From the point of view of a naval seaman it was a far cry from the first war in defence of the nation’s life to the last one—so far, indeed, that all the progress made in the construction of ships of war from the time when men first went afloat to fight, down to the war of the Revolution, had not equalled that made in the eighty odd years that elapsed between, say, the battle of Lake Champlain, which was the most important battle afloat in the Revolution, and that of Hampton Roads, which was first in the Civil War.

Consider the forces that Arnold mustered against the whelming odds under the ambitious Carleton. Though two of the vessels were dignified with the name of schooner and one was called a sloop, the flagship of the squadron was a galley managed by means of oars, and the fleet as a whole, including the Royal Savage, was inferior to an equal number of the galleys with which the Romans, in the days of Carthage, held sway over the Mediterranean.

And then consider the ships that in 1860 graced the register of the American navy—ships that with the aid of steam could hold their own against wind and tide, and that carried guns of so large a calibre that any but the largest from Arnold’s fleet might have been shoved down their throats after the trunnions were knocked off. Arnold in his flagship, the galley Congress, had eight guns of which the bore was about three and a half inches in diameter, and the shot weighed six pounds. But when the Civil War came, the Minnesota was armed with forty-two guns of a nine-inch calibre and one of eleven inches, besides four rifles that threw elongated projectiles weighing 100 pounds and one rifle with a projectile weighing 150. Arnold’s Congress could throw at a broadside twenty-four pounds of metal over an effective range of perhaps 300 yards; the Minnesota could throw 1,861 pounds over an effective range of 1,600 yards.

And a still more wondrous advance was in the minds of men; it was at hand—an advance to a point where steel forts were to be sent afloat in place of the ships that were in 1859 the pride of naval seamen.

Remarkable as it seems to the present-day student of naval history, the changes in naval ships that produced the Minnesota before the year 1859—even the changes that gave us the steel fort afloat—were foreshadowed in 1813 when the immortal Fulton made plans for a ship of war that should not only be propelled by steam, but should be as impregnable to the guns of that day as were the ironclads of 1862 to the guns of their day.

Although this ship was designed in 1813, she was not sent afloat until October 29, 1814, and even then, although swifter and more convenient than Fulton had promised that she should be—although she was the very craft that on a smooth-water day could meet and destroy the insolent blockading squadron then off Sandy Hook—she was not put into commission immediately, and the war came to an end before there was opportunity to show what steam might do for the sea power of a nation.

But because this was the first steam warship the world ever saw, and because, when sent on trial trips, she more than fulfilled every promise of her designer, it is worth while giving a full description of her. Her length was 150 feet; breadth, 56 feet; depth, 20 feet; water-wheel, 16 feet diameter; length of bucket, 14 feet; dip, 4 feet; engine, 48-inch cylinder, 5-feet stroke; boiler, length, 22 feet; breadth, 12 feet; and depth, 8 feet; tonnage, 2,475. She was the largest steamer by many hundreds of tons that had been built at the date of her launch. The commissioners appointed to examine her, in their report say:

“She is a structure resting upon two boats, keels separated from end to end by a canal fifteen feet wide and sixty-six feet long. One boat contains the caldrons of copper to prepare her steam. The vast cylinder of iron, with its piston, levers, and wheels, occupies a part of its fellow; the great water-wheel revolves in the space between them; the main or gun-deck supporting her armament is protected by a bulwark four feet ten inches thick, of solid timber. This is pierced by thirty portholes, to enable as many 32-pounders to fire red-hot balls; her upper or spar deck, upon which several thousand men might parade, is encompassed by a bulwark which affords safe quarters. She is rigged with two short masts, each of which supports a large lateen yard and sails. She has two bowsprits and jibs and four rudders, two at each extremity of the boat; so that she can be steered with either end foremost. Her machinery is calculated for the addition of an engine which will discharge an immense column of water, which it is intended to throw upon the decks and all through the ports of an enemy. If, in addition to all this, we suppose her to be furnished, according to Mr. Fulton’s intention, with 100-pounder columbiads, two suspended from each bow, so as to discharge a ball of that size into an enemy’s ship ten or twelve feet below the water-line, it must be allowed that she has the appearance at least of being the most formidable engine of warfare that human ingenuity has contrived.”

