There is a saying at the Naval War College that the three heavy volumes On War by General Karl Von Clausewitz, veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns and pupil of the great Scharnhorst, are so often quoted in officers’ theses that the civilian stenographers can be trusted automatically to supply the needed quotation marks. Ponderous, as only German philosophical writings can be ponderous, those books still stand as classics.
“War,” wrote Von Clausewitz, “is the continuation of state policy.” We might paraphrase the master by saying that war merely transfers statecraft from the council chamber to the battlefield. In any issue between sovereign states force is ever the last appeal, the ultima ratio regum, “final argument of kings,” an axiom so beloved of cynical, hardheaded monarchs that they commanded it to be engraved on the old bronze cannon which took up their power politics where diplomacy faltered or failed. Such polite phrases as “this government could not be indifferent to” or “His Majesty’s Government cannot regard but with alarm,” in fact all those somewhat vague but beautifully expressed Foreign Office formulas that adorn the textbooks on diplomatic history carry behind them the roar of artillery.
Since the profession of arms under the American flag is our chosen career, it is surely worth while to attempt at this time of world chaos briefly to sketch the historical interrelation of America’s naval and foreign policies. Both are concurrent expressions of the deep desires, the vital interests of our country, seeking first, independence, then in turn, neutrality, isolation, expansion, the control of a hemisphere, and today, as always, security.
Think back some century and a half and picture the brilliant court of Louis XVI and the beautiful Marie Antoinette, the Old Regime in its expiring splendor, the powdered hair and the rouged cheeks, the great palace at Versailles as yet undefiled by the sans-culottes of the Revolution. At the brilliant levee, mark an elderly gentleman with horn-rimmed spectacles, Dr. Franklin of Philadelphia, in the plain dress of the middle class. It had been his outward mark of distinction from the very beginning of his residence at Paris for the very simple reason that the tailor had failed to deliver the court costume he had ordered for his first audience. The rustic simplicity of this kindly old gentleman had won the hearts of the French noblesse. His presence at Versailles was like a breath of fresh air in a room heavy with perfume.
Mark him now deep in conversation with the Count de Vergennes, French Foreign Minister.
The war is going badly in America, our seaports occupied by the British, Washington’s dwindling army bravely encamped at West Point, still undefeated, but of itself obviously unable to drive the British invaders from our shores. America must have aid, not merely money and stores and volunteer officers, but trained regiments and ships of the line. So he argues, and so it comes about that Rochambeau’s magnificent regular Tegiments escorted by DeTernay’s seven ships of the line are dispatched to Newport. That was the entering move on the broad game board that was finally to see those ships and regiments combined with the French Fleet from the West Indies and the Continental Line from the Hudson at the siege of Yorktown. Were one foreign flag to fly beside our own in celebration of our independence, it should be a forgotten white banner of Bourbon France which once flew from the gaff of a French man-of-war.
Born thus of naval power, for it was in reality a foreign naval contingent that tipped the scales in the six long years of the Revolution, the United States of our forefathers looked seawards with mingled hope and apprehension, hope that the once thriving trade we had enjoyed within the closed economy of the British Empire would somehow return, apprehension lest the wars of Europe themselves return to wipe out the fragile American independence they had, as a kind of curious by-product, created. Commerce and isolation— political isolation in terms of “give us time to grow”—these were the foreign policies of our first presidents. But trade and isolation are the results of naval strength, and with the selling off of the last ships of the Revolutionary fleet, the new nation, without a single gun afloat, faced the heavily armed and cynical Europe of the Old Regime. In fact, so lightly was our independence regarded that current diplomatic rumor credited France with the intention of taking Newport as a naval base in part payment of the French debt.
Move nine years forward from Cornwallis’s surrender, and listen to the debates in President Washington’s first Congress. The Boston schooner Maria, venturing into the Mediterranean with her new Stars and Stripes at the peak, had been boarded by the piratical Algerines, her crew, according to a contemporary account, “stripped of their clothes, all except a shirt and a pair of drawers,” and left to shiver in a filthy North African dungeon. “Our commerce,” so resolved a Senate Committee, “can be protected but by a fleet, to be built,” they added, “as soon as the state of finances shall permit.”
