In all the literature of the Civil War no collection of letters is more remarkable than the Confidential Correspondence of Guslavus V. Fox, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1861—65.1 Other collections: the Home Letters of General Sherman, the Papers of Captain Percival Drayton, the letters of Rear Admiral Du Pont, Brigadier General T. Kilby Smith, etc., reveal the unusual experiences at the front and also the intimate and admirable philosophies of the writers. The Private Papers of General Benjamin F. Butler present a panorama of observations on political, social, economic, and military matters, treated with sincereness on the whole, but generously enlivened with war prejudice, propaganda, and gossip. In general the greatest degree of frankness is found in the collections of letters that were written to individuals throughout the period of the war: Sherman to his brother John, the Senator; Kilby Smith to his mother; Drayton to his friend Hoyt; Butler to his wife. Each collection, therefore, presents facts and observations more or less tailored to measure for the individuals who were to receive them and through each collection inevitably runs a degree of sameness.
Unique in theme, range of emotion, and panorama of personalities involved, the Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Fox is a library in itself, and it is no exaggeration to say that the top floor added to the Navy Department Building during the war was constructed to house this “library” and put into practice a few hundred out of its thousands of suggestions for improving the Navy. It is true that to become the recipient of so large a private correspondence no other individual in public or private life was so perfectly situated as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The official position he occupied was a new one, and with few restrictions Fox could make of it what he would. Fortunately for posterity he chose, among other things, to make it a bureau of unofficial information. Fox’s intimate correspondence covers operations on all the naval fronts: the Potomac, the North and South Atlantic blockades, the Eastern and Western Gulf blockades, the Mississippi, and the high seas flying squadrons chasing Confederate commerce raiders. Fox received personal letters from hundreds of individuals in and out of the naval service; but the range of the personalities contacted is sufficiently indicated by the list of flag officers with whom Fox most frequently corresponded: blunt and blustery Goldsborough; the gallant “Bayard of the Navy,” Du Pont; Fox’s average and complacent brother-in-law, S. P. Lee; the earnest and religious idealist, A. H. Foote; the jocular, hot-tempered, hard-fighting D. D. (“Black Dave”) Porter; the mild-mannered scholar, C. H. Davis; and the genial “Heart of Oak,” first Admiral of the Navy, David Glasgow Farragut.
From this group of diversified personalities, Fox drew an amazingly intimate correspondence, in spite of the fact that at the time of writing each of these men was usually up to his eyes with the work of his particular squadron and had numerous axes to grind. Throughout the war the flag officers never had enough ships or men to do the work demanded of them; engines and guns, especially in the new gunboats and ironclads, were forever needing replacement or repair; munitions, food, coal, medical stores seldom arrived on time; difficulties of co-operation with the volunteer armies were legion. Their confidential letters to Fox supplemented their official communications to Secretary Welles. They knew of course that Fox was in a position to get things done. But they also regarded him as a friend on whom they could rely for moral support. The Fox correspondence is intimate and personal, at times gruff and growling, at times light, gay, and ridiculous according to the oscillations at the moment of a personal mood or of the fortunes of war.
Inevitably the Fox Correspondence raises interesting questions regarding personnel and morale. How could this unusual civilian with a desk job in Washington command the utter confidence of naval officers afloat? Unquestionably it was important that Assistant Secretary Fox should know how matters really looked to the commanders on various stations. But how did he break down the barriers of officialdom and get these overburdened men to “loosen up” and write of their problems and their feelings as freely as they might write to their wives or brothers?
In the first place Gustavus Fox had a tremendous advantage in having once been an officer in the Navy. Appointed a midshipman from Massachusetts, on January 12, 1838, Fox remained in the Navy until 1856, and of these 18 years he spent approximately 14 on sea duty in the Mediterranean, off the west coast of Africa, in the East Indies, in the Coast Survey, and on special assignments as captain of the mail steamers Ohio and George Caw, in which the government was interested because of the subsidy. Naval officers, not all of whom were so fluent in written expression as D. D. Porter or Du Pont, had the satisfactory feeling that Fox would know and understand their language. Officers invariably had too little time and too much to write about, and Mr. Welles with his dignified reserve and reputation as a punctilious journalist was a difficult person to write to; unless, as in the case of Captain Foote, he happened to have been a boyhood chum. Besides, as Porter wrote Fox, “Your eyes are younger than his, I must make you the recipient of my scrawl.”
Younger officers of the Navy—and it was largely these near-contemporaries of Fox who fought the war—knew Fox to be a man of open mind, interested in the new developments of the machine age, anxious to take advantage of them, and ambitious personally to get along in the world. In fact it was Fox’s initiative that had caused him to resign from the inactive Navy in 1856 to marry Virginia, a daughter of the well-known Judge Levi Woodbury, and settle down as superintendent of a progressive cotton mill in Lowell, Massachusetts. As a “cotton-spinner” Fox developed himself in two directions which would serve him well later on—experience with machinery and with the handling of personnel problems in a large industrial organization. The latter especially enabled him to understand the difficulties of flag officers in transforming the green hands from coastal and river cities into able-bodied seamen.
