THE NAVY IN THE CIVIL WAR
Published
1883, 1885
------------------------
VOLUME I
THE
BLOCKADE AND THE CRUISERS
BY
JAMES RUSSEL SOLEY
PROFESSOR, U.S. NAVY
CHAPTER
VIII
CONCLUSION
As it was a
part of the object of this book to deal with the condition of the navy at the
outbreak of the war and with the preparations made by the Government to carry it
on, it will not be out of place to dwell for a moment upon certain conclusions
which may be drawn from a consideration of this branch of the subject. As
conclusions by a non-professional observer, they are submitted with hesitation
and diffidence; and as they carry with them no weight of authority, they may be
taken simply at their own worth.
A military
force, whether intended to operate on land or at sea, exists primarily for
purposes of war. Cruising on foreign stations during peace, in these days when
piracy has disappeared, is not an occupation calculated to exercise fully its
powers. Ships-of-war are no doubt of use from time to time at various points,
but their usefulness is not so great that a government whose foreign relations
are generally amicable would keep up a large establishment for this object
alone. Their real purpose is to become the national defence in time of war. As
with the ships, so with the officers; it is in war, not in peace, that the fruit
of their labors is to be gathered.
So far,
doubtless, everybody is agreed; in fact, what has been said is little more than
a truism. But the logical inference drawn from the premises is far from
commanding universal assent, and still farther from obtaining recognition in
practice. The inference is this: that the primary object for. a navy at all
times is to maintain itself, in all its branches, materiel, personnel, and
organization, in the most perfect state that is possible of readiness and
efficiency for war. This should be
the first and ever-present consideration with those who enact, who administer,
and who execute measures of naval policy; the ability to place the whole
establishment in the condition of active warlike operation, as instantaneously
and as smoothly as an engineer starts his machine.
In 1861, the
navy was by no means in a condition of readiness for war, although war was the
purpose for which it existed. In materiel, it had a few ships suitable for
cruising purposes, and it had superior ordnance but half the fleet was
antiquated, and the rest was displaying the flag on distant stations. As to the
personnel, it is useless to deny the fact that the list was heavily weighted by
the old officers at the head, who had reached their position, not because of
merit, but because of the date when they happened to enter the service; that the
middle of the list was suffering from long stagnation, and from the absence of
any inducement to effort; and finally, that the young men, who were to bear the
brunt of the work, were altogether too few for the needs of the service. It is
commonly said that the navy was on a peace footing; but if that was the case, a
complete and well-defined provision
should have been made for expansion. To speak of a “peace footing"
implies that a “war footing" is something different; and no naval
establishment can consider itself prepared for war that has not made beforehand
all the arrangements necessary to pass at once from, one to, the other.
Conceding the
necessity of a peace footing for personnel and materiel, on the score of
expense, there is no necessity for such a thing as a peace footing for
organization. The organization of a military, or naval establishment iss fixed
primarily, with a, view to efficiency in war, and only such slight modifications
are introduced in time of peace as are indispensable. So far from this being the
case in. 1861, the, whole administration was arranged, on, an exactly opposite
'basis. It was about as unfitted, for the conduct of a war as it was possible to
be. The organization was that of five bureaus, independent of each other, and
only united by a common subordination to the Head of the Department. Now,
whatever merits the system of nearly independent bureaus may have in time of
peace, it is entirely inadequate as an organization for carrying on war. The
direction of military or naval operations must be centralized, not only in the
person of the Departmental head, but in his responsible professional advisers;
and to impose this heavy burden upon Chiefs of Bureaus, whose business is with
certain specific branches of administration, is to expect men to take in at the
same moment the whole field of view and the minutest details of a single part.
It is the essence of a good organization that every branch of it should have its
own work, and should confine itself to that; and for that, and, that alone, it
should be held to the fullest responsibility. The province of a Bureau is to
furnish a gun, or a hull, or an engine, or -a crew, the best possible, that can
be obtained; and to devolve upon its Chief the duty of, planning campaigns is
only to divert him from his legitimate business, ,and would, in the nature of
things, result disastrously both to the campaign and the bureau. The general
direction of military and naval operations, if we are to accept the testimony of
the highest authorities and the evidence of the most successful campaigns, is
the work of men bred in the business. It cannot be done successfully, according
to the demands of modern warfare, by this or that officer picked up on the spur
of the moment, or by boards of officers created as the exigency arises. It must
be put in the hands of those who have spent much labor and thought in examining
and fastening upon the strong and weak points of all possible enemies; who have
made their office the repository of all possible information; who have, as
Moltke is said to have had, the whole details of campaigns in their
pigeon-holes, to be modified, month by month, as new circumstances arise; and
finally, who are studying, not gunnery, nor machinery, nor construction, nor
fleet-tactics alone, but the science of war, in all its bearings, as an actual,
living, and, above all, as a growing science. In short, the direction of naval
operations, like that of military operations, should be entrusted to a
previously-trained and previously-equipped General Staff.
