FATHER NEPTUNE’S WAR

Gideon Welles was fifty-nine years old when he arrived in Washington to become Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of the navy. With a long white beard and full wig that covered his bald pate, Welles stood out as a memorable figure who soon won Lincoln’s admiration and the affectionate nickname “Father Neptune.” Over the course of the war, Welles oversaw the navy’s growth from fewer than nine thousand sailors and officers and fifty vessels on active duty to more than fifty thousand men and 650 ships (dozens of them ironclads). He took an active role in Union strategic planning, which included important naval and combined operations along the 3,500-mile-long Confederate coast, on rivers from the Mississippi to the James, and on the oceans. The president paid tribute to the navy’s role in fashioning victory when he wrote, “Nor must Uncle Sam’s Web-feet be forgotten. At all the watery margins they have been present. Not only on the deep sea, the broad bay, and the rapid river, but also up the narrow muddy bayou, and wherever the ground was a little damp, they have been, and made their tracks.”6 Welles put his imprint on virtually every aspect of the naval operations Lincoln applauded and must be reckoned among the best secretaries of the navy in United States history.

He also ranks among the most important American diarists. He began making entries in August 1862 and continued through the early summer of 1869. For the years of the Civil War, he observed events from the center of power, where he participated in crucial cabinet meetings, knew and interacted with innumerable influential people, and developed a strong relationship with Lincoln. His voluminous comments about fellow members of the cabinet, military and naval commanders, political events, and a wide range of other topics carry special weight because he usually recorded them almost immediately rather than waiting and trying to recall what had happened. Welles’s diary is essential to a full understanding of the Lincoln administration and the Union war effort, more revealing than Salmon P. Chase’s wartime journals or Edward Bates’s diary (both of which also have been published)

Two unsatisfactory three-volume editions of Welles’s entire diary appeared in 1911 and 1960. The first is profoundly flawed because of how sloppily—and silently—the editors assembled the text from wartime entries and later revisions and additions (it is not clear precisely who did the editing); the second, prepared by academic historian Howard K. Beale, superimposes editorial symbols and proofreader’s marks on the text of the 1911 edition and is confusing and hard to use. I have consulted Beale’s version extensively in my own work and been frustrated every time.

Happily for all students of the Civil War, a new edition of Welles’s wartime diary appeared in 2014. Edited by William E. Gienapp and Erica L. Gienapp under the title The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy, it marks a milestone in the published primary literature on the conflict.7 Meticulously faithful to the original document, it renders the sections devoted to the war in both earlier editions entirely irrelevant except, perhaps, to specialists charting changes between the original manuscript and the 1911 and 1960 versions.

How good is Welles as a witness? I will offer several examples of why his diary demands our attention. On September 22, 1862, the president raised the topic of his preliminary proclamation of emancipation with the cabinet. “It is momentous both in its immediate and remote results,” commented Welles, “and an exercise of extraordinary power which cannot be justified on mere humanitarian principles, and would never have been attempted but to preserve the national existence. These were my convictions and this the drift of the discussion. . . . For myself the subject has from its magnitude and its consequence oppressed me, aside from the ethical features of the question. . . . There is, in the free states a very general impression that this measure will insure a speedy peace. I cannot say that I so view it.”8

On July 14, 1863, Welles and Lincoln discussed George G. Meade’s failure to strike the Army of Northern Virginia before it retreated safely across the Potomac after Gettysburg. Leaving a cabinet meeting, “we walked together across the lawn and stopped and conversed a few minutes at the gate. He said with a voice and countenance which I shall never forget, he had feared yet expected this—that there has seemed to him for a full week, a determination that Lee should escape with his force and plunder,—and that, my God, is the last of this Army of the Potomac. There is bad faith somewhere. . . . What does it mean, Mr Welles—Great God what does it mean?”9

In the bloody summer of 1864, Welles wrestled with the question of how harshly the war should be prosecuted. “I have often thought that greater severity might well be exercised,” he observed, “and yet it would tend to barbarism. No traitor has been hung—I doubt if there will be, but an example should be made of some of the leaders, for present and for future good. . . . Were the leaders to be stripped of their possessions, and their property confiscated—their families impoverished the result would be salutary in the future. But I apprehend there will be very gentle measures in closing up the rebellion. The authors of the enormous evils that have been inflicted will go unpunished—or will be but slightly punished.”10

On April 10, 1865, Welles joined most other loyal citizens in celebrating news from Appomattox: “This surrender of the great rebel Captain and the most formidable and reliable army of the Secessionists virtually terminates the rebellion.” “Called on the President,” Welles added, “who returned last evening, looking well and feeling well.” On April 14, Lincoln told the cabinet that reconstructing the Union “was the great question now before us, and we must soon begin to act. Was glad Congress was not in session.”11 Welles next saw Lincoln, slipping toward death, at the Petersen House across from Ford’s Theatre.