Decision at Sea

by Symonds, Craig L.

  9. Lincoln’s “Proclamation of a Blockade,” April 19 and April 27, 1861, in Roy S. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 4:338–39, 346–47.

  10. Mallory to his wife, August 31,1862, Stephen Mallory Letters, P. K. Yonge Library, University of Florida; Mallory to Congress, May 8,1861, ORN, series II, 1:742.

  11. John M. Brooke, “The Plan and Construction of the Merrimac” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York: Century, 1887–89), 1:715–16 (hereafter B&L); John L. Porter, untitled essay, B&L, 1:716–17; J. Thomas Scharf, The Confederate States Navy (New York: Rogers & Sherwood, 1887), 1:145–47. See also Craig L. Symonds and Harold Holzer, “Who Designed the CSS Virginia,” Military History Quarterly, Fall 2003, 6–14.

  12. Investigation of the Navy Department, February 26,1863, ORN, series II, 1:783–84; Scharf, Confederate States Navy, 1:147.

  13. John Quarstein, CSS Virginia: Mistress of Hampton Roads (Appomattox: H. E. Howard, 2000), 36–39; Scott Nelson, Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 39.

  14. Mallory to Conrad, May 8,1861, ORN, series II, 1:742; Quarstein, CSS Virginia, 36; Charleston Mercury, October 30, 1861.

  15. John Niven, Gideon Welles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 365–66.

  16. Bushnell to Welles, March 9,1877, B&L, 1:748.

  17. Ibid.; Robert Schneller, Quest for Victory: A Biography of Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 183–89.

  18. Bushnell to Welles, March 9,1877, in B&L, 1:748.

  19. Ibid., 749.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Smith to Worden, January 11,1862, ORN, series I, 6:515; Gideon Welles, ”The Building of the Monitor,” B&L, 1:731n; Worden to Smith, January 13, 1861, ORN, I, 6:516.

  22. Keeler to his wife, February 28,1862, in Daly, Aboard the USS Monitor, 18.

  23. Ibid.; George Geer to his wife, March 2,1862, in William Marvel, ed., The Monitor Chronicles (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 20.

  24. Keeler to wife, serial letter dated March 6, 1862, in Daly, Aboard the USS Monitor, 27.

  25. Davis, Duel Between the First Ironclads, 49.

  26. Geer to his wife, March 2,1862, in Marvel, The Monitor Chronicles, 21.

  27. John Ericsson, ”The Building of the Monitor,” B&L, 1:741; Keeler to his wife, serial letter dated March 6,1862, in Daly, Aboard the USS Monitor, 27–28.

  28. Samuel Greene, ”In the Monitor Turret,” B&L, 1:721; Keeler to his wife, March 6, 1862, in Daly, Aboard the USS Monitor, 28–30.

  29. Louis N. Stodder (as told to Albert Stephens Crockett), ”Aboard the U.S.S. Monitor,” Civil War Times Illustrated 1 (1963): 32; Greene, ”In the Monitor Turret,” 1:721; Keeler to his wife, serial letter dated March 6,1862, in Daly, Aboard the USS Monitor, 30–31.

  30. H. Ashton Ramsay, ”The Most Famous of Sea Duels,” Harper’s Weekly, February 10, 1912, 11; E. A. Jack, Memoirs ofE. A. Jack (White Stone, VA: Brandywine Publishers, 1998), 14.

  31. Thomas O. Selfridge, Memoirs of Thomas O. Selfridge, Jr. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Inc., 1924; reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987), 44.

  32. [Richard Curtis], History of the Famous Battle Between the Iron–Clad Merrimac, C.S.N., and the Iron–Clad Monitor and the Cumberland and Congress of the U.S. Navy (Hampton, VA: Houston Printing and Publishing House, 1957), 5; Jack, Memoirs, 14; Symonds, Confederate Admiral, 163.

  33. [Curtis], History, 8.

  34. Selfridge, Memoirs, 50.

  35. Morris to Radford, March 9,1862, and Kennison to Welles, March 18, 1862, both in ORN, series I, 7:721, 722; Symonds, Confederate Admiral, 164; Selfridge, Memoirs, 58.

  36. Davis, Duel Between the First Ironclads, 99–100.

  37. William H. Parker, Recollections of a Naval Officer, ed. Craig L. Symonds (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1985), 277; Davis, Duel Between the First Ironclads, 100.

