ENTERING THE GILDED AGE: U.S. NAVY AND MARINES 1867 - 1876

The decade following the Civil War witnessed a rudderless Navy.  Bereft of appropriations, subject to the vagaries of partisan politics, lacking in public support, and itself myopic regarding technological advancement, the service suffered atrophy both in practice, and in innovations lost.  But amidst this drift and atrophy, a kernel of resilience and innovation grew.  

 

The Marine Corps suffered no less than the Navy did.  A much smaller service, with a simple mission to support the Navy, Marine leadership lacked in the imagination it had exercised openly only a decade earlier. Both in its Civil War leadership, and in the leadership of the following decade, the service failed to impress individuals in the Navy Department and in the Congress.  The failure to make itself essential to the Union, and the Navy, meant the Marine Corps periodically had to fight for its very existence.

 

In this essay we’ll examine the decline of the Navy and Marine Corps during the decade following the war, the operational challenges they faced, and the incremental, yet not insignificant movement towards reform that would be more evident in the following decades.  Of special interest is the inclusion of the analysis provided by Michael Krivdo on the history of the Marine Corps prior to, and during, the Civil War, and how that impacted leadership in the Marines in the fallow years following.  

 

This essay closely follows the annual reports of the Secretary of the Navy, with some (hopefully correct) explanation, illustrations, and amateur analysis.  

 

1867

 

TWO YEARS AFTER THE END OF THE CIVIL WAR, the politics of Reconstruction drove national affairs. The resulting partisan politics drove Congressional appropriations in all aspects.  William Peterson, in Congressional Politics; Building the New navy 1876-86[1], made the argument that partisan politics damaged the Navy following the Civil War.  The U.S. Navy became another political football in the struggle over appropriations, influence, and the course the Congress set.  The Radical Republicans’ fought Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policies, they fought Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles’ initiatives to maintain a small but effective Navy.    Republicans struggled with the Johnson administration over Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau and the rehabilitation of Confederate individuals and states all work in Navy Yards and Bureaus came to an effective halt.  Naval appropriations dropped from $125 million in 1865 to only $2 million in 1866.  In 1867, the Navy budget bounced up to an austerity level of $20 million on the back of slashing cuts made in manpower, and all new construction put on hold.  

 

GIDEON WELLES WAS IN HIS seventh year at the helm of the Navy Department. Secretary of the Navy was still a member of the President’s cabinet, and under President Andrew Johnson, Wells concerned himself mostly with protecting the administration and its policies in Congress, engaging in infighting with other members of the cabinet on the side.  

 

Politically motivated, Welles involved himself with Andrew Johnson’s struggle to placate Democrats, and minimize retribution against the south.  Welles was instrumental in defending Johnson during his impeachment having assisted getting him the VP nomination with the creation of the National Union Party in 1864.  As a result of his partisanship, he, and the Navy Department, came under fire from critics in Congress, mostly Democrats and Radical Reconstruction Republicans.  (check this)

 

Welles’ prioritizing of matters other than the Navy wasn’t entirely misplaced.  Rebuilding the nation eclipsed naval strategy or preparedness; two large oceans ensured any threat by foreign navy was not immediate.  Great Britain remained a distant threat due to its size, technological advancement and its support of the South.  The French remained a concern because of their involvement in affairs in Mexico.  Conventional wisdom discounted these threats with the country’s geographic isolation, and the sheer size of the U.S. Navy during the war.  Unfortunately, technology would overcome the geographic advantage eventually, and neglect would decimate the U.S. fleet.  

 

Structurally, the Navy had eternal challenges and headwinds.  Organized into fleet stations, technical and administrative bureaus, and navy yards, the Navy was a series of silos each competing for the political patronage of local government and the Congress. 

 

Conflict split the officer corps.  Traditional line officers, trained in sail and seamanship, felt professionally threatened by staff officers working with the new technologies in the fields of propulsion and armaments.  Traditionalists placed their faith in Vice Admiral David Dixon Porter, USN, who shunned steam power for sail.  

 

 

Gideon Welles

 

Despite the late war between the states, the country continued to grow; the territory of Alaska was purchased from Czarist Russia for the sum of $7.2 million ($137 million in 2022 value), and the Nebraska territory became the thirty-seventh state.  Policies overshadowed by the Civil War reemerged; under the Medicine Lodge Treaty, Native Americans of the Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Cheyenne Tribes were relocated from the Great Pains to Oklahoma Territory.  In New Orleans, a Yellow Fever outbreak killed 3,000.  A mosquito-borne virus that attacked internal organs, causing the body to bleed out internally in 15% of those infected.

 

Two years after the Civil War, the U.S. Navy had 238 ships on the rolls, only 103 were listed as “in use”,[2] Of that smaller number, only 59 were cruising the oceans and Great Lakes, and 11,900 sailors provided manpower.  

 

The Navy was organized into a complex series of fiefdoms, largely composed of the fleet, the Navy Yards, and the administrative and technical bureaus.  The fleet was organized by geographic station or squadron;  the EUROPEAN, ASIATIC, NORTH ATLANTIC, SOUTH ATLANTIC, NORTH PACIFIC, SOUTH PACIFIC were each individual commands, composed of a handful of ships that pretty much operated individually.  Ships in SPECIAL SERVICES operated individually, moving cargo and dispatches from the U.S. abroad.  

 

The Navy Yards at the time were located at Portsmouth (Kittery, ME.), Charlestown (Boston), New York (Brooklyn), Philadelphia, League Island, Washington DC, Norfolk, Pensacola, and Mare Island.  Additional Naval Stations were located at Sacketts Harbor on Lake Ontario, Key West, New London (Thames River), Mound City Illinois, and at the United States Naval Academy.  The headquarters of the Navy was located at the Southwest Executive Building, adjacent to the White House, the Naval Observatory in DC, and the Naval Asylum in Philadelphia.  

 

Navy Yards were home to civilian work forces managed by individuals from the navy bureaus; Yards and Docks, Equipment and Recruiting, Navigation, Ordnance, Construction and Repair, Steam Engineering, Provisions and Clothing, and Medicine and Surgery each reported to the Secretary of the Navy, and managed their own activities at the yards and aboard ship.  Then as now, political patronage was rife in the yards; congressmen seeking employment for their constituents contributed to the graft and feather bedding associated with ship building contracts.  And, as each bureau lobbied for its own appropriations, they might find themselves duplicating efforts, or, expending effort counter to one another.  

 

In port, ship captains reported to yard commandants, not the squadron commander; at sea, ship captains reported to their squadron, but largely cruised on their own.  In port, ships remained in commission, for short periods, or were assigned “into ordinary”, a status in which they remained in the Navy Yard for repairs, but without crew.  Ships may have been stored in the stocks, out of water, as a reserves that would only take a small amount of time and effort to put into commission in case of war.  

 

Prior to radio telegraphy, ship commanders made a lot of their own decisions when it came to diplomacy and reacting to issues in foreign waters.  If an incident arose in Cuba, a ship commander off the coast of Brazil might make the decision, all on his own, to sail to Havana and consult with the U.S. envoy stationed there.  

 

Even the officer corps was bifurcated; divided into the officers of the line, and staff officers, who reported to the bureaus, an internecine struggle continued between those steeped in the tradition of wooden ships and sail, those responsible for development and deployment of innovations in powerplants, weaponry, armor, communications, and navigation. In the post-war Navy, where promotions were throttled by seniority, the struggle between staff and line officers resulted in even more division. 

 

Admiral David Farragut, USN, hero of the Battle of Mobile Bay, and the highest-ranking Navy officer, took command of the European Squadron in July 1867, and embarked on a tour of the ports and capitols of Europe, collecting honors and accolades.  Vice Admiral David Dixon Porter, USN, was appointed superintendent of the United States Naval Academy, where he sought to improve the professionalism of officers in the Naval Service and inculcate the strength of seamanship in soon to be junior officers.    

 

Admiral David Farragut and Vice Admiral David Dixon Porter[3]

 

In the fleet, USS IDAHO joined the Asiatic Squadron; built in 1864, she was a screw steamer converted to “sail only” when her powerplants were determined incapable of delivering the power needed to let her make 15 knots. In Yokohama, she’d eventually be utilized as a floating store ship for the squadron.

 

 

USS IDAHO (at right)

 

Squadron Commander Rear Admiral H.H. Bell, USN, sought to regain ground lost during the war to Prussia and England, engaging in trade negotiations with the Japanese “Tycoon”.  Commander, Robert W. Shufeldt, USN, and the USS WACHUSETT sailed for the west coast of Corea, to the Ping Yang River, seeking information on the welfare of the crew of the SS GENERAL SHERMAN. Despite being interrogated aboard WACHUSETT, Corean locals offered no insight to the disposition of the SHERMAN’s crew. To the south, USS MONOCACY anchored off Bruni, Borneo, verifying that the residence of the American Consul had not been attacked and destroyed.  

 

Commander John C. Febiger, USN, aboard the USS ASHUELOT, sailed for Formosa to determine the fate of the SS ROVER.  Finding the ROVER’s crew had been executed,[4]Febiger advised against immediate retaliation, given the small size of forces he carried aboard ASHUELOT. Typical of naval diplomacy of the era, Rear Admiral Henry H. Bell, USN,  sailed with USS HARTFORD and USS WYOMING to exact retribution upon the “savages” guilty of the act.  

 

USS ASHUELOT (Wikipedia)

 

On June 13^th, Commander George C. Belknap, USN, landed with a force of one-hundred eighty-one Marines and Bluejackets from the USS HARTFORD. Captain James Forney, USMC, led the Marine company.  

 

 

USS HARTFORD

(The Army-Navy Club, Library Trust)

 

The party landed at the southern point of the tropical island, below the tectonic mountain range that dominates Formosa, and pursued locals for several hours in blistering heat.  The landing party entered into a running gunfight with the tribesmen that they equated to calvary fighting Indians on the Great Plains.  Due to numerous cases of heat prostration the landing force halted pursuit.  Tribe members counterattacked, and Lieutenant Commander Alexander S. Mackenzie, USN, died of a gunshot wound.  Other officers and men succumbed to heat stroke and, after being ashore six hours, in a running fire fight, the force retreated to their ships, burning native dwellings along the way.  The diplomatic situation was not resolved until the U.S. envoy, Charles William le Gendre returned with Chinese and British troops, and imposed a treaty with Formosan tribes to spare the lives of western ships’ crews.  

 

[5]

 

In other moves, the USS SHENANDOAH visited Calcutta, on the western coast of India, before retiring to Saigon in Cochin China.  USS IROQUOIS visited Madagascar, Mozambique, Aden, Muscat and Bombay.   USS AROOSTOCK visited Johanna, in the Comoros Islands to communicate with residents and French merchantmen on the abolition of the African slave trade.  

 

The North Atlantic Squadron was dealing with another challenge, Yellow Fever, a virus transmitted by mosquitos, which results in fever, aches, pains, and potentially severe liver disease.  In severe cases, the skin turns yellow and internal bleeding results in the vomiting of blood and organ failure.  The squadron reacted to the outbreak as it typically would, avoid sending ships into the areas where the virus was burning through the populace. 

The squadron also reacted to disturbances in Hayti (sic), Saint Domingo, Aspinwall (Panama), and in Mexico at Vera Cruz.  The Navy sat offshore Veracruz Mexico, witnessing the end of French and Austrian control in Mexico, as the potential of revolution fizzled.  No landings were required, but the appearance of the U.S. Navy gave American interests insurance against unrest. 

 

 

The Port Royal Naval Station closed. Opened during the Civil War[6] all equipment and stores were moved to Key West Naval Station.

 

 

USS MONONGAHELA (navsource.org)

 

On November 18, 1867 a hurricane blew the USS MONONGAHELA ashore at Frederiksted in the Virgin Islands; it took the Navy five months to refloat her.