Small comfort, that, to down-easters laboring in an Algerian prison camp! And even smaller comfort would have been the scorn of the Republican opposition, who saw in “this thing of a fleet” “a plan of the Court Party,” “an opening wedge for a new monarchy in America.” (The popular distrust of the epauletted naval officer is as old as our history.)
It is not in the speeches of contemporary politicians, nor yet in the writings of contemporary statesmen that one finds a clear and precise statement of the policy that dictated our first building program and, what is even more significant, our first naval designs. It is in the musty letter books of Joshua Humphreys, master shipbuilder of Philadelphia. In January of 1793, Humphreys wrote to his senator a now famous letter on foreign and naval affairs. Humphreys’ letter is a kind of Magna Charta of the United States Navy. One should remember as he reads parts of it that the United States of 1793 were weak and nearly bankrupt, a tributary to the Algerine pirates, and that our merchant ships were still denied any genuine approach to freedom of trade. He should also recall that in Europe another general war was about to break out, and that, as colonies, we had been engulfed in every general war, our frontiers drenched with blood and our hinterland a mere minor counter for barter at the peace tables of Europe. With good cause then, Humphreys wrote:
From the present appearance of affairs, I believe that it is time that this country was possessed of a navy.
He then passes on to the consideration of types, with the frank admission that “our navy must for a considerable time be inferior [to foreign navies] in numbers.” He considers first improved ships of the line of moderate size, and then frigates; that is,
such Frigates as, in blowing weather, would be an overmatch for double deck ships, or, in light winds, able to avoid coming to action.
Note that Humphreys conceived a ship of such stability as to be superior in stormy weather to the next most powerful foreign type by reason of her ability to work all her broadside guns in a seaway. Note also that he called for a speed which, in light airs, would give his frigates the ability to refuse action with a ship of superior gun power. All this meant a big hull.
And frigates, he concludes, “will be our first object.” “Small frigates,” he writes,
will not answer the expectation contemplated from them, for, if we should be obliged to take a hand in the present European war, or, in the future, we should be dragged into war with any of the powers of the old continent, especially Great Britain, they, having such a number of ships ... it would be an equal chance by equal combat .... Several questions will arise, whether one large or two small frigates will contribute most to the protection of our trade .... For my part, I am decidedly of the opinion that the large one will answer best.
Thus, at the very outset, Joshua Humphreys committed us to the “big ship school.” Youthful America was soon to see his frigates victorious over lesser opponents. But what is most significant to bear in mind is that their design considered far more than mere technical factors. Humphreys wisely looked ahead to the strategic and tactical employment of the types he recommended in war against the existing ships of probable enemies. And all this he relates to a definite foreign policy, “the protection of our trade.” Progress has long since consigned the wooden frigate to the pages of history. We are no longer the weakest of the powers, seeking of necessity to set the pace in new design lest we lose our few ships “by equal chance in equal combat.” But one factor has not changed, and can never change, that is the need to relate the design of fighting ships to the foreign policy they must fight to defend. Guided by these basic considerations, the successors of Joshua Humphreys, our first Naval Constructor, still strive for technical superiority in design.
It was, in fact, neither the support of Washington nor even the backing of the New England shipowners which finally tipped the scale. Rather it was a strange turn of events in the sun-baked city of Algiers. In September, 1793, Charles Logie, His Britannic Majesty’s Consul, acting in the name of Portugal, had the effrontery to conclude a truce between that nation and his friend the Dey. It contained the extraordinary stipulation that “the Portuguese Government shall not afford protection to any nation against the Algerine cruisers.” To our protestations for peace, the Dey replied with an engagingly frank statement of his personal concept of Algerine naval policy. “If I were to make peace with everyone,” he said indignantly, “what then should I do with my corsairs? What would I do with my soldiers? They would take off my head for want of other prizes, not being able to live upon their miserable allowance!”
