When Lieutenant John M. Brooke of the Confederate States Navy shook hands with Constructor J. L. Porter in the Richmond office of Secretary Mallory on an unknown date in the summer of 1861, there was formed one of those collaborations of theoretical ingenuity and practical knowledge of detail that have so often produced important historical results. Porter, who had just come up from Pensacola, brought with him a model for a floating harbor-defense battery, obviously inspired by the French bombardment vessels that had fought at Kinburn, seven years before. It was shaped like a truncated pyramid and was mounted on a scow; he explained that the sides were to be of iron and the engines just strong enough to enable the queer craft to shift position in the untroubled waters of a port. He wished the Confederate Government to authorize the construction of several such craft to protect the coastal cities against the overwhelming wooden navy of the Federals.
Brooke had been thinking along similar lines, but in terms of a ship whose tactical purpose should be attack rather than defense. The concept he sketched out for Porter was a vessel with length and sharp ends to give it speed and the power to maneuver. The ends were to be under Water as a protection against shot, and &n iron, invulnerable citadel would be mounted amidships to house the guns. But the lieutenant was an ordnance man, not a constructor, and he had been unable to work out the details. Would it be possible to set Porter’s floating battery atop his hull?
The man from Pensacola said it would, and set to work on the drawings at once, during the course of the work adding to the hull a projecting tooth, or ram, for driving into the sides of enemy ships below the water line. Unfortunately for the Confederacy both the collaborators ran into difficulties. Brooke could obtain nothing but some railroad iron for the armor, and Porter had trouble with hull and engines. There was not in the whole Confederacy a power plant capable of driving a ship of the desired size at the desired speed, and there were no facilities for building one. To both men it was desperately important to get their ironclad afloat at the earliest date, for advices from the North assured them that the Federal Navy was also embarking upon the construction of metal-plated ships, and permanent naval victory might go to the party that first entered the lists. Under the circumstances they decided to use the hull of the steam frigate Merrimac, which had just been rescued from the bottom at the Norfolk Navy Yard, where she had burned down to the lower deck before sinking at the time of Virginia’s secession.
The use of the second-hand hull had important results; instead of the ship of 8 feet draft contemplated in Porter’s plans, the new ironclad Virginia rode 22 feet down in the water, and her engines were so little improved by their several months’ pickling in salt water that even with repairs and alterations they would drive her no faster than 9 knots, and this in smooth water, with the accompaniment of constant breakdowns. Such as she was, she was able to steam out into Hampton Roads on March 8 following, destroy the Congress, sink the Cumberland, and terrorize the whole North for the 24 hours before Worden and the Monitor arrived on the scene.
Yet a very brief study of the history of the rebel rams is sufficient to show that that one day of victory for their ironclad was more fatal to the Confederates than half a dozen defeats. For the destruction of the two wooden ships convinced the guiding minds of the Richmond Cabinet that they had found a cheap and easy method of attaining sea power. It was not true, of course. The important thing historically, however, is that Jefferson Davis and his assistants thought it was true. The thought led them to refuse Brooke’s frantic petitions that great quantities of engines and armor plate be purchased abroad and brought in before the Union blockade became any more stringent.
Why get excited? was the official attitude. The events off the Rip Raps had rendered all wooden ships obsolete; South and North were starting from scratch in ironclad construction, with the former having the advantage of what then looked like the better system. In the long run, the persistence of this idea that they could build ships to break the wooden blockade whenever they chose led the Confederate authorities to reject every other system of warship construction but the one triumphantly demonstrated against the Cumberland and Congress. In short, the Virginia’s one success fixed the Confederate States Navy at the point it attained on that March morning, insuring that it would never advance beyond that point save by means of the multiplication table.
For every other ship of the Confederate Navy with the exception of a few armed tugs, a few commerce raiders constructed in England, and the two ironclads never quite finished in France, belonged essentially to the Virginia type. We count 27 such ships all told; 27 first class battleships, in modern terminology, enough to make a fighting fleet that would have menaced any navy in the world. Yet except for a few anxious days inside the North Carolina sounds and a few anxious moments in Mobile Bay, this great fleet never came close to challenging the Federal superiority by sea.
This can perhaps best be appreciated by a brief examination of the 27 ironclads and their fate. The details we would most like to know about them are often wanting, and the authorities for the details we possess are often contradictory, but the general outline of the story will emerge clearly enough.