 

In Paraguay, the South Atlantic Squadron focused on the safe conduct-of-passage for U.S. ministers; Brazil had imposed a blockade. The squadron continued visiting ports on the west coast of Africa, making sure the slave trade remained suspended. The North Pacific Squadron busied itself with monitoring French moves on the west coast of Mexico, and in exploration of the shores and waters of the recently acquired territory of Alaska.  Captain William Reynolds, USN, skipper of the USS LACKAWANNA, followed up on previous visits to the Middlebrook Islands and took possession of the islands under the “Guano Islands Act” on August 28, 1867.  USS LACKAWANNA spent much of the rest of the year about the Sandwich Islands, conducting diplomacy with the House of Kamehameha[7] and exploring atolls to the northwest, rescuing the crew of a whaling ship.[8]  

 

The South Pacific Squadron spent its time monitoring the hostilities between Spain and Chili (sic) and Peru, ensuring U.S. interests weren’t at risk, and coordinated with the North Atlantic Squadron to ensure the protection of the American railway crossing the isthmus between Aspinwall and Panama.  

 

[9]

 

Ships on “Special Service” conveyed diplomats involved in the resolution of the potential rebellion at Veracruz and explored reported uncharted reefs.  The USS SACRAMENTO found its way from Madeira and the Canary Islands around the Cape of Good Hope, and visited ports across the Indian Ocean to the Bay of Bengal. At the entrance of the Godavarey River near Kothapalem, SACRAMENTO sank in June; her captain and his entire crew made their way to Madras, where they found berthing aboard the SS GENERAL CAUFIELD, returning to New York in late November.  

 

Perhaps the most bizarre flex of the year was the use of the Civil War iron-clad monitor USS MIANTONOMAH to cruise across the Atlantic to the ports of Europe.  Monitors were generally designed for battle in the coastal waters and rivers of America, not the high seas of the North Atlantic.  Semi-submersible, to pose the lowest profile for enemy guns, monitors had negligible freeboard, and were susceptible to flooding.  Despite the assertions in the annual report that monitors could, with minor modification, sail anywhere, it’s worth remembering that MIANTONOMAH spent a large portion of the voyage being towed from point to point, due to short stowage of coal aboard.  

 

USS Miantonomah[10]

 

 

In 1867, the Navy did manage to complete four ships that had been laid down during the Civil War — United States Ships MOSHOLO, MENNETONKA, PUSHMATAHA, and NANTASKET.  Work on others was suspended indefinitely; many ships built during the war were constructed to lower standards, using White Oak instead of Live Oak.  Live Oak, native to coastal areas of the American southeast, is an evergreen tree, keeping its leaves year-round.  Lack of Live Oak, as well as appropriations meant that  other vessels languished in the stocks, amonth them PASSACONAWAY, POMPANUSUC, and QUINGSIGAMOND.   

 

A ship house is a large barn like structure in which ships are built and stored prior to launch.  Renderings of shipyards of the time are dominated by these large wooden structures.  The. U.S. Navy had a practice nearly completing new ships, then leaving them on the stocks or in ship houses until they were needed; these ships were a form of naval reserve and didn’t suffer degradation the way ships in the water did.  The number of ships of the fleet reported annually included ships in all stages of operation, completion, and storage.  

 

Ship Houses at Philadelphia Navy Yard

 

USS VIRGINIA was a special case; a 74-gun frigate, her keel was laid at the Charlestown Navy Yard (Boston) in 1820, and remained incomplete, in the stocks. Navy leadership posited, that if completed, she’d never be anything but a receiving or stores ship, as antiquated as she was.  Other ships not yet launched, but not being built in ship houses, were getting covers to their decks installed to protect the vessels from the weather.  In the wake of demobilization, the Navy found itself in a “damned if you do” conundrum; appropriations weren’t available for semi-completed ships, but if left exposed to the weather, they’d even lose their scrap value.  

 

The Navy Yards weren’t in much better shape under austerity budgets. Congress made no allowances for yard improvements, and limited funds for facility maintenance.  The purchase of Seavey Island expanded the Portsmouth Navy Yard, but no funding was available to build new works for the cramped but essential yard.  Norfolk and Pensacola remained in shambles from their destruction during the war, despite their strategic import to American interests in the Caribbean and Panamanian isthmus.  

 

Norfolk Navy Yard, 1864

 

The biggest development regarding Navy Yards was Congress authorizing the acquisition of League Island and adjacent marshes for a new yard in Philadelphia.  The existing yard at Front St. and Federal St., was small, with no room to expand, so the decision was made to move to an island located the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers met.  The new yard would allow the Navy to greatly expand shipbuilding and repair capabilities in the region.  In Connecticut, Congress authorized the Navy to receive a grant of land from the State on the Thames River, near the towns of Groton and New London, where the river was four fathoms deep[11].  

 

Maintaining ships it couldn’t use was expensive; the Navy was selling what it could for cash; it sold two iron clad steamers for scrap, and it sold the Confederate Navy’s STONEWALL to the Japanese.  The Navy continued with repairs at the Naval Academy, fixing what the Army had destroyed, and expanded the campus under the guidance of Vice Admiral David Dixon Porter, USN.  

 

Administrative notes on the matters dealt with by the various bureaus follow the meat of the secretary’s report, including the disposition of the prize for the iron cruiser AMAZON, captured during the war by the USS PONTIAC, then commanded by Commander Stephen B. Luce, USN.  

 

Amongst the Bureaus, Yards and Docks concerned itself with maintenance and repairs at the various yards, Equipment and Recruiting reported on ships’ repairs, and the facilities at the yards performing them, and the experiment performed using gasoline as a fuel for ships.  The Navy rejected this move, gasoline being too volatile and dangerous for shipboard use.  

 

The Bureau of Navigation reported on its work with the instruments, charts, and equipment required to navigate the seven seas, and Ordnance inventoried powder and projectiles, and reported that old weapons have been sold for scrap.  Construction and Repair reported that only the most essential repairs were being made to ships in commission, and Steam Engineering reported that no new machinery had been contracted for, and existing machinery in the yards would not be sufficient to keep up with technological advances being made elsewhere. 

 

Provisions and Stores was still working down inventory levels reached during the late war, and Medicine and Surgery reported on the causes of disease and death amongst the ships and stations of the Navy.  

 

Thus was the state of the Navy at the end of 1867.  Reduced in capability and capacity, budgets slashed, and manpower reduced precipitously.  Secretary Welles had been heading the Navy since 1861, but in the wake of the war, partisan politics and Reconstruction conflict dominated his focus as a member of the President’s cabinet.  

 

EVER SINCE ARCHIBALD HENDERSON WAS COMMANDANT of the Marine Corps, the report of the Secretary of the Navy included a report on the status and progress of the Marine Corps.  The 1867 report is no different, but to understand the position of the Marine Corps in 1867, it’s important to understand it’s position prior to and during the Civil War.  

 

Michael Krivdo[12] laid out how Archibald Henderson had been instrumental in the expansion of the Marine Corps mission prior to the Civil War.  Henderson sought, throughout his three decades as Commandant (1820-1859), to further involve the Marine Corps in military affairs ashore.  Whether it was in fighting Indians in the 1830s, or in Mexico in the 1840s, Henderson accepted and executed non-traditional Marine missions with great success and elan. 

 

Henderson maintained a sense of imagination during his career and sought greater responsibility for his men by augmenting the skills Marines offered aboard ship. With steam, iron cladding, and more powerful naval guns, Marines were less likely to be of use manning the rigging to repulse boarding parties or maintain good order and discipline of sailors under fire.  He sought artillery training for his officers, and permission to arm shipboard units with field howitzers.  His successor, Colonel Commandant John Harris, USMC, lacked the imagination and sense of daring that made Henderson an efficient leader.[13]

 

Harris served as Colonel Commandant from 1859 until his death in 1864.  In that short period, much of the innovation and reputation of the Marine Corps garnered by Archibald Henderson atrophied and suffered, as Harris seemingly attempted to remove Marines from the fight.  In 1861, he quickly responded to requests to augment security at the forts surrounding Washington.  Drawing on Marines from east coast barracks, via telegram, Harris reacted quickly to defend the capitol.  Just as quickly he sought replacements to man the forts, believing the role his Marines were asked to perform were outside their normal responsibilities.  After this, the Marines remained removed from the center of the fight, save for two disastrous engagements: at First Bull Run, and in the attack on Fort Fisher, Marines suffered due to flawed mustering of green troops, and a failure to provide adequate planning and execution of the mission.[14]  

 

At Bull Run, Colonel Commandant Harris mustered a battalion of Marines to accompany the Army, as directed by Secretary Wells.  Unfortunately, the battalion was composed largely of raw recruits.  Veteran Marines remained in barracks at the various Navy Yards, and aboard ships of the fleet.  The lack of experience showed, the Marines turned their backs to the enemy, and joined the Army in retreat.  Because of Commandant Harris’ reluctance to volunteer his Marines for action, their mission largely remained aboard Navy vessels, keeping order, and guarding Navy Yards from Maine to California.  But for a handful of actions under control of Navy landing parties, the Marine Corps avoided the large battles.  A positive aspect of this timidity was the low number of Marines casualties during the war, 148 killed, and 131 wounded.

 

In one way, Harris was like his predecessor, Henderson; Harris died suddenly, in office, with no plans for succession in place.  Secretary Welles, unimpressed with the ranking field grade Marine officers, picked number four on the list by date of commission, Major Jacob Zeilin.  Those officers passed over for the position, a colonel and two lieutenant colonels, drunkards and oftentimes under investigation, were forcibly retired, but allowed to remain in command of their barracks until the end of the war. These officers would not prove to be of any great assistance to Zeilin when he was promoted to Colonel Commandant.  

 

SO WHEN HE COMPOSED HIS report to the Secretary of the Navy in the fall of 1867, Jacob Zeilin was in his fourth year as Commandant of the Marine Corps.  On March 2, he had become the first commandant to be promoted to the rank of Brigadier General.[15]  During the previous year, he’d toured the major east coast barracks aboard the Navy Yards and was satisfied with their upkeep and the appearance of his Marines. He’d also directed that Emory Upton’s Infantry Tactics, Double and Single Rank be the standard for tactics drill for Marines ashore and embarked.  Upton’s instructions covered drill and movement for the individual soldier, companies, battalions, and brigades.  

 

 

Jacob Zeilin

 

However, Zeilin woulndn’t have to concern himself whether his Marines would master Upton’s manual for any formation larger than a company.  The Marine Corps remained a small organization, with only 1600 Marines in uniform.  And while the Marine Corps took a hit with the reduction in force following the end of the war, its loss was nowhere near as extensive as that that the Navy took.  A weak recruiting effort during the war meant that the Corps hadn’t expanded to the full number authorized by Congress for wartime service, so as the other services demobilized and eviscerated themselves, the Marine Corps only dropped from a force of thirty-eight hundred Marines to sixteen hundred.  

 

Following a movement in Congress in 1866 to fold the Marines into the Army, Zeilin appealed to friendly Naval officers to provide testament that the Marine Corps was essential to the continued efficiency of the Navy.  This form of lobbying was an old tactic, but the Corps escaped the hatchet, as it had on previous occasions, and Zeilin was awarded a promotion to Brigadier General. 

 

At the barracks at Pensacola, eight Marines had succumbed to Yellow Fever ­– Captain Hall, Lieutenant Glisson and six enlisted.  Aside from a couple of minor complaints about manning levels, and appropriations for repairs to the barracks, Zeilin’s report was hardly forthcoming about how the Marine Corps would have to adapt to an ever-changing world.  

 

In this, Zeilin followed in the footsteps of his immediate predecessor, Colonel Commandant John Harris, USMC, and not those of Harris’ predecessor, Brevet Brigadier General Archibald Henderson, USMC. Harris’ lack of imagination in seeking out and accepting new missions, and willingness to change would haunt the Marine Corps for the following four decades.  

 

 

1868

 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, Andrew Johnson, was impeached by the House of Representatives for his dismissal of the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, then acquitted in the trial at the Senate.  The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, giving African Americans full citizenship, and all Americans due process of the law. Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and the Carolinas were readmitted to the Union.  In November, Ulysses S. Grant, formerly the General who led the Union Army to victory over traitorous slavers, defeated Horatio Seymour, the former Democratic Governor of New York for the presidency.    