But Consul Charles Logie, so tenderly concerned for the Dey and for the British shipping interests, unwittingly played a dramatic and important historical role. The direct results of his obscure intrigue in Algiers was the passage of our first building program, six frigates of the Humphreys design. Scheming for Britain’s interests, he raised up a fleet to rival hers. Only eleven years later, Admiral Lord Nelson of the Nile, eyeing the American Mediterranean Squadron at Gibraltar, remarked, “There is in the handling of those trans-Atlantic ships a nucleus of trouble for the navy of Great Britain.” Fate at times plays curious tricks in the choice of her tools. One wishes that the ghost of Consul Charles Logie could pass down the long line of fighting ships which today fly the flag he once so lightly turned over to the depredations of his friend, that maritime racketeer, Hasan Pasha of Algiers, who modestly styled himself “conqueror and great, the transactor of all good works, the shadow of God, and the King of Kings!”
Be it to our eternal disgrace that peace was perforce purchased from this august ruler before the last three of the Humphreys’ frigates were completed. It was then that Gouverneur Morris wrote into history a declaration of American naval policy, as important in its sphere as Washington’s contemporary Neutrality Proclamation was in the related sphere of foreign policy. Sadly viewing our pitifully insecure position at sea, the depredations of the Algerines, the closed Caribbean, the dark clouds of a threatened European war, destined, like every general war, to send both its cruisers and its propaganda to our neutral shores, Morris wisely wrote, “If the United States pursue a just and liberal policy with twenty ships-of-the-line at sea, no power on earth will dare insult them.”
It might be well to pause here a moment to examine the just and liberal foreign policy for which Governor Morris longed, and its attendant naval implications ‘twenty ships-of-the-line at sea.” Twenty ships of the line would, in that day, have given us about the same strength that either France or Britain could have brought against us in American waters. Those twenty sail would have made a hostile incursion into the Western Hemisphere difficult, if not impossible. Surely they would have made it not worth while.
We have then two significant statements of early American naval aspirations, both attuned to the same fundamental foreign policy, non-involvement in the wars of Europe. Note first Joshua Humphreys, the practical builder, the professional technician (if you will), seeking to create new type raiders of such nuisance value that neither belligerent would wish f® see them loose on her trade routes, as Britain did to her sorrow in 1812. Note, in contrast, the statesman’s surer conception, Morris’s 20 ships of the line, a battle fleet sufficiently powerful to defeat any force likely to be met in American seas. Humphreys’ is the policy inherent to the weak neutral who must take advantage of the fact that potential aggressors are at war among themselves. Morris’s is the policy of the maritime state strong and secure at all times in its chosen isolation. Humphreys wrote for the years of our early weakness. Morris foresaw the strength of America today.
The Quasi-War with France was soon to vindicate Joshua Humphreys. The operations of the Constitution type of frigate on the French Caribbean trade routes convinced even the cynical Talleyrand that spoliations could not be made to pay. It was, in fact, we who spoiled the spoiler. An American squadron of distinctively American design proved adequate to President John Adams’ limited policy, the vindication of our merchant flag in American waters.
In contrast, we might picture the frigate navy of 1812 as only partially successful. In terms of national pride, rather than in terms of national policy, the three frigate victories of 1812 rank high in American history. But as a fleet sufficient to enforce our views on “free trade and sailors’ rights,” the frigates were hopelessly inadequate. Scorned by noble Tory peers in the House of Lords as “a few fir-built ships manned by a handful of bastards and outlaws,” the Humphreys’ frigates flung back the taunt in single ship victories from Cape Sable to Bahia. But, in 1814, as they lay locked in port by the British blockade, two or three British ships to mark off each of ours, the triumph of the new design had ended.
The gallant challenge sent in to Boston in the spring of 1813 by Broke of the Shannon to James Lawrence commanding the ever unlucky Chesapeake, summarizes the essence of the War of 1812.
As the Chesapeake now appears ready for sea [wrote Broke, with a chivalry that speaks of other days] I request you will do me the favour to meet the Shannon . . . ship to ship ... to try the fortunes of our respective flags. . . . The result. . . may be the most grateful service I can render my country, and . . . you . . . will feel confident that only by repeated triumphs in even combats can your little navy hope to console your country for the loss of that trade it can now no longer protect.
Broke’s chivalry does not typify British operations in 1813 and 1814. Already the American frigates were being overmatched by British counter-building. Type superiority has always given merely a temporary advantage. It can never be a permanent substitute for real fleet strength. Morris’s wiser policy of “twenty ships-of- the-line” was obviously our naval destiny. But long years were yet to pass ere we achieved it.
