"Captain Fox—He Is the Navy Department"

Thus did President Lincoln* describe Gustavus Vasa Fox, naval officer, master of steamships, and business executive who, from 1861 to 1865, discharged singlehanded the entire duties that are today performed by the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. Historians have yet to determine whether Lincoln’s statement was correct. There can be no doubt that contemporaries agreed, with one understandable exception. This was Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, under whom Fox served as Assistant Secretary.

Two years before the President made this remark, Flag Officer S. F. Du Pont, who then knew Fox better than any other naval officer, wrote to his wife, “The President has been told up and down by Mr. Fox, who is the Secretary . . . that the blockading squadron cannot be kept at sea in the winter without depots for coal.”

The Lincoln appraisal was further confirmed a half century later by another contemporary, John S. Barnes, who was among the most capable and best known of the younger group of Civil War naval officers. Barnes had many opportunities to observe Fox closely, and he also lived to see the Diary of Gideon Welles when it appeared in print in 1911. In an acid appraisal of the Diary, Barnes wrote:

Little or no credit is given to the real Secretary of the Navy, and the master mind of the Navy Department, Gustavus V. Fox—without whose professional assistance and advice in all matters relating to the Navy, Mr. Welles would have been like the master of a ship without compass or rudder. ... It would be reasonable and interesting to all to have Mr. Welles’s private opinion and estimate of this gendeman, who more than all others, was his ‘fidus Achates’ from first to last; and who was recognized by all naval officers as the real head of the Navy. There was not one among those estimable old gendemen who were heads of bureaus who did not bow down before the mandates, and court the influence of Mr. Fox. He selected the officers to command fleets and stations, he approved or disapproved the models and building of ships—gave out contracts—pointed out where praise or censure was to be given, drafted important orders for Mr. Welles to sign, espoused with great energy and unlimited faith the Monitor system, carried on a confidential and private correspondence with his former naval acquaintances, most of whom were made to feel that their selection for command was due to his personal friendship or appreciation—and drew from them frank, free, and honestly expressed opinions under the guise of friendship, using such correspondence later when it suited his purposes.

The centennial of the Civil War has induced a deluge of its literature, but Gustavus Fox and the role he played in that war still remain largely unknown. The reason is that Gideon Welles, the superior whom Fox overshadowed during the war, later became one of its most able publicists. Welles’ three volume Diary is perhaps more widely quoted than any other private source coming out of the war. The former Secretary also published many articles in the Galaxy, a leading magazine of the period, and these, being available later in book form, also had a weighty influence on historical writing. In these articles, Welles all but ignored Fox. He was aided in doing so by the practice in the Navy whereby the head of an office or command personally signs official correspondence instead of “by order of” or “by direction.” Navy Department letters give the appearance of being personal directives, and after the war the Secretary did nothing to change this impression.

On the other hand, only one work, the two volume, Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox (1918-1920), discloses the prominent part Fox played during the war and his close relationship with the squadron commanders. This excellent source, however, is incomplete, unindexed, and poorly edited, and so has had little influence on Civil War history.

Carl Sandburg, in his four-volume Abraham Lincoln, The War Tears, gives Fox proper recognition and makes evident his close association with the President. Sandburg points out that Lincoln, who knew nothing about ships, soon recognized Fox’s dynamic ability. Fox’s loyalty to Lincoln was staunch, and the two maintained a direct and almost intimate relationship until the President’s death.

Gideon Welles was by no means a figurehead. He knew what was going on in his department. He himself wrote the official letters to other cabinet members and prepared the voluminous Annual Reports of the Department. He gave his views at cabinet meetings and may have influenced some political decisions. But, in purely naval matters, everyone in the White House, in the War and Navy Departments, and especially in the operating squadrons looked to Fox. Whatever he wanted in the direction of naval affairs, Welles agreed to. The Assistant was canny enough, however, not to take advantage of his favored position with the President for, as one qualified observer of the Navy Department scene, Paymaster General Horatio Bridge, observed, “Gideon is not to be driven by anyone.” Together the two men ran the Union Navy with an iron hand as Wilkes and other naval officers were to learn. Not for a century would there again be in government such tight civilian control of the military.