Now, in 1861,
the navy had no general staff. Staff work was a branch of naval science as
uncultivated as the attack and defence by torpedoes; nor did it occur to the
authorities at the time that a staff might be created. So they set about to find
a substitute. By one of those fortunate accidents, which lead our happy-go-lucky
nation to fall on its feet, when it has come unprepared upon a crisis, a man had
about this time come forward, in connection with the relief-expeditions to Fort
Sumter, who was fitted, as nearly as any one man could be, to take charge of the
work. This man was Captain Gustavus V. Fox. It may be said in passing that an
accident of this kind cannot be counted on, nor can it justify the absence of
preparation, when preparation is so simple and easy–in war nothing must be left to chance. In addition to
his natural attainments, which were exceptional, Fox was a man of varied
experience, having passed eighteen years in the navy, during which he had served
in ships-of-war, in the Coast Survey, and in command of mail-steamers. Five
years before the war he had resigned, and had engaged in business. He therefore
started in his career as Assistant Secretary with a grasp of the situation, and
a capacity to meet it, that could be found in few men at that time, either
outside the service or in it. To say that he became Assistant Secretary does not
define his position. He was anything but an Assistant Secretary. He was really
the Chief of Staff; or rather he was the whole general staff in person. Of
course he could not-per form all the details of his work himself, and as he had
not at command a previously-trained body of staff-officers, he made judicious
use of the material at his disposal by the creation of temporary boards. One
board was organized, composed of Captains Dupont and Davis, Major Barnard of the
Engineers, and Professor Bache, to report on the coast of the enemy, its points
of access and its defenses. Here the exceptional character of the war led to the
selection of exceptional persons to give the, information necessary for
intelligent operations; for, as the enemy's coast was also our own, no one could
be better informed about its accessibility and defenses than the Superintendent
of the Coast Survey, and the engineer who had built the forts. Similarly another
board, composed of Commodores Smith and Paulding, and Captain Davis again, was
appointed to examine plans for ironclad vessels. The board modestly stated in
its report that it approached the subject "with diffidence, having no
experience and but scanty knowledge in this branch of naval architecture."
It was composed of extremely able men, and their conclusions were formed under
the circumstances with promptness and judgment. Yet the report of the board was,
only made September 16, five months after the war may be said to have begun, and
six weeks after the Act of Congress authorizing the expenditure for the purpose
of building iron-clads. A
properly-organized general staff in working operation would have had every plan
that could be presented thoroughly examined and passed upon before Congress was
even in session; and the contracts should have been ready for signature on the
day after the appropriation was made. The importance of time, even 'in a war as
loosely conducted and as long drawn out as that of the Rebellion,' has no better
illustration than in the case of the Monitor.
Congress assembled July 5; a month later it passed the appropriation; in six
weeks the board reported; three weeks afterward the contract for the Monitor
was signed; and, after all this deliberation and discussion, had the Monitor's
arrival in Hampton Roads been postponed by one single day, by the infinitesimal
space, considering the length of preparation, of twenty-four hours, she would
have found little in the shape of a fleet to need her protection.