We did, however, emerge from the War of 1812 with our first battleships nearing completion. During the half century between the War of 1812 and the Civil War we continued to climb slowly but surely toward a recognized position in the hierarchy of naval power.
Yet, were one to plot the relative strength of the maritime nations in 1823, the year of the Monroe Doctrine, he would find our fleet almost negligible in comparison to those of France and Spain. What then made effective Monroe’s bold pronouncement against the threatened extension of Russian colonization on the North West Coast and the imminent intervention of France in Spain’s revolted colonies? It was, in truth, the British Navy. Despite the fact that Secretary of State John Quincy Adams insisted that “it would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our own principles explicitly [rather than] to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of a British man-of-war,” in terms of naval realities, we did temporarily shelter the avowal of our fundamental foreign policy in the lee of the British battle line. One might, in fact, reverse Canning’s famous boast, and say that it was we who called in the Old World and its oldest navy to redress the balance of the New. By Monroe’s pronouncement, Morris’s “just and liberal policy” had been extended to include the dominance of the Western Hemisphere. Should the backing of the British Fleet be withdrawn, we would, more than ever before, have need of his 20 ships of the line.
Not twenty, but at most four real ships of the line appear upon the United States Navy Lists in the four decades between Monroe’s famous declaration and the Civil War. Yet those decades contained our somewhat bumptious claims to Cuba, ours “by every law human or divine.” They saw American Marines in the “Halls of Montezuma” and an American landing force ashore at Monterey, under the very guns of H.M.S. Collingwood, whose single broadside would have blown the adobe, built presidio off the landscape. They heard the brag of “54-40 or fight.” They witnessed, in fact, our final conquest of a continent.
How, it might be asked, did expansionist national policies succeeded without the sea power necessary to back them? The answer is to be found, partially at least, in contemporary European history. Those were the decades of the Continental revolutions, 1830, 1848, and the bloody Carlist wars in Spain. They saw the death throes of the Holy Alliance and the System of Metternich. The old eighteenth-century imperialisms had ended. The modern imperialisms of the nineteenth century had not yet found their stride. Europe was busy with European problems, problems in which, as President Monroe wisely declared, “we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so.” Despite a passing and, in reality, harmless interest in Oregon, Texas, and California, the old imperialist powers were content to leave America free to follow her manifest destiny to the Pacific.
One should not, however, picture these four decades as a period of complete naval inactivity. What we might call the limited naval policy of Joshua Humphreys and the larger naval policy of Governor Morris were both working toward realization. These years were to see a startling advance in type development together with a gradual increase in fleet strength. The side- wheel frigates, splendid ships of their kind, were soon followed by our first iron man-of-war. Then came the introduction of the screw propeller in the Princeton.
Captain Stockton’s official report on the trials of the Princeton is well worthy of quotation, both for its technical disclosures and its application of Joshua Humphreys’ formula, superior ships for the less numerous navy, a small squadron of fast, hard-hitting raiders conceived as an instrument to vindicate neutrality by holding the casting balance between the larger foreign fleets.
The Princeton [wrote Stockton to the Secretary of the Navy] is a full rigged ship of great speed and power. . . . Her engines lie snug in the bottom of the vessel out of reach of an enemy’s shot. . . . [She is] the cheapest, fastest, and most certain ship of war in the world. . . . The big guns . . . can be fired with an effect terrific and almost incredible. . . . [By] the improvements in the art of war adopted aboard the Princeton . . . the numerical superiority of other navies, so long boasted, may be set to naught. The ocean may again become neutral ground and the rights of the smallest . . . may once more be respected.
In fact, until the writings of Admiral Mahan in the late 1880’s, our naval philosophy was more Continental than British. Our aspiration in terms of fleet strength was to negative Britain’s all-conquering sea control rather than to duplicate it. For almost a century, our fundamental policy resembled the political and strategic principles for which the contemporary French writer, Admiral Castex, now stands, rather than the well-known philosophy of sea power given to all the world by our own American master of naval theory. Time and the growth of our wealth and interests have completely altered the direction of our naval thought. And yet, remembering our early maritime background, surely we can well afford to give full weight to the modern proponents of the “Continental School.”