Gustavus V. Fox was born in Saugus, Massachusetts, on 13 June 1821. He entered the Navy as a midshipman in 1838; was advanced to passed midshipman, 1844; and to lieutenant, 1852. The Dictionary of American Biography is in error in stating that he graduated from the Naval Academy. In addition to duty in cruising warships, he served with the Coast Survey and in the Merchant Marine as first officer of the Collins transatlantic liner Baltic in 1851 and had command of U. S. Mail steamers running between New York, New Orleans, and Panama from 1853 to 1856. He thereby began his civilian career in the Navy Department with more experience in ocean-going steamships than most officers in the Navy, and he did not hesitate to let them know it. Fox never held a naval command, however, the honorary title “Captain” being derived from his merchant marine days.

He had resigned in 1856, married, and accepted a position as business agent for the Bay States Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. Another resident of Lowell, the controversial Benjamin F. Butler was a schoolmate and lifelong friend, which may be a reason for Butler’s participation in so many Civil War joint operations.

Fox married Virginia, daughter of Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire, a former Secretary of the Navy and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Another Woodbury daughter was married to Montgomery Blair, of the politically powerful Blair family, and the two men were close friends. Blair became Postmaster General in Lincoln’s cabinet, and through him Fox was given the chance to play a major part in the abortive attempt to relieve Fort Sumter, off Charleston, S. C., in April 1861.

This was one of the most bizarre affairs in American history. While Postmaster General Blair, Secretary Welles and General Winfield Scott prepared to send reinforcements under Fox to Sumter, Secretary of State William H. Seward, who wanted that fort abandoned to relieve political tension, persuaded President Lincoln to sign orders, without Welles’s knowledge, sending the steam frigate Powhatan under Lieutenant David D. Porter to Pensacola. Captain William Mervine, commanding that ship and with orders from Welles to take command off Charleston, thereby found himself relieved by higher authority. When Fox arrived off the city with troops in the transport Baltic, he learned that the senior naval officer there, Commander Stephen C. Rowan in Pawnee, had neither instructions nor knowledge of what was going on. When Fox asked Rowan to support him and land the troops, the naval officer’s reply was: “I am not going in there and begin civil war.”

Their dilemma was settled by the Confederates opening the bombardment of the fort. All Fox could do was look on and, after the surrender, transport Major Anderson’s command to New York. He would later boast to a friend: “I was the principal person in bringing on the war.”

In May 1861, Fox joined the Navy Department as its Chief Clerk. This appointment can be credited both to the Blair family and to the recommendations of two prominent New York shipping men, William H. Aspinwall and George Law. Lincoln wrote to Welles when he heard that there was opposition in the Department: “My wish, and advice is, that you do not allow any ordinary obstacle to prevent his appointment. He is a live man, whose services we cannot well dispense with.” The office of Assistant Secretary was created for Fox by an act of Congress in August 1861.

Fox took over complete direction of naval affairs as soon as he entered the Department. The Navy was then at its nadir with the blots of Pensacola and Norfolk on its record and Confederate privateers still roaming the waters off the New York and New England coasts. Within a year, under Fox’s leadership, the Navy became the darling of the North. Victories were gained at Port Royal, Fort Henry, and New Orleans; the ironclad Mer- rimac was kept in check by the Monitor; and the blockade at last became effective.

In the summer of 1861, a strategy board recommended seizing anchorages on the Southern coasts as bases for the blockading ships. Fox chose the senior member of this board, S. F. Du Pont, for command of the naval component of the joint expedition to accomplish this. Port Royal Roads, South Carolina, was captured and became the base for future operations on the South Atlantic coast. After his victory, Du Pont gave full credit to Fox for convincing him that the splendid harbor of Port Royal should be his first objective rather than the minor anchorage at Bull’s Bay which the board had chosen.

Immediately following the success at Port Royal, Fox pushed for another amphibious operation, this time the capture of New Orleans, the South’s major port. He gained approval despite the fact that General Scott’s plan for opening the Mississippi called for a land campaign down the river from the North. Fox’s choice of a commander this time was David G. Farragut and success was again achieved. Fox’s energy enabled the Navy to gain two victories before the Confederates were ready and, to his delight, without having to share the glory with the Army.

