Civil War Ironclads: The U.S. Navy and Industrial Mobilization

2. Forging the Fleet: Alban C. Stimers and the Passaic Project

[ 25 ] he navy’s enthusiasm for ironclads led to a construction program that dwarfed any previous shipbuilding effort. Whatever the truth of the claim that the Monitor had included at least forty “patentable contrivances ,” no one could doubt the novelty of the enterprise.1 The Navy soon discovered that its prewar apparatus for building ships could not cope with the twin challenges of wartime urgency and revolutionary technology. The sailing Navy had built its ships almost exclusively in Navy yards, where the Navy Department completely controlled the process. Ships were usually built by ones and twos, to designs prepared or approved by the Bureau of Construction, Equipment and Repairs. Even when different yards received the same plans and specifications, no one expected that their products would be identical—the vagaries of wood, a heterogeneous natural material, ensured uniqueness even in the absence of the natural human tendency to “improve” a design.2 Ship acquisition in the 1830s and 1840s involved long building times for small numbers of ships, government control of the process from design to finished product, and responsiveness to input from operators—the line officers who would use the ships. These factors encouraged the accretion of design changes. It was as true then as now that most changes to ships involve adding something—more of these, another of that, something the designer forgot, something else the prospective commanding officer saw “on my last ship”—and even when individual changes have little impact, their aggregate effect can be serious. General Inspector Alban C. Stimers and the Passaic Project ForgingtheFleet C H A P T E R 2 T The Navy’s ship acquisition process received a thorough shake-up in the 1850s with the introduction of steam propulsion. Navy yards lacked facilities and personnel to design and build steam engines, so the Navy turned to private contractors for its propulsion plants. The frigate Merrimack , a wooden steam vessel of the 1854 “Young America” program, shows how the Navy evolved a system to maximize the impact of the only element that contractors understood: money. First, contractors would receive progress payments (best considered as advances against the final contract price) at certain construction milestones. This would encourage timely fulfillment of the contract as well as relieve the contractor of some of the financial burden of building the machinery. Then, the contract included performance guarantees for the finished product. The Navy would “reserve” (i.e., withhold) final payment until the machinery performed successfully at sea. Like earlier wooden ships, the six Young America frigates differed slightly from each other. The new technology accentuated the differences because the six power plants were built by five different contractors —for practical purposes, each combination of hull and power plant was unique. The Young America frigates, with sound if not outstanding power plants, showed the effectiveness of the new system of performance guarantees. The Navy learned a lesson: although it could not control civilian contractors the way it could control its own shipyards, “recalcitrant contractors best understood the power of the purse.” It continued to refine the guarantee system in its 1857 and 1858 contracts for sloops of war.3 The Navy had internalized this lesson by the time ironclad construction began. In the absence of any in-house ability to build ironclads, the Navy had to depend upon contractors, and the contracts for the three first-generation ironclads incorporated the elements of the successful 1854 frigate and 1857 and 1858 sloop programs. They were what would now be called firm fixed price contracts, in which the contractor agreed to build a specified vessel for a specified price. During construction, the Navy would make progress payments to the contractor, withholding (reserving ) 25 percent until the ship had been tested at sea. By contract, the government had ninety days to make these tests. If the ship did not meet specifications, the Navy could hold the ship as collateral until it recov26 • Civil War Ironclads ered the money it had advanced. The government would then return the ship to the contractor.4 Defects in the 1850s acquisition system quickly showed themselves once the war began. The reservation system presupposed that the government would be able to test the ship in a timely manner; easy enough in peacetime but not always possible under wartime pressures. The Navy’s inability to complete testing prevented it from punishing Bushnell & Co. for faulty...