 

Congressional attacks on Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and the department continued. As the Navy continued into its return to peacetime cruising, Congress required it to reduce its ranks; as many of its ships were incapable of safe operations manpower wasn’t critical.  Only eighty-one of two-hundred-six, were “in use”.  The rest were laid-up, not completed, under repair, or for sale.  Two ironclads were sold for scrap, while others continued rotting in the tributaries near the Philadelphia and Washington Navy Yards.    

 

Admiral Farragut, ranking officer of the Navy, returned from his tour of Europe where he’d spent the better part of a year exchanging pleasantries and honors.  

 

In the Asiatic Squadron, Rear Admiral Henry H. Bell, USN, drowned in Osaka harbor, when his boat crossing the reef swamped. It took his replacement Rear Admiral S.C. Rowan, USN, four months to reach the squadron from New York.  In the meantime, the squadron engaged in diplomacy as warring factions sought control of Japan.  Providing refuge for “the Tycoon”, the U.S. aligned itself with European states seeking to protect their assets in the region.  To protect westerners, this alliance occupied Yokahama, setting the stage for how the west would handle affairs in the east through the end of the century.  

 

In April USS SHENANDOAH made a call on Coree (Korea) in regards to the missing crew of the SS Sherman.  No survivors were found, but a survey of the Ping Yang River was made.  The USS AROOSTOCK visited Formosa, seeking redress from the previous year when a landing party was attacked by “savages”.  The U.S. envoy did reach agreement with Formosa on the handling of shipwrecked crews landing there.  

 

The North Atlantic Squadron lost its commanding officer, Rear Admiral James S. Palmer, USN, to Yellow Fever on December 7, 1867, at St. Thomas.  Of the 2571 sailors in the squadron, 1708 contracted the disease, and 80 succumbed to the “febrile disease”. Rear Admiral H.K. Hoff, USN, took over command.  The squadron focused on unrest at Aspinwall (Panama) and in Hayti (sic).  

 

The USS DESOTO was dispatched to Venezuela to secure the freedom of the captain and crew of the whaling ship HANNAH GRANT.  The squadron continued to interdict filibusters transiting from New Orleans and U.S. gulf ports to Mexico, where France was in the process of withdrawing, and Cuba, where rebels sought the ouster of Spain.  

 

The South Atlantic Squadron monitored the ongoing hostilities between the alliance of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, as they faced off with Paraguay. The North Pacific Squadron focused on Mexico and the Central American states, but also explored the waters off the new Alaskan Territory and maintained a ship in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) owing to its strategic potential.  Brooks Island (Midway) was examined as a potential annexation, given its location on the shipping lanes crossing the Pacific.  The South Pacific Squadron focused its concern on South American states, and suffered the loss of two ships, USS FREDONIA and USS WATEREE from the earthquake and tsunami that struck Peru on 13AUG68.  

 

At the Navy Yards, the U.S. found itself with only six drydocks, and three floating drydocks.  In Britain and France, the ports of Portsmouth and Toulon both found themselves operating more dry docks than this, each.  Facilities remained at Kittery (Portsmouth, NH), Charlestown (Boston), Brooklyn, Philadelphia (downtown), Washington DC, Gosport (Newport, VA), Pensacola, Mare Island, and Mound City.  The workforce in the Navy Yards was reduced, as production, and maintenance functions were struck by austerity measures.  

 

At the United States Naval Academy, Vice Admiral David Dixon Porter, USN, was faced with pressure to drop the restrictions on appointees being admitted from states of the confederacy.  The naval apprentice program was gutted, as cuts were made in manning levels across the Navy.  Admiral Farragut completed his European Tour, returning to New York in November of 1868.  But not all was dim.  Connecticut ceded land to the Navy on the Thames River, nearby New London.  The negotiation of the purchase of League Island continued.  Yet the Bureaus found themselves in a stasis coincidental to the austerity budget coming out of Congress.  They worked down their surplus supplies from the war and planned for improvements to be made when the taps were turned back on.  

 

Recently promoted Brigadier General Commandant Zeilin, USMC, reported that through discharge, the Marine Corps had trimmed nine hundred Marines from the ranks, leaving 1,020 aboard ships of the Navy, and 1,674 at the barracks in the various Navy Yards.  This was four hundred under the amount permanently authorized by Congress in 1861, but indicated the level for the following three decades. He also reported that the barracks at 8^th & I in Washington, DC, built in 1800, was in a state where it would need to be condemned.  

 

Beyond these housekeeping statements, Zeilin made no further requests, nor highlighted plans for improvements to his force.  

 

1869

 

IN MARCH, U.S. GRANT was sworn in as the 18^th President of the United States.  In May, the final spike was driven in the first transcontinental railway across North America, fourteen years after the railway crossing the Isthmus of Panama was completed.  Adolph Borie was made Secretary of the Navy. 

 

Adolph Borie

 

Adolph Borie was a mercantile trader, trading in silk and tea, and the exact kind of businessman whose interests the Navy was defending in foreign ports.  Borie apparently didn’t see moving to Washington to be a requirement of serving as Secretary of the Navy, and remained in Philadelphia, where he could continue to manage his business interests.[16]  In his absence, he largely left the running the department to Admiral David Dixon Porter, as Farragut engaged in his various tours, and increasingly failing health. 

 

Admiral Farragut remained near home on the east coast, before embarking on a tour of the West Coast in the summer of 1869.  Prior to the Civil War, he’d been instrumental in the opening and development of Mare Island Navy Yard in Vallejo, California. During his return trip, he suffered heart illness in Chicago. His appearances, and work schedule, following his return to Washington was very limited.[17]

 

Borie’s tenure was brief; he resigned in June of 1869, but his legacy remained.  He ordered a great number of Navy ships renamed.  During the Civil War, under Secretary Gideon Welles, many ships of the Navy were named using Native American names for tributaries and rivers. USS TONAWANDA, a twin-turreted ironclad monitor of the MIANATONOMOH class, was named after a creek in Western New York.  Under Borie, she was renamed USS AMPHITRITE, after Poseidon’s wife.  The newspaper The Independent, published a rebuke of Welles’ policy on naming ships which may have spurred the change in policy:

 

 

Army Navy Journal, Vol. 5, 1868-69

The lack of enthusiasm for the names given ships during the Civil War, oftentimes judged to be unpronounceable Native American names, and Borie’s lack of control of his department, led to 

 

“a great many changes being made in the summer of 1869 by circular orders issued be the Navy Department.  American names were usually discarded and, in many cases, especially with the monitors, names borrowed from the mythology of the ancients substituted for them; some names were changed twice within a few weeks; some were changed back to their originals, and some received for new name those that had belonged to vessels of other classes, much confusion resulting as a consequence.”[18]

 

 

Borie was also responsible for desegregating the Washington Navy Yard and implementing the eight-hour workday in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  

In 1869 the Navy saw the following General orders issued:

 

-      Uniform Changes: General Order No. 90, 11 March 1969. Further clarified the appearance of the uniform for the officers who held the rank of Admiral, Rear Admiral, Vice Admiral, and other officer and midshipman ranks.  Changes were made to Warrant Officer and Staff Officers as well.  As this G.O. was signed by Secretary Borie, during his short tenure, I’d guess these were changes David Dixon Porter found imperative.    

 

-      Authority Given to Fleet Officers: General Order No. 99, 11 March 1869. Provided guidance on limiting various honors that Navy Fleet Officers, surgeons, paymasters, engineers, and the like, were granted.  The honors gave the appearance that staff officers were of equivalent rank to ships’ captains; the order also ended the practice of staff officers inspecting ships of the fleet without the express order of the Squadron Commander.  This order highlighted the greater struggle between staff officers, and officers of the line.  Especially salient in coming decades would be the struggle between technology and seamanship.  Scott Mobley, in Progressives in Navy Blue aptly shows the mindset of the “mariner-warriors” faced with the increased influence of technology, in terms of administration, medicine, steam, electricity, weaponry and armor.[19]

 

-      North & South Pacific Squadrons Combined int Pacific Station: General Order No. 105, 13 March 1869. Announced the consolidation of forces under one flag.  An administrative move, it didn’t hide the fact that the Navy, in its own admission, only had ten usable ships in the combined fleet of fourteen.  These ten ships were responsible for protecting U.S. interests spread out from the Bering Strait to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) and Midway, and from Baja, Mexico to Cape Horn. The U.S. lost a competitive step in the Pacific due to its focus on protecting California from Confederate raiders.  

 

-      Forbidding Applications for Duty Through Persons of Influence: General Order No. 110, 17 March 1869. Sought to remove patronage, corruption, and favoritism from the process of officer selection. In it, the Navy sought to enlist and commission better candidates.  

 

-      Sea Service of Officers to be Three Years: General Order No. 112, 17 March 1869. An attempt to reduce the perception of favoritism in officer assignments.  Three years at sea would be followed by three years at a U.S. shore station and no one would be assigned to the Mediterranean station until they’d had hardship tours off Brazil, China, Pacific and home squadrons.  

 

-      Uniform Change for Masters, Ensigns & Midshipmen Upon Graduation: General Order No. 123, 27 April 1869.  I’m guessing these changes were a reflection of Admiral David Dixon Porter’s tastes in uniform as Admiral David Porter was removed from the situation with travel and illness.  

 

-      List of Types of Officers to Mess in the Second Ward Room: General Order No. 127, 9 June 1869.  Again, I’m guessing this is more Porter’s choice than Borie’s.  Assistants to the Staff (correct term) Officers aboard, Masters, Ensigns, and civilians were to be fed separately from the Captain and his officers.  

 

-      Exercises for Ships with Sails: General Order No. 128, 11 June 1869. Decreed that all ships capable of making way under sail would be equipped with sails, even if they were capable of moving solely under steam, and would perform exercises daily, in port and at sea, to maintain efficiency.  (except for tugs, monitors and steam dispatch vessels)  This was definitely the work of David Dixon Porter.  He, and many of his cohort, believed that sail was essential in developing seamanship; steam made sailors lazy and diminished the tactical capabilities of officers.  While steam had been under development for decades, and in widespread use, ships of the era were not large enough to carry enough coal for extended voyages under steam.  

 

-      Economizing the Use of Coal: General Order No. 131, 18 June 1869.  Well, if you force them to use sails, they won’t need coal, will they?  Also, if commanders were determined to not have had an emergency where coal use was required, they’ll be charged for it.  During the Civil War, overseas coal storage contracts lapsed, hampering the infrastructure that supported an 1860s navy.  Availability of coal would hamper Spain in its war with the U.S. in 1898 and force the Navy to use the Marines as a force to secure safe harbors on foreign shores.  Coaling stations helped establish the Colonial Marines of the late 19^thand early 20^th centuries.  

 

On June 25, 1869, Borie left his post as Secretary of the Navy with no advanced notice.  His replacement relegated David Dixon Porter to a less hands on role running the department.  Evidently Porter had little respect for Robeson, and only visited the Navy Department four times during his tenure.[20]

 

So, in 1869, George Robeson was responsible for the content in the Secretary of the Navy report, submitted in late October.  A New Jersey attorney, prosecutor, and State Attorney General, Robeson had no naval experience. As anyone coming into a new position does, he attempted to minimize the abilities of his predecessors, and highlight his own accomplishments. 

 

Two hundred and three ships were on the rolls, with only 43 assigned to the squadrons. Robeson judged that only EIGHTEEN of these vessels were “in condition for real service”.  

 

Another twenty-six were assigned as receiving ships, store ships and tugs.  So, only 69 of 203 were of any real use.  All remaining vessels would require significant overhaul to return to sea, or a significant investment to complete, or were beyond repair.  The monitor fleet, of noted efficiency during the war, was largely laid up in backwaters near Navy yards, rotting and rusting.  

 

On September 21, 1869 the USS IDAHO was wrecked by a typhoon at Yokahama.[21]

 

Secretary Robeson did endeavor to highlight the repair activities the Navy undertook in the months since the transition between administrations.  His stance was that all seaworthy ships were on station with the various squadrons, and nothing in the Navy Yards was ready for sea service.  He indicated that 80 ships had undergone some sort of repair since the start of the administration, all while the Navy continued to cut costs in the yards.  