The Assistant Secretary formed a close association with Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa, key member of the Naval Affairs Committee. They worked together to get needed naval legislation enacted including creation of the admiral’s grade, abolition of the spirit ration, and transfer of the Mississippi Squadron from the War Department to the Navy. The two men maintained a lively correspondence. “I beg of you,” wrote Fox, “for the enduring good of the service, which you have so much at heart, to add a proviso abolishing the spirit ration. . . . All the insubordination, and all misery, every deviltry on board ship can be traced to rum.” In turn the Senator encouraged Fox to ignore seniority in order to get the best men into the major commands. “I know you have stuck your head into a hornet’s nest. But never mind . . . your duty is to the country and not to a set of waterlogged captains who ought to have been laid up in ordinary twenty years ago.”

Despite his heavy duties creating and operating the wartime Navy, Fox did not forget its future as embodied in the Naval Academy. His correspondence with the Superintendent, George S. Blake, reveals not only his interest but the details in which he involved himself. A dynamic speaker, he urged a course in public speaking, and he directed the establishment of a department of steam engineering. When he learned that midshipmen considered “engine driving” as degrading to their profession, he had this department’s name changed to marine engineering. Fox may have preferred that the Naval Academy remain at Newport, Rhode Island, following the Civil War, as Blake and a one-time member of the faculty, Stephen B. Luce, advised, but Senator Grimes insisted that it be returned to Annapolis.

Gustavus V. Fox was not without his faults. He loved power and after the successes at Port Royal and New Orleans, he was so sure of himself that he would neither take advice nor brook resistance. When it served his purposes, or the best interests of the Navy (which he usually equated together), he could be ruthless, unfair, and vindictive. He shunned interservice co-operation even when sound strategy demanded it, holding that in joint operations the Navy never received the credit it deserved. “I feel my duty is two fold,” he wrote Du Pont, “first to beat our Southern friends; second to beat the Army.”

The Assistant Secretary’s strong personality became the hallmark of the Navy Department. Naval officers were denied direction of operations, and in few cases was their advice sought. There were no admiral counterparts to Generals Scott, McClellan, Halleck, and Grant. It was Fox who discussed naval and joint matters with these gendemen, and he gave them to understand that the Navy was to be no mere servant of the Army.

Fox was a doer and could not tie himself down to the study, planning, and follow- through that naval operations require. He preferred schemes and contrivances that appeared to provide easy solutions and, with his sanguine nature, he adopted them with enthusiasm. When he made mistakes, he made big ones but they were always errors of commission, never of omission. His capital blunder was allowing himself to come under the spell of the inventor, John Ericsson, and thus to become irrevocably committed to the monitor type of ironclad. In depending on monitors alone, he largely dissipated the advantage that control of the sea had given the Northern cause.

John Ericsson, perhaps one of the most overrated men in American history, was a better publicist than engineer. Opinionated and articulate, he forced acceptance of his ideas without bothering to subject them to adequate tests. According to Captain John Rodgers, who had more experience in Ericsson vessels than any other naval officer, he ruined every man who ever placed confidence in him.

Fox had not been impressed with the monitor type until, by accident, he witnessed the Monitor-Merrimac engagement at Hampton Roads, 9 March 1862; in his enthusiasm over the supposed Monitor victory, he became a devoted Ericsson disciple. He saw a 15-inch Rod- man gun at Fortress Monroe and thereupon decided that it was the answer for penetrating ship armor. He forced John A. Dahlgren, Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, against the latter’s judgment, to design a naval counterpart. Without further tests or trials, he contracted with Ericsson for ten more monitors and virtually turned over to the inventor the entire ironclad program. The men responsible for the Navy’s ship construction, Chief Constructor John Lenthall and Engineer-in- Chief Benjamin F. Isherwood, were ignored. Ericsson restricted his sub-contracts to favored clients, and such able naval architects as William H. Webb and John W. Griffiths, who were not among Ericsson’s friends, were kept out of the war effort.

Fox’s commitment to monitors checked Northern investigation of the Confederate concept of the casemated ironclad and stopped the building of additional ships of the proven New Ironsides type, a broadside armored frigate more effective, in service opinion, than all the monitors put together. Farragut certainly could have used one or more New Ironsides at Mobile Bay. Five million dollars were spent on the Navy during the war, but at the war’s end, the United States still did not have a seagoing battle fleet to match those of England and France. Such a fleet could have forced the French out of Mexico as the Russians were forced out of Cuba a century later. But in 1865, an army had to be sent to the Mexican border to do this job.