The influence of the Civil War on the naval policy of the United States is often misunderstood. In 1861, the Union was faced with an immediate and definite problem, the imposition of the blockade. Almost the entire shipbuilding facilities of the North were set feverishly to work to create the “ninety-day gun boats,” the soapbox navy, the hastily armed side- wheel ferries, that motley collection of floating miscellany rushed south to make effective in British eyes a blockade at first as insecure as her own Napoleonic “paper blockades” of evil memory. Next came the insistent demand for shoal-water craft, harbor ships, and river gunboats to float guns into the southern inlets and down the western rivers along the routes of the invading Union armies. Then came the threat of the ironclad ram, Merrimac, a threat dramatically answered by Ericsson’s new Monitor. Yet, in terms of permanent sea power, these efforts were almost wasted. Nor could the recommissioning of the old steam frigates be said to have made the North a naval power. The reason is not far to seek. In 1861, what we might call the naval revolution of the nineteenth century was just getting into its stride. The new French and British seagoing ironclads were already in hand. Foreigners were rebuilding their blue-water fleets while we were blinded by the smoke of our own river and harbor fighting. Needed now, if ever, Morris’s 20 ships of the line were farther than ever from realization.
The dangerous weakness of the Union was our inability to enforce on Great Britain a reasonable conception of neutral duties. The Alabama and her consorts, British-built auxiliary cruisers, British armed in neutral jurisdiction, were soon loose on the trade routes. The merchant marine that had boasted the proud Atlantic packets and Donald McKay’s clipper ships sought refuge under the British flag. Britain, using the Confederacy as her tool, bid fair to force America from the ocean trade routes.
Picture for a moment the darkest days of that Civil War. The South at the high tide of her fortunes, needing only a victory on Northern soil to win the recognition of France and England. Even Gladstone, the Liberal, had given his benediction to President Jefferson Davis and the Southern leaders, who, he stated,
have made an army, they are making, it appears, a navy, and they have made what is more than either—they have made a nation.
The Bahamas crammed with British goods waiting the blockade runners. The waters a hundred miles off Boston alight from the burning hulls of a dwindling United States Merchant Marine. And at Laird’s shipyard, a monster ram nearing completion, known by Charles Francis Adams to be about to sail to join the Confederate States Navy. You can, I think, picture the Adams’ face, the stern Puritan expression with its indrawn lips. From father to son to grandson, that hard-cased New England family had looked the British Lion squarely in the eye and faced him down. Charles Francis Adams was worthy of the greatest of all American family traditions as he bent over his desk in the Embassy and wrote to the British Foreign Secretary the bravest words in all our diplomatic correspondence, “It would be superfluous for me to point out to your Lordship that this is war.”
Brave words indeed, but what actual blue-water fleet had the United States with which to back them? Practically none.
The triumphant answer was to be made, not by an American battle fleet, but by a superior American type, lineal descendant of the Constitution and the Princeton. The construction program of 1863 included a group of commerce destroyers of the Wampanoag class, built primarily for speed. Swper-Alabamas, auxiliary sail power, long lean hulls crammed with boilers and machinery, they were conceived and designed for one purpose only, to wreak havoc on Britain’s sail-borne commerce.
Chief Engineer Isherwood publicly defended their design three years after the war.
It was proposed [he wrote] to construct a vessel having greater speed . . . than any ocean steamer, a vessel which should be able to go to the British Coast in case of hostilities and burn, sink, and destroy every vessel of inferior force, naval or merchant, that might be found there. Nothing she pursued could escape her and nothing she fled from could overtake her. The more heavily- armed but slower cruisers of the enemy could only follow her by the flames of the burning wrecks she left behind.
Modern naval warfare [he continues] includes much more than a yard-arm-to-yard-arm fight in mid ocean. . . . Without comprehending the purpose for which a vessel is built, it is impossible for anyone to criticize it.
Facing the page on which those words are printed is Isherwood’s picture, a young man of keen and earnest expression. His enemies condemned him as a dreamer, a radical, and incompetent. Like Humphreys and Ericsson, he was a shipbuilder of vision. He saw into the political and diplomatic purpose without which technical advance becomes a mere engineer’s triumph.