 

Robeson did admit that the U.S. was falling behind the other navies of the world.  He sought permission to begin building “sea-going iron-clads, suitable to cruise on foreign stations”.  Innovation continued through the creation of a torpedo corps under the Bureau of Ordnance, but at the time focus was more on stationary torpedoes as a defensive system.  Experimentation with a locomotive torpedo was still several years in the future in the U.S.  Robeson expected Porter’s rebate from reduction of coal usage and reliance on sail would fund an investment in new technology and experimentation.  

 

Robeson made an interesting and prescient proposal dictating construction of civilian cruisers that would be available as a reserve fleet in time of war.[22] Robeson also identified shortcomings in the Navy Yards; founded around the time of the Revolution, they were mostly small, and ill-equipped for modern ships and ancillary equipment. This helps to explain the move to open new yards at League Island, south of Philadelphia proper, and on the Thames River near New London, Connecticut.  

 

Additionally, the Navy was in the process of presenting options on an Inter-Oceanic Canal at Darien (Panama), having completed several surveys.  The Navy was working with the Army to adopt the their signal code.  Another concern was a manning level of only 8,000 sailors.  Robeson identified a need for 12,000 at minimum to effectively pursue the Navy’s mission.   

 

Commandant Zeilin presented a pretty standard report for the era.  There was the evergreen complaint about the number of Marines available.  Marines at Norfolk still didn’t have barracks and were quartered aboard the USS St. Lawrence.  Other than this, the Colonel Commandant didn’t take advantage of the annual report to highlight any innovations or improvement his command made in the previous year.  This is indicative of the stagnation that occurred during the Zeilin regime, and what reformers such as Henry Clay Cochrane found so disturbing. 

 

 

1870

 

MISSISSIPPI IS READMITTED to the United States, and CONGRESS enacts the 15^thAmendment, giving African Americans the franchise. Congress creates national holidays giving federal workers in the District of Columbia paid days off on Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July.  To counter terrorism against Blacks in the south under Reconstruction, Congress created the Department of Justice.  

 

SECRETARY ROBESON REPOTED that Admiral Farragut, still serving the Navy in a limited capacity, had the USS Tallapoosa placed at his disposal for a family vacation to New Hampshire.  There, in August of 1870 the 69 year old died, surrounded by family and friends, having served the U.S. Navy for 60 years.  President Grant honored the Admiral at his funeral at Woodlawn Cemetery in Westchester.[23]

 

Following the Civil War, Admiral Porter ordered commanders to re-equip their ships with sail, and prohibited the use of coal, for locomotion, except in emergency.  Publically, Porter blamed the decline of seamanship amongst Navy sailors on the introduction of steam.  

 

“Even at the first introduction of steam power into the navy a deterioration in the crews of ships could be perceived, owing, in a great measure, to the seamen being employed in coaling ship and hoisting out ashes, to the exclusion of their more agreeable and legitimate duties.” 

 

“Agreeable and legitimate duties” being hauling sail, climbing rigging, and working aloft.  Whether this was cover for the Navy going into austerity, or a genuine opinion, it highlights how political decisions can affect readiness of a force. European navies were not following this trend. Rather than work around cost, or develop technical professionalism, the Navy abandoned innovation in propulsion for a decade.  

 

The shrink in fleet continued.  Four gunboats were condemned as unseaworthy, and a tug was sold to Liberia.  The tug Maria ran aground and sank with the loss of four lives on Long Island Sound. 

 

On January 24, 1870, the steam sloop Oneida, departing Yokohama for the U.S., collided with the British steamer Bombay, and sank.  Just twelve miles out of port, the senior officers were at dinner, leaving a junior officer at the helm.  Confused by a single light shining from the Bombay, the JO called the navigator to the helm, but after a short discussion the navigator returned to dinner.  The Bombay struck the Oneida at a sharp angle, shearing off a great portion of the ship.  Japanese fishing boats saved sixty-one sailors, yet one hundred twenty-seven U.S. sailors perished.  The Bombay failed to stop to render assistance.  Elsewhere, the USS PALOS became the first Navy ship to transit Suez.[24]

 

 

USS ONEIDA

 

 

The Navy was reduced to 181 ships on the rolls, with only 49 active with the squadrons or on special services.  Ten more were available to the fleet, but were awaiting crew.  The small cruiser, USS Palos, made the transit from Boston to Singapore via Suez in seventy-three days.  Midway Island’s ship channel was undergoing widening; USS Saginaw was dispatched to assist with the work.  

 

With the new administration, David Dixon Porter found himself occupying a vacancy created by his half-brother, Admiral David Farragut, who was ill, suffering from the stress of commanding the Navy during the Civil War, and advancing age.  In the 1870 Secretary’s report, Porter touched on the topics close to his heart in regards to the Navy.  

 

Porter accounted for the conditions the sailors of the fleet endured; sailors of foreign navies had their uniforms provided for them, U.S. sailors were expected to provide their own.  He recommended that sailors who are discharged have three months to return to service, with full pay for their three months off.  This policy would allow the Navy to recruit experienced sailors, the suspension of this policy negatively affected recruiting and manpower. 

 

Porter was a strong proponent of sail, even as steam was making inroads in Navies of the great powers.  He saw sailors who monitored boilers as idle loafers, versus men who were able to furl and stow sail in an efficient and timely manner.  Additionally, he maintained that wooden ships were superior to the newer ironclads and the steel ships being developed by foreign navies.  

 

Porter also needed the ships of his fleet to maneuver in formation to overcome enemy formations.  As ships of that date largely cruised from foreign port to foreign port on their own, this was not a skill often exercised.  He advocated for squadron exercises so that officers and sailors could attain superior competencies in fair weather and foul, and a new training ship for the Naval Academy, the USS TENNESSEE, a Civil War Monitor. In the long term he sought a squadron of ships dedicated to training the sailors and officers of the Navy before they were assigned to the various cruising stations. 

 

USS TENNESSEE (née CSS TENNESSEE)

 

Part of Porter’s concern was that the U.S. was constantly in range of the Spanish fleet working out of Cuban waters, and that the Spanish were fielding better class of ships.  Strangely, or not, Porter still believed that ships of live oak and sail were superior to those of iron and steam.  

 

He sought large, fast, well-armed sailing ships as flagships for the various squadrons and stations and admitted that U.S. engineers didn’t have the knowledge or means to build ironclads comparable to European designs. To correct the dearth of engineering know-how, he recommended Navy engineers travel abroad and absorb engineering knowledge, and that engineering should be incorporated into the USNA curriculum.  Like many in the austerity minded halls of the U.S. government, torpedoes (naval mines) were the disruptive future of defending American ports from foreign fleets.  Still in their infancy, small, speedy, relatively inexpensive torpedo boats were sought to rapidly approach within yards of enemy vessels, deploy their spar-torpedo, and quickly retreat. 

 

Additionally, Porter asked the powers that be to address the dearth of drydocks; individual European ports had more drydocks than the entire United States.  Also, he saw the utility in turning the Washington Navy Yard into a “national foundry” for ordnance development.  

 

The Hall Scientific Expedition to find a sea route to the North Pole is assigned the USS PERIWINKLE, a heavy screw tugboat converted to gunboat during the Civil War. 

 

Commandant Zeilin reported that though the Marine Corps was authorized by law 2,500 privates, Congress had only allocated funding for 2,000.  On his tour of the barracks, he noted that Mare Island had a nice barracks, but not enough Marines. Norfolk and Pensacola didn’t have barracks for the Marine guard, but housed Marines aboard barracks ships.  

 

The Marine Corps was attempting to move out of the age of muzzle loading rifles.  Ships’ detachments and Marines guarding the Navy Yards shouldered weapons secured during the Civil War, Model 1861 and Model 1864, .58 caliber Rifle-Muskets. 

 

 

M1861 Springfield Musket

 

Captain McLane Tilton, USMC, joined senior Navy officers from the Ordnance Bureau in examining what rifle the Navy, and Marine Corps, should select to replace outmoded muzzle loaders.  By December 1869, the Navy place an order with Remington for 5,000 .50-caliber Remington Rolling Block rifles, with associated tools and saber bayonets.[25]  

 

 

Navy First Model 1870 (Remington Rolling Block)

 

The rolling block design uses two thumb levers, one to roll the block backwards to open the chamber, the other is a hammer that drops upon trigger pull, striking the firing pin in the block.  The rifle fired a .50-70 centerfire round and was accepted by the Navy as the “First Model 1870 Navy Rifle” starting in 1870.  The Marine Corps did not place an order for this rifle, despite input on its design through Captain Tilton.  

 

Rolling Block Mechanism

 

The Marine Corps took a different tack in their selection of a replacement weapon for their muzzle loaders.  Instead, in September of 1870, the Springfield Armory began shipping the Model 1868 Springfield Rifle in .50 caliber.  The weapon utilized the Civil War .58 caliber barrel with a liner that reduced bore.  While Marines guarding Navy Yards on the east coast received the replacement in a timely manner, Marines in the Pacific and Far East had to make do with muskets for another two years.  

 

M1868 Rifle (Trapdoor Springfield)

 

The Trapdoor Springfield, as it is popularly refered to, was a rebuild of Civil War era components, with the addition of a “trapdoor” atop the receiver, which swung up and forward, allowing a single cartridge to be loaded in the chamber.  To ease logistics, it was chambered in the same .50-70 cartridge the Navy used in its First Navy Model 1870.  

 

 

Trapdoor mechanism

 

Springfield Arsenal shipped 3,000 rifles to the Marines, and they would be the primary weapon for the Corps until 1897, and some would still be in service in China in 1900.  

 

 

1871

 

PRESIDENT GRANT SIGNED the Ku Klux Klan act.  Thirty-three ships are lost in Alaska sea ice in the whaling service.  The Polaris Expedition reaches its farthest point North at 82 degrees 45 minutes N.  The Great Chicago Fire displaces 100,000 people. 18 Chinese immigrants are killed by a mob of 500 in Los Angeles, CA.  Tammany Hall Boss Tweed is arrested for corruption.  

 

THE NAVY IS DOWN TO 179 ships, having lost the USS SAGINAW at Ocean Island on October 29, 1870.  

 

The U.S. Navy, interested in a waypoint from San Francisco and Honolulu for ships bound for the Far East, determined that using Midway Island, nee Johnson Island, as a safe harbor and point where fresh water could be found was appropriate.  As a result, they asked for and received appropriations from Congress to widen and deepen the approach to the harbor.  Funding was provided through October of 1870.  When no further funds were appropriated, the crew dredging the approach abandoned their work, and embarked on the USS Saginaw.  

 

The Captain of USS SAGINAW, Commander Montgomery Sicard, elected to travel to Ocean Island, one hundred miles west of Midway, to see if any shipwreck survivors may be there, awaiting rescue.  

Approaching Ocean Island in the dark, Saginaw wrecked upon the reef there on the 29^thof October.  Gathering resources, Sicard dispatched his XO and four sailors on the largest ship’s boat to sail to Hawaii, fifteen hundred miles to the east on 18 November.  

 

Upon arrival at Kanai Island, in the Hawaiian chain, on 19 December, the Saginaw’s boat foundered, and four of the five members of the crew drowned.  The sole survivor managed to get the dispatches to the proper command, and a rescue was dispatched in the form of a civilian Hawaiian steamer, who rescued the remaining crew of the Saginaw.  The amount of appropriations needed to complete the work at Midway would have been about $187,000. 

 

Ironclads laid up at League Island are deteriorating at a slower rate because the Delaware River is fresh water.  

 

COREA HAD BEEN AN ONGOING concern for the Navy since 1866, when the crew of the SS GENERAL SHERMAN went missing attempting to “trade” nearby what is modern day Seoul.  GENERAL SHERMAN was U.S. flagged, British leased, and crewed by mostly Chinese. It had developed a reputation in China and Korea for plundering communities.[26]  The Navy visited the peninsula on several occasions in the next five years, but information on the crew of the GENERAL SHERMAN was slow in being revealed. But by 1871 SHERMAN had become a pretext for the U.S. State Department negotiating a trade agreement with Corea rather than solving the mystery of the missing crew.    