The Confederates, despite their few resources, always had their ironclads operational first—-at Hampton Roads, Charleston, Mobile, and in the North Carolina Sounds. Design defects and desirable improvements continually delayed completion of the Union monitors. A wiser Fox was to write in February 1864, “If we had taken a lesson from the rebels and put our vessels together cheaply and simply, we should now be in possession of every Southern port.” Nowhere, however, is he penitent for the shocking fact that as late as the spring of 1864, Flusser in Miami and Roe in Sassacus had to match their wooden ships against the armored ram Albemarle, while, a few months before, William Webb had delivered to the Italian government two excellent ironclads that had been built for that country in New York during the height of the war!

The monitor type introduced two radical principles to warship design, (1) impenetrability through low freeboard, and (2) firepower concentrated in a small number of large guns mounted in armored revolving turrets. Ericsson’s ships were a match for the Confederate ironclads, but they were never successful against forts, the primary combat opponents of the Union Navy in the Civil War. With their poor ventilation, monitors were hell to live in and, with little positive buoyancy, easy to drown in. They were slow and with no sea-keeping qualities, they often had to be towed from port to port if, as one senior officer put it, the Navy Department was not to be indicted for murder. It took at least six minutes to load their two large guns and this violated cardinal principles of gunnery, rapidity and volume of fire. Volume of fire had brought victory at Port Royal and New Orleans, and naval officers knew it was absolutely necessary if warships were to compete successfully against forts.

For the Northern officers who had to fight them, the monitors were a naval contradiction. Ericsson, in his original design, had in mind as answers to the ironclads of England and France, primarily harbor and coast defense vessels. But the Union Navy had to use the monitors offensively and maneuvering in the shoal waters off the Southern coast, they were liable to grounding and to easy capture by boarding. They would then become, for the Confederates, just the type needed for the defense of their ports.

Fox refused to admit these weaknesses and went ahead to make another major mistake, the naval attack on Charleston. The Union cause at the beginning of 1863 was at a low ebb. Lincoln, for political purposes, wanted victories of any sort, but Fox wanted them to be naval. The political and departmental benefits from the capture of “the cradle of the Confederacy” blinded him to the tactical difficulties and strategic dangers involved. Charleston, for the Confederacy, was already second in importance to Wilmington, North Carolina, the supply port for Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Du Pont off Charleston held that the city could only be taken by a large-scale, well-planned joint Army and Navy operation. He was concerned primarily with the maintenance of the blockade. He feared that any monitors disabled in an attack and captured would be used by the enterprising Confederate Navy to break the blockade and perhaps force the North into a war with the two European maritime powers, either of whose navies could sweep away the frail craft that composed the blockading squadrons.

Such an appreciation of the problem was not shared in Washington. Fox knew that he could not get the troops that Du Pont felt were necessary, because General Henry W. Hal- leck, the Army’s Chief of Staff, opposed extensive amphibious operations where the Navy would have too large a measure of control. The Assistant Secretary had already publicly boasted that a single monitor could steam by the Charleston forts and frighten the city into submission. Now he had seven plus two other ironclads. Fox’s enthusiasm, supported by Lincoln’s blessing, was hard to resist, and Du Pont acquiesced.

The attack was made on 7 April 1863 and failed. Seventy-six guns from six forts rained 2,206 shots on the ironclads, hitting them 439 times. The 23 guns of the nine ships were able to deliver only 139 rounds in the hour-and-40- minute action. One ship was lost and several monitors suffered materiel casualties. To have pushed into the harbor would have meant presenting one or more of the monitors to the enemy. Du Pont withdrew, refusing to turn a defeat into a disaster.

Fox could not bear to have his cherished scheme dropped. Du Pont was relieved by John A. Dahlgren, and efforts were renewed, but the city resisted capture. The drawn-out siege of Charleston thereby delayed operations against Mobile and Wilmington until August 1864 and January 1865, by which time these naval victories no longer had any strategic purpose. A look at a relief map of the area of the Confederacy will indicate that successful amphibious assaults on these two ports in 1862 or 1863 could have made unnecessary Sherman’s Atlanta campaign and the great encircling marches of his Army of the West.

As director of naval operations, the Assistant Secretary was culpable in his failure to suppress the Confederate cruisers which drove the U. S. Merchant Marine from the seas. His excuse was that ships could not be spared from the blockade for this purpose. Ships were available; what was lacking was intelligent planning and direction of their use. In 1861, a feeble and ineffective blockade was strengthened by following the recommendations of a strategy board. A similar board of able officers, directed to study the Confederate cruiser situation, might again have brought success and saved the North its worst defeat, the loss of the nation’s Merchant Marine. But the one-man rule of the Navy Department in 1864 precluded any such approach to the problem.

