Robert Underwood Johnson, Clarence Clough Buell, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War: The Opening Battles. Volume 1.

---

[623] substance. The commodore of the period was an august personage, who went to sea in a great flag-ship, surrounded by a conventional grandeur which was calculated to inspire a becoming respect and awe. As the years of peace rolled on, this figure became more and more august, more and more conventional. The fatal defects of the system were not noticed until 1861, when the crisis came and the service was unprepared to meet it; and to this cause was largely due the feebleness of naval operations during the first year of the war.

In addition to the other elements of weakness, the junior grades at this time were short of officers, owing to the recent establishment of the Naval Academy and the limitation of the power of appointment; and at the very moment when stress was put upon the service, it lost through resignation a large number of its members, many of them men of high professional reputation. To fill these gaps, the course at the Academy was for the moment curtailed, and the upper classes were ordered into active service. On the 1st of August, 1861, the total number of officers of all grades and corps holding regular appointments in the navy was 1457. This number was inadequate to supply the demands of the newly expanded fleet, and it became necessary to employ volunteer officers, 7500 of whom were enrolled in the navy during the war. These came chiefly from the merchant marine. Many of them were brave and capable, but their want of naval (as distinguished from merely nautical) training delayed their development. A still larger increase took place in the force of enlisted men. The normal strength of the corps of seamen was 7600, which rose during the war to 51,500, although the utmost difficulty was found in obtaining recruits, and it became necessary toward the end of the war to offer enormous bounties. The same want of training was apparent in the blue-jackets as in the volunteer officers, and while the army was able to rely from the beginning upon a trained militia, the navy was compelled to create its militia after the war had begun. Although the organization of a trained naval reserve presents no serious difficulties, and although it is evident that such a reserve is of prime importance in any considerable war, no steps had ever been taken to form it.

This was, however, only one of the many points in which the workings of the department were defective. There seems to have been a total want of information at the central office of administration in reference to the existing demands of naval war, and the measures necessary to put the machine into efficient operation. Everything in relation to the plan of a campaign, to the vulnerability of points on the coast,--and it must be remembered that this was our own coast, whose capacity for resisting attack should have been better known to the Navy Department than any other,--to the increase of the force of officers and men, to the expansion of the fleet, to the acquisition of the most modern instruments of warfare,--in short, all problems relating to the conduct of hostilities, the only purpose for which a navy really exists, had to be worked out and solved after the war had begun. Indeed, it would seem that the one subject with which the direction of naval affairs had never concerned itself was the subject of making war.

These circumstances placed the Secretary, at the opening of his