James Barnes, author of David G. Farragut, Naval Actions of 1812, Yank ee Ships and Yankee Sailors, Commodore Bainbridge , The Blockaders, and other naval and historical works, The Photographic History of The Civil War: in ten volumes, Thousands of Scenes Photographed 1861-65, with Text by many Special Authorities, Volume 6: The Navy.
Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.

[94] Pawnee was the largest vessel in the river, and she was only of about thirteen hundred tons and carried a battery of fifteen guns. The commander of this vessel, Stephen C. Rowan, cooperating with the ill-fated Colonel Ellsworth and his regiment of Zouaves, took possession of the town of Alexandria. Virginia, May 24, 1851, and it was the navy that hoisted the Stars and Stripes once more over the custom-house.

There was an apparent fruitlessness in a naval force continually contending with shore batteries. If one was silenced and its gunners driven off, the odds were that it would be reerected the next night, and the work would have to be done all over again. Constantly did the Navy department request from the Secretary of War that a land force should act with it in the destruction of the Potomac batteries. But General McClellan declared that he could not spare the troops. As a naval writer of that day has pictured the situation, it can be well understood:

Under such circumstances, the service of the Potomac flotilla was probably among the most fatiguing and discouraging of the war. The crews of the vessels spent a great portion of their nights in rowing up and down the river on picket duty, watching for mail-carriers, smugglers, and spies of all kinds; and in the daytime the ships were often aground on the bars and shoals, in spite of all precaution. They were in hourly danger of being opened upon by masked batteries, which could be constructed unseen in the thick undergrowth of the shores; their quarters in the little steamers were exceedingly uncomfortable; their prizes were rowboats, and small, worthless river craft. . . . For their reward, these hard-working, much-enduring men received too often only the complaints of the country that nothing was done, and sneers at the inefficiency of the Navy department, and especially of the Potomac flotilla.

As we look back upon these times, when North and South were on tiptoe with excitement, it was remarkable that the Government had not made, before the end of May, any really