  38. John R. Eggleston, “Narrative of the Battle,” Southern Historical Society Proceedings 41 (1916):173.

  39. Ramsay, ”The Most Famous of Sea Duels,” 12.

  40. John Taylor Wood, ”The First Fight of Iron–Clads,” B&L, 1:700.

  41. Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, ed. Howard K. Beale (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 1:62–64.

  42. McClellan to Wool, March 9,1862, in Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), 199.

  43. Davis, Duel Between the First Ironclads, 116; Symonds, Confederate Admiral, 170.

  44. An excerpt of Catesby Jones’s report is in Buchanan to Mallory, March 27, 1862, ORN, I, 7:46.

  45. Welles to Marston, March 5 and 7, 1862, and Van Brundt to Welles, March 10, 1862, all in ORN, series I, 6:681, 687, 7:11.

  46. Keeler to wife, serial letter dated March 6, 1862, in Daly, Aboard the USS Monitor, 32–33.

  47. Ibid.

  48. Welles, ”The Building of the Monitor,” 1:734; Greene, ”In the Monitor Turret,” 1:722. Ericsson’s original plan called for a viewing slit only 5/8 inch wide, but it was enlarged to 7/8 inch during construction. I am indebted to Francis J. DuCoin of Stuart, Florida, for information about the design of the Monitor’s pilothouse.

  49. Keeler to his wife, serial letter dated March 6,1862, in Daly, Aboard the USS Monitor, 34.

  50. Ibid.; Greene, “In the Monitor Turret,” 722; Quarstein, CSS Virginia, 108.

  51. Davis, Duel Between Ironclads, 122; Greene, “In the Monitor Turret,” 1:723.

  52. E. V. White, The First Iron–Clad Engagement in the World (New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1906), 6; Ramsay, “The Most Famous of Sea Duels,” 12.

  53. Greene, “In the Monitor Turret,” 1:725.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Ibid.

  56. Wood, “The First Fight of Iron–Clads,” 1:703.

  57. Ramsay, “The Most Famous of Sea Duels,” 12.

  58. [Curtis], History, 12.

  59. Greene, “In the Monitor Turret,” 1:725.

  60. Van Brunt to Welles, March 10,1862, ORN, series I, 7:11.

  61. Wood, “The First Fight of Iron–Clads,” 1:701.

  62. Keeler to his wife, serial letter dated March 6,1862, in Daly, Aboard the USS Monitor, 38.

  63. Ibid.

  64. Davis, Duel Between the First Ironclads, 133.

  65. Jack, Memoirs, 16.

  66. Keeler to his wife, March 30,1862, Daly, Aboard the USS Monitor, 63.

  67. James Tertius deKay, Monitor: The Story of the Legendary Civil War Ironclad and the Man Whose Invention Changed the Course of History (New York: Walker and Co., 1997), 227.

  68. Nathaniel Hawthorne, ”Chiefly About War Matters,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1862, 43–62.

  PART THREE: THE BATTLE OF MANILA BAY

  1. Quoted in John D. Hayes and John B. Hattendorf, eds., The Writings of Stephen B. Luce (Newport, RI: Naval War College, 1975), 1. The Oscar Wilde story was first published in 1890, the same year that Mahan published his influential book.

  2. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1890).

  3. Lt. C. G. Calkins, USN, “The Naval Battle of Manila Bay,” in The American–Spanish War: A History by the War Leaders (Norwich, CT: Charles C. Haskell & Son, 1899), 110; Cdr. Nathan Sargent, USN, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Foundation, 1947), 23; George Dewey, Autobiography of George Dewey, Admiral of the Navy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 207; Joseph L. Stickney, ”With Dewey at Manila,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1899, 489.

  4. John M. Ellicott, ”The Naval Battle of Manila Bay,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, September 1900, 499.

  5. Dewey, Autobiography, 199.

  6. Ibid., 208.

  7. Wayne Longnecker to his brother, July 31,1898, “Wayne [Longnecker], United States Navy, Vessels A–O, USS Olympia,” Spanish–American Wa
r Survey Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute (USAMHI), Carlisle, PA; Ellicott, “The Naval Battle of Manila,” 499; Stickney, “With Dewey at Manila,” 478; Calkins, “The Naval Battle of Manila Bay,” 111; Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 33.

  8. Calkins, “The Naval Battle of Manila Bay,” 113; Longnecker to his brother, July 31,1898, USAMHI.

  9. Dewey, Autobiography, 211; Stickney, “With Dewey at Manila,” 479.

  10. The Ostend Manifesto of October 18,1854, is in House Exec. Doc. 93 (33rd Cong., 2nd sess.), 127–32; Louis A. Perez, The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Car olina Press, 1998), 5.

  11. Richard H. Bradford, The Virginius Affair (Boulder: Colorado Associate University Press, 1980). Admiral David Dixon Porter’s 1874 report on the state of the Navy declared that most of the nation’s monitors ”can never be of the least use in peace or war, unless sunk as obstructions to channels.”

  12. Perez, The War of 1898, 12–24.

  13. The New York World, May 17,1896, quoted in Harold U. Faulkner, Politics, Reform, and Expansion (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 226.

  14. Ivan Musicant, Empire by Default: The Spanish–American War and the Dawn of the American Century (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 38–124; David Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1981), 1–57.

  15. Margaret Leech, In the Days of McKinley (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 161–65.

  16. Detailed diagrams of the Maine’s design are in Charles D. Sigsbee, “Personal Narrative of the ’Maine,’” Part II, Century, December 1898, 250–51.

  17. Sigsbee, ”Personal Narrative,” Part I, Century, November 1898, 84; Musicant, Empire by Default, 126, 129.

  18. Quoted in Musicant, Empire by Default, 132–33.

  19. Ibid., 165.

  20. Hyman G. Rickover, How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed (Washington, DC: Naval History Division, 1976), 91.

  21. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, 168; Sandburg is quoted in Perez, The War of 1898, 26. Italics in original.

  22. See Table 1 in Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Gray Steel and Blue Water Navy: The Formative Years of America’s Military-Industrial Complex, 1881–1917 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979), 222; Leech, In the Days of McKinley, 169.

  23. Leech, In the Days of McKinley, 181–90.

  24. Long to Dewey, April 24,1898, in Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 22n.

  25. See diary entries of January 11, February 25, and February 26 in The Journal of John D. Long, ed. by Margaret Long (Rindge, NH: Richard R. Smith, 1956), 212–13, 216–17.

  26. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 210–11.

  27. Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 8.

  28. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898, 75–76. See also John A. S. Grenville, “American Preparations for War with Spain, 1896–1898,” Journal of American Studies, April 1968,33–47.

  29. Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 5.

  30. Ibid., 11.

  31. Musicant, Empire by Default, 198–99; Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 10; Dewey, Autobiography, 191.

  32. Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 10.

  33. Calkins, “The Naval Battle of Manila Bay,” 105; Stickney, “With Dewey at Manila,” 482.

  34. Black to Dewey, April 24,1898, in Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 19n–20n.

  35. Dewey, Autobiography, 170.

  36. Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 19; Calkins, “The Naval Battle of Manila Bay,” 107; Wayne Longnecker to his brother, July 31, 1898, USAMHI.

  37. Calkins, “The Naval Battle of Manila Bay,” 106; Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 30; Dewey, Autobiography, 230; Long to Dewey, April 24, 1898, in Sargent, 22n.

  38. Quoted in Ernest May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961), 86.

  39. Archbishop Davila’s broadside is printed in Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 30–31, n. 7.

  40. Montojo to the commandant at Cavite, April 24, 1898, in Adelbert Dewey, The Life and Letters of Admiral Dewey (New York: Woolfall Company, 1899), 274.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Ibid.

  43. Musicant, Empire by Default, 207; Ellicott, ”The Defenses of Mobile Bay,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, June 1900, 279–85; Montojo’s report, printed in Dewey, Life and Letters, 285.

  44. Montojo’s report, printed in Dewey, Life and Letters, 287.

  45. Calkins, “The Naval Battle of Manila Bay,” 114.

  46. Dewey, Autobiography, 212; Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 35.

  47. Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 36; Dewey, Autobiography, 214; Charles H. Twitchell, quoted in Dewey, Life and Letters, 373.

  48. Dewey, Autobiography, 214; Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 36; Twitchell in Dewey, Life and Letters, 373.

  49. Calkins, ”The Naval Battle of Manila Bay,” 116; George P. Colvocoresses to Dewey, May 3,1898, in Dewey, Life and Letters, 367.

  50. Calkins, ”The Naval Battle of Manila Bay,” 115–16,125; Bradley A. Fiske, ”Why We Won at Manila,” Century, November 1898,131–32. The description of loading and firing during the battle is from Fiske, who was a gunnery officer on the Petrel during the fight.

  51. Stickney, ”With Dewey at Manila,” 38; Hugh Rodman, Yarns of a Kentucky Admiral (Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1928), 78.

  52. Ellicott, ”The Naval Battle of Manila,” 505; Ensign W. Pitt Scott, quoted in Louis Stanley, The Life of Admiral Dewey (Philadelphia: P. W. Zingler & Co., 1899), 138; Twitchell quoted in Dewey, Life and Letters, 373–74; Rodman, Yarns of a Kentucky Admiral, 243–44.

  53. Stickney, “With Dewey at Manila,” 476.

  54. Calkins, “The Naval Battle of Manila,” 117; Dewey, Autobiography, 220; Ellicott, “The Naval Battle of Manila,” 503.

  55. Dewey, Autobiography, 218.

  56. Stickney, “With Dewey at Manila,” 476–77.

  57. Ibid.; Dewey, Autobiography, 218–19.

  58. Calkins, “The Naval Battle of Manila,” 116; Dewey, Autobiography, 221; Ellicott, “The Naval Battle of Manila,” 504–5; Stickney, “With Dewey at Manila,” 480.

  59. Calkins, “The Naval Battle of Manila,” 118.

  60. Ibid., 119; Dewey, Autobiography, 221.

  61. Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 40; Ellicott, “The Naval Battle of Manila,” 511.

  62. ”Calkins, ”The Naval Battle of Manila,” 120.

  63. Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 42–43.

  64. Dewey to Long, May 1, 1898, in Ibid., 44n; see also 54.

  65. Quoted in May, Imperial Democracy, 246.

  66. Dewey, Autobiography, 234; Dewey to his brother, October 6,1898, in Dewey, Life and Letters, 413.

  67. Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign, 93.

  68. Musicant, Empire by Default, 591.

  69. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898, 257–69; French Ensor Chadwick, The Relations of the United States and Spain: The Spanish–American War (New York: Russell & Russell, 1919), 2:142–77.

  70. Musicant, Empire by Default, 198.

  71. Brian Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000), 20–22.

  72. Ibid., 22.

  73. Henry Corbin to Wesley Merritt, August 13,1898, quoted in Linn, The Philippine War, 26.

  74. Long diary entry, November 4,1898, The Journal of John D. Long, 229.

  75. U.S. State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States (1898), 937–38; Musicant, Empire by Default, 602–4; Trask, The War with Spain in 1898, 441.

  76. Linn, The Philippine War, 31.

  77. McKinley is quoted in Perez, The War of 1898, 118.

  78. Linn, The Philippine War, 315.

  79. Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the R
ise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1902), 123–24. See also Glenn A. May, “Why the United States Won the Philippine–American War, 1899–1902,” Pacific Historical Review 52 (1983): 353–77.

  80. Linn, The Philippine War, 315–17.

  81. Ibid., 31; Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace, 124–25.

  82. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898, ix; Charles M. Thompson, History of the United States (Chicago: B. H. Sanborn, 1922), 474. Proctor is quoted in H. Wayne Morgan, America’s Road to Empire: The War in Spain and Overseas Expansion (New York: John Wiley, 1965), 83; Frank Prebery, “To Lands Across the Sea,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, May 1899, 1; Henry Cabot Lodge, “The Spanish War,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, February 1899,447; Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden,” McClure’s, February 1899, 12.

  83. Quoted in Warren Zimmerman, First Great Triumph (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002), 327.

  84. Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936), 317–26. As Pratt wrote: ”The annexation of Hawaii was a by–product of the war with Spain” (317).

  85. David W. Taylor, ”Our New Battleships and Armoured Cruisers,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, December 1900, 593.

  86. London Times, May 2,1898, quoted in May, Imperial Democracy, 221.

  PART FOUR: THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY

  1. Samuel Eliot Morison, Coral Sea, Midway, and Submarine Action (May 1942–August 1942) (Boston: Little, Brown, 1949), 52–56; E. B. Potter and Chester Nimitz, eds., Sea Power: A Naval History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice–Hall, Inc., 1960), 662–68; John B. Lundstrom, The First Team: Pacific Naval Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1984), 155–306.

  2. Gordon W. Prange with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, Miracle at Midway (New York: McGraw–Hill Book Company, 1982), 111; interview of Captain Joseph J. Rochefort, USN (ret), by Etta–Belle Kitchen, October 5,1969, U.S. Naval Institute Oral History Collection, Special Collections, Nimitz Library, U.S. Naval Academy, 1:225.

  3. Prange, Miracle at Midway, 111; Joseph J. Rochefort interview, October 5, 1969, 1:225.