 

In May of 1871 Rear Admiral John Rodgers, USN, escorted the U.S. envoy to China, Frederick Low[27] to open Corea to U.S. trade, and survey the anchorage at Roze Roads (Asanman Bay) and the Salt River (Ganghwa).  After a brief and ambiguous parlay with a low-level Korean diplomatic party, Admiral Rogers ordered the monitors MONOCACY and PALOS, along with four smaller steam craft, to survey the Ganghwa Straits[28].  

 

Three miles upriver, the U.S. vessels, who presented no written or verbal permission to explore the Korean interior approaching the capitol at Seoul, came under fire from Korean forts looking down on the river.  As she maneuvered, the MONOCACY foundered on the rocks of the shallow river, and two sailors were wounded as a result of Korean fire.  Admiral Rodgers response was unequivocal:

     

 

With this order, one hundred and fifty Marines and sailors landed with artillery and assaulted the five forts on the estuary approaching the Han River.[29]  The expedition struggled with the thigh-deep mud of the estuary, but once ashore, managed to roll up the Korean defenders without great loss.  The Koreans lost 200 defenders, as well as five forts, and numerous antiquated field pieces.  The U.S. lost one naval officer, one sailor, and one Marine.  

 

 

Bluejackets and Marines in landing boats towed by the USS MONOCACY  (Duvernay, Sinmiyangyo)

 

The U.S. had nominally been seeking to engage in diplomacy with the Koreans, partly to avoid U.S. flagged ships being seized and their crews killed, moreso for commerce, but their exploration of the river without Korean permission, and the Navy’s heavy-handed response to Koreans defending their territory, meant that another decade and a half would pass before the U.S. and Korea would enter into any treaties.  

 

Admiral David Dixon Porter made his annual report, reporting both that he was concerned with the quality of uniform being issued sailors upon enlistment, and the inferior class of men enlisting.  He lobbied for the Navy to enlist 2000 apprentices In order to develop and train a better cohort of sailors for the future.  He also made note that nearly all ships of the fleet lacked lifesaving equipment for the entire crew and felt cork mattresses should be supplied to aid as life rafts in case of shipwreck.  As always, he stressed the importance of daily sail exerce to maintain sail proficiency. (G.O. No. 128)

 

The USS PERIWINKLE was renamed USS POLARIS, and sets sail from New York on June 29, 1871, destination the North Pole. The ship was captained by Charles Francis Hall, a civilian with Artic experience gained searching for the FRANKLIN Expedition, but no leadership training or experience.  Hall’s crew largely consisted of German and American merchant sailors with whaling experience.  His Chief Scientist, Emil Bessels, and Meteorologist, Frederick Meyer were both Germans.  After setting off, the crew split into two factions over the lack of command experience Hall had.  In October, at Thank God Harbor in Greenland, Hall fell ill, and died.[30]  Investigators a century later determined he ingested a large amount of arsenic the last weeks of his life.  Sidney O. Budington took command of the expedition upon Hall’s death.  

 

 

 

USS POLARIS

 

COMMANDANT ZEILIN DIDN’T HAVE much to report in 1871, except that his Marines needed barracks at Norfolk, Annapolis, and Pensacola.  He suggested using surplus funds developed from the pay cut imposed on enlistees to fund repairs.  In time the pay cut would prove to be disastrous for retention, aggravating an issue the Marine Corps had for most of the 19^th century, desertion.  In New York City, Marines from the Brooklyn Marine Barracks under Lt Col J.L. Broome, USMC, assisted the local police and the Army in raiding illegal stills run by Irish gangs.  .  

 

During this period Zeiin grew increasingly ill, having contracted hepatitis on the Perry Expedition to Japan in 1853. In 1871 the sixty-five-year-old Commandant brought an heir-apparent to headquarters, Colonel Charles McCawley, USMC, to assist him in the continued administration of the service.  McCawley did not place himself at center of the burgeoning reform group of Marine officers, but believed improving creature comforts for enlisted Marines was the best means to reduce desertions.  

 

1872

 

PRESIDENT ULYSSES S. GRANT signed the Amnesty Act, which clawed back many of the restrictions on holding office by traitors of the late war imposed by the Fourteenth Amendment.  Going into the November election, the Republican Party was split;  Ulysses Grant was the Republican party candidate running on Reconstruction, and Horace Greely the Liberal Republican Party candidate, supported by the Democratic Party, was running on a platform of ending Reconstruction, and of government reform.  Grant won handily.  

 

During his first four years in office, President Grant accumulated a number of critics, including the owner of the New York Sun, Charles Dana.  Members of his cabinet, such as Secretary of the Navy Robeson began to come under fire from members of the press and general public, and Congress as allegations of corruption snowballed.  

 

THE NAVY SHIP COUNT was down to 178 on the rolls, with only 45 in active commission for sea-service.  This number would shrink to 41 when ships returned from foreign deployment.  The exploration and development of the Interoceanic Canal was still a top priority.  G.O. # 175 Division of the Pacific Station into Two Stations: General Order No. 175, 8 July 1872. Split the Pacific at the Equator, with the southern station extending as far west as Australia, and the northern one covering Alaska, Hawaii and Midway.  Due to its strategic location, and the shortage of ships of the line, Panama was common to both.  

 

Panama in relation to the hemisphere

 

In the expedition exploring a Nicaraguan route, six officers and men from the USS KANSAS drowned when their boat capsized crossing the reef at Aspinwall, off eastern Panama.  In the western Pacific, the Navigator Islands, or Samoa, came into focus as a base for the Navy, and a market for U.S. commerce.  

 

The Navy continued with charting the Pacific Ocean, and development of more efficient and safer steam powerplants. Partly in keeping with department policy to minimize the time spent steaming, to conserve coal, all four bladed screw-propellers were removed and replaced by two-blade appliances, which reduced drag when the ship was under sail.   

 

In Philadelphia the Navy was amidst the move from the original yard, near what is now Penn’s Landing, to League Island at the intersection of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers.  The new site was being built on marshy islands where the Navy was attempting to keep the ironclad monitors in some state of order in freshwater storage.  As it was a marshy island, fill was being transported in to raise the island above high tide.     

 

Philadelphia and League Island

 

Norfolk continued to languish, lacking appropriations to rebuild to antebellum standards, and while New London offered promise, funding was not made available by Congress. At Newport, the Navy was experimenting with “torpedo-boat” craft, remotely controlled, and carrying a 500-pound charge of fulminate, but Navy leadership was still pulling for investment in men-of-war that could protect U.S. interests abroad.  In New York, at no cost to the government the city and citizenry was allowed to dump trash, on marshland, increasing the footprint on which the Navy could build yard infrastructure.   

 

The Navy was continuing to adopt the Army signal method, completing training at Ft. Whipple near Washington and expanding instruction on it to the Naval Academy, and out into the fleet.  At the same time the Navy was working to reintroduce the International Signal Code, which had fallen out of use since the Civil War.       

 

The POLARIS report in 1872 consisted of the most recent, rosy, correspondence from the crew in August of 1871, when the ship and crew left the Greenland port of Godhavn, having acquired additional sled dogs for the expedition. The lack of communication with the far North meant Secretary Robeson had no idea that Captain Hall had died the previous November, or that his second in command, Captain Sidney O. Budington, was a raging alcoholic, and that good order and discipline aboard the POLARIS was crumbling.  

 

In June, part of the crew made the attempt to get to the pole by boat; a few miles from POLARIS, the small boat was crushed by ice.  The intrepid explorers returned to ship on foot, and took a second, collapsible boat to make a renewed attempt at the pole.  After they set off, POLARIS escaped the ice it had been surrounded by since winter.  Since Budington didn’t want to spend another winter in the ice, he sent men out on foot to retrieve the party making the pole attempt.  

 

When the whole crew was back aboard, POLARIS attempted to make the voyage south to civilization.  Unfortunately, on October 15^th, she grounded upon some ice, and the crew threw away much of their supplies to attempt to refloat the ship.  When part of the crew was on the ice, the floe they were upon broke away, removing them and a ton of supplies from contact with the ship. Fortunately for the portion of the crew adrift on the ice, they had Inuit hunters and their family with them, and several boats and kayaks. They would spend the winter adrift.  

 

POLARIS ran aground again, this time on purpose, and when the boiler was shut down, the bilge pumps could not keep up with the ship’s leaks.  Some of her timber was rescued, and Budington and a dozen members of the crew built a hut to winter over.                 

 

COMMANDANT ZEILIN REPORTED that the Corps was 2,293 Marines strong, with roughly 1,000 assigned to the ships of the fleet.  Zeilin believed desertion was the biggest challenge facing the Corps in 1872, similar to what the Army and the Navy were experiencing.  In 1871 there had been a cut in pay, but that cut had been restored, yet desertions continued.  

 

In Norfolk, instead of living in barracks, the Marines were quartered on the receiving ship, USS St. LAWRENCE, which was evidently rotting and leaking. The commandant reiterated his request for decent barracks for his Marines at this major facility.  

 

 

 

Receiving ships at Norfolk Navy Yard, FRANKLIN and RICHMOND

 

Captain James Forney, USMC, departed the U.S. for Europe, to conduct a tour of military facilities, gathering information on how other countries employed their Marines and naval infantry.  

 

 

1873

 

MARK TWAIN RELASES The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, written with Charles Dudley Warner, who was a writer, editor, lecturer, and close friend.[31]  Prescient of the epoch that the United States was entering, the book focused on a family attempting to get rich through land speculation, and through lobbying in Washington, D.C. 

 

In Northern California and Oregon, the U.S. Army is engaged in fighting the the Modoc People and Klamath Tribes.  Ulysses S. Grant was sworn in for his second administration.  Barbed wire is introduced to the public, and the James Gang pulls off the first train robbery in the west.  The U.S. dispenses with bimetallism, returning to the gold standard in full. 

 

In September the stock market crashed, triggering the Panic of 1873.  Speculation in the railroads, and an on-again, off-again embrace of silver monetization contributed to the panic, which led to what was “The Great Depression” in which 18,000 businesses failed in the following decade.  

 

SECRETARY ROBESON REPORTED that the Navy had 165 ships, of which 46 were performing sea-service with the squadrons.  Ships built of white oak during the Civil War, as opposed to the more durable live oak, had reached a point where maintenance and repair were no longer fiscally viable.  However, the Navy did claim that it was “repairing” six vessels at various locations.  Some of these were the Miantonomoh class of twin turret monitors, which in fact were having the entirety of their mechanical and armament components removed and installed on entirely new hulls. Congress in 1872 authorized the construction of eight sloops of war, which were under construction.  

 

In May, at Panama, the threat to U.S. commercial interests posed by warring factions spurred Rear Admiral Charles Steedman, USN, commanding the South Pacific Station, to land two-hundred Marines and Bluejackets, tasked with defending American properties including the railroad.  After two weeks, with a resolution between the warring factions found, the U.S. withdrew, only to return in September for a period of two weeks, again providing security for the rail depot and rail lines.  

 

U.S. trade ties to Cuba dated well back prior to the U.S. Civil War.[32]  In 1868, civil war broke out in Cuba. Cuban landowners, who still possessed slaves, attempted to overthrow the Spanish government on the island.  Popular sentiment in the U.S. backed the rebels.  

 

The SS VIRGINIUS was a U.S. flagged ship that plied the Caribbean, often under the protection of the U.S. Navy, hauling contraband, or filibustering, to Cuban rebels.  When the Spanish warship TORNADO captured the VIRGINIUS in November, the Spanish executed part of the crew as pirates.  Fifty-three American and British citizens were condemned, executed, and beheaded, with their remains then being trampled by Spanish horses.  Only when British envoys arrived did the situation deescalate.  Eventually the remaining crew members and their ship were released to the U.S.

