University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
THE IRON-CLADS. DU PONT'S ATTACK ON SUMTER.

MY Dear N: Our friend, Major Wright, showed
me one paragraph of your letter to him, in
which you referred, apparently with surprise, to the
fact that the attack on Charleston by the iron-clads
should have been discontinued “when so few casualties
had occurred.” This is so obvious a reflection,

on the first hasty view of the affair, and one so radically
unjust when we look calmly at the facts, that,
in Major Wright's absence (he has gone down the
posts along the Florida coast on a tour of inspection)
I will venture to occupy your time a few moments
on the subject.

In ordinary warfare the amount of casualties will
give a fair idea of the strength of the resistance and
the power and persistency of the attack. With
wooden vessels, your remark, as previously quoted—
and I know it to be an all but universal one—would
apply with truth; and it is because we have all
become so accustomed to measure battles on land or
sea by the amount of slaughter and maiming inflicted,
that we are apt to err in judging an utterly
uncommon and unprecedented battle by the ordinary
or common standard. Let me also add that this
standard is both a vulgar and false one. McClellan's
victory at Yorktown was a bloodless one, but, nevertheless,
a triumph of the highest importance in its
results. Of Halleck's siege and capture of Corinth,
the same may be said—that victory, although a bloodless
one, having thrown open the doors of the entire
South-West to the conquering advance of our armies.

And now, let me submit to you, more in detail,

some few hasty reflections on the subject of the
recent operations for the capture of Charleston:—

1. It is to be borne in mind that this (so far as the
navy was concerned) was purely an experiment as to
the possibility of taking a city by machinery. The
Monitors might be called blood-saving instruments,
with this penalty attached to them: that whenever
the loss of life should begin, it would involve the almost
certain destruction of every man on board.
The number of men in the whole iron-clad squadron
was less than a regiment; and these few hundred
men, rushing against thirty or forty thousand behind
powerful fortifications, were to have no other part in
the fight than to supply the necessary power for working
the machines. If Charleston were to fall, it was
by machinery; and the moment the experiment was
tested to the point of proving that the machines were
inadequate to their work, it was wisdom to withdraw
them, and would have been dangerous foolhardiness
to have held them longer exposed.

2. The experiment was fully prosecuted up to this
point, with a magnificence of gallantry before which
every generous and just spectator, not directly involved
in the attack, must have bowed in reverence.
The machines were untried, and the conflict was the

first practical test we have ever had of the power of
the new kinds of ordnance and ordnance material
employed against them. I refer to the Blakely and
Whitworth English guns, firing bolts and steel-pointed
shot. The warfare was almost as new to Admiral
Du Pont and his Captains as it would have been to
you or myself—new kinds of projectiles raining on
them from above; vast torpedoes known to be underneath
their keels, and every channel of entrance
blocked up with triple rows of torpedo-armed obstructions.

3. After less than an hour's conflict, five out of the
eight Monitors were disabled—the Keokuk sinking.
Behind the forts, calmly waiting their opportunity,
lay three of the enemy's iron-clads in plain view:
vessels not able in fair fight to live an hour before
one of our Monitors; but held in readiness to cruise
out and capture any Monitor disabled by the artillery
practice of the forts and batteries. This
should not be let out of sight.

4. With two or three of our vessels of this kind
disabled, captured, repaired, and in the enemy's service,
what force would it require to maintain the
blockade of Charleston? Wooden vessels—our gunboats
and steam-sloops—would be useless; and our

iron vessels could not live outside of Charleston bar
in rough weather. Nor, even if they could, unless
we had enough of them to cross-fire over every inch
of the mouth of the harbor permanently, could a
blockade be maintained against the fast clipper
steamers built as blockade-runners in English shipyards.
In a word, the enemy, with a single Monitor
of ours, could drive every wooden boat from the
blockade: and the blockade would thus practically
be raised.

