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3. The Navy Looks West
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
[ 45 ] he “harbor and river monitors” took their name from Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles’s letter of March 1862 advising the Navy Department ’s intent to build monitors “for harbor defence and to operate upon the Atlantic coast and in the Gulf of Mexico,” but the design for which the Navy contracted in August 1862 underwent drastic modifications that dramatically slowed the ships’ construction and raised their cost. The harbor and river monitors engendered a shipbuilding expansion program of unprecedented magnitude and complexity, a program unequaled until the twentieth century. They also captured the difficulty of managing simultaneous expansion and technological development programs. With shipyards drowning in changes, the harbor and river monitors’ contracted six months’ building time extended to over three years in the expansion yards and averaged twenty-one months even in more experienced yards. The Passaics were hardly under way when the Navy began planning the new class of monitors. Fox expected that Ericsson would design them, but the inventor was already overloaded with building six Passaics under his personal supervision, developing numerous changes to that design, and designing the Dictator and the Puritan.1 Ericsson could not do justice to his two big pets, to the Passaics, and to the harbor and river monitors all at once. Stimers’s answer was to establish an office in New York, near Ericsson ’s own, where he placed a junior engineer and some draftsmen. Ericsson would produce a general plan and Stimers’s draftsmen would fill in the details and submit each drawing to Ericsson for approval before it was issued. For the harbor and river class, Ericsson “drew up a general plan and submitted a general description,” and Stimers consulted with Ericsson and Fox to develop the specifications, including “the changes TheNavyLooksWest C H A P T E R 3 T upon which we all agreed.”2 The new procedure marked another incremental expansion of Stimers’s role in the ironclad program. Stimers discussed many of the changes with Fox. The assistant secretary emphasized speed, writing that he blamed himself for not insisting that the Passaics be capable of nine knots. Ericsson had told Fox in April 1862 that he could design a monitor that would do twelve knots. Fox took this statement as the basis for the harbor and river monitors, and his correspondence sometimes refers to them as “fast monitors.”3 With Ericsson’s general plan in hand, the Navy advertised for the ships on August 14, 1862. Fox’s desire to build monitors west of the Alleghenies had crystallized; “every shop capable of doing the work, shall have one, both here and on the western waters,” he wrote.4 Stimers’s draftsmen were to develop working plans for the class based on Ericsson’s general plan, but the Navy advertised for the ships before they had time to do so. Would-be builders had little beyond the general plan and specifications to examine, and many sent representatives to Washington or New York to ferret out enough information to be able to bid. James F. Secor wrote directly to Welles to request particulars, especially of “the difference between those referred to & the Monitors building here in New York.” Charles A. Secor was told to consult directly with Ericsson, but when he visited Lenthall and Fox, he saw at least three other builders’ representatives. A week in New York and an informal conference with Lenthall and Fox (informal enough that Fox sat on the arm of his chair with his feet on the seat) left another firm’s agent with little information.5 Under these circumstances, the contractors had to take the Navy’s advertisement at face value. It explicitly related the new vessels to the Passaics , requesting bids for vessels “similar to those building in New York, having a single revolving turret.” Builders thus expected a vessel very like the Passaic class, and their conversations with Stimers, Lenthall, Ericsson, and Fox reinforced this idea. In addition, the preprinted contract gave the new ships’ dimensions and stated that they were to be “upon the general plan of vessels now building.” Although the new ships would be longer than the Passaics (235 feet versus 200), they would have the same 46-foot beam and 12 1⁄2-foot depth (Fig. 3.1).6 The specifications shown to the bidders and the information upon which they based their offers were much closer to the Passaics than to 46 • Civil War Ironclads [44...