It was after the discussion of old Sam Houston’s refusal to swear an oath to the new Confederate government of Texas and the steps to be taken to force the surrender, preferably without bloodshed, of Fort Pickens in Pensacola and Fort Sumter in Charleston that Jefferson Davis announced his intention to issue Letters of Marque and Reprisal to Southern ship owners.4 Mallory reminded the president that privateering had been labeled illegal by the Declaration of Paris of 1856. Davis responded that neither the United States nor the Confederate States had signed that agreement, and thus he was not bound to follow it. Furthermore, South Carolina’s congressmen thought privateering a fine idea—in fact had suggested it to him because privateering had been profitable for Charleston in the past. Then the tone of the meeting intensified.
Mr. M. {Secretary Mallory} questions: “These are naval men?”
President {Davis}: “Well, no, at least I don’t think so.”
Mr. M.: “Do they have extensive connections with European governments, then?”
President: “No, but they…”
Mr. M. (growing red in the face, interrupting): “Then I must say that this is idiocy! We have no ships! We have no engines! We have no cannons! And we cannot anger the very people that we hope to sustain us in our hour of need! Such action would be as asinine as this proposal for a cotton embargo of European markets that is spreading through the newspapers!”
President (agitated): “I will not have…”
[At this point, the handwriting of the note taker becomes illegible as if scribbled hurriedly, though “Damn you!” appears at least once.]
Mr. M. leaves the room after threatening to tender his resignation.
President: “My apologies gentlemen, but better ended now than later. Let us move on to the discussion of the cotton embargo proposed by the representatives from Texas…”5
The next afternoon, Secretary Mallory approached the president in private (resignation in hand, it should be added). Though their meeting is not recorded, President Davis’s appointment book for that day notes that all meetings after Mallory’s appearance were canceled. It can be assumed that both men realized that the pressure of forming a new nation had led to the harsh words of the preceding day. Apparently, Mallory managed to sway the often unswerving Davis to his point of view, as two days later (and with the support of Davis), he addressed Congress on naval matters. If a nexus can be identified wherein the course of the Confederacy turned sharply from potential disaster to possible success then this speech marks that juncture of time and action:
“Honored representatives of this Confederacy, I thank you for the time to discuss the needs of our naval establishment and the situation in which the coming conflict—and have no doubt that it will come—finds us. We are a newly birthed nation whose life blood is commerce. We lack the self-sufficiency of a long established country, and we require access to Europe. Our cotton must reach the markets of the old countries, and we must have European goods unloading in a constant stream at our wharves if we hope to see this great endeavor succeed.
Sadly, our seaports and rivers are vulnerable to any aggressor. The loss of even one major port, once overrun by an enemy army supplied from the sea, will be a dagger aimed at our heartland. Already, the United States refuses to surrender the forts at Charleston and Pensacola—bastions that by right belong to our nation. Two of our great ports are thus already plugged, and near a hundred ships under the Stars and Stripes ready to blockade the rest.
Yet we do not have a single ship capable of challenging potential blockaders. Our handful of gunboats mount fewer guns than one first-rate screw frigate. Yes, we have gunboats building, but there is no guarantee that we can find the engines to power them or the cannons to give them teeth. We have neither foundries nor machine shops, though they do exist—in Europe.
Now two bills, the one for the establishment of privateers and the other for an embargo, and both quite damaging to our maritime position, may well appear before you. They must not be passed. International law, as observed by the great nations of Europe, prohibits private vessels of war. For us to flaunt that law would be viewed as the naive arrogance of mere children and would not create the friends that we so dearly need. If any man would serve this nation rather than seek to line his own pockets, then let him enlist himself and his ship in this glorious cause! There will still be prizes, but let us not anger our friends across the Atlantic with the legitimacy of their taking.