Formidable she certainly was, but no war came to demonstrate her powers, and she lay in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a receiving-ship until the 4th of June, 1829, when her magazine was fired, presumably by a drunken member of the crew, and she was blown to pieces.

Robert L. Stevens, of Hoboken, in 1832, conceived the idea of an ironclad ship that was to be 250 feet long and twenty-eight wide—something lean and eager in pursuit and yet shot-proof. It was an idea that cost him and his family nearly $2,000,000 before he was done with it; but nothing came of it, save as it kept the restless inventors of the world thinking on the subject of swift, impregnable ships of war. Mr. Clinton Roosevelt, of New York, proposed to build a steamer that should be sharp at both ends, “plating them with polished iron armor, with high bulwarks, and a sharp roof plated in like manner, with the design of glancing the balls. The means of offense are a torpedo, made to lower on nearing an enemy, and driven by a mortar into the enemy’s side under water, where, by a fusee, it will explode.” The idea of polishing the armor to make it slippery seems amusing now; but the fact is that even as late as 1862 the armor of vessels in the Civil War was greased to make the projectiles glance off. Of course, the grease was of no use.

It is worth noting that it was in 1836 that John Ericsson patented in England his screw propeller. A model boat forty-five feet long, which he named, for the American consul at Liverpool, the Francis B. Ogden, attained in 1837 a speed of ten miles an hour. The Lords of the Admiralty took a trip in this boat, and the opinion of Sir William Symonds, who spoke for the others, is worth giving as showing how thick-skulled prejudice operates to retard naval progress. He said: “Even if the propeller had the power of propelling a vessel, it would be found altogether useless in practice, because the power being applied in the stern, it would be absolutely impossible to make the vessel steer.”

However, Capt. Robert F. Stockton made a trip on the Ogden, and fortunately Stockton was at once a man of wealth and of common sense. Being convinced of the value of the invention, he induced Ericsson to leave England for the United States in the year 1839, and that was, in a way, one of the most interesting events in the history of the American republic.

Meantime, however, a steamer to replace the old Demologos, Fulton’s first war steamer, had been launched in 1837. Practically the Fulton 2d, as she was called, was a sloop-of-war—a ship of one deck of guns, propelled by paddle-wheels. She was broad and shallow in model, being 180 feet long by thirty-five wide and thirteen deep. She had horizontal engines lying on her upper deck. Her paddle-wheels were twenty-two feet in diameter, towering high above the deck, and her boilers were made of copper. However, she carried eight long forty-twos and a long twenty-four—a right powerful set of guns for that day, and she behaved so well that Capt. Mathew C. Perry, who was assigned to her, expressed the opinion that a time would come when sails, as a means of propelling a man-of-war, would become obsolete. However, it must be said that this remark made almost every one who heard of it, and especially the other officers of the navy, think that Perry was a “visionary.”

It was in 1839 that Perry risked his reputation by an expression of opinion—about the time that Ericsson reached the United States. Backed by Stockton, Ericsson planned a man-of-war that should be driven through the water by a submerged screw at the stern. The idea of a ship being driven by machinery that was placed wholly below the water-line, and so out of danger from an enemy’s shot, was of a kind to appeal even to a backwoods congressman, and an appropriation was obtained. In 1843 the ship was launched under the name of Princeton, and she was in a variety of ways vastly superior to anything built before her. She was 164 feet long by thirty wide and twenty-one deep, and with 200 tons of coal and all supplies on board, she had a draft of nearly twenty feet.