II
One of the most striking facts in this outline is that of the two participants in the first engagement between ironclads, the Monitor was the smallest and weakest of her class, and the Virginia the largest and most powerful of hers. No other rebel ram had half the displacement of the first; no other had so big a battery; only three carried a greater thickness of armor, and though engine-room data is conspicuous by its absence, there is no record of any other being as fast. Among the monitors the situation was exactly reversed on all counts, and in addition the original Monitor was the only one restricted by orders to the use of half powder charges for her great guns, the Washington authorities at the time fearing that full charges would burst these weapons.
The reason for the reduction of the original Virginia’s dimensions in subsequent editions was largely her great draft and the general unhandiness that resulted from it, together with the difficulty of obtaining engines to drive so large a ship- The Confederate Navy Yard at Richmond, under the personal direction of Brooke and Porter, turned out four ironclads after the first one, all approximately of the same design, which may be taken as standard for the rebel ram navy. They were ships 150 to 180 feet long, 35 to 40 feet in beam, 12 to 15 feet in draft, with 4 inches of iron armor (except in the case of the second Virginia, which had 6) and with 4 to 6 big guns. None of the Richmond ships were ready before 1864; by that time General Grant was operating on the James and the river was full of monitors, including a particularly redoubtable double-turreted specimen, the Onondaga.
Three of these ironclads—the second Virginia, the Fredericksburg, and the Richmond—twice came down the stream to have a go at the Federal fleet. Each time they met the Onondaga, and when the latter’s 150-pound rifles let daylight through their sides, went back up again in a hurry. All three were blown up when the Confederate capital fell; at the same time a nearly-completed fourth ship—the Texas—was captured and taken into the U. S. Navy. A survey pronounced her the finest hull taken during the war, but when she was fitted for sea her freeboard proved so dangerously low that she was sold out in 1867.
In the North Carolina sounds one ram Was built—the Albemarle—and she made trouble enough, twice beating squadrons of the light draft wooden ships in actions too famous to need recounting here, before she fell a victim to Cushing’s gallant torpedo raid. The thing worth noting about her story is that her Captain Cooke broke off both his victorious battles and abandoned an original intention of cleaning out the whole Union sound flotilla because his ship’s engines went back on him.
Wilmington, North Carolina, produced two seagoing ironclads, the North Carolina and the Raleigh. The latter, first afloat, made one thrust at the blockading squadron, decamped as soon as her commander sighted a monitor, and was wrecked on the bar getting into harbor, while her sister-ship foundered in the Cape Fear River as the result of a slow leak.
Neither these two nor the four rams built at Savannah seem to have inspired their commanders with much confidence and the answer probably lies in the first of these almost identical vessels. This was the Atlanta, which came out in June, 1863, accompanied by excursion boats to watch her “smash up the abolition blockade,” and ran into the new monitor Weehawken, commanded by John Rodgers. The latter was armed with one of the 11-inch guns borne by the original Monitor, but also with one of the new 15-inch Dahlgrens. She fired just four shots—two 11-inch which jarred chunks of armor loose from the ram’s side, and two 15-inch which went right through—before the Confederate ship surrendered.
The Atlanta was taken north and employed by the Federal Navy on the James toward the close of the war, but not until her power plant had been entirely revised and her armor strengthened. Of the three other Savannah ships, the Savannah and Milledgeville were so slow in getting their engines that they never got steam up before Sherman’s marching men cut the base from beneath them; the Georgia was finished early, but her engines proved too weak to give her steerage way and she was moored as a floating battery for harbor defense. One other rebel ram was built in Georgia, a remarkable craft called the Muscogee, somewhat along the lines of the Union river ironclads, with a central wheel between catamaran hulls, but like the pair at Savannah, she was completed too late to avoid Sherman’s columns and perished at her dock.
Throughout the war there was a good deal of activity at Charleston, which enjoyed the advantages of a good navy yard. Soon after the Virginia's exploit in Hampton Roads, two rams were laid down there, the Chicora and Palmetto State. Early in 1863 they rushed the Union inshore blockading line in a morning fog, rammed the U.S.S. Keystone State and disabled the U.S.S. Mercedita by gunfire, both the Federal wooden ships hauling down their flags. Neither prize was secured; the Palmetto State developed engine trouble and when the gigantic New Ironsides slid toward them the two rebel craft ran for harbor. A few months later Charleston finished the C.S.S. Columbia, the best armored of any of the rebel rams, and with the other two ships, the one which stood the best chance of meeting the Union forces in a stand-up fight. Before she was ready to go out, however, she got caught in a harbor current, and while steaming out of it, broke her back on a reef. Still another ironclad, the Charleston, was finished during the siege of the city; with the first two, she participated, though not to any effective extent, in the defense of the place against Admiral Dahlgren, and with them she was blown up when Sherman’s troopers took the city from the rear.