As for this cotton embargo, do not allow it! When has an embargo succeeded? Did those of the founding fathers prevent their bloody struggle against tyranny? Did Jefferson’s embargo (and the hardship that it caused, you learned at your father’s knee!) stop a war? Did Madison’s embargo during that same war do ought but make the common people hate him? Now is the time that we must establish our credit abroad! We must show the nations of Europe that we value our economic ties! We must let them know that the mills of Lancashire and the looms of France will not wait on us! And if the bales stop flowing and their mill workers cry of hunger and need, it will not be on this Confederacy that those powerful Admiralties turn their ire. Oh no, gentlemen, to us they will extend their hands to reach the one that we have already given them.
The issues in this naval bill now before you are self-evident. But I would like to summarize the key items. The bill proposes the immediate establishment of a National Naval Arsenal at New Orleans, to include a powder mill, a naval cannon foundry, a general purpose foundry, four new slips for large vessels, a drydock, and boiler and engine manufacturies. As the manufacturies will not be ready for at least a year, agents will be authorized to purchase engines and miscellaneous accoutrements abroad for the building of four warships at New Orleans capable of challenging and defeating any blockading force on our coasts. Nor will we neglect our Atlantic coast while this force is building; large gunboats will be bid to private contractors in the ports designated by this bill. Again, agents dispatched to Europe will endeavor to purchase engines for these vessels. Artillery and munitions for coastal fortresses must be ordered as well. Sundry other items also appear in the bill.
Honored representatives, this will not come cheaply. No navy ever has. We may well mortgage our future for a generation—but, I promise you, there will be a future to mortgage. Without this effort, without this great outlay of wealth, that future may not arrive at all. Let us not quibble over dollars. They are small things when stacked beside our freedom. Had the Athenians quibbled when Themistocles asked that their silver be turned into warships, then the iron heel of a Persian tyrant would have trampled that glorious democracy. Had the Roman senate held close the coins needed to build a navy (and to build another when storms destroyed the first!), that fair Republic would have fallen to the mercantile tyranny of Carthage. I do not know exactly what lies before us, but I do know this: To surrender the sea is to surrender our democracy and our republic. And we must not let that happen.”6
Within days, newspapers began hailing Mallory as the “Southern Themistocles.”7 The passage of the new naval appropriations was never in doubt, and though the price of “Mallory’s Navy” would create a national debt that would not be repaid during his lifetime, at least there would be a nation to repay it. Within a week of the speech, the first naval purchasing agents sailed for Europe, but by then the Confederacy’s prominent Secretary of the Navy had turned his attention to other opportunities.
Yards for the Confederate Navy
By the end of March, even faint hopes of reconciliation between the Confederacy and the United States had evaporated. Lincoln decided, in the waning days of that month, to hold Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens. The border states, especially North Carolina and Virginia, had already rejected secession once—now their loyal and disloyal citizens alike waited nervously for the first fratricidal shells to fall. Of course, some citizens alleviated their nervousness with action, especially in the organizing of militia and “volunteer” units. In wavering Virginia on the third day of April, one such unit, the Washing
ton Rifles, elected a 37-year-old graduate of West Point as its captain. William Edmundson Jones, better known as “Grumble” to those around him, was an experienced soldier and local politician.8 Little could he have imagined on that day that his loyalty to Southern ideals would place him first on the field of battle for his state.
In Montgomery, Mallory still wrestled with creating a navy. Delegating minor tasks such as the creation of uniforms, flags, and forms to his growing staff, he focused on placing ships and men on the water. To lure those who would have become privateers, Mallory offered generous bounties for prizes taken by the Confederate Navy—75 percent of auction value, as well as gun money and head money for enemy warships, to be divided among crew and officers. To encourage ship owners to risk their vessels in national service, Mallory promised 20 percent of the auction value of each prize for division among the owners of vessels loaned to the national government for conversion to warships. By the end of the first week of April, a dozen large steamers and three times as many smaller vessels had been deeded to the government. Hundreds of men—including far too many whose only experience of salt water had been that prescribed by a physician for sore feet—had flocked to recruiters in ports throughout the Confederacy, ready for their share of the prize money.