5. Could we afford to have Charleston a free
port—the greatest free port in the world, when
viewed as the only outlet and inlet for the commerce
of eight millions of people; with arms and all other
requisites pouring into it unmolested, and cotton,
tobacco, naval stores, and so forth, pouring out?
Would not such an event of necessity—a moral and
political necessity — compel France, and perhaps
other wavering foreign Powers, to acknowledge the
Confederacy? Are we in a position lightly to
hazard these consequences?

6. Bear in mind that the weakness of the Monitorturrets
was increasing in geometrical ratio under the
force of each concussion. Each bolt started, each
plate cracked, each stancheon bent by the first ball,

left weaker protection against the second; and the
second transmitted this deterioration, increased by its
own impact, to the third. Thus onward—the element
of the calculation being that three hundred guns,
worked with every advantage of space and fixity,
were arrayed against thirty-two guns cramped up in
delicate machines, and requiring to be fired just at
the exact right moment of turretal rotation.

7. Fort Sumter itself, we should not forget; was
but the fire-focus of two long, converging lines of
forts and batteries; and while, for aggressive purposes,
and from its position, its armament was more
to be dreaded than that of any other work,—the fort
itself, being built of masonry, fully exposed to fire,
was the most pregnable point in the harbor. Nor
would its fall have terminated the contest, nor given
any further ease to the iron-clads, than the withdrawal
of so many guns from against them. Their
work would still lie before them, in silencing the
other forts and removing the triple line of powerful
and cunningly devised obstructions.

The foregoing, my dear N—, are only a few of
the most prominent suggestions to be used in forming

a right estimate of the struggle. Busy and overworked
as I am, this explanation has appeared necessary
to my conscience as a point of duty: insomuch
that I could not rest until my very utmost was done
to let you see this affair from the standpoint of a
deeply interested spectator, who had given some
thought and observation to the problem, and who
certainly has no other interest in this matter than to
see that no injustice is done to brave, true patriots
whom he honors—honors with his whole heart and
soul.

How I should have felt if in the Weehawken,
commanded by John Rodgers, who had the post of
honor in the van, I do not know; but suppose that
pride and the busy sense of duty and responsibility
would have held me firm to my work. Only a spectator,
however, with no immediate cares to distract my
attention, I am not ashamed to say that I trembled
like a leaf for the gallant souls on board the Weehawken,
when she first steamed into the hell-made-visible
fronting and around Fort Sumter.

The chief officers, as you know, who took part in
this fight were Admiral Du Pont, Commodore Turner,
Fleet Captain Ramon Rodgers, Dupont's chief of
staff; and Commanders John Rodgers, Drayton of

South Carolina, brother to General Drayton of the
Confederate army; George W. Rodgers, Daniel
Ammen, Downs, Fairfax, Worden, who commanded
the original Monitor in her fight with the Merrimac
in Hampton Roads; and Rhind who, with rash galgantry,
ran his vessel, the Keokuk, right under the
walls of Fort Sumter, in which position she was so
badly riddled and ripped up with bolts and percussion
shells, that she sank next morning, despite all efforts
to keep her afloat and send her down for repairs to
Port Royal. I record these names because it gives
me pleasure to write them. It is with names such
as these that the future crown of the Republic will
be most brightly jewelled.

And here let me give you a few verses, on the
subject of the iron-clads, which are said to have been
picked up in a bottle on the shore of Seabrooke Island
by a soldier named Miles O'Reilly—a youthful warrior
of Italian extraction—belonging to the 47th New
York, but now detached as an orderly at the Headquarters
of Brigadier-General Thos. G. Stevenson,
Commanding United States troops around Edisto
Inlet. As several of the Monitors are lying in the
Edisto, some think, from intrinsic evidence, that the
verses must have been written on board one of them

by some officer acquainted with their demerits; but
who, fearing the wrath of the higher powers, could not
publish them in regular form, and was therefore
obliged to launch his only edition in a sealed bottle
over the side of his ship.