Among other features, it appears that she was the first warship fitted to burn anthracite coal, thus avoiding the dense volumes of black smoke which revealed all foreign war-steamers. She was the first to carry telescopic funnels that could be lowered to the level of the rail out of the way of sails, and the first to use blowers to force the draft in the furnaces. She was also the first to couple the screw directly to the engine instead having cog-wheels intervene.

Her armament was also peculiar, for she was fitted with two long wrought-iron guns that threw balls about a foot in diameter, weighing 225 pounds—guns that, when fired at a target at a range of 560 yards, pierced fifty-seven inches of solid oak timber.

And there was one other peculiarity to which Stockton, who commanded her, called attention with pride: “To economise room, and that the ship may be better ventilated, curtains of American manufactured linen are substituted for the usual wooden bulkheads.”

As a steamship the Princeton was a very great success, but the art of forging was not then sufficiently advanced to warrant the manufacture of any but cast-iron guns. On a trial trip made from Washington in 1844, one of the great forged guns burst, killing and wounding a number of gentlemen, including the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Navy, with several ladies who had been invited to go on the trip. Stockton had boasted that “the numerical force of other navies, so long boasted, may be set at naught, and the rights of the smallest as well as the greatest nations may once more be respected.” And the boast would have been almost justified but for the failure of the wrought-iron gun.

However, the success of the Princeton as a ship was so pronounced that money was appropriated from time to time for others designed much as she was until the navy had six screw frigates—the Niagara, the Roanoke, the Colorado, the Merrimac, the Minnesota, and the Wabash; six screw sloops of the first class—the San Jacinto, the Lancaster, the Brooklyn, the Hartford, the Richmond, and the Pensacola, besides eight screw sloops of the second class, of which the Iroquois was a type, and five of the third class, of which the Mohawk was a type. There was also a screw frigate on the stocks at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, dock-yard. The guns that these ships carried, when compared with those of the war of the Revolution, were quite as interesting as the ships themselves.

The prejudices in the way of improving great guns were not only strong, but they were founded on experiences that were seemingly convincing beyond peradventure. For instance, under Charles V a cannon was cast at Genoa that was fifty-eight calibres long; that is, it was of about six inches diameter of bore and twenty-nine feet long. When fired, its ball of thirty-six pounds weight had less range than an ordinary twelve-pounder. So they cut off four feet of the gun and found that its range increased. Cutting off three feet more still further increased the range, as did another cut of six inches—“which shows,” says Simpson’s text-book on gunnery, printed in 1862, “that there is for each piece a maximum length which should not be exceeded.” So that dictum stood in the way of arriving at the design of a gun like the modern rifle, that would really give the greatest possible range to a projectile. Then, the distribution of the metal in the cannon with which Arnold fought on Lake Champlain seems now ridiculous. One must needs see a picture of the old gun beside one of the guns as developed just previous to the Civil War to realize the difference; but it may be said that, with the bell-shaped muzzle and the “rings” and “reinforces,” the old gun in outline had as many ups and downs as some step-ladders, while the cast-iron weapon of 1860 was as smooth and symmetrical as the hull of a Yankee clipper.

A curious series of experiments, made by Colonel Bomford of the United States Ordnance Department, told for the first time where the greatest strain was exerted on the bore of a gun, and gave some idea of the relative strain elsewhere along the bore. Taking an old cannon, he drilled a hole from the side near the muzzle directly into the bore and inserted a pistol-barrel. Then he put a bullet into the pistol-barrel, and after loading the cannon in the ordinary way, he fired it. Of course, as the cannon-ball was driven from the big gun the powder gas behind it drove the pistol-ball from the pistol-barrel. The colonel measured the velocity of the pistol-ball and made a note of it. Then he drilled another hole in the cannon some inches farther from the muzzle, and repeated the experiment. The force exerted on the pistol-ball was slightly greater there. By drilling other holes he learned approximately the pressure all along the bore. It appeared that the greatest pressure was directly over the shot when it was rammed home against the powder. From there the pressure decreased rapidly, being only about half as much when the ball had travelled four times its own diameter from its original resting place.