The actual danger of war with England had passed 5 years before his swift ships ran their trials, 17½ knots sustained speed with a final burst of 20 knots, speeds then thought almost incredible. Our government was then pressing the Alabama claims against Great Britain.
In London the Foreign Office tentatively sounded out the Admiralty. What would war with America entail? Could the Admiralty promise quick success?
The reply shook the Foreign Office from its self-confident arrogance. British commerce, still largely sail-borne, so wrote the Admiralty, was wide open to the attack of fast Yankee cruisers. A war would mean great loss to the shipping, the trade, and the prestige of the Empire. Perhaps it would be better to pay up. And perhaps it would be well to write into international law a precedent fixing neutral duties, else when Britain herself again became a belligerent, her enemies might think to fit out commerce destroyers against her in neutral ports.
The Wampanoag, tied up in ordinary, lay rusting alongside the dock when a commission in Geneva reiterated our claim that neutral duty necessitated
due diligence to prevent the fitting out . . . within [neutral] jurisdiction of any vessel which [there is] reasonable grounds to believe is intended to cruise against [a friendly] power.
The nation which half a century before had seized the fleet of a peaceful Denmark, had declared a blockade of all Europe and stationed frigates in Narragansett Bay to help enforce it, now became a staunch supporter of neutral duties. Again the Navy had given to the statesman a weapon of real, if, alas, of only temporary value. The Wampanoag had, as Captain Stockton predicted of the Princeton, “made the seas again neutral ground.”
The decades which followed the Civil War were the decades of America’s naval impotence. Morris’s policy of 20 ships of the line at sea was farther than ever from realization. A few antiquated vessels still dragged out a protracted existence merely for the sake of the navy yards. In this almost nonexistent fleet, there was neither material nor spiritual preparation for war. Conservatives in the Department and afloat soon ordered a return to sail lest officers grow stale “loafing through their patches in a steamship.” Admiral Sims, in later years, dubbed these decades “the white glove and champagne period,” a pleasant enough time for captains’ families on leisurely foreign cruises where ceremony could hide incompetence. Except for a small group of restless spirits, headed by Admiral Luce and his friend Commander Alfred Mahan, who were to find at the newly founded Naval War College a mental solace in the midst of material decay, the post-Civil War Navy was willing merely to exist, solemnly to administer its affairs in an atmosphere of unreality, and stubbornly to resist the simple truth that war readiness is the only index of efficiency.
The renaissance of the Navy in the 1880’s was dictated by the growing realization that the United States had vital interests which could not be restricted to the exploitation of her own continental domain. The year 1867 had seen Secretary Seward’s purchase of Alaska, soon to bring with it the problem of the Pribilof seals and to lead Secretary Blaine to go so far as to attempt to declare all Bering Sea an American mare clausum. One is reminded of the Russian threat of 1822 when the Czar thought to establish a closed Russian Sea south even to San Francisco Bay. In the waters of the northeast, the old problem of the Canadian fisheries was again causing trouble between the rival Gloucester and blue-nose fleets. In the Caribbean, Cuba, “the ever faithful isle,” had at last forgotten her four centuries of loyalty and had entered upon a period of chronic revolution. Farther to the south, French engineers, under the eyes of the great De Lesseps himself, builder of the Suez Canal, were soon to break ground for the now abandoned ditch back of the city of Colon. At home, the Irish vote was beginning to loom as a political asset. The risky game of twisting the British Lion’s tail was adding an annoying vexation to Anglo-American correspondence. The United States, woefully weak in terms of naval and military force, for the Northern politicians had made short shift of the Union armies in 1865, was beginning to realize that Appomatox might not have ushered in the millennium of perpetual peace.
It is a source of mortification [wrote Secretary Hunt in his Annual Report of 1880] . . . that our vessels should stand in such mean contrast to those of inferior powers. It seems to be the pretty well settled opinion of our people [he continues] that we cannot afford to give up the free way across the Isthmus of Panama to any foreign power. The construction of a nucleus new navy obviously becomes an imperative necessity.
Thus it was that our reviving interest in foreign policy dictated the re-creation of the fleet.
