see her there in safety. Eads, who was so deeply interested in his boats that on another occasion he was narrowly prevented from going into action with one of them, gladly agreed. Before long the Benton grounded. As Eads was merely a guest, and as there were naval officers aboard, he did not feel called upon to interfere with any suggestions. But after the officers and crew had labored all night trying to float her, then with his aptitude for emergencies he used his scientific knowledge to suggest another scheme. The captain at once gave him leave to command the entire crew, and by means of hawsers tied to trees ashore and then strongly tightened, the vessel was floated. In this case the old river man knew more than the naval officers.