Over the following months, the Confederate naval apparatus would take shape, but in those first weeks Mallory and his subordinates faced overwhelming logistical restraints: no uniforms, few barracks or tents, little preserved food and naval stores, a severe shortage of artillery and munitions, a lack of drydocks and experienced artificers to convert their new found wealth of vessels to something resembling a navy, and a shortage of experienced naval officers to bring order to the chaos in every Southern port.9
When, on April 7, Davis notified his secretary of the navy that the governor of South Carolina had ordered communications between Fort Sumter and Charleston cut in preparation for forcing the issue of ownership of the bastion, Mallory requested permission to initiate what in modern parlance would be called a “black op.” With the president’s approval, Mallory dispatched a trusted lieutenant to Virginia with a written plea to an old acquaintance, the governor of that wavering state. Though the actual missive was destroyed by the governor, its contents remain well known: if Virginia should join the Confederacy, then every effort must be made to secure the Gosport Naval Yard near Norfolk.10 If the yard could be taken quickly, the Confederacy would gain a well-stocked, first-class naval facility. And Mallory did not trust the United States simply to turn it over to its rebellious sons. The governor shared Mallory’s concern, and quietly called upon an old and trusted friend, Grumble Jones (breveted to major), to begin shifting his company to Norfolk. There Jones would take command of local militia. Working with Southern sympathizers stationed at the yard, Jones was ordered to seize the facility if Virginia prepared to leave the Union.
At 04.30 a.m. on April 12, the first shots struck Fort Sumter. The following day, Major Robert Anderson surrendered his battered command. Two days later, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers as a force to march south and end the rebellion. Missouri and Kentucky refused to send soldiers against their sister states, while Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas took the first steps to leave the Union and join the Confederacy. On April 17, Virginia’s legislature officially voted in favor of secession, and its governor telegraphed Grumble Jones to act immediately. By 11.00 p.m. Jones had led his forces through the main gate at Gosport, skirmishing as they went with a small guard of Marines and sailors. As Jones wrote:
“Forming the Rifles into a volley line in the field across from the gate, I called upon the officer of the guard to surrender his small force in the name of the Sovereign State of Virginia and the Confederate States of America or I would order my men to fire. Before he could reply, the boys being a mite high strung had heard the word fire, released a shamefully ragged volley, and headed for the gate in what they thought was a charge. The Union boys took off, and a race commenced that did not end until my boys had followed some of them onto a big ship docked in the harbor. Following at a more sedate pace, I took the color guard to the quarters of Commodore [Charles S.] McCauley and allowed him to change from his nightshirt to a uniform before accepting his sword. The next morning we locked up 107 prisoners, all those who refused to swear allegiance to Virginia or the Confederacy, and began to organize batteries to receive the expected Yankee visitors. Losses all around were about 23 wounded or injured—mostly from fist fights and stumbling around boats.”11
It was well that Jones organized his defenses so quickly, as Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had already dispatched Captain Hiram Pauldry’s Pawnee with a force of Marines from Washington to burn the yard. Pauldry’s arrival at Norfolk was met with enthusiastic though inaccurate fire from shore batteries. Unwilling to risk his ship and Marines against an obviously prepared defense, Pauldry returned to Washington.
According to his clerks, Mallory danced in delight when he first heard the news of the capture of the yard, complete with its large drydock, ropewalks, foundry, machine shop, boiler shop, covered ways, and overflowing store houses. Some 1,200 cannon, including over 50 of the new Dahlgren guns, and tons of munitions were among the booty. Best of all, along with several old sailing ships stored in ordinary and the yard’s steam tugs, Jones had captured the seven-year old screw frigate Merrimack. Docked for repair of its ailing steam engine, the ship had been rigged for scuttling, but the headlong charge of the Washington Rifles had captured the vessel before its captain could react.12 Mallory wasted little time in shifting war materials from the naval yard to his scattered squadrons forming at Southern ports.