The driving, energetic Fox, moreover, plunged himself into the Civil War months before it began, at once proving his loyalty to the Union and exciting the admiration of naval officers whose very status compelled them to remain passive in the face of the approaching crisis. After the secession of South Carolina in December of 1860 it at once became evident that the garrison of Fort Sumter would have to be supplied with additional men and provisions. Fox was well known to merchants and shippers of Boston and New York because of his service in mail steamers; and these men, particularly Mr. William H. Aspinwall of New York, recommended Fox as a man clever enough to carry relief to Sumter without provoking Charleston, i.e., to perform the mission in complete secrecy. Fox’s plan was to take the Collins line paddle steamer Baltic (see page 705) with a load of provisions to the bar of Charleston, thence under cover of night to run the supplies in on steam tugs to the beleaguered fort. President Buchanan was interested in the project, but refused to undertake it, and in March, 1861, President Lincoln took it up. In addition to his New York friends Fox now had the powerful backing of his brother-in-law, the new Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. Since South Carolinians had by this time materially strengthened their secondary forts, a Federal naval force was now added to Fox’s expedition, with the ambitious Fox assuming responsibility for its direction.
Fox sailed from New York on April 9, and arrived off Charleston three days later to find that through interference of the State Department in the Navy Department’s affairs his strongest vessel, the U.S.S. Powhatan, had been diverted to Fort Pickens off Pensacola. The South Carolinians in ugly mood bombarded Fort Sumter the day Fox appeared, and Fox without the Powhatan could only stand by and receive Major Anderson and his garrison on board after the fort’s surrender.
The failure of the Sumter expedition stirred the country in a manner opposite to what he had expected, and Fox returned to Washington to find himself in popular eyes a hero, with President Lincoln himself apologizing for the mix-up over the Powhalan and anxious to bestow on Fox some mitigating favor. Fox had his choice of a naval command afloat or a position in the Navy Department. He accepted the latter, becoming at first Chief Clerk, and on August 1, when the office was created for him, Assistant Secretary of the Navy. His reason for not returning to the line was that he believed the naval war would become nothing more than a tedious blockade. His forecast was to prove incorrect; but his choice of a position in the Department was one of the happiest circumstances of the war both for himself and for the Navy. In the Department, Fox quickly became Mr. Welles’ right- hand man. Officers throughout the service recognized this, and when Fox gave them clearly to understand that he wanted personal, unofficial letters from them, and himself set the example, they responded generously.
Such a thing as writing personal confidential letters to friends in Washington was not unprecedented. Sometimes one wrote without reserve to a special friend in a bureau. But to carry on an extensive private correspondence with a department official whose executive power transcended that of all the bureau heads together was a thing unheard of.
The confidences he received must have amazed even Mr. Fox himself. One senior captain confesses that he is not really old enough to go on the retired list since his midshipman’s commission for a sentimental whim had been dated “1812,” and would Mr. Fox please to change it! A lieutenant angrily explains why he doesn’t capture the New Orleans forts:
A man don’t associate down here with alligators sand flies, mosquitoes and rattlesnakes for nothing, he soon gets his eye teeth, and gets wide awake—take a fort indeed! I don’t think it likely that anybody will take anything down here unless it is the fever or the Scurvy. How can it be otherwise, when there is no Ice or lemon juice; whoever sends us Ice and lemon juice shall have a Fort sent to him . . .
A flag officer reads one of his reports in a newspaper and fulminates:
Please do not let that gang of Thugs the Associated Press have my reports or the reports of my officers to me—they always mutilate, never know the point involved of anything professional, and generally leave out what is best. .. .
Another squadron commander wonders:
What in the name of all patience can keep the Quaker City! I want her to go off Wilmington, and also watch the three Inlets to the South’d of that place. She is just the vessel for the purpose.
Farragut writes:
My greatest anxiety now is to have proper comforts for the sick & wounded ... It is a great gratification to Jack to see that his comforts are looked to, when he is sick . . .
Porter writes:
Let the Government buy Ericsson at any price. . . . When one sees such a genius as that living in a hovel surrounded by the monuments of his art while “charlatans” are fattening on the crumbs from the public crib, it induces him to believe that in our country people obtain patents for ignorance and imbecility.
Day after day Gustavus Fox opens these letters, marked “Private and Confidential” and usually double sealed within two envelopes, written most of the time in extreme haste by men of varying temperaments, swayed by every imaginable caprice of circumstance. These letters bring to Mr. Fox a tremendous mass of information on every conceivable phase of naval life and activity. They are not literary in any sense, but practical outpourings of the ideas of practical seamen. Prattle and spritely gossip mingle with many a deep- sea growl, and occasionally there are bugle notes of praise for the Navy Department!
Fox understands the seamen’s language and while winnowing grain from chaff, writes for officers (especially captains of ironclads) to “make full reports of their vessels and find all reasonable fault and offer suggestions. It is the only way we can learn anything to guide us in the future.”