It is a
common mistake to point to our experience in 1861 to show that a navy can be
prepared for action at short notice. It is supposed that, because the Government
came out victorious in the end in its naval operations, without having made any
preparation beforehand, it will always be safe to postpone measures looking to
war until the war is upon us—the supply of a large body of trained officers,
the selection of the ablest men for the higher grades, the establishment and
training of a general staff, the organization of reserves, the construction of
modern vessels. It is true that a partial substitute for all these requisites of
an efficient force was secured before the war was over; that in 1865 there were
7,600 officers and 50, 000 seamen in the service, that the ablest men had come
to the front, that a Chief of Staff was found in the person of the Assistant
Secretary, and that the fleet had been increased from sixty-nine vessels to six
hundred and seventy-one, two hundred and eight of which had been built or begun
while hostilities were going on. Perhaps, if our next war lasts four years, and
if all the sea-board cities are not destroyed during the first half-year, we may
do the same again. No doubt the Administration was handicapped at the outset by
its unwillingness, for reasons of public policy, to take the offensive; but even
allowing for this delay, the fact remains that in the first six months-months
during which, in modern wars, not only the most telling blows are struck, but
the issue of the war is generally decided-all that could be done with the most
strenuous efforts, and the greatest energy in the administrative head, was to
collect our fragmentary resources and to discover the men who could make them
available. Fortunately, we were fighting a Government that was destitute of a
naval force. Had our enemy been a maritime power with a navy in the most
ordinary condition of readiness, and with a competent working staff, it would
have fared ill with us in the first summer. In our next war we shall probably
have no such good fortune, and we shall learn to our cost the fatal result of
procrastination.
It is idle to
suppose, in face of the changes that mechanical science is making every year in
our daily lives, that the materials of naval warfare will remain long at any
given stage of development. Progress will go on, and the only, way in which a
naval force can be kept up which shall be equal to the barest necessities of the
country is by a constant adaptation of fleets and armaments to the new demands
of modern war. Objectors may say that if changes are so rapid, new constructions
will shortly be superseded by newer ones. But science advances, whether
Governments wish it or not; and if the navy is to be kept up at all, it must be
kept up to date. New instruments of warfare cannot be manufactured in a day; nor
can officers be expected to use them to advantage when they have had no previous
opportunity to practice their use. "Our occupation," wrote Admiral
Jurien do la Gravière, shortly after the war, "was formerly an instinct;
now it is a science." The mastery of a science requires study; but while
war is going on, men have little time to think, much less to study. They can
only use as best they may the new tools that are put into their hands, if their
government has not given them modern tools beforehand. Even admitting, though it
should never be admitted for a moment, that it is too much to ask that provision
should be made for keeping the material in the forefront of scientific progress,
there is at least a limit to the distance which it may be allowed to fall in the
rear. If we must be out of date, it is better to be four years behind the times
than to be twenty years behind.
It is hard to
see how the advocates of a policy of procrastination can reiterate the old
arguments about the success of our naval operations in the war, to justify
inaction. It was not really a naval war, for there was hardly a naval enemy.
There were three or four cruisers at sea, some of which were captured or
destroyed after having obliterated our commerce, and one of which, at least,
never was captured. There was an extemporized fleet here and there, made up of
anything that came to hand, such as drove the blockading squadron from the Head
of the Passes. There was one steam-frigate that had been raised out of the
water, and made in some sense a modern war vessel, which played havoc with her
antiquated opponents, and for a month kept the force at Hampton Roads at bay.
There were other ironclads which had been fitted out under almost every
disadvantage that circumstances could create, and which had a short career at
various points. In coping, not with this force, for it could hardly be called a
force, but with the simple obstruction of natural causes, the navy, as soon as
it obtained any suitable ships, maintained an extensive blockade, and captured
many vessels; it occupied several points on the coast, but only three of them in
the first year; it was compelled to postpone attacking others until years had
been spent in making them impregnable; and it cruised in the dark after the
commerce-destroyers, without adequate sources of intelligence or unity of
direction. In the first six months, the enemy had few powerful forts, and fewer
torpedoes; his navy hardly existed; and yet all that could be done was to effect
an entrance at Hatteras Inlet, and to establish a blockade that during this
period came near the suspicion of being fictitious, except at a few of the
principal ports. If a navy can be built to order after a war begins, how did it
happen that with unheard-of efforts there was not an adequate force afloat in
September, 1861, to enter every Southern port?
The cause did
not lie in the officers. Such faults as they had were faults, not of the men,
but of the system-a system which ignored the cardinal principle of naval policy,
that a navy must always be maintained in a condition of readiness for instant
war. Neither in its central organization, nor in the number and mode of
advancement of its personnel, nor in the character of its ships, did it approach
such a condition. Even the bravery, endurance, and energy of its officers, and
the capacity shown in its direction during the war, in the face of extraordinary
obstacles, cannot blind us to the fact that the work would have been better and
more quickly done under a better system-a system which should utilize the long
intervals of peace to prepare, with the utmost thoroughness, for the sudden
emergency of war.
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