As the war drew to a close, the fame Fox coveted as a major figure in it began to escape him. The President’s confidence continued, but Lincoln by then had lost much of his earlier interest in the Navy. Powerful New York newspapers which had once hailed Ericsson became bitterly critical of the inventor, his ships, and the Navy Department that sponsored him, especially after the fiasco of the light-draft monitors which, when launched, had almost no freeboard. Lincoln’s death meant the end of Fox’s power, as Welles assumed his rightful place in the Department. It also ended Fox’s hope for an admiral’s commission after the war. He resigned in 1866 in order to make an official visit to Russia. He tried to enter the lucrative railroad business with the help of Grimes, James B. Eads, and other friends, but without success, and he returned to his former work in the Lowell textile mills.

He and Welles corresponded until the latter’s death in 1878 but never intimately. Fox assisted in preparing at least two of the Welles’s articles for the Galaxy, but he did not insist that the Secretary share credit with him. He died in 1883 without knowing what was written about him in the famous Diary.

A just appraisal of Gustavus V. Fox as a prominent figure in the Civil War cannot be attempted in an essay of this sort. It must await a long-overdue full-length biography, and such an appraisal will have to consider not only the gifted, high-handed man but the situation in which he was placed, a Navy Department unable to perform its only function—the direction of naval war. Secretary Welles, when he entered into the duties of his office at the beginning of the nation’s greatest conflict, found five Bureau chiefs, each involved in affairs of his own Bureau, but no officers directing naval operations or supervising personnel, duties which, in the quiet days of peace, the Secretary himself discharged aided by a few clerks. Welles did bring some senior officers into the Department and one of them, Commodore Hiram Paulding was making good progress when Fox arrived. Paulding, however, was only an unofficial advisor; he had no statutory authority as did General Winfield Scott in the War Department, the organization of which had been reformed by Secretary John C. Calhoun after the War of 1812.

The North began the Civil War with control of the sea, an inestimable strategic advantage against an enemy with a long, exposed coastline. But the Navy Department, even with Fox in charge, was incapable of fully exploiting this control. This became evident to one of the most perceptive of the naval participants, Stephen B. Luce, and it started him on a half century of thinking, writing, and persuading which eventually produced the Naval War College in 1885 and the office of the Chief of Naval Operations in 1915. Luce advocated a dualism in the Department’s organization which definitely separated civil from military functions, and civilian command such as Fox exercised was never again possible.

In May 1861, however, Gustavus V. Fox was what the Navy needed. He had drive, know-how and an implicit faith in himself. He also had the full trust of the Lincoln administration, something no naval officer could have acquired at this time. And no naval officer would have dared so early to slaughter the sacred cow of seniority—and this was the first thing that had to be done.

Fox’s outstanding quality was his loyalty, loyalty to Lincoln, to the Union cause, and to the Navy as a whole. He allowed nothing to stand in its way, least of all the feelings of his former naval associates and the generals of the U. S. Army.

His great want was that touch of humility that is a necessary quality for greatness. Naval officers were not to be his advisers and collaborators, only his clerks and runners. In the amphibious war that the Union had to fight, friendly and understanding co-operation between Army and Navy was a first requirement, but the Assistant Secretary was not the man to achieve this.

The Gustavus V. Fox Papers in the New York Historical Society are a mine of Civil War naval history. Fox kept copies of all his own letters and carefully saved those he received. Only a small portion of these were published in Confidential Correspondence, mostly to flag officers, and the letters selected tended to portray these men rather than Fox.

Other sources on him are rare. The best is, oddly, the Army’s War of the Rebellion: Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (130 vols., 1880-1901). In this series are numerous mentions of Fox as well as letters which give insight to the wide range of Fox’s activities. On the other hand, the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies (30 vols., 1894-1914) do not contain as much Fox material as might be expected, primarily because Mrs. Fox did not make her husband’s papers available to the Navy Department for this purpose.

Gustavus V. Fox was both good and bad for the Union Navy in the Civil War. Neither Secretary Welles nor any naval officer could have accomplished what he did in the first year. But no man is indispensable and, by the middle of 1862, Fox thought he was, and then his usefulness was over.