Fox never allowed himself to “go stale” at his desk in Washington. For all his multifarious duties he was continually hopping by train to New York, Philadelphia, and Newport News to confer with Ericsson, encourage shipbuilders, and visit with naval officers on the job. After the great naval and military victory at Fort Fisher he went down the coast on a fast dispatch boat to congratulate Admiral Porter in person. Another sample of Fox’s efforts to keep in touch with the situation as presented to the fighters is his trip to Hampton Roads when the C.S.S. Virginia first came out of Norfolk for her brief carnage against the wooden Federal block- aders. Fox was present on that memorable night to welcome the arrival of Captain Worden and the U.S.S. Monitor, and on the next day to witness the classic first battle of ironclad ships. After the fight Fox went on board to congratulate the Monitor’s crew while smoke was yet in their eyes and their overtaxed muscles were still a-quiver with the labor of serving the heavy guns. He sent the wounded captain to Washington in charge of a friend and remained at Hampton Roads for a week repairing the Monitor’s injuries and inspiring the crew with telegrams from Washington that told of Captain Worden’s recovery.
To keep the many streams of personal letters flowing steadily, Fox reciprocated with intimate details of Navy life in Washington. What officers were in town, what they were talking about, what truth there was in the rumors flying around in the Department, what the Department was planning as its next move, what duty the particular officers might expect in the future; all of these details Fox writes with amazing spontaneity, always adapting them to the individual officer to whom he is writing. He enlivens a long technical letter to Du Pont with a word about his own household scene at the moment:
Our new Admiral Davis, is sitting by Mrs. F. smoking a cigar, but my heart is with you, and my anxiety is, not regarding your attack [on Charleston], which will be surely crowned with success, but with our poor fellows in the Gulf [Farragut] without an ironclad . . .
To his brother-in-law S. P. Lee he rages upon a theme popular with most naval officers of the time—the shortcomings of the Army.
Dark days are upon us. Pope, a lying braggart, without brains of any kind, has been driven into Washington and his Army disorganized. [September, 1862, after the Second Battle of Manassas.] The Rebels again look upon the Dome of the Capitol, and the flag of disunion can be seen on the neighboring hills.
In the tumult Fox also keeps in touch with the Naval Academy and future naval officers. He requests Captain Blake, the Superintendent, to write an inspiring message to the midshipmen for Secretary Welles to sign, and suggests that the famed orator, Edward Everett, address “these Boys in language that should live as long as the Navy exists.”
To keep the flag officers continually on their toes Fox promoted a series of friendly rivalries. In the Mississippi River campaign he urged Farragut to hasten his capture of New Orleans from the south lest the ironclads descending the river under Davis get there first. Farragut won. Immediately Fox used the Navy’s singlehanded success at New Orleans as a touchstone of excellence to be applied by Du Pont against Charleston. In the capture of Charleston a military force proved to be actually indispensable; but during the first three years, when no adequate army was available, Fox had every man in the South Atlantic Squadron burning to make Charleston, the birthplace of the rebellion, a purely naval conquest. When the ironclads failed because their delicate mechanical devices were too easily deranged, Fox never lost faith in the principle of Ericsson’s contrivances but kept steadily driving toward further improvement; he kept up the essential spiritual factor of morale, though to accomplish this he had to replace his old and intimate friend Du Pont with a new commander, Dahlgren, whom Fox personally disliked.
In his drive for a successful termination of the war Fox never lost sight of the personal interests of officers. He held out the tantalizing hope of promotion, always emphasizing that advancement in rank was dependent on success in battle. It was not Fox but Congress who made admirals. Only success in battle would convince Congress. And if Fox could show Congressmen some tangible evidences of success. . . .
Fox inspired the maddest trophy hunt in American history when he wrote that “Any little trophies would be most gratefully received by the members of Congress, . . . [who] constantly ask me for such.” He received box after box of relics—captured battle flags from Port Royal, Fort Jackson, Arkansas Post, etc., captured portraits of President and Mrs. Jefferson Davis, broken bits of shell and solid shot, a raft of old carbines, Confederate Army stores of all kinds—everything but mosquito netting which the captors invariably appropriated for their own use.
On the whole the intimate details dissected from the main body of the Fox correspondence are extremely trivial. But it is abundantly clear that Gustavus Fox meant them to be so. They are the butterflies that flicker over the battlefield. The eye catching them for a few whimsical seconds forgets the cannon balls. But in the mind of Fox, behind these lively and colorful excrescences, there is always the dominating purpose to win the war.
After he had labored in the Department so to place men and material as to secure the maximum results from each of the squadrons, he endeavored to put before each flag officer an accurate picture of conditions at home, to let him know what was expected of him, and to encourage him to carry out his particular mission with a proper understanding of the whole problem.
From the testimony of the Confidential Correspondence one must conclude that Fox’s sympathetic understanding, shrewd handling of personnel, tireless activity, and abounding confidence—in short that Gustavus Fox himself was an essential factor in winning the Civil War.