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iron-clad vessels, and recommended the appointment of a competent board to inquire into and report on the subject.
Already there had been spent more than a million of dollars in the construction of an immense iron-clad floating battery, for harbor defense, by Messrs. Stevens, of Hoboken, New Jersey, most of it by the Government, and yet it was not completed.
He recommended a special inquiry concerning that battery, before the large sum asked for its completion should be appropriated.1
The call for recruits for the Navy was promptly complied with, and for the want of them no vessel was ever detained more than two or three days. Since the 4th of March, two hundred and fifty-nine officers had resigned their commissions or had been dismissed from the service for disloyalty; and several vessels were sent to sea at first without a full complement of officers.
The want was soon supplied.
Many who had retired to civil pursuits now patriotically came forth promptly to aid their country in its struggle for life, and were re-commissioned ;2 while many masters and masters' mates were appointed from the commercial marine.3 The Naval School and public property at Annapolis, in Maryland, had been removed to Newport, Rhode Island, because it was unsafe, in the state of public affairs in Maryland, to continue the school there.
Fort Adams, near Newport, was tendered by the War Department for the temporary accommodation of the school.
1 Until just before the war, this structure had been shut in from the public eye. It was to be seven hundred feet long, covered with iron plates, so as to be proof against shot and shell of any kind. It was to be moved by steam-engines of sufficient power to give it a momentum that would cause it to cut in two any ship-of-war then known, when it should strike it at the waist. It was intended to mount a battery of sixteen heavy rifled cannon, in bomb-proof casemates, and two heavy columbiads for throwing shells. The latter were to be on deck, fore and aft. The smoke-stack was to be constructed in sliding sections, like a telescope, for obvious purposes; and the vessel was to be so constructed that it might be sunk to the level of the water. Its burden was to be rated at six thousand tons. It is yet (1865) unfinished.
2 The following is the form of the naval commissions:--
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| Navy Department seal. |
3 Report of the Secretary of the Navy, July 4, 1861.
Scanned printed text.
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