Our friend Commander George W. Rodgers is
strong in this belief; and his suspicions as to the
authorship are almost equally divided between Commanders
Beaumont, Ammen and Downs, with the
heaviest balance of suspicion against the first named
of these officers. Others, who are not in the Navy,
think that the lines are the work of Private M.
O'Reilly's own brain, the stanzas being revised and
put into good English by a certain Chaplain Hudson
of the Volunteer Engineers, who has a taste for
literature, and is known to be “in cohoot” with
O'Reilly, who has become quite famous in a small way
throughout the Department for comic songs and impromptu
verses about the incidents of the day. This
latter class are of opinion that there “never was no
bottle at all,”—much as the ungrateful Betsy once
insulted Mrs. Sairey Gamp by saying, that “there
never was no such a person as Mrs. Harris!” Be these
things as they may, the lines, if containing little
poetry, are as full of sense as an egg is full of meat;

and whether written by Beaumont, Ammen, Downs,
Hudson or Private O'Reilly, they reveal certain
truths which the authorities at Washington should
by no means overlook.

AN IDYL OF THE IRON-CLADS.

CONSIDERABLY AFTER MR. EMERSON'S “BRAHMA.”

[Lines picked up in a bottle by Private Miles O'Reilly.]

Before concluding this letter—hastily written, but
containing points, it seems to me, which you might
do the country a service by bringing to the notice of
Mr. Lincoln—let me call attention to the manifest
impolicy of further increasing our fleet of Monitor
built iron-clads. These vessels, admirable perhaps
for attacking fortified places along our coasts—although
they have been badly repulsed at Forts McAlister
and Sumter—are manifestly unfit to cross the
ocean, except when a guaranty-deed of “dead calm”
shall have been obtained from the Clerk of the Weather;
and are just as manifestly unfit for human
beings to live in for any length of time. Besides, it
is clear, that, with the reduction of Charleston and
Mobile, all the work for which this class of vessels is
peculiarly fitted will have been accomplished.

I know it is said that they could be used as floating

batteries with which to defend our harbors; but
ask the men best competent to judge of their capacities
as against vessels like the Warrior, Guerrière,
La Gloire, etc., and this illusion will be dissipated.
In the judgment of men who have commanded these
little, low-lying, two-gun, slow sailing, floating batteries,
one of the vast iron-clad frigates of France
or England could receive the fire of any two of
them—eight or ten guns at most—and then run
right over them, the vast ploughs which such frigates
carry in front, beneath the water, ripping
the whole lower skin of the Monitor-hulls to pieces,
and their tall prows moving on undisturbed over the
little circular towers and pilot-houses, which would
go down in eddying whirlpools beneath their irresistible
weight and impetus.

Believe me, my dear N—, that we need iron-clad
frigates; and fast vessels to fight fast vessels.
There is not one of our grass-grown Monitors to-day
that can make, to save her life, even in tideless water,
over five miles an hour, if so much; while the mailed
frigates of France and England make from seven to
eleven and a half. In this respect also, the Roanoke
is a failure, only making six knots per hour; and our
only safeguard against invasion, and our only means

of aggression in case of a foreign war, must be looked
for in such vessels as Mr. Webb, of New York, is
now constructing.

Cannot the Navy Department be made to realize
these obvious facts? Cannot Mr. Assistant Secretary
Fox—whose abilities and zeal are highly spoken of by
many who are in the best position to judge—cannot
he be brought to comprehend that all vessels-of-war
must be in their nature a compromise between the
best shape and construction for the immediate purposes
of battle—occurring, mayhap, once in several
years; and the necessity for having such accommodations,
ventilation, comforts, etc., as will preserve
the health of the men and officers forming the
respective crews? These questions are asked by
every unprejudiced naval officer at this station; and
it is important that the matter should receive the
prompt attention of all who are interested in
city property along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards.