Never Call Retreat (21 page)

To be sure, all of the damage to turrets, gun carriages, port stoppers, side armor, and so on could be repaired in a few days, but there was nothing to show that the story would not be repeated in the next engagement. Indeed, the story would probably be worse because if the monitors pushed on to really close range they would reach the torpedoes and obstructions that clogged the ship channel, and would have to try to remove these things under a heavier fire than they had yet taken. Worst of all, they could not maintain anything approaching the volume of fire the Confederate gunners could inflict on them: for the job ahead of them their hitting power obviously was inadequate. Captain John Rodgers of
Weehawken
put it accurately in a letter to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles: "The punishment which the monitors are able to stand is wonderful, but it cannot be denied that their gun gear is more liable to accident than was foreseen. Battles are won by two qualities, ability to endure and ability to injure. The first we possess to an unrivalled degree—the latter one more sparingly."
¹¹

It was the inability to injure that was decisive. The monitors carried the heaviest guns yet put into modern battle action, but they did not have many of them and they could not fire them very often. In the entire battle they got off about 140 shots, hitting thirty or forty times; Beauregard's gunners had fired more than 2200, scoring an estimated 440 hits. Sumter had been damaged, but working details were busy all night and by morning the fort was just about as strong as ever. The Confederates had lost four men killed and ten wounded, and although the navy's casualty list (incurred mostly on
Keokuk)
came to no more than one man dead and twenty-two wounded it was clear that Beauregard could play this kind of game all year. The monitor captains concluded almost unanimously that the percentage here was all against the fleet.
¹²

It would have been hard to arrange a battle more likely to cause misunderstanding in Washington. From the beginning, President Lincoln had felt that Du Pont was unenthusiastic and slow, and the man's constant request for more ships sounded unpleasantly like McClellan asking for more troops; the President told Secretary Welles before the battle that he thought Du Pont and McClellan were much alike and said that he "was prepared for a repulse at Charleston." Now all he could see was that the admiral had thrown in his hand after a short fight which killed hardly any sailors and did the ships little harm, and his faith in Admiral Du Pont declined. The Navy Department sent Chief Engineer Alban C. Stimers down to examine the ironclads, and Stimers said he was "agreeably disappointed" to find that neither the side armor nor the turrets of the monitors had been penetrated. He felt that the harbor obstructions could be removed if the fleet really tried and concluded that "the monitor vessels still retain sufficient enduring powers to enable them to pass all the forts and batteries."

Du Pont formally accused Stimers of falsehood and conduct unbecoming an officer, but it did no good; Secretary Welles chided Du Pont for it, and went on to express his regret that Du Pont had abandoned, "after a single brief effort, a purpose that the nation had deeply at heart." President Lincoln sent down a curt order: Du Pont was to hold his position inside the bar near Charleston, if he had left that position he was to return to it at once, and he was not to let Beauregard build any more batteries on Morris Island, a sand-spit south of the harbor entrance. The President added: "I do not, herein, order you to renew the general attack. That is to depend on your discretion, or a further order."
¹⁸

All of this was rather unfair, for Du Pont was a good man who had done his best; handicapped because he served when the navy was embracing machinery, the embrace being so new that keeping the machinery from harm could seem more important than making the fullest use of it. Perhaps what was chiefly bothering the President was a thought old Admiral Farragut had voiced earlier in the winter. Farragut told David Strother that he believed ironclad ships and rifled guns were going to ruin the fighting forces. In the old days, said Farragut, wooden walls and smoothbore guns at close range were good enough, and men went in and fought to the finish. Nowadays what men fought with seemed to mean more than the men themselves; the old fighting spirit was bound to decline once it was permissible to shirk a fight because one did not have enough armor or modern rifles. . . . Admiral Du Pont patched up his monitors, President Lincoln and Secretary Welles began to think about a replacement, and
Harper's Weekly
deplored the failure to take Charleston and concluded simply: "The most obvious of all inferences is that it insures the indefinite prolongation of the war."
¹
*

2. Men Trained for Command

APPRAISING THE STATE of the Union from the American Legation in London, Charles Francis Adams felt that it was time to think about getting another President. It seemed to him this spring that the United States government was like a big machine running on its own momentum, and to find the right man for Mr. Lincoln's place was infinitely important. On the whole, Mr. Adams felt that the next President probably ought to be a general, because generals were properly trained for command; at the same time, no general really looked like a presidential candidate because of course the man chosen ought to be a
victorious
general and the North did not seem to have any of these. National prestige was gone, and "it needs some extraordinary genius to bring it back."