No less than five ironclads were produced up the rivers leading to Mobile Bay during the war, but only one of them, the famous Tennessee, ever saw action. The story of her famous single-handed fight with Farragut’s fleet and how it ended when her unprotected steering gear was shot away by U.S.S. Chickasaw needs no retelling. The Confederate authorities had trouble finding engines and armor for the other four ships, and when their equipment did arrive, it was too late, for the Federal Navy had by that time captured the Mobile forts and installed monitors in the bay. There were bad sandbars at the river mouths; to get armored ships across them, their guns had to be taken out, and the rebels could conceive of no method of getting the guns back in under the fire of the monitors, so all four ironclads were scuttled.
Louisiana had the best workshops in the original Confederacy and in this state, before the fall of New Orleans, the most hopeful naval effort was made. The first of the Louisiana ironclads, also, was the only one of the whole 27 that departed from the original Brooke-Porter design- This was the Manassas, built by a syndicate of Louisiana business men as an invulnerable privateer; she had an iron turtleback extending down below the water line, broken only by a gun port forward like a Cyclopean eye, a tall funnel, and an armored porthole for the crew to enter the structure. As a seagoing ship she would have been a failure, but did good service on the river, beginning on a dark night in the fall of 1861, when she fell on a small Federal detachment at the Head of Passes. The screw-sloop Richmond was coaling; before her people knew of the ram’s approach, the Manassas banged into her side, and in the Federal squadron, which does not seem to have been very well commanded, something like a panic resulted. In the subsequent Battle of New Orleans the Manassas succeeded in ramming the U.S.S. Brooklyn, damaging her seriously, but fell an easy victim to the Mississippi, whose heavy shells went through her plates and blew her up.
At the date of the battle the Louisiana authorities had two other ships afloat, larger, heavier, and with more guns than any other rebel ram but the original Virginia. Porter appears to have supplied nothing toward their construction but the basic design, local talent attending to the details, and doing it so inefficiently that when the first of these ships, the Louisiana, floated down the river, it was discovered that her portholes were too small to admit of the guns being given any train either laterally or in elevation. She had the usual Confederate trouble with her engines and during the Battle of New Orleans served as a floating battery under the bank at Fort St. Philip. After the Federal Fleet ran the forts she was blown up; her engines were still unable to move her, and she was so placed that shells from the Federal mortars would fall onto her unarmored deck. The other Louisiana ironclad, the Mississippi, was regarded by the Southerners as their real hope, and there have been many expressions of regret that she was not completed before the arrival of Farragut’s ships made it necessary to burn her. It is doubtful whether she would really have justified half the extravagant expectations entertained for her. To be sure, her artillery was extremely powerful, but there is a big question about her engines, which were expected to drive her at 14 knots (the Union did not produce a 14- knot ship of any kind till 1865, and then an unarmored cruiser), and a still bigger question about her plating, which was only 3 inches thick. Heavier armor than this failed under Union big guns on several occasions.
Farther up the river two ironclads were laid down at Memphis in 1861. One, the first Tennessee, was burned on the stocks when the city fell to the Union armies; the other, the Arkansas, had been launched and was towed down to the Yazoo, where she was completed during Farragut’s first drive at Vicksburg. She came out of her hole on July 15, 1862, under command of Isaac M. Brown, probably the best naval officer the Confederacy had; flew at the Federal Fleet, drove the Carondelet ashore with severe damages, set the Tyler on fire, ran the gantlet of the combined Union river and ocean squadrons, and anchored under the guns of Vicksburg. Next morning Farragut’s ships filed past her on their Way downstream, giving and taking broadsides, with no damage to the ram. The state of her engines did not permit her to follow; and when she did go downstream some weeks later to support a movement of the Confederate army, Brown was no longer in command.
