Lincoln's Hand in Naval Matters

Professor of History and English at the U.S. Naval Academy, Richard West's most recent bookis Mr. Lincoln's Navy, publishedlastyear. He has also written biographies of Gideon Welles and David Dixon Porter. Lincoln's Hand in Naval Matters RICHARD S. WEST, JR. rr was not far from the White House to the Navy Department. Often the President strolled over informally, shod in carpet slippers, with a shawl draped about bis angular shoulders. After pattering up the stairs to the second floor, he would get only as far as the Chief Clerk's office before energetic Assistant Secretary Gustavus V. Fox would bustle in to greet him, followed by the austere, more deliberate Secretary Gideon Welles. Sometimes Mr. Lincoln simply wanted to reassure himself that naval matters were proceeding satisfactorily. He was no expert on the navy. As a young man he had drifted down the Mississippi River on a flatboat. As a congressman he had probably made a tourist jaunt to the Washington Navy Yard. That would be the limit of his maritime experience before he became President. "The President came into Fox's room while I was there," Admiral Dahlgren once recorded, and sat some time, talking generally of matters----- Abe was in good humor, "and at leaving said, "Well, I will go home; I had no business here; but as the lawyer said, I had none anywhere else.' " Sometimes, as in the spring of 1863 when the amphibian campaigns at Vicksburg and Charleston had been long hanging in the balance , he was visibly anxious. Dahlgren found the gaunt visitor in the Chief Clerk's room on March 29, 1863. "He looks thin and badly, and is very nervous, complained of everything. They were doing nothing at Vicksburg or Charleston. Du Pont was asking for one iron-clad after another , as fast as they were built. He said the canal at Vicksburg was of no account, and wondered that a sensible man would do it. I tried my hand at consolation without much avail. He thought the favorable state of pubHe expectation would pass away before anything was done. Then levelled a couple of jokes at the doings at Vicksburg and Charleston. Poor gentleman !" 175 176 RICHARD S. WEST, JR. Lincoln's influence upon naval events was not limited to informal calls at the navy's headquarters. Yet, contrary to his daily practice in dealing with the War Department, he held to a minimum any direct personal intervention in naval matters. To some extent the disparity in the amounts of presidential attention devoted to the two services may be accounted for by the early mishaps of the Army of the Potomac, the extreme age of General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, and the ignorance and inefficiency of Secretary Simon Cameron. Or it may possibly have been due to the fact that testy old Gideon Welles resented outside interference in his Navy Department. At the outset of the war Lincoln had, in his own phrase, "burned his fingers" when (listening to Secretary of State William H. Seward and the latter's fast-talking young friends Captain Montgomery C. Meigs of the army and Lieutenant David D. Porter of the navy) he had presumed, without Secretary Welles's knowledge, to order the U.S.S. "Powhatan" to proceed upon Seward's secret mission to Fort Pickens. This presidential indiscretion, as it later transpired, had seriously interfered with the Navy Department's effort to relieve Fort Sumter. When the resultant mix-up was clarified, Lincoln made his peace with the Naval Secretary by promising never again to interfere in naval affairs behind the Secretary's back—and Lincoln kept that promise. As a matter of course, the President was consulted when important naval operations were undertaken. Naval couriers from the fighting fronts were always promptly taken to the White House so that the President might receive the latest intelligence. Sometimes on the basis of these eyewitness reports Lincoln assumed the initiative in organizing a new campaign . This was true of the joint army-navy expedition to New Orleans. On November 12, 1861, Commander D. D. Porter, just in from the blockade , gave the Chief Executive a graphic account of the situation...