In 1858 Maury was advanced to the rank of Commodore, by special act of Congress. Maury also originated the idea of water-marks and river gauging along the Mississippi and its branches. In 1860 he had reached the high tide of his worldly prosperity. He began to realize material benefits from the fruits of his pen when the Civil War broke out. Mr. Lincoln called for 75,000 troops. Virginia’s answer was secession and a call upon her sons for support. Maury resigned his office and went to Richmond. Nothing had been offered him by the Confederacy. He had everything to lose, nothing to gain. He was a peace-loving man, a student and philosopher; besides, he was greatly opposed to the war. But when Virginia called he left his congenial pursuits, his achievements and his discoveries for what he held to be his duty to his mother State. When it became known abroad that he had severed his connection with the United States, he was invited by France, Russia and Mexico to become their guest, but he declined both. He entered the Confederate States navy, with the rank of commodore and chief of the seacoast, harbor and river defences of the South. He assisted in fitting out the Merrimac and invented a formidable torpedo. In 1862 he established the Confederate submarine battery service, at Richmond. In the same year he was ordered to England to purchase torpedo material. After the war he was not allowed to come home for several years.
In 1868 he, together with Tennyson and Max Muller, received the degree of LL.D. from the University of Cambridge. In 1869 he accepted the chair of physics in the V. M. I., at Lexington, Va. Here, surrounded by his family and friends, he passed the remaining years of his life in peace and rest. He died February 1, 1873.
I will conclude with two short extracts, the first from the Richmond Dispatch, as follows:
“The joint resolutions introduced into the Legislature, memorializing the President and Congress to erect, in the shape of a lighthouse on the Ripraps, a monument to Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury, opens the way for the nation to efface from its escutcheon a blot that has long rested there. Soon after the death of Maury a movement was inaugurated abroad to build at a point off the coast of Brazil, an international lighthouse as a memorial to the ‘Pathfinder of the Seas.’ It was intended that each nation should contribute individually to the fund for this purpose, and that the structure should be as enduring as money and human skill could make it. The movement found great favor with foreign nations, and would have materialized but for the attitude of the United States. When this government was sounded on the subject it was found that the partisan hatred and sectional prejudice was so strong at that time that, for diplomatic reasons, the matter was dropped.
“It is designed that the proposed monument shall be dedicated in the presence of the combined nations of the world. And should the United States make the occasion practicable, the grandest naval demonstration that has ever been witnessed anywhere, and in any age, may be expected.
“The great foreign nations in whose scientific societies and aboard whose ships Maury’s name is a synonym of reverence, would delight in an opportunity to pay such a tribute to his genius and to his services. By affording such an opportunity the United States government would put honor not only upon Maury, but upon itself, and reach a higher plane in the eyes of the governments abroad than it has ever occupied since the war. The memorial not only would be a monument to the ‘Wizard of the Winds and Currents,’ but a perpetual reminder of the nation’s confidence in republican institutions and in the fact that we are a reunited people.”
The second extract is from a tribute paid him by the Hon. A. J. Caldwell before the “Agricultural Society.” He said:
“A farmer lad, he was trained by his country for the sea. She made him a sailor; God made him a genius. A genius like Ariel’s, which made wind and tide and meteor’s glare his servants, and laid its wand upon the main of the ocean and made it the servant of the servants of men. The maritime world to-day would be lost if his great works were blotted out from human memory.
“He first spoke of the submarine telegraphic plateau between Ireland and Newfoundland, on which the ocean cable is laid. He first told the ocean steamers of the ‘sea lanes,’ where, outside of the area of icebergs they run safe from shore to shore. And such was the plenitude of his power, such the comprehensive grasp of his reason, and the fullness of the blessing which his genius bestowed upon the world, that, as experience and time go by, his scientific methods are adapting themselves to the needs of every tiller of the soil in every State of the Union and nation of the earth. The Signal Service, with its daily weather reports, its prognostications, control the actions of every intelligent agriculturist in the land to-day.
“With Promethean hand he snatched the meteoric fires from heaven and lit up the altars of industry. He is dead and gone; but what Columbus was to discovery, Newton to astronomy, LaPlace to physics, Humboldt to national history, Maury was to navigation, meteorology and agriculture. The winds and currents of the ocean bear his name around the watery world. The lowing herd, the bleating flock housed by him from the storm, the flowering meads and golden fields which filled with the shouts and laughter of happy toil are memorials on the lands. His memory will brighten as the years go by, and the blessings of his genius will reach every household and the gratitude of mankind will follow him where sweet fields beyond the swelling flood stand dressed in living green.”