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[ 269 ] While there is a mountain of literature on the Civil War and a foothill on the naval war, a large fraction of the naval works are operationally oriented. A good-sized body of literature of varying quality deals with the ships themselves, and a smaller number of authors have written on the strategic and political aspects of the naval struggle and on naval administration. Very little work has been done on the acquisition and logistics systems that provided the Navy with ships and kept them at sea, and no studies exist on the industrial effort spawned by the Navy’s urgent need for ironclads. To examine the subject of naval industrial mobilization, one must approach its literature from several aspects ; at a minimum, naval, biographical, industrial, and technological. The Monitor herself has fascinated writers since the Battle of Hampton Roads in 1862. The “monitor myth” tells how the brilliant inventor John Ericsson persuaded mossbacked naval officers to try his revolutionary armored warship . After a Herculean effort, his Monitor ventured forth to battle, miraculously surviving a gale on her way. Arriving in the nick of time, the “heroic little cheesebox on a raft” met the Confederate behemoth Merrimack in a seagoing version of David and Goliath, with the Union at stake. In a happy ending, the Navy forsook its earlier skepticism, built a fleet of Monitors and won the war with them. A more accurate account, less frequently encountered, is no less interesting . Worthwhile examinations of the ship’s inception and construction include William N. Still’s Monitor Builders: A Historical Study of the Principal Firms and Individuals Involved in the Construction of USS Monitor (Washington , D.C.: National Park Service, 1988) and Stephen C. Thompson’s thesis and article, “The Design and Construction of USS Monitor” (Warship International 27, no. 3 [1990]). A more culturally oriented discussion of the vessel and her context is David A. Mindell’s War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Many published works briefly address the later monitor-building program in a few sentences or paragraphs. Such books almost always mention the “light E s s a y o n S o u r c e s draft monitor fiasco,” generally assigning the role of goat to Stimers, with more or less attention to the parts played by Fox, Ericsson and the bureau chiefs. Excepting Donald L. Canney’s recent Lincoln’s Navy: The Ships, Men and Organization , 1861–65 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1998), which gives a glimpse of the process by which ships were produced, nothing has been written about naval industrial mobilization. The impact of such innovations as centralized configuration control, integrated logistics support, and “project of- fice” organization has not been explored, nor have the ways in which economic and industrial conditions affected the Navy’s ironclad building. Naval logistics have been similarly neglected. Robert M. Browning Jr.’s From Cape Charles to Cape Fear: The North Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the Civil War (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993) is among the few published works to examine naval logistics, but Browning’s very valuable work stresses operational logistics rather than acquisition. A shorter, more narrowly focused study of ironclad logistics matters is Dana M. Wegner’s article on the Port Royal Working Parties (“The Port Royal Working Parties,” Civil War Times Illustrated 15, no. 8 [December 1976]). Of the major players in the Navy’s industrial mobilization, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles has received the most attention. The “standard” biography is John Niven’s 1973 Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); among older works is Richard S. West Jr.’s Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s Navy Department (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). Both books understandably focus more on the secretary himself and upon the politics and strategy of the war than on the mobilization effort. William J. Sullivan ’s “Gustavus Vasa Fox and Naval Administration” (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1977) on Gustavus Fox’s administration of the Navy Department is the only lengthy work on this complex figure. Sullivan brings out much of the friction that affected the construction program, but some of his conclusions are questionable. John D. Hayes’s article, “Captain Fox—He Is the Navy Department” (United States Naval Institute Proceedings 91, no. 9 [September 1965]) ably sets out the views of the “Fox as Chief of Naval Operations” school, but its discussion of monitor...

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