This was unfortunate for the Arkansas, for she encountered the U. S. river ironclad Essex, under W. B. Porter, who was an extremely capable and resolute man. At the crest of the fight the Confederate ship’s engines faltered, either from the effect of a Union cannon ball or from natural causes; the Essex instantly seized a position from which she repeatedly penetrated her antagonist’s armor without a return, drove her ashore, and blew her up.
III
This finishes the conspectus of the rebel rams’ individual history, and what does it leave us? It is obvious at once that in its relation to them the Union Navy enjoyed interior lines; the rams were built at widely separated points and could not be brought together without becoming subject to concentrations of Federal warships. But this is not the whole story, it is not even the most interesting part of the story. For by concentrating attention on the strategic disadvantages of the Confederate Navy, by calling attention to the fact that the South had not many seamen and some of them incompetent, we lose sight of the larger issue. Naval tactics always and naval strategy to a degree are dominated by the characteristics of the ships employed; and it is only when we seek to understand the ideas behind the construction of the rebel rams that we can really discover the causes for the course events took.
Now the Brooke-Porter system of ironclad construction possessed certain very important advantages; it was cheap, it was easy to carry through, even with unskilled labor, and above all, it produced ships that carried big guns behind good protection through shallow and restricted waters. No vessel of the Union Navy during the whole war could compare with the Albemarle in general effectiveness for inshore operations.
Yet the Confederate system also had serious defects, some of which were inherent in its advantages; and both advantages and defects tended to chain the rebel rams to coastal waters and to action against wooden craft. This is not, fundamentally, surprising. Porter was a brilliant constructor, but a constructor merely, without military ideas of his own. His value lay in the fact that he could translate other men’s thoughts into blueprints. Brooke was the member of the pair who determined the tactical characteristics of the ships. He was an experienced officer of the pre-war navy, but his experience had been largely confined to ordnance work and to hydrographic explorations along the coast. In other words, his habits of thought, his mental pattern, were fixed by his lifelong employment. He conceived of naval war in terms of landlocked passages where there was no seaway, where all ships must operate at low speeds, and in constant danger from rock and shoal.
This becomes clear when one compares the rebel rams with ironclad ships built outside the Confederacy at the same period. The British built their Warrior, the French their Gloire, with high sides, as seagoing cruisers of deep draft, and then plated them along the water line and gun ports. The Unionists built their New Ironsides to the same basic pattern; and when they did construct a ram, turned out the Dunderberg, with twice the draft and three times the freeboard of her Southern contemporaries. In all these non-Confederate ships the constructors allowed such matters as draft and flotation to care for themselves; in all the question of getting the guns high enough above the water to fight in a swell receives the first consideration and speed the second, with the beam- length ratio fined down to gain the greatest possible utility from the engines.
By comparison the rebel rams seem designed especially for millponds. The weight of the armored casemate is spread across the greatest possible surface to reduce draft, and as a consequence they have enormous beam. Several of the rebel rams had a beam-length ratio higher than 1:5; in one case (the Georgia) the figure reaches 1:4.1; and in only two, one of them the first Virginia on its ready-made hull, does the beam-length ratio fall as low as 1:6.
Again, in all the rams the gun ports are placed far down near the water line. To be sure this saves top weight and permits heavy guns to be carried on a relatively small ship with a low investment in armor, but it accomplishes these results at the price of demanding that her commander stay in sight of green trees. Josiah Tattnall was as bold a naval officer as ever lived, and he had every confidence in the first Virginia as a fighting machine, but he blew her up at Norfolk rather than take her out where he might have to open those gun ports in a gale.
Finally, one of the most striking facts about the rebel rams is that they were rams, intended to punch through an enemy’s ribs. Five times they succeeded in charging into Federal vessels. The Manassas turned the trick twice on the Mississippi, the Albemarle once in the sounds, the Virginia at Hampton Roads, and the Palmetto State in her raid out of Charleston Harbor. These successes were powerfully to influence naval architecture for the next 40 years, but they influenced it on a premise entirely false—the premise that it was possible to build a craft with a ram that could move as fast and turn as rapidly as any other type of ship.
