“It seems to be a paramount duty on my part to correct an error which, if left unnoticed, would be the source of great and lasting injury to the navy; and it may reasonably be expected that General Scott will cause the inscriptions referred to to be so altered as to make them correspond more closely with history.” In proof of his assertions, Perry quoted an extract from General Scott’s Orders referring to the services of the navy in blockade, in disembarkation, in the attack on the city, and in the battery No. 5.
Like a true soldier, Scott made speedy correction on the brasses, and on the 24th of October wrote to Captain Brewerton, “Please cause the plates of those three objects to be unscrewed, efface the inscriptions and renew the same with the words and Navy inserted immediately after the word ‘Army.’ ” He added, “No part of the army is inclined to do the sister branch of our public defence the slightest injustice, and that I ought to be free from the imputation, my despatches written at Vera Cruz abundantly show.”
As commentary on the last line above, it may be stated that in his autobiography, in writing of Vera Cruz, Scott never mentions Commodore Perry, the navy, or the naval battery. Biographies of Scott, and makers of popular histories, basing their paragraphs on “Campaign Lives” of the presidential candidates, give fulsome praise to Scott, and due credit to the army; none, or next to none, to Perry and the navy.
The enlarged experience gained by our naval men during the war was now put to good use, and two great reforms, the abolition of flogging and the grog ration, were earnestly discussed. The captains were called upon for their written opinions. These, bound up in a volume now in the navy archives at Washington, furnish most interesting reading. They are part of the history of the progress of opinion as well as of morals in the United States. The proposition to do away with the “cat” and the “tot” found earnest and uncompromising opponents in officers of the old school; while, on the other hand, the credit of reforms now well established has been claimed by the friends of more than one eminent officer. Let us look at Matthew Perry’s record.
As early as 1824, Perry had studied the temperance question from a naval point of view. He was, it is believed, the first officer in our navy to propose the partial abolition of liquor, which was at that time served to boys as well as to men. This reform, he suggested in a letter to the Department, dated January 25th, 1824. His endeavor to stop the grog ration from minors was a stroke in behalf of sound moral principles and a plea for order. With a high opinion of the marines, and their well-handled bayonets—before which, the most stubborn sailor’s mutiny breaks,—Perry yet wished to take away one of the fomenting causes of evil on shipboard. When a midshipman, Perry was heartily opposed to strong drink for boys, and especially to the indiscriminate grog system licensed by government on ships of war. In his diary kept on board the President, the lad notes, with sarcastic comment, the frequent calls for whiskey from certain vessels of the squadron, especially the Argus, the crew of which had a reputation for a thirst of a kind not satisfied with water.
Perry’s letter dated New York, February 4th, 1850, fills eleven pages, and shows his usual habit of looking at a subject on all sides. To have answered the question as to grog, without consulting the sailors themselves, would have smacked too much of the doctrinaire for him. He was personally heartily in favor of abolishing grog, but with that love for the comfort of his men which so endeared “Old Matt” to the common sailor, he proposed for the first-rate seamen, the optional use of light wines. His attitude was that of temperance, rather than prohibition.
Flogging had been introduced into the American navy in 1799, when “the cat-of-nine tails” was made the legal instrument of punishment, “no other cat being allowed.” Not more than twelve lashes were allowed on the bare back. Even a court martial could not order over a hundred lashes. As to its total abolition, Perry felt that his own opinion should be formed by a consensus of the most respectable sailors. Personally he was in favor of immediately modifying, but not at once abolishing the penalty. This was to him “the most painful of all the duties of an officer.” He would rather make it more formal, leaving the question of its administration not in the hands of the captain, but of an inferior court on ship of three officers, the finding of the court to be subject to the captain’s revision. Perry believed, as the result of long experience, that the old sailors and the good ones were opposed to total abolition of flogging, since the punishment operated as a protection to them against desperate characters. To satisfy himself of public opinion, he went on board the North Carolina and asked Captain J. R. Sands to call to him eight of the oldest active sailors. The men came in promptly to the cabin, not knowing who called them or why. All were native Americans, and all were opposed to the abolition of flogging. Nevertheless, Perry was glad when this relic of barbarism was abolished from the decks of the American ships of war. On him fell the brunt of the decision. He first enforced discipline, chiefly by moral suasion, on a fleet in which was no flogging. The grog ration was not abolished until 1862.
Until the great civil war, only two fleets—that is, collections of war vessels numbering at least twelve—had assembled under the American flag. These were in the waters of Mexico and Japan. Both were commanded by Matthew C. Perry.
Nearly forty years have now passed since the Mexican war, and a survey of the facts and subsequent history is of genuine interest. The United States employed, in the invasion of a sister republic, about one hundred thousand armed men. Of these, 26,690 were regular troops, 56,926 volunteers, while over 15,000 were in the navy, or in the department of commissariat and transportation. Probably as many as eighty thousand soldiers were actually in Mexico. Of this host, 120 officers and 1,400 men fell in battle or died of wounds, and 100 officers and 10,800 men perished by disease. These figures by General Viele are from the army rolls. Another writer gives the total, in round numbers, of American war-employées lost in battle at 5,000, and by sickness 15,000. About 1,000 men of the army of occupation died each month of garrison-fever in the city of Mexico, and many more were ruined in health and character. In all, the loss of manhood by glory and malaria was fully 25,000 men. The war cost the United States, directly, a sum estimated between $130,000,000 and $166,500,000. Including the pensions, recently voted, this amount will be greatly increased.
Turning from the debit to the credit account, the United States gained in Texas, and the ceded territory, nearly one million square miles of land, increasing her area one-third, and adding five thousand miles of sea-coast, with three great harbors. Except for one of those world-influencing episodes, which are usually called “accidents,” but which make epochs and history, this large territory would long have waited for inhabitants. The vast desert was made to bud with promise, and blossom as the rose, by the discovery of some shining grains of metal, yellow and heavy, in a mill race. California with her golden hands rose up, a new figure in history, to beckon westward the returned veteran, the youth of the overcrowded East, the young blood and sinew of Europe. The era of the “prairie schooner” to traverse the plains, the steamer to ply to the Isthmus, the fast-sailing American clipper ships to double the Cape, was ushered in. Zadoc Pratt’s dream of a trans-continental railway, laid on the Indian trails, soon found a solid basis in easy possibility. In the eight months ending March 1850, nine millions of gold from California entered the United States. The volume of wealth from California and Texas in thirty-two years, has equalled the debt incurred during the great civil war to preserve the American union; enabling the government to say to Louis Napoleon, “Get out of Mexico, and take imperialism from the American continent.”