 

The U.S found out about the capture and execution of the crew and immediately made plans to counter the Spanish fleet. At that point, the Navy acknowledged it had no ship that could counter the Spanish cruiser ARAPILES, then under repair in New York harbor.  ARAPILES was an armored, wooden-hull, single-screw vessel armed with two ten-inch naval rifles, and five eight-inch cannon.  

 

 

ARAPILES in drydock

 

Built in Britain, ARAPILES had been converted to an ironclad during construction, and the sort of ship not found in the U.S. Navy of 1873.    

 

However, the Navy did assemble a squadron at Key West in anticipation of war with Spain.  These ships, stripped from all the Navy’s squadrons, were commanded by Rear Admiral A.L. Case, USN, of the North Atlantic Station.[33] After the threat of war with Spain went away, these ships remained on station in Key West to conduct exercises the following year.    

 

The route for the Interoceanic Canal remained up in the air, as exploration and survey of the peninsular interior continued, in Darien (Panama) and Nicaragua.  In the Navy Yards, not much had changed; League Island was in the process of moving assets, facilities were being built, and the old yard was prepared for turn-over to the City of Philadelphia for sale.  Norfolk and Pensacola continued to require repairs from the Civil War, and New London still held promise, but for a lack of appropriations.  

 

After two years of training with the Army’s Signal Method, the Navy realized it wasn’t what it needed for squadron tactical communications.  Instead, the Navy began exploring use of the “flash method”.

 

In the fall of 1873, officers stationed at the United States Naval Academy made a course correction that would impact the Navy for decades.  Fifteen officers met, and formed the United States Naval Institute, then a problem solver’s organization, to foster discussion on how the Navy could become a more efficient and professional organization.  World travelers all, they’d seen professional institutes in action in foreign navies.[34]  They had numerous topics to cover; armaments, armor, propulsion, training, organization, signals, communication, navigation, tactics, strategy, medicine, naval architecture, and leadership were then, as today, turbulent topics upon which everyone had an opinion, and no one a clear answer.  Captain Stephen B. Luce, USN, posited that events in Cuba might lead to war with Spain.[35]

 

 

USNA at Annapolis, circa 1854. 

 

After nearly a year and a half, the greater world, finally got some word on what had taken place on the POLARIS Expedition to the North Pole.  On April 30, 1873, the Inuit and explorers adrift on the ice were picked up by the whaler TIGRESS, having drifted 1,600 miles over six months.  In July, Captain Burdington and the remainder of survivors of POLARIS were rescued by the whaler RAVENSCRAIG after they’d built boats out of the lumber used for their cabin and sailed south. Secretary Robeson’s expedition to be the first to the North Pole traveled further north than any group to date, 82°29’N.  The Secretary declared the expedition a victory however, despite the POLARIS being lost in the ice, and the crew not reaching the pole.[36]   

 

 

ADMIRAL DAVID DIXON PORTER EXPRESSED HIS concern that not one ship of the fleet had enough life-saving equipment in a time of need.  He again expressed the need for an apprentice program, a la the Royal Navy.  He expressed an opinion that eight inch guns are superior to nine inch guns because more of them could be carried aboard equal sized ships.  And although he didn’t want ships to sail under steam, he did believe the steam capstan, for lifting anchors, and hauling line, were essential for a modern warship.  He also felt that officers needed to be paid more and recommended that Farragut’s flag be adopted for the ranking admiral billet.  As he had a very high opinion of the future of the torpedo as a weapon, he lobbied for a better course of instruction at the Torpedo School, and better students.  As much as he believed in the future of torpedoes, he thought a good ship’s captain could out maneuver any directed his way.  He lamented that ships are not exercising sail drill to the level required by orders, that the Navy needed to adopt better standardization in uniforms, and that sailors should not be trained to be firemen, but as competent ship handlers.  Porter continued to see monitors as an important part of harbor protections, and sought appropriations to make monitors efficient, mentioning USS AMPHRITE (née TONAWANDA), one of the MIANATONOMAH monitors being surreptitiously being built/rebuilt.  And this was a ship that required $180,000 to bring her up to date, only eight years after commissioning.  

 

IN THE FALL OF 1873, Commandant Zeilin reported that the Marine Corps was in great shape, except for the barracks ship at Norfolk, the USS ST. LAWRENCE, which was leaky when it rained. He again recommended barracks to replace it.  2,331 privates were enlisted, and 1,000 embarked. The Corps remained a few hundred short of what Congress had provided appropriations for, but desertion remained a challenge. 

 

Captain James Forney, USMC, who’d led the Marines in the landing party fighting the “savages” on Formosa in 1867, returned from his tour of the continent in September, and submitted a report to the Secretary of the Navy on what he’d seen in England, Spain, France, Italy, Turkey and Vienna.[37]  Enamored with the Royal Marines, he recommended reorganization of the Marine Corps into a brigade of three regiments, trained and ready for deployment at the Secretary of the Navy’s discretion.  He sought training and equipping of infantry and artillery companies within the regiments, and commissioning officers out of West Point.  

 

1874

 

AMERICAN MISSIONARIES HAD been working in Hawaii since the 1820s, and business interests in the island nation grew in parallel.  In March 1874, following the election of a new king, Hawaii signed a treaty giving the U.S. exclusive trade rights. 

 

Due to the Panic of 1873, and the ensuing depression, much of the economic activity that drove Reconstruction faltered, and the Grant Administration was unable to do much to correct the situation.    In the wake of the Panic, the mid-term elections witnessed the Democrats taking the House of Representatives for the first time since before the Civil War.  Seeking further gains in 1876, the Democrats began a series of investigations into perceived instances of corruption by the Grant administration.  Secretary of the Navy Robeson was target of these investigations, for good reason.

 

In DeKalb, Illinois, Joseph Glidden patented the design for the barb wire he’d been making on his own farm as “The Winner”.  In December, the House Committee on appropriations recommended that the Marine Corps be folded into the U.S. Army, or outright eliminated.  

 

SECRETARY ROBESON REPORTED that the size of the fleet has shrunk again, from 165 vessels to 163, despite the addition of 11 new sloops and boats.  The Navy was nowhere near this strong, the count includes ships that are on the stocks and will never be launched, are floating barracks or prisons, and those rusting away in the backwaters near League Island, or upon the Anacostia River.  

 

Of note are four “powerful double-turreted monitors” which were “undergoing repair”.  These ships, all built during the Civil War, were presently being scrapped in all but name, and being built upon new iron hulls.  These included the USS AMPHRITE (née TONAWANDA), USS MONADNOCK, USS TERROR, and the ship the class was named for, USS MIANTONOMOH. Built during the Civil War with white oak, instead of the southern live oak timber, these ships all were rotting away less than eight years after commissioning.  With Congress refusing to fund new ships, Robeson and his staff took the course of building new ships under a line item reserved for repairs.  Loosely, Robeson and company were only replacing the hull, but in fact, nothing but the names of the originals remained at the end of the “repairs”.  

 

 

USS TONAWANDA PLANFORM 1864

USS AMPHIRITE 

 

Congress eventually took exception to Robeson’s accounting procedures, when they found out he was releasing the hulks of older, smaller, rotting, monitors to shipbuilders, as payment in part for the recreation of the four monitors listed and the USS PURITAN, whose construction started during the war, but was never completed.  

 

The Navy still regarded the monitor class as an effective defensive weapon, used as part of the defense in depth to protect American harbors.  Despite the requirement that they be towed over any great distances, their engine rooms were too hot for the crew to stand watch, and their seakeeping was abysmal unless the structure of their bows were built up to prevent decks from becoming awash the Navy planned on keeping them in service.  

 

It's worth noting that the best defense the Navy and War Departments thought they could offer the coastal cities of the U.S. was a local defense in depth, consisting of torpedoes (mines) to channelize an enemy fleet to a path where U.S. Navy monitors and Army coastal artillery batteries could kill the enemy before they began firing on harbor facilities or a city. 

 

In case of war, the rest of the Navy would abandon the peacetime diplomatic cruising in defense of U.S. interests abroad and take up positions off the enemy’s coast raiding their commercial shipping. But the threat of war with Spain in 1873 proved this strategy of coastal defense and commerce raiding to be lacking, and the Navy was going to have to develop another course in the defense of the country.  

 

Following the VIRGINIUS Affair the previous November, all the ships that gathered at Key West in anticipation of a face-off with Spanish fleet near Cuba, where the Navy elected to conduct exercises as a fleet en masse.[38] Much of the exercise focused on the control of ships as a maneuver unit at sea, but at one point 2,700 Bluejackets and Marines, along with artillery and Gatling Guns, were landed at Key West.  As much as the threat by the Spanish showed a material deficiency in the U.S. fleet, the exercises at Key West highlighted the deficiencies in practice.  Attempting to maneuver ships of differing displacements, speeds, and abilities to maneuver, and lacking compasses of precise accuracy, under sail instead of steam, was determined to be a feat requiring improvements in the vessels, officers, and crews of the Navy.  

 

The now damaged Virginius, secured from Cuba with the remaining crew members, travelled to the U.S. and was headed north to New York when she foundered off the coast of Cape Hatteras and was lost.  

 

The commander of the South Pacific Station, Rear Admiral Napoleon Collins, USN, died at Callao, Peru.[39]

 

Napoleon Collins

 

Born March 4, 1814, in Pennsylvania, Napoleon Collins became a Midshipman at the age of nineteen.  In 1846 he was commissioned a Lieutenant and served in the hostilities with Mexico aboard USS DECATUR.  During the Civil War, he was promoted to the rank of Commander, and skipped the USS UNADILLA.  

 

At 0300, on October 7, 1864, Collins took his ship, the USS WACHUSETTS and rammed the Confederate cruiser, CSS FLORIDA, damaging it, and demanded FLORIDA’s surrender.  A firefight ensued.  Fifteen Confederate sailors jumped overboard, attempting to escape capture, and nine of them were shot in the water by WACHUSETT’s guns.  Collins eventually accepted the FLORIDA’s surrender of 58 sailors and 12 officers. FLORIDA’s skipper, Lt. D. Maginault Morris, CSN, was ashore for the evening and avoided capture. 

 

Inconveniently, this battle took place in the harbor at San Salvador, Brazil, a neutral harbor, where the local commander had attempted to separate the two ships and prevent hostilities. As WACHUSETT took FLORIDA under tow they took fire from Brazilian forces for broaching the neutrality of the harbor.  

 

Collins later argued that he’d seen Confederate ships take coal from three captured US ships, prior to burning them under the protection of Brazilian guns.  WACHUSETT, with FLORIDA in tow, outran Brazilian pursuit, and made harbor in Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands.  

 

For the international incident that he’d created, Collins was court martialed, but popular acclaim over the capture of the FLORIDA precluded his dismissal.  He remained in the Navy and eventually became the commander of the South Pacific Station, promoted to captain and Rear Admiral. Napoleon Collins, USN, was serving in this capacity when he died at Callao, Peru in August of 1875, aged sixty-one.[40]

 

In February, 150 Marines and Bluejackets from the USS TUSCARORA and USS PORTSMOUTH, along with a Gatling Gun, landed in Hawaii at the behest of the royal government to restore the peace upon the election of King Kalakaua.  After three days, U.S. forces withdrew, and Hawaii signed an agreement with the U.S. assigning exclusive trade rights.  Two cruisers responded to political strife in Panama, but the situation resolved itself without a Naval Landing Party introducing itself.  

 

Pensacola was struck with Yellow Fever. Sailors and officers affected were put aboard a monitor and moved to New Orleans for quarantine.  Yellow Fever was such a threat to the general population at the time that Secretary Robeson suggested moving the bulk of Key West operations to the north during summer months, to avoid this plague.  

 

The Navy Yards continued to be hamstrung by the lack of appropriations.  League Island was in the process of being established and the abandonment of the Philadelphia Yard near the city center continued.  Norfolk dragged for wartime repairs yet, and facilities at Pensacola remained inadequate. 

 

The officers at Annapolis who’d banded together as the USNI, began publishing their thoughts on increasing the efficiency and proficiency of the Naval Service in the form of USNI Proceedings.  Essays on a topic would be published, and in subsequent issues, rebuttals presented.  The widespread dissemination of information on numerous topics would result in greater professionalism and standardization in thought among Navy officers.  Proceedings remains in publication today, one hundred and forty-eight years later.  