It was entirely overlooked that two of these rammings were executed on blockading ships at anchor, one on a ship aground, and all within narrow waters where the rammed ships could not use their speed to make a gunnery action of the contact or their greater turning power to avoid the stroke. It was neglected that ships with the prodigious beam of the Brooke-Porter system and the underwater resistance of the ram could not possibly be built to move as fast as the ordinary seagoing vessel, given approximately equal engine equipment. Nor were the engine equipments ever
Table or Data
The Confederate Ironclads
Name | Built at | Date | Tons | Lenth, Beam, draft | Armor | Armament | Speed | Comple- | Times | Remarks |
Albemarle | Roanoke River | 1864 |
| 158'x35'x9' |
| 2-8" |
|
| 2 | Torpedoed at dock; engines faulty |
Arkansas | Memphis | 1862 |
| 165'x35'x11'8" |
| 2-8";2-100pr.;2-32pr.R. | 8 m.p.h. |
| 3 | Ran into bank in action with U.S.S. Essex; engines failed |
Atlanta | Savannah | 1862 |
| 204'x41'x15'9" | 4" | 2-7"R.; 2-6.4" R. | 7 kts. | 21 o. 124 m. | 1 | Taken in action by U.S.S. Weehawken |
Charleston | Charleston | 1863 |
| 180'x36'x12'6" | 4" | 4-7" R.; 2-9" |
|
|
| Blown up at fall of Charleston |
Chicora | Charleston |
|
| 150'x35'x12' | 4" | 2-9"; 4-6" R. |
| 20 o. | 2 | Blown up at fall of Charleston |
Columbia | Charleston | 1934 |
| 216'x51'x13' | 6" | 8 |
|
|
| Broke back on reef in Charleston harbor |
Fredericksburg | Richmond |
|
| x 'x11' | 4" | 1-11": 1-8"; 2-6.4" R. |
|
| 2 | Burned Apr. 4, 1865 |
Georgia | Savannah |
|
| 250'x60'x |
| 2-9"; 3-32 pr.R. |
| 20 o. 82 m. |
| Classed as floating battery: engines too weak to move her |
Huntsville | Mobile |
|
|
|
| 4 |
|
|
| Scuttled 12 m. above Mobile; never received engines |
Louisiana | New Orleans | 1862 | 1400 | 264'x62'x |
| 2-7"R.; 3-9"; 4-8"; 7-32 pr.R. |
|
| 1 | Burned after battle of New Orleans; engines failed |
Manassas | New Orleans | 1861 | 387 | 128'x26'x11 |
| 1-68 pr. R. |
|
| 2 | Sunk in action, battle of New Orleans |
Milledgeville | Savannah |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Burned 1864 |
Mississippi | Jefferson City, La. | 1862 | 1400 | 260'x58'x14' | 3" | 20 |
| Designed 14 kts. |
| Burned after battle of New Orleans; incomplete |
Muscogee | Columbus, Ga. |
|
|
|
| 6 |
|
|
| Center wheel |
Nashville | Montgomery, Ala. |
|
| 271'x62'x6"x10'9" |
| 2-7"; 1-24 pr. H. |
|
|
| Surrendered in Tombigbee River, 1865; side wheeler |
North Carolina | Wilmington | 1863 |
|
|
| 4 |
|
|
| Sank from slow leak, Cape Fear River, 1864 |
Palmetto State | Charleston |
|
|
| 4" | 1-7" R.; 1-6.4" R.; 2-8" |
| 21 o. 120 m. | 2 | Burned at fall of Charleston |
Phoenix | Mobile |
|
|
|
| 6 |
|
|
| Floating battery; engines too weak; destroyed |
Raleigh | Wilmington | 1864 |
|
|
| 4 |
|
| 1 | Wrecked on Wilmington Bar, May, 1864 |
Richmond | Richmond |
|
| 180'x 'x16' |
| 4 |
|
| 2 | Scuttled at fall of Richmond |
Savannah | Savannah |
|
| x 'x12'6" |
| 2-7" R.; 2-6.4" R. |
| 27 o. 154 m. |
| Burned, Dec. 1864 |
Tennessee | Memphis | 1862 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Burned on stocks, 1862 |
Texas | Richmond |
|
| 217'x46'x13'6" |
|
|
|
|
| Taken at Richmond; added to U.S. Navy |
Tennessee | Mobile | 1864 | 1273 | 209'x48'14' | 6"-5" | 2-7" R.; 2-6.4" R. | 6 kts. | 18 o. 110 m. | 1 | Taken in battle of Mobile Bay |
Tuscaloosa | Mobile |
|
|
|
| 4 |
|
|
| Sunk above Mobile |
Virginia | Norfolk | 1862 | 3200 | 275'x35'x22' | 4" | 2-7" R.; 2-6" R.; 6-9" | 9 kts. | 31 o. | 2 | Blown up |
Virginia | Richmond |
|
| 'x 'x13' | 6"-8" | 1-11"; 1-8" R.; 2-6.4" R. |
|
| 1 | Blown up at fall of Richmond |
even approximately equal. It is not too much to say that the Confederate States Navy died of acute engine trouble; for if any blanket cause will cover the failure of that navy to accomplish more than it did, it can be found in faulty, weak, worn Machinery. Of the 27 rebel rams, 14 suffered engine breakdowns at crucial moments in battle and were lost because of them, or never got engines powerful enough to carry them into battle. Three of the most famous—Albemarle, Arkansas, first Virginia—were forced to drop out of action with victory in their grasp because of trouble with the power plant. The faulty machines of another brought her to grief on the rocks.