It is significant that Secretary Hunt speaks of the creation of a new navy rather than a rehabilitation of the old. We were to start afresh, midway along the paths of development which, since our Civil War, had been carried forward by foreign powers.
A Naval Advisory Board now attempted to fix our needs in relation to the absolute factor of geography and in relation to the relative factor of foreign fleet strength. The recommended total of 38 cruisers, a type in which absolute rather than relative factors rule, is just three less than the figure for light and heavy cruisers recommended by the General Board in 1919.
Even more significant was the Board’s final recommendation of steel rather than iron as a material for the new ships. Despite the House Naval Committee’s frank admission that “no nation is now less able to wage war than the United States,” the recommended construction was cut to six cruisers and a single steel ram. Better, they counseled, a program of steady building than a costly policy of rapid advance followed by years of complete neglect. Such was the background of the famous White Squadron, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, and Dolphin, the first ships of what we might call the modern navy. Few indeed were the statesmen of the 1880’s who would have believed that in less than 40 years our fleet was destined to outstrip the maritime might of Britain herself and, by a treaty of self-abnegation, to fix its own strength as equal to hers.
From the White Squadron of the early 1880’s this new navy gradually grew until upon the eve of the war with Spain it comprised a balanced fleet including battleship types.
There was a new and dangerous fascination in the possession of a real fleet. Again a President and his Secretary of State looked the British Lion squarely in the eye, this time over a somewhat unimportant extension of the boundary of British Guiana.
Today [wrote Secretary Olney] the United States is practically sovereign upon this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.
Morris’s “just and liberal policy” was now becoming frankly self-assertive. But we were at last a naval nation. His “twenty ships-of-the-line” were almost within our reach.
With this startling growth of the Navy, there was soon to come an even more startling extension of its responsibilities. The Spanish War was destined to make continental America a colonial power. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt had shown an unusual interest in the departure of Commodore George Dewey, appointed just before the war to command the American China Squadron. The presence of six miscellaneous United States cruisers in the Far East early in 1898 had, at first sight, no especial significance. There were, of course, the usual American interests to guard. Missionaries felt then, and still feel, a little more confident in their preaching of the faith if an American gunboat is within call. Bondholders and foreign managers are never averse to the employment of a Marine landing force. And just then the Powers were busy collecting leaseholds in China, those fabulous 99-year leases of diplomacy, which seem to have been marked down from a hundred just to console the unwilling lessor. John Hay’s Open-Door Policy lay still a year in the future, as Dewey’s squadron swung to its anchors off Hongkong. If the Commodore himself had perhaps a suspicion of the great events impending, it is certain that the people of the United States had none. They were sold imperialism as a fait accompli, accomplished by a dispatch drafted almost secretly by Assistant Secretary Roosevelt and his friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge:
Dewey Hong Kong
Secret and confidential .... In event of war your duty will be to see that the Spanish Squadron does not leave the Asiatic Coast, and then offensive operations in the Philippine Islands.
That brief cablegram and Dewey’s quick victory over the Spanish Fleet off Cavite (it cost us but eight wounded) were destined to carry our territory to the very gates of the Orient, a colonial commitment from which we now seek at least partially to withdraw. Seven antique Spanish cruisers at Manila had lured the Stars and Stripes 4,000 miles west of San Francisco. Thus with dramatic suddenness we had greatness thrust upon us, and undertook an imperialism far beyond the power of even Morris’s 20 ships of the line to defend. In fact, in terms of national policy and its attendant naval strategy, our position in the Orient is today our single point of insecurity. The historic American foreign policy of isolation from Europe and its accompanying naval strategy of hemisphere defense, these we have at last realized. They rest secure upon our ability to defend them against any likely adversary. But insistence on the territorial integrity of China, involving, as it well may, the defense of the Philippines, entails action in a dangerously distant sphere.
The years between the Spanish War and the World War comprise the first period our naval manhood. At a long last, we had the will and the power to speak with authority in the councils of the world. The Philosophy of Admiral Mahan entered the White House in the person of President Theodore Roosevelt. It is there today in the person of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sea power, and the use of sea power, not only to win wars, but rather to back the victorious diplomacy which forestalls them, that was the teaching of the naval officer. His pupil, the President, learned his lesson well. Without relinquishing our traditional isolation, President Theodore Roosevelt put us squarely into the world balance of power.