 

 

Proceedings – 1874 Vol. 1/1/1

 

Topics covered in the first issue of the magazine included:

-      The Institute’s membership, constitution, and bylaws.  

-      Stephen B. Luce, USN, wrote of the quality of seamen available in the U.S. and the relative merits of British and French sailors at Crimea.  

-      Chief Engineer C.H. Baker, USN, contributed a piece on the development of compound engines.

-      Lt.Cdr. H.C. White, USN, recounted the voyage of the USS TIGRESS in the rescue of the crew of the Artic exploration ship POLARIS.  

-      Professor B.P. Greene, USN, wrote about marine compasses and the construction of the Navy compass.

-      Captain W.N. Jeffers, USN discussed trends in arming ships of war.  

-      Lt. Frederick Collins, USN, recounted the exploration of the Isthmus of Darien, and the proposed route of the proposed interoceanic canal.  

-      The experiment on determining the center of gravity of the USS SHAWMUT on the Potomac River.

-      Commodore Foxhall A. Parker, USN, contributed two articles, one on the Monitor and Merrimac, the other on the fleet exercises that occurred at Key West in January and February of 1874.  

 

In December, Parker addressed the assembled members of the USNI, advising them that the “fleet of tomorrow” would be unlike the sailing fleet of that day.  Steam power would be the standard, which heralded the demise of the traditionalists of the officer corps.[41]  

 

ADMIRAL DAVID DIXON PORTER REPORTED ON FLEET MANEUVERS, where he felt that sailors and officers were disciplined, but that the “fleet showed itself very unsuitable for war proposes”. Ships in the U.S. Navy were slower and smaller than those of European fleets, and the British man of war HMS Invincible might go through entire U.S. fleet easily.  He commented that due to their lack of speed, monitors were of no use in fleet maneuvers. European rifled guns had become better than U.S. laminated armor, and U.S. foundries that made it. In this appraisal, he admitted that the “…first step toward improvement is for a nation to understand its weakness.”  

 

Porter saw torpedoes (naval mines) as a means to prevent anyone from invading the U.S., as long as they used under cover of naval gunfire.  The British fleet had doubled since 1865, and the U.S. fleet was halved.  Porter cast doubts on ironclads ever superseding wooden ships.  Porter felt that the U.S. Navy continuing to rely on smooth bore guns was making it fall behind European powers.  Germany was building sea-torpedo vessels, each 150’ long, 28 in total.  Europeans were experimenting with “fish-torpedo” which would eventually change naval warfare.  Porter felt Germany was the model for energy and determination in developing a fleet of modern vessels with haste.  He was impressed with the torpedo rams recently commissioned, the USS ALARM, and the USS INTREPID, and found them satisfactory for harbor defense.

 

USS ALARM

 

AFTER TEN YEARS SERVICE AS COMMANDANT, Jacob Zeilin finally got a barracks for his Marines at Norfolk.  As Congress limited the size of the Marine Corps to 1,500 privates recruiting was shut down.  Whether or not the Marine Corps could cover security and sentry shifts at the Navy Yards and aboard ship isn’t clear. What was clear was that if a deployment of Marines was needed, scraping together an ad hoc company wouldn’t be easy.  At Pensacola, Yellow Fever took the life of Lieutenant William B. Slack, USMC, along with 7 Marines in the barracks.  Slack was the son of the Quartermaster of the Marine Corps, Major William B. Slack.  

 

In December Marine officers gathered at the Washington barracks to pool their resources to counter a movement in Congress that threatened to disband the Marine Corps or possibly fold it into the Army.  Ever since An Act for a Better Organization of the United States Marine Corps in 1834, the Marines had been at risk of legislation that might disestablish the service or transfer its authority.  As recently as 1864, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Gustavus Fox, had it on his list of priorities to abolish the Corps.  

 

 

1875

 

THE ARMY CONTINUED TO MOVE NATIVE AMERICANS off their land to distant reservations at gunpoint.  Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act, which, in theory, assured blacks’ employment in civil service, and assignment to jury duty.  Nativist legislation from Congress prohibited the immigration of Chinese women.  Railway and mine owners hired the Pinkertons to spy on and incarcerate Irish workers loyal to the Molly Maguires.  Corrupt political boss, William Magear Tweed, better known as Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, escaped prison, and fled to Cuba, then Spain.[42] The Great Depression continued, with hundreds of businesses failing. The failure of railways that might have resulted in economic gains in the South undergoing Reconstruction, remained uncompleted.  

 

SECRETARY ROBESON REPORTED THAT the Navy has 147 ships on the rolls.  Of that number, 80 are available for immediate service, including 16 iron-clads and 2 torpedo boats.  The ships continued in their standard assignments, cruising foreign ports, showing the flag, and protecting U.S. business interests abroad.  In August, two ships of the European Station, USS CONGRESS and USS HARTFORD responded to insults made to the U.S. consul in Tripoli, addressed unruly individuals ashore, and departed a week later “after a full restoration of the previously existing friendly relations.”  Robeson recommended Congress continue funding the “repair” of the MIANTONOMOH class twin-turreted monitors, that were in fact being rebuilt from the keel up.  

 

The USS LANCASTER had been cruising the coast of Brazil since 1869, except for the period when it was off Key West in 1873 and 1874 responding to the SS VIRGINIUS incident.  Upon her departure for home from Rio de Janeiro in April 1875, her crew was struck by a virulent form of Yellow Fever.  The senior medical officer, the assistant surgeon, and a lieutenant died from the disease, and the LANCASTER returned to Brazil where a hospital was opened for them.  With 400 sailors, Marines and officers aboard, it is astonishing that the virus didn’t have a greater impact on the health of the crew.  Resupplied, the ship continued on to Norfolk, then on to Portsmouth, where she was put out of commission.  Pensacola too was struck by Yellow Fever in April, which kept ships of the North Atlantic Station from docking there.  

 

In the Northern Pacific, USS SARANAC was lost off the shore Vancouver Island, British Columbia, on her way to the Alaska Territory and Sitka.  No hands were lost, but no salvage was possible due to the position of the ship and currents in the Seymour Narrows. 

 

 

USS SARANAC

 

In the Navy Yards, the lack of appropriations continued to stymie maintenance and improvements, except in Philadelphia, where the old Navy Yard was closing.  Infrastructure at League Island was slowly developing, and Pensacola remained under the threat of Yellow Fever.  

 

IN THE SECRETARY’S REPORT, JACOB ZEILIN did make the point that the Marine Corps is 1,000 men shy of what statute allows, due to continued cuts in appropriations.  Perhaps in a nod to the reformers within the officer corps, he recommended promotion examinations, and that future newly commissioned Marine officers originate from the Naval Academy, which stood to increase the efficiency and professionalism of the service. 

 

The association of Marine officers that met in December of ’74 backed two publications to plea the case of the Marine Corps.  The first was a pamphlet from 1864 that was a collection of statements made by Navy officers on the positive aspects of having a Marine Corps keeping order aboard ship and guarding shore-based facilities. The second was the first history of the service, compiled by one of its own officers, Richard S. Collum.[43]

 

Not coincidental to the movement by Navy officers to create a forum to discuss reforms, Henry Clay Cochrane took the lead in the fight for reform in the Marine Corps.[44]  Marine officers could not be blind to efforts by Navy officers to improve their own lot; Marine officers spent half their careers aboard ship, serving with Navy officers, and dining and relaxing in the common wardroom.  Increasingly, they were attending the Torpedo School in Newport, and even Commandant Zeilin was an early member of the United States Naval Institute.  The center of gravity for reform among Marines now focused more on junior officers, who had more at stake over time regarding promotion.  Cochrane took to advocating for his peers to petition influential Congressmen in uniform on behalf of the of the Marine Corps.  Less than a century after its inception Marines were proving themselves adept at protecting the Marine Corps from political enemies.    

 

Fearing the Navy Department or Congress would decide for one and for all to abolish the Marine Corps, Cochrane published an anonymous pamphlet directed at his fellow Marine officers. He angrily pleaded for reforms  such as a brigade organization for the Corps with permanently formed companies and battalions, and to source new officers for the Marines either from Annapolis or West Point.  Commissioned in 1863, he didn’t believe he’d see the rank of major before he reached retirement age.  To free up promotions, and introduce new blood into the officer ranks, he sought promotion reviews and mandatory retirement of officers at age sixty-two.[45]

 

Zeilin, McCawley, Forney, Cochrane and others within the Corps attempted to address the root issues facing the service, in officer professionalism and competency, which hopefully would address other issues, such as training and desertion rates.  This course of action made complete sense, yet with the continual attacks from the Navy and Congress on whether a Marine Corps was needed, failed to assure the Marines of a permanent spot in the Navy Department.  Where Archibald Henderson realized there was more to the Marine Corps mission than merely guarding Navy assets, and keeping order aboard ship, his heirs wore blinders, and focused on what the Marine Corps had always done.    

 

 

1876

 

ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL MADE his historic first phone call and patents his invention.  The nation celebrated the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence.  Colorado was granted statehood.  Custer’s formation is decimated at Little Big Horn.  Boss Tweed is captured in Spain and returned to New York. 

 

In January of 1876, with the election coming up in November, Democrats in Congress sought to solidify their gains by conducting investigations on everything Republican.  Caught up in these investigations was Secretary Robeson, who oversaw creative bookkeeping on the double turret monitors, and gave contractors government property in return for work performed on those monitors and other ships.  On their side was Admiral David Dixon Porter, who was looking for support for his programs, and who held no affection for Secretary Robeson.[46]  The House Naval Affairs Committee found Robeson had moved funds from bureau to bureau without Congressional approval, was building ships instead of repairing them, and had given friendly contractors resources without recompense.  Democrats leading the committee referred the case to the Judiciary Committee, expecting impeachment proceedings.  The “stolen” election of 1876 and other issues knocked this move down, but the Democratic Congress would make the Navy pay through the smallest budgets the Navy saw since the year after the war.  

 

Yet the reform movement in the Navy persisted.  As a harbinger of the reform in thought that would overtake the leadership of the Navy, Stephen B. Luce lectured at the Naval Academy on operational art and strategy.  His remarks, expanding on the thoughts of (rank) Foxhall Parker, USN, laid out the tenets of studying history to develop maritime strategy in the current day, a practice that continues in military colleges and professional programs the world round, even today.    

 

FOLLOWING A PRECIPITOUS DROP following the Civil War, Naval appropriations stayed largely level through the decade following, at around $20 million a year, until the Democrats expressed their dislike of Robeson’s creative bookkeeping.  

 

ANNUAL APPROPRIATIONS

 

Navy manpower followed the appropriations trend pretty closely:

 

 

NAVY MANPOWER

 

The count of ships of the fleet dropped from 238 in 1867, to 146 in 1876.  Secretary Robeson, in his last annual report tried to show how well the country had done by the Grant administration and its management of the fleet. He made note of ships completed during the period, as well as those repaired and returned to service, purchased, and built from keel up.  He noted that the Navy was well provided for with seasoned live oak stored at various yards, contributing to the belief that wooden ships would remain relevant for the time being.  

 

He also noted that the U.S. was in an altogether different situation than the various states of Europe.  The U.S. lacked the colonies that drove competition between those states and was protected by two vast oceans.  Fast wooden cruisers plying the high seas, protecting American interests abroad, reinforced by ironclad monitors protecting her rivers and harbors and innovative torpedo technology made the U.S. as a secure fortress.  The U.S. had no need for complex, ironclad ships of the line armed with long range, rapid-fire, naval rifles. Exceptionalism drove the type of the Navy the U.S. needed, not competition. 

 

Secretary Robeson made note of the four double-turreted monitors “undergoing repair”. He continued with the charade that he wasn’t having four new monitors built, under legacy names.  Also, he failed to mention the way he was granting obsolescent single turret monitors to the shipbuilders in turn for their ongoing “repairs” on the four monitors.  These sketchy accounting practices would result in Congress investigating him and his cronies in the Navy Department in 1876 and 1878.  