The complete engine failure of the rebel rams was caused ultimately not by these
fundamental difficulties but by the way in which they were regarded. It is true that Brooke complained constantly about bad engines, and at least during the early part of the war tried to get better ones from England. But it is also true that in the compromise of qualities that enters into the construction of every mechanical warship, it was always the engines that he allowed to suffer. When he came to build the second Virginia he had available only engines of the same type and power that had already shown themselves rather weak for the Fredericksburg and Richmond. Yet he loaded the third ship of the class with 2 to 4 extra inches of armor in an effort to make her impenetrable to shell and gave her still heavier ordnance than they, and allowed the engine-room staff to shuffle along as best it might. With this background it is not surprising that, even in the narrow space of the James, she could not deal with the nimble monitors.
This is not at all the way in which the same man met the problem of ordnance, at which he labored like a Titan, improvising gun factories where none existed, working out a system for reboring old 32- pounders and strengthening them with bands to take heavy rifled shot. He simply was not as much interested in engines as he was in guns; and while their other characteristics nominated his ships for in land duty it was not important that he should be as much interested.
Yet this is exactly what the conditions of war will not permit any naval constructor to do in an era of mechanical navies. If there is anything at all to be learned from the story of the rebel rams it is that a compromise of qualities is a stringent requirement; that to confer upon a ship special qualities for one type of naval war saddles it with special weaknesses for every other; and that while special ships are very well as auxiliaries, they cannot lie in the line of battle.
|
In the early weeks of the Civil War the Navy Department was confronted with the tremendous problems of calling ships home, building, buying and chartering new ones, as well as supplying the necessary men, guns, and ammunition. To maintain an effective blockade was at first manifestly impossible, although Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, and his able Assistant Secretary Gustavus Vasa Fox made every effort to do so. The newspapers of the day and many citizens were exceedingly critical of the Navy’s administration and clamored for action at once. On May 29,1861, Fox received this impatient letter from a citizen of New York:
G. V. Fox, Esq.
Sir:
The growing discontent created in the public mind by the extraordinary and disheartening delays of the Navy Department will undoubtedly soon result in meetings of the People, who will declare their want of confidence in the competency of the present Secretary and his principal assistant. A month has elapsed since the Blockade proclamation was published, and at this time as well as can be ascertained, every Port, south of the Chesapeake, except Pensacola, is still open. The Blockade is on paper merely. We shall be disgraced by the presence of a British Fleet, off the Ports in the Gulf, before they will have been invested by us. In the meanwhile the Wabash,
Portsmouth, and Vandalia have been in the stream for nearly a week or more. What are they doing there? Waiting for orders, or failing to obey them? The former, it is said, is waiting to replace an incompetent Gunner. The next excuse may be the want of toothpicks. The Mediterranean Fleet, as late as the 11th of this month, had received no orders to return- one day’s charter of a merchant Steamer, of the tonnage of the Richmond, would have been sufficient to defray the expenses out & home of a special messenger, ordering peremptorily the immediate return, of the vessels on that Station, ready for sea or not ready—if any of the officers should be on shore, the ships should be ordered to leave without them. Unless at least some slight degree of energy be exhibited, no effectual blockade will have been established before the meeting of Congress, or before some disasters to our Commerce will have occurred, for which your Department will justly be held to a full responsibility.
Your Obed’t Serv’t
It is not known whether Fox ever replied to this extraordinary missive but below the signature is this ironic statement in Fox’s handwiriting:
“Dear -----------
Come on and take my place for a week and you will feel better.
Yrs in haste
G. V. Fox”