Musing thus, Mr. Adams went on to remark that neither North nor South had any real advantage in the matter of leadership. Presidents and generals on both sides were about equal and about average.

"Jefferson Davis is perhaps in some respects superior to our President," wrote the American minister to England. "But after all, he is not a superior man. His generals are respectable in the field, but they seem to be wholly without marking qualities. There is not a ray visible of Washington or even of Jackson, much less of Napoleon or Wellington. I fear the same thing may be said of us."

Mr. Adams put these reflections in a letter to his friend Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and he drew Dana's attention to "the singular effect produced upon the people of England" by the American Civil War.

"The aristocracy are decidedly against the continuance of the Union," he wrote. "The crown and the people favor it. The commercial classes are in the mean time putting in for the profits at any risk. The danger of a collision between the countries springs mainly from the action of these last."
¹

Dana could understand this point. He himself was famous because he wrote one of America's enduring literary classics,
Two Years Before the Mast,
and the ship
Alert
which his book made forever legendary had some months earlier been captured and burned by C.S.S.
Alabama,
a square-rigged, steam-powered cruiser built, armed and largely manned at Liverpool in what Mr. Adams considered a gross violation of British neutrality. Lord Russell, at the Foreign Office, had never publicly admitted that Mr. Adams' complaints had any substance. Still,
Alabama's
exploits this spring were becoming famous, and Lord Russell privately confessed that the spectacle of that cruiser "roaming the ocean with English guns and English sailors to burn, sink and destroy the ships of a friendly nation is a scandal and a reproach."
²

The danger of a collision looked bigger than it really was.
Alabama
was a spectacular irritant but not much more than that, and Lord Lyons, the British minister in Washington, reported that although the Americans were exasperated their government did seem anxious to keep the peace; in this difficult spring he himself was "getting on pretty well again with Mr. Seward," which was an encouraging sign. He would have agreed with Mr. Adams that the desire of the commercial classes to make money was the chief problem, and he thought it would be well if London, quietly and without appearing to yield to threats, could find some way to keep British shipyards from building any more warships for the Confederacy. He warned that a good many American naval officers would actively welcome a war with Great Britain; then they could go commerce raiding themselves, winning much prize money and escaping the dull monotony of endless service on the blockading squadrons.

This feeling did exist, and it could easily get entangled with the avarice of the commercial classes mentioned by Mr. Adams. Lord Lyons' biggest single worry this winter had been a case involving both of these factors-—the seizure by a United States cruiser of the British merchant ship
Peterhoff,
bound from England for the Mexican port of Matamoros on a wholly legitimate errand.

Matamoros lay on the Mexican side of the mouth of the Rio Grande, across from the Confederate port of Brownsville, Texas. Brownsville of course was under blockade, and Matamoros as a neutral port was not; and Matamoros had suddenly developed a trade ever so much greater than anything it ever had in time of peace, the inescapable deduction being that goods unloaded at Matamoros were quickly ferried across the river to Brownsville and sent on to Confederate consumers.
Peterhoff
had a mixed cargo worth 130,000 pounds sterling consigned to Mexican importers; and on February 25, 1863, she was stopped by U.S.S.
Vanderbilt
near the Virgin Islands and sent into Key West as a prize.

The case was interesting for several reasons.
Peterhoff
was seized hundreds of miles from the blockade area; furthermore, the seizure had been ordered by one American naval officer who unquestionably would welcome a war with Great Britain, Captain Charles Wilkes, the headstrong man who had brought America and England to the edge of war more than a year earlier by stopping the British steamer
Trent
in order to remove the Confederate commissioners, James Mason and John Slidell. On top of this, it developed that a large part of the trade that was moving into Matamoros these days was not British at all but came straight from New York in American-flag ships. A quick check showed that in the last four months, fifty-nine vessels bound for Matamoros had cleared from New York, carrying American-made goods that had undoubtedly been ordered by Secessionists. As Lord Russell was quick to point out, for all anyone knew the British goods were consumed in Mexico while the American goods went on into the Confederacy. Secretary Seward found the case embarrassing.