In 1907 the Atlantic Fleet visited Japan on its famous round-the-world cruise. Almost exactly half a century had passed since the startled Japanese had viewed the strange, fire-belching ships commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry. Like their historical predecessors, President Roosevelt’s battleships entered Japanese waters as envoys of American foreign policy. They were the so-called “big stick” of the Roosevelt diplomacy. What is usually forgotten is the other half of that dynamic President’s formula, “speak softly and carry a big stick.” The soft speaking in this case was the tactful suggestion that, in a gentleman’s agreement, Japan herself voluntarily undertake to prohibit the emigration of her laborers to our west coast. Again, as in 1852, diplomacy backed by naval guns had won its point off Yokohama.
Thus, in the sweep of American history from the winning of independence down to the Great War, our foreign and naval policies worked out each its appropriate destiny. But that destiny was realized in a world where forces were almost in equipoise.
In 1914, conditions were vastly different. When, that fall, the war of movement ended on the Western Front and the trench system crept from Switzerland to the sea, it was obvious that we, and we alone, could break the stalemate. There was one great extra-European source of strength open to the Allies, the United States. There was one course open to Germany, the submarine campaign, through which she might starve England into submission ere the weight of America be flung into the scales. Both pointed to eventual American involvement.
Our traditional naval and foreign policies seemed almost meaningless in the two years of our drift toward war. No policy, however just and liberal, could have assured our neutrality. No moderate force of 20 ships of the line at sea could have deterred the German Admiralty from its last desperate bid for victory in a war whose dead were already numbered in the millions. Those dangerous days seemed to demand almost the entire strength of America deployed at sea, if indeed we were to avoid involvement and play the merciful role of mediator in a war-maddened world. Or, should Fate deny us that role, then it seemed that America’s full might must be hurled into the balance.
These ideas underlay our most radical departure in the related spheres of naval and foreign policy. That “incomparably most efficient navy in the world,” which President Wilson so suddenly called for, was to be a force sufficient, not only to defend the Americas, but to give to the United States a preponderant and dictating position in world affairs. From the wise and cautious neutrality of our first President, backed by not a single naval cannon, we had at last come all the way to the apparent necessity for world dominance backed by a fleet whose equal the world had never seen. If the precedents of a century and a half were finally to be swept aside and America was to enter the wars of Europe, she chose in 1916 to come in, not a suppliant, but as a crusader.
Time did not permit the realization of this, the boldest of all America’s ventures into world politics. The Allies had definite need of American regiments, American merchant ships, and American destroyers to convoy them through the submarine zone. To the surprise of our own people, we found that not even America could create a preponderant navy in a few years of hurried construction. Yet those of us who saw the A.E.F. pass in review on French soil cannot escape the deep conviction that, once fully aroused to war, though half the world oppose her, America holds the balance of world power.
The fate of that “incomparably most efficient navy” was destined to be the acetylene torch and the breaker’s yard. The naval preponderance sought in 1916 was born of the war. It had no permanent place in American foreign policy. But from it came, at long last and in full measure, the realization of Morris’s dream of “a just and liberal policy with twenty ships-of-the-line at sea.”
That policy is, I believe, the sure defense of the Western Hemisphere. Those 20 ships of the line are the United States Fleet whose many vessels, filling some isolated anchorage, can never fail to thrill even the most prosaic spectator with an abiding faith in their latent power to dictate the course of history. The dream of the elder statesman has at last come true. Nor have we forgotten the lesser and inherently American dream of those who gave us type superiority in the days of our naval weakness, Joshua Humphreys planning a faster and more powerful frigate, Stockton writing of the newly built Princeton, Isherwood bending over the plans of the Wampatioag’s engines. Their dreams live, and will continue to live, in the maritime genius of the American race, seeking swifter destroyers, longer range submarines, handier dive bombers. The two American naval policies have met today in the fleet strength and the technical perfection which assure, and will long assure, the realization of the historic aims for which our statesmen have striven, the peace, the security, and the' greatness of the country they left in our keeping.