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Chapter XI Conclusions.
the Navy Department had an immense work to perform in the civil war. Except so far as the purchase abroad of vessels of war was concerned, it had the markets of the world to supply its wants without impediment, and it had money without stint.
That millions of dollars should have been wasted was a probable, not to say an inevitable result of a lack of preparation, and of empiricism, as shown in the construction of the Chimo and her twenty counterparts, known as the ‘totally submerged class of monitors.’
The defect of the latter was radical; no professional doctors could cure or even better them; their office was ‘to lie in cold obstruction and to rot.’
All that appears in these pages relating to them is given in the language of the Department, without comment.
To build and purchase vessels more or less adapted to war purposes; to fit, arm, officer, man, and provision them, and to keep up their supplies over a coast line of three thousand miles, with hundreds of inlets to blockade, and to provide fleets here and there to bombard, as at
Fort Fisher, required great energy on the part of the Navy Department and its subordinates; and these onerous requirements were fulfilled with a reasonable degree of success and with an immense outlay of money.
There are teachings that seem to belong to war exclusively.