It was also dangerous, and Lord Lyons frankly warned Secretary Seward that he would consider one more seizure like this "little less than a calamity." Fortunately, the Supreme Court settled the matter by ruling that
Peterhoff’s
detention was unwarranted. Admitting that Matamoros represented a serious leak in the blockade, the court held that the United States Navy could not legally do anything about it; "trade from London to Matamoros, even with intent to supply from Matamoros goods to Texas, violated no blockade and could not be declared unlawful." The tension was eased. Secretary Welles recalled Captain Wilkes for other duty, writing that the man had been sent to the West Indies to try to catch the
Alabama
and adding: "In this he totally failed, while zealous to catch blockade-runners and get prize money."
⁸

Neither
Alabama
nor
Peterhoff,
then, would cause a war; yet the situation remained unquiet. The United States and the Southern Confederacy were carrying on an important fraction of their struggle on British soil, and there was always the danger that this struggle would some day produce something too big for statesmen to handle. A case in point was the activity of James D. Bulloch, correctly described by Confederate Secretary Mallory as "an intelligent and reliable officer of our Navy," who had induced the Laird shipyard, at Birkenhead, to build two ironclad rams for the Confederate service. Construction of these ships was well along: Bulloch had hoped that they could be delivered some time in the spring of 1863, but there had been delays and the ships would not be ready until late summer or early fall. If they ever got into Confederate hands all former troubles would look small, because these were regular battleships, heavily armed and armored, much more seaworthy than the sluggish monitors and far more powerful than any wooden warships afloat. Commander Bulloch believed that with them the Confederacy could break the blockade all along the Atlantic coast, and Washington was inclined to agree. Secretary Seward told Mr. Adams that the United States would probably consider their delivery cause for war with Great Britain. He also pointed out that Congress had just given President Lincoln authority to commission privateers in case of trouble.

The whole affair was intricate. Everyone knew that the rams were being built but it was hard to prove whom they were being built for because Commander Bulloch had covered his tracks with much ingenuity. He had a deal with a French firm, Messrs. Bravay of Paris, whereby Bravay appeared as the contracting party; Laird was building the rams for Bravay, who in turn was acting for the Viceroy of Egypt, and at the moment the ships bore Turkish names,
El Tousson
and
El Mounassir.
Unless Mr. Adams could offer clear proof that the work was really being done for the Confederacy the British government could not legally interfere. Thomas Haines Dudley, American consul at Liverpool, had a small army of spies at work and was collecting innumerable affidavits, and in the end he might be able to prove something. The fact that the British shipping community would look with horror on any prospect of a repetition of American privateering, 1812 style, would doubtless render his proofs more persuasive.
⁴

For in the long run the British government would follow a policy of self-interest; a fact which was most discouraging to Henry Hotze, who was in England as a combined purchasing agent and propagandist for the Confederacy, and who had about concluded that Lord Russell would never help the Confederacy. The ruling Conservative party, Hotze wrote, was "all but unanimous in our favor," but that did little good because this party "has scarcely a distinctive principle except the traditional loyalty to the person of the sovereign, and as the Queen desires peace and quiet in her mourning" (Prince Albert had died a few months earlier) "and is besides a sympathizer with the North, that party is paralyzed in American policy." There had been, to be sure, a fluttering of the pulse in the previous autumn, when William E. Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, made an indiscreet speech confessing that the Confederates had created a nation and asserting that "we may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern states so far as regards their separation from the North." This looked briefly like a sure forecast of recognition, but it was not: Lord Russell assured Mr. Adams that the cabinet disavowed the speech and that no change in policy was to be anticipated; and shortly afterward the Richmond
Whig
wrote bitterly about "the grovelling and cold-blooded selfishness of the British Ministry toward the Confederate States."
⁸