Captain Rodman of the Ordnance Department, put a piston in place of Bomford’s pistol-barrel and let the piston punch into a piece of copper, and then determined the pressure on the piston by forcing the same kind of a piston into the same kind of a piece of copper by a known weight. “Although not an accurate process,” it was good enough, and with the figures obtained by it before him, Lieut. John Dahlgren, of the United States navy, designed the gun of smooth outline that by its splendid success in the hands of both forces, during the Civil War, made him famous. The greatest thickness of metal was placed around the greatest strain, and a proper thickness at every inch of length of the bore.

It was not alone, however, in putting the metal where it would prove most serviceable that Dahlgren made his gun efficient. He was a metallurgist, and was careful to improve the quality of iron used.

Meantime Captain Rodman had proposed to cast cannon hollow and cool them from the interior, instead of casting a solid log of iron and boring it out on the old plan. Although the first experiments did not show any especial improvement in the strength of a gun so cast, the method was eventually found to be the best.

With Dahlgren’s model a gun of eleven inches of diameter of bore was cast in 1852. It was fired 500 times with shells and 655 times with solid shot that weighed 170 pounds, the service charge of powder being fifteen pounds. The gun was not seriously injured or worn even by the work. That settled the status of the Dahlgren guns, and from that time on they were furnished with reasonable rapidity to the new steam warships of the navy.

Meantime rifled cannon made of cast iron reinforced over the breech by a wrought-iron jacket that was shrunk on had been introduced into the American navy. They varied from thirty-pounders up to 100-pounders, and, except for the smaller calibres, were in many cases more dangerous for their crews than for the enemy. It must be told also that a cast-iron rifle known as the Brooke, because designed by Commander John M. Brooke, of the Confederate navy, was produced in Richmond that was better than the Parrott. It was strengthened in its early service days by a series of wrought-iron bands two inches thick and six wide, that were shrunk on over the breech. Later a second series of bands was shrunk on over the first, breaking joints with them, of course, and so a very good 150-pounder was produced.

Meantime one Dahlgren smooth-bore, with a bore fifteen inches in diameter, had been successfully made, and the shells for all the Dahlgren guns were provided with fuzes that could be set to explode just about where and when the gunner wished to have them do so. But whether the damage to be done by a fifteen-inch round shot smashing its way through a ship’s side would be greater or less than that of a rifle projectile boring its way through was a question that had not been decided. It was granted that the rifle had the longer range—with a reasonable elevation a rifle would carry three miles, maybe four, and do some damage when the projectile arrived, while the effective range of the smooth-bore was, say, 1,500 or 1,600 yards, though gunners made efforts, when the time came, to run in to a range of 600 yards or less instead. But, on the whole, it was the belief among American naval officers before the Civil War that the big Dahlgren smooth-bore was the best gun afloat.

So it came to pass that the newest and best ships of the navy were armed with the Dahlgren gun. The Merrimac, which was not the best of the frigates, carried twenty-four nine-inch guns on her gun deck, with fourteen eight-inch and two ten-inch pivots on her spar deck. She could throw 864 pounds of metal from her gun-deck broadside, 360 pounds from her broadside of eight-inch guns, and 200 from her ten-inch, both of which could be fired over either rail.

Mr. Hans Busk, M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge, was moved to write on page 104, in his “Navies of the World,” that “the navy of the United States has a tolerably imposing appearance upon paper,” but he concludes that a British frigate of the Diadem class, “avowedly built to cope with those of the description of the Merrimac, etc., would speedily capture her great ungainly enemy.” To fully appreciate this remarkable statement it must be known that the Diadem could fire at a broadside ten ten-inch shells, weighing in the aggregate 820 pounds, five thirty-two-pound solid shot, and two sixty-eight-pound solid shot—in all 1,116 pounds of shot to 1,424 pounds that the Merrimac’s broadside weighed.