Though Mallory could immediately use the materials captured at Gosport, the use of the vessels captured there was a tad more perplexing. Those ships ranged from the antique frigate United States (of War of 1812 fame) to the old 74-gun ship of the line Pennsylvania and, of course, the modern Merrimack. The non-steam warships were so vulnerable as to be useless, except as floating batteries. Even the Merrimack, despite being a first-rate steam frigate, did not stand a chance against an entire fleet and could only be used as a raider if it could escape the Union vessels soon to invest Hampton Roads. Similarly, the yard itself remained relatively useless unless the blockaders could be defeated. Mallory foresaw only one answer to this dilemma, proposing on April 26:
“… to adopt a class of vessels hitherto unknown to naval service. The perfection of a warship would doubtless be a combination of the greatest known ocean speed with the greatest known floating battery and power of resistance…”13
That answer was to build, to convert, or to acquire seagoing ironclad vessels.
Ironclads and Gunboats
Mallory’s role took on increased urgency when Davis approved a bill on May 3 that proclaimed a formal state of war existing between the Confederacy and the United States. Forced to act by this declaration, European nations officially recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent, though not as a nation in its own right. Britain’s Queen Victoria declared her nation a neutral in the conflict, though the world knew that the day’s greatest maritime and industrial state’s definition of “neutrality” could be somewhat flexible.
Mallory’s decisive actions in the first weeks of his tenure began to bear fruit during May. At Gretna, Louisiana, the first naval cannon was cast on May 4, while 2-inch wrought iron plates followed by the end of the month from a new mill in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.14 These fruits of hard Southern labor wended their way to New Orleans and the rapidly expanding naval yard in that city.15 There, two private shipbuilding firms would be authorized to build the first ironclads in the western Confederacy, the Louisiana and the Mississippi.
Slowly, but steadily, naval squadrons began to emerge from the initial chaos in Southern ports. By the end of May, some 20 gunboats, equipped with one or two guns each, patrolled the Mississippi, supported by a transport squadron of six fast steamers. Squadrons of six to ten steam vessels of varying sizes, conf
igurations, and capabilities trained at each of the major Southern ports. Additionally, state navies such as the “Mosquito Fleet” of North Carolina patrolled coastal estuaries and sounds.16 The command situation improved dramatically with the secession of Virginia when over 100 officers and nearly as many enlisted ranks decided to “go South.” Several former Union officers would quickly prove worthy of the task at hand.
On June 9, lookouts aboard the U.S.S. Massachusetts, part of the small squadron supporting Fort Pickens and the blockade of Pensacola, spotted a plume of smoke on the horizon. Investigation revealed it to be the British registered steamship Perthshire, its holds laden with cotton. After seizing the neutral ship (the first such seizure of the war) for carriage of contraband, an examination of its log and manifests shocked the American captain. The ship had unloaded six steam engines, six screws and shafts, and sundry machine parts at New Orleans a week earlier. Worse, a copy of the New Orleans Picayune dated June 6 revealed that a Confederate squadron of three steamers under the command of Commodore Franklin Buchanan had sunk or captured the two small Union warships blockading the mouth of the Mississippi.17
Unfortunately for the Confederacy, the Union Navy was growing by leaps and bounds. Welles purchased or purloined anything that floated, from trans-Atlantic steamers to ferryboats to private yachts, and the yards of the North quickly converted them to warships with the addition of weapons and naval officers. Within weeks, New Orleans was again blockaded, and the interdiction of the Southern coast as a whole stiffened day by day as the war progressed. Twice, once at Charleston and once at Mobile, small Confederate squadrons challenged the blockaders. In both cases, lives were lost and ships damaged, but the blockade remained. Until ironclads could be completed, the blockade would only strengthen.
Dixie Victorious: An Alternate history of the Civil War Page 6