 

Little had changed on the stations the Navy kept about the globe, but Robeson did explain that when ships were put into commission, they were assigned to the North Atlantic Station - which would eventually be nicknamed “the Home Squadron” - for their shakedown cruises and training.  This move allowed the Navy to begin to develop fleet tactics, originally attempted at Key West in the first part of 1874, after the scare of war with Spain.  

 

Manpower of the Navy remained an issue; it was down to 7,500 men in uniform, from a postwar height of 11,900 in 1867.  The Department attempted to keep the pipeline of new sailors open by training boys, 479 of them, aboard school ships in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.  

 

The Navy continued to endeavor in signals, hydrography, astronomy, a naval almanac, and exploring canal routes across Central America.  The Ordnance Bureau was moving ahead with both breech loading weapons and rifling, overcoming the decade of inertia austerity budgets created in terms of adopting innovations already in vogue in Europe.  

 

The Navy continued to develop New Londo, and League Island was nearly fully established, with the old Philadelphia Navy Yard sold.  Mare Island’s dry dock needed additional maintenance.  Congress convened a board of five officers to determine if any of the Navy Yards could be dispensed with, but Congress and the Navy were interested in opening a coaling station on the Saint Mary’s River in Maryland.  

 

 

BRIGADIER GENERAL COMMANDANT Jacob Zeilin was in the twelfth year of his appointment administering the Marine Corps.  Since taking the position, he’d periodically had to defend the cause of Marines.  The Naval Appropriations Act enacted by Congress and signed by President Grant restricted the Marine Corps from commissioning any new officers until their ranks had thinned through attrition.  In the annual report Commandant Zeilin pushed back on reforming Marine Corps structure as proposed by the younger reformers.  The Marine Corps was down to 989 Marines embarked on Naval vessels, and 882 assigned to shore duty.  The total, 1871, was below the amount authorized by law, but reflected where appropriations were for the service.  Between the Civil War and present day, this headcount was about as small as the Marine Corps would get.  

 

The relocation of the Philadelphia Navy Yard to League Island raised an interesting question, who would the Marines report to?  No barracks were yet built at League Island, so Marines were berthed aboard the USS ST LOUIS, and reporting to the ship’s captain, not the Yard Commandant, as they would in any established Navy Yard.  As the situation of lacking a barracks had come up in other locations since the war, it’s a wonder why it was an issue at League Island.  

 

Zeilin did try to state, that just days short of his retirement, that the Marine Corps did not need reorganization to be an efficient service.  This flew in the face of many of the junior, reform-minded officers of the service, and would be contrary to what reformers in the Navy would require of the Marine Corps in coming decades.  

 

So, on November 1, 1876, Jacob Zeilin retired from the Marine Corps.  In 1864 he had been “deep selected” for the post because he didn’t carry the baggage that those senior to him did.  He followed in his immediate predecessor John Harris’s, steps in not volunteering the Marine Corps for much outside of the established roles in guarding Navy Yards and providing security aboard ships of the line.  Had Secretary of the Navy Welles been able to find someone with the leadership and imagination of Archibald Henderson, perhaps the Marine Corps wouldn’t have to have faced down existential challenges from members of Congress and the Navy every couple of years.  Instead, the period between the Civil War and the War with Spain was one where the Marine Corps focused on smaller housekeeping issues, with none of the greater strategic world view the Navy developed.  

 

Conclusion:

Any history of the U.S. Navy or Marine Corps following the Civil War mentions the severe decline in the size of the fleet, and notes that there was a low period before the reformers rebuilt the Navy to suit a new American imperialism.  What they typically don’t cover is that some of the decline was due to the political partisanship between the Democrats who didn’t gain power in Congress until 1872, and Republicans split over how to handle Reconstruction.  Already small appropriations were aggravated by this friction between the parties, and how they handled relations with the political appointees in the Navy Department.  

 

The source of the decline in the Marine Corps following the Civil War had its roots in the failure of leadership in the Commandants who succeeded Archibald Henderson, who died suddenly in 1859, without an heir apparent.  Commandant Harris and Commandant Zeilin refused to engage in the expansion of mission that Henderson took on in augmenting the strength and training of embarked Marines.  The two set the standard for commandants for the rest of the century, which meant that the Marines never really lived up to the expectations of Naval Reformers.  Not until the War with Spain, and the formation of the General Board, was this desire formally stated; Marines would be required to take and hold advanced bases and harbors for a Navy engaged in competitions abroad with great powers.  The lack of interest in catering to Navy expectations meant that the Marines would periodically have to rationalize their own existence to Congress and the Navy several times a decade for a generation.  

 

American imperialism was limited during the immediate post war era.  Of course the imperative to protect American interests abroad, against unrest and insult, was nowhere as evident as in Panama, where the American railroad linked the Atlantic and Pacific, seriously shortening the time it took Americans to travel from East to West, and back again.  Continuous exploration of the possible routes for an interoceanic canal occupied Navy assets for several years, and when troops were required to protect the rail and business interests, Navy Bluejackets and Marines executed armed landings.  

 

Other interests occupied Navy activity of the era.  Punitive landings in Formosa and Korea escalated quickly into combat, with varying successes for the U.S. Occupation of posts in Alaska Territory, as well as landings at Midway, and armed support for elections in Hawaii set the stage for U.S. influence in those locations to this very day. 

 

In many ways, the period is uninteresting.  The Navy developed little by ways of technology, save for an interest in torpedoes, and the Marine Corps, even less.  Armed conflict during the era was limited to actions in Korea and Formosa.  The threat of armed conflict with Spain spurred the Navy to start thinking about operating in fleet formations, but until the Congress caught up with appropriations, and the Navy standardized modern ships, these maneuvers would remain in infancy.  The interest in the era lies in how far the two services sank, and sets the stage for the true innovations that came by way of Navy professionalism in the 1880s and 1890s, and prepared the country to grow into a new empire in the 20^th century.  

---

[1] Peterson, William S. Congressional Politics: Building the New Navy, 1876-86. Armed Forces and Society, Vol. 14 No. 4, Summer 1988. 489-509. Inter University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society.  

[2] The source for events of 1867 is the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy.

[3] The two were stepbrothers.  

[4] The 14 members of the crew were killed by local tribe members upset with sailors from foreign ships landing and killing them. 

[5] Wikipedia.

[6] Near what is today MCRD Parris Island.  

[7] After Captain Cook charted the area of the Sandwich Islands in the late 1700s, the islands had a population of 300,000. By the 1850s, the diseases brought to the islands by Europeans, most notably smallpox, whittled the population down to 60,000. – Wikipedia( Cumings, Bruce (2009). Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power. Yale University Press. p. 201.)

[8] Middlebrook Islands would later be known as Midway Atoll, and the Sandwich Islands, Hawaii.  

[9] From Wikipedia.org 

[10] Spanamwar.com

[11] There are 6 feet in a fathom.  

[12] PhD in History from Texas A&M, 2011(?)

[13] Henderson offered Harris a position in the ad hoc Marine Battalion mustered in response to the War with Mexico in 1841 (check date).  Harris turned down what most certainly would have been a combat assignment to remain in command of the Marine Barracks at Gosport (Newport).  His argument against deploying was that he didn’t wish to serve under another Marine officer of equivalent rank.  

[14] Krivdo, p.133

[15] Archibald Henderson had been breveted, promoted for bravery in battle.

[16] Bennett, Frank M. – The Steam navy of the United States: A History of the Growth of the Steam Vessel of War in the U.S. Nayv, and of the Naval Engineer Corps.  W.T. Nicholson, Pittsburgh. 1896. Alpha Editions reprint.  

[17] Mahan, AT. Great Commanders - Admiral Farragut. D. Appelton and Company, New York.  1897. Kindle Edition.  

[18] Bennett, Steam Navy.  p.623

[19] Mobley Jr., Arthur Scott.  Progressives in Navy Blue: Maritime Strategy, American Empire, and the Transformation of the U.S. Naval Identity, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis MD. 2018 Kindle Edition.  

[20] Peterson, Congressional Politics. p.xx Porter and Robeson did not see eye to eye.  In 1876, Porter happily gave up info on Robeson in Congressional hearings.

 

[21] (Author) Civil War Navies, 1855-1883, publisher, city, year, Kindle edition.

[22] Eventually, through legislation allowing the discount of mail rates, shipping companies built and manned ships that would be taken over and armed by the Navy during the Spanish American War.

[23] Mahan, Admiral Farragut.  

[24] (author) Civil War Navies. 

[25] McAulay, John D. Rifles of the United States Navy & Marine Corps, 1866-1917. Mowbray Publishing, Woonsocket, RI. 2017. P28. 

[26] Duvernay, Thomas. Sinmiyangyo – The 1871 Conflict Between the United States and Korea.  Seoul Selection. 2020. Google Play edition.  

[27] Former U.S. Representative and Governor of California.  

[28] Duvernay, Thomas. Sinmiyangyo: The 1871 Conflict Between the United States and Korea. Seoul Selection.  2020. Amazon Play edition.  

[29] The amphibious assault on Inchon in 1950 would occur not far from where the 1871 expedition landed.  

[30] Wikipedia entry for Charles Hall

[31] 1851 graduate of Hamilton College.  

[32] Jonathan M. Hansen, in his history of America in Cuba, recounted that George Washington’s half-brother Lawrence had failed in establishing plantations for Britain in Guantanamo Bay, and had been a partner with Edward Vernon, for whom Mount Vernon is named.  Vernon, Jonathan M. Guantanamo – An American History, Hill and Wang, New York, 2011. Kindle version.   

[33] The fleet consisted of LANCASTER, TICONDEROGA, FRANKLIN, MINNESOTA, WABASH, COLORADO, BROOKLYN, CONGRESS, WORCESTER, ALASKA, CANANDAIGUA, SHEANDOAH, JUANITA, OSSIPEE, WACHUSETT, POWATAN, WYOMING, KANSAS, SHAWMUT, SAUGUS, MAHOPAC, MANHATTAN, AJAX, CAONOICUS, DICTATOR, DESPATCH, PINTA, FORTUNE, and MAYFLOWER

[34] Mobley, Scott. Progressives in Navy Blue. USNI Press. (year) Kindle edition.  

[35] Mobley, Scott. Progressives in Navy Blue.  USNI Press.  (year) Kindle edition.

[36] Evidence points to POLARIS’ Captain, Charles F. Hall, being poisoned by a crew member during the voyage.  

 

[37] Shulimson, The Marine Corps Search for a Mission, p.14. 

[38] Rentfrow, James C. “Home Squadron: The U.S. Navy on the North Atlantic Station”. United States Naval Institute Press, Annapolis.  2012. Kindle edition.

[39] Collins had commanded the USS WACHUSETT, during the Civil War, and got himself in hot water for taking the Confederate Navy ship CSS FLORIDA in a harbor of the neutral Brazilian state.  Court-martialed for this action, popular acclaim allowed him to remain in uniform and serving up until his death. 

[40] Collins had commanded the USS WACHUSETT, during the Civil War, and got himself in hot water for taking the Confederate Navy ship CSS FLORIDA in a harbor of the neutral Brazilian state.  Nearly court-martialed for this action, popular acclaim allowed him to remain in uniform and serving up until his death.  

[41] Mobley. Progressives.  Ch. 2. 

[42] Wikipedia

[43] Shulimson, p.15.

[44] Cochrane is one of the most interesting figures in Marine Corps history of the era, in part because he maintained daily journals, and was not shy in criticizing his peers or superiors.  Commissioned a Marine officer at the beginning of the Civil war, his commission was revoked on the first day because of his being under age.  Nonplussed, he joined the Navy and became a Master, seeing action in several river battles.  When he was of age, he took a commission in the Marine Corps.  Stationed at the Washington Barracks, he and the Marine Band accompanied Abraham Lincoln to Gettysburg for the commemoration of the veterans’ cemetery, which gave us the Gettysburg Address.  He was an outstanding example of Marine officer in the years between the Civil War and First World War.  

[45] Shulimson, p.17. 

[46] Peterson, Congressional Politics. p.xx