The frigate Minnesota carried, soon after the Civil War broke out, no less than forty-two nine-inch Dahlgrens, one of eleven inches, four 100-pounder rifles, and one 150-pounder rifle. She could throw 1,861 pounds of metal at a broadside. Moreover, it was not a mere matter of weight of metal. The diameter of the American projectiles was a matter for serious consideration by the enemy, and so was the ability of the gun to stand service. The best English gun could stand a charge of twelve pounds of powder, and the best American fifteen. There was a vast difference in the smashing effect of an eleven-inch shell driven by fifteen pounds of powder and a ten-inch shell driven by twelve.

All this seems worth telling only because it shows that the ideas of armament which prevailed among the English and the Americans before the War of 1812 were still held by the two nations in 1859. Indeed, the disproportion between the Minnesota’s armament and that of the Diadem was very much greater than that between the United States and the Macedonian.

In short, all things considered, the American people had just the fleet they needed for that day to resist foreign aggression.

But while the patriot holds up his head in pride at the thought of the ships of 1859, he hesitates and stammers when he comes to tell of the men—of the personnel of the navy. It was a far cry from the sailing ships of the old days to the steam frigates of the later, but it was a farther one, and a cry over the shoulder at that, from the men who swept the seas under the once-despised gridiron flag to those who carried the American naval commissions in 1859. It was not that courage and enterprise were dead, or knowledge and skill were lacking. There were, of course, men a-plenty who were brave and tactful and energetic and learned—plenty who were to become during the war men of the widest fame. But “long years of peace, the unbroken course of seniority promotion, and the absence of any provision for retirement,” had served the officers as lying in ordinary served white oak ships. Nearly all of the captains were more than sixty years old. The commanders at the head of the list were between fifty-eight and sixty years of age. There were lieutenants more than fifty years old, and only a few of the lieutenants had known the responsibility of a separate command.

And then, “as a matter of fact,” as Professor J. R. Soley says in his work on “The Blockade and the Cruisers,” “it was no uncommon thing, in 1861, to find officers in command of steamers who had never served in steamers before, and who were far more anxious about their boilers than about their enemy.”

But that was not all nor the worst that can be said of the personnel of that day, for a sentiment—a faith—had developed and spread to a degree that now seems almost incredible, under which men who had made oath that they would always defend the Constitution of the United States came to believe that they were under obligations to draw their swords against the flag they had sworn to defend—the flag which some of them had defended with magnificent courage.

That the politicians should have been secessionists is not at all a matter of wonder. It was entirely natural. But how a Tatnall, the story of whose bravery at Vera Cruz still thrills the heart; how an Ingraham, whose quick defence of the rights of a half-fledged American in the Mediterranean is still an example to all naval officers—how these men could have placed the call of friends and neighbors and a State above the obligation of their oath to support the Constitution, is something that is now incomprehensible.

It must be granted that they were of good conscience. There was not a sordid thought in their minds—not one. Indeed, most of them felt that they were making the greatest of sacrifices for the sake of principle. But, if the writer may express his thoughts without offence, no patriot can now read of the glorious achievements of the men who in other days fought afloat for the honor of the nation, without feeling inexpressibly shocked at the thought that any man of the navy should have been found willing under any circumstances to strike at the gridiron flag.

There is not a little interest in considering the actual numbers of the men who left the navy to take part with the Southern States. Before South Carolina passed her ordinance of secession there were 1,563 officers, commissioned and warrant, on the naval register. Of these, 677 were from Southern States; but 350 of these Southern-born men remained true to the flag, while 321 resigned to enter the Confederate navy. Of thirty-eight Southern captains, sixteen resigned; of sixty-four Southern commanders, thirty-four resigned; of 151 Southern lieutenants, seventy-six resigned; of 128 Southern acting midshipmen, 106 resigned.

And that is to say that so demoralized had the navy become under the influence of quarrelling politicians that more than one-fifth of all the officers were ready to forsake their allegiance.