An engraving of Gideon Welles as secretary of the Navy.
An engraving of Gideon Welles as secretary of the Navy.
Save for a few haunting portraits of adolescent recruits, all the subjects of photographs from the Civil War era look at least a decade older than they are. It is surprising to remember that at the time of his inauguration, the immemorial face of Abraham Lincoln belonged to someone who had just turned fifty-two. Even so, Gideon Welles, who was in his late fifties when he joined Lincoln’s cabinet, looks as old as Neptune. And that is the fond, mildly teasing nickname Lincoln gave his Navy secretary: Old Father Neptune.
Welles, like every politician, had enemies, and many of them made fun of his appearance. That wasn’t hard to do. Years earlier, when his hair was still brown, he had ordered a curious wig, a high, wedge-shaped burst of fibers that had of course failed to turn white when his copious beard did. If this toupee was a reflection of the man’s vanity, he was cavalier about it. He would put on the hairpiece in the morning, then pay it no further attention. When he became agitated, it would twitch about on his large head like a cat trying to get comfortable.
Massachusetts governor John Andrew once came to call on Welles asking, “Where can I find that old Mormon deacon, the secretary of the navy?”
The supple New York politico Thurlow Weed, who had first supported Welles’s appointment and then, when his keen nose sniffed a change in the wind, opposed it, told Lincoln that if the President would “stop long enough in New York, Philadelphia or Baltimore to select an attractive figurehead, to be adorned with an elaborate wig and luxuriant whiskers, and transfer it from the prow of a ship to the entrance of the Navy Department, it would, in my opinion, be quite as serviceable as his Secretary, and less expensive.”
With his shrewd combination of toughness and affable deflection, Lincoln replied, “Oh, wooden midshipmen answer very well in novels, but we must have a live Secretary of the Navy.”
A New York Tribune reporter saw what Lincoln did. He wrote that Welles was “a curious-looking man: he wore a wig which was parted in the middle, the hair falling down on each side; and it was from his peculiar appearance, I have always thought, the idea that he was an old fogy originated. . . . In spite of his peculiarities, I think Mr. Welles was a very wise, strong man. There was nothing decorative about him; there was no noise in the street when he went along; but he understood his duty, and did it efficiently, continually, and unvaryingly. There was a good deal of opposition to him, for we had no navy when the war began, and he had to create one without much deliberation; but he was patient, laborious, and intelligent in his task.”
Welles did not come to the task nearly so well equipped as his Southern counterpart Mallory had. Just after he got to Washington, Lincoln told him, “I know but little about ships.”
Welles knew less.
AN ACCIDENT OF GEOGRAPHY PUT Gideon Welles in charge of the US Navy. He thought he would be getting that eternal plum of the spoils system, a postmastership—in this case, the postmastership. But Montgomery Blair was made postmaster general. He was from Maryland; Simon Cameron, the secretary of war, from Pennsylvania; Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, from Ohio. Lincoln needed a New Englander to balance things.
Gideon Welles was born in 1802 in Glastonbury, Connecticut, a few miles downriver from Hartford. His father, Samuel, owned a shipyard, a store, and a farm; the neighbors called him the Squire.
Gideon’s boyhood was shadowed by death. His invalid mother died when he was fourteen, and two years later, his older brother Sam drowned while swimming near his father’s docks. Gideon brooded and hung about the local cemetery, where his grandfather’s tombstone offered the flinty solace “The wise in God will put their trust, / The young may die, the aged must.”
After a while, his father brusquely told the melancholy boy that he was getting stupid and sent him away to the Protestant Episcopal Academy in Cheshire. Gideon was a lackadaisical student, his appreciation of Latin such that he told his classmate and lifelong friend Andrew Foote—who would one day be a rear admiral in the Navy Gideon oversaw—that he wished Rome had suffered the same fate as Carthage.
Shortly before Gideon’s twenty-first birthday, his father wrote him, “You will soon be your own man now, remember that you are made for other purposes than merely to amuse yourself with the curiosities of this world—God blessed you with Talents—which you ought not to lie rol’d in a napkin.”
Welles was already nurturing a vocation, although not one that would have pleased the Squire. He wrote in the notebook he had taken to carrying, “When vexed by the petty ills of life . . . [I] seize my pen and forget the cause of my uneasiness in writing something that might imitate verse to mix with the . . . pieces of prose which I may have idly and almost thoughtlessly composed.”
He wanted to be a writer. He is not remembered as one, but writing would be a great comfort to him during the war, when he kept the diary that not only relieved the endless aggravations of his office, but—although a private exercise—survives as the greatest day-by-day account of one who held high office during those burning years.
By writing, he mounted the first rungs of his career. In the summer of 1823 he sent a sentimental sketch to a weekly called the New York Mirror and was thrilled to read in the September 13 issue that “The Deserted Orphan,” a “beautiful little story . . . will appear next week.” He sold the Mirror four more stories. They gained him entry into a Glastonbury group that liked to call itself The Literate.
His tiny triumph helped him become tax collector for Glastonbury, in 1823, and thereafter he was involved in politics for the rest of his life. When the new Democratic Party began to coalesce around Andrew Jackson, he joined it and, having landed a job on the Hartford Times and Advertiser, wrote vigorous (his opponents said strident and “illiberal”) editorials for the candidate in the 1828 campaign. Jackson lost Connecticut, but he won the presidency and made Welles the state’s Democratic Party manager. In the state assembly he echoed Jackson’s feelings about hereditary privilege by complaining that Connecticut’s problems came with “a political spice from Old Yale College. . . . I am ashamed . . . to say of the civil and political complexion of my state [that] a degraded, bigoted, hide-bound, aristocratic, proud, arrogant and contemptible policy governs her, through designing hypocrites, and artful and unprincipled knaves.”
When he went to Washington to meet Jackson (“His person is very tall and spare, his phiz remarkably long, his eye quick, roving and penetrating”), he discovered that the office of Hartford postmaster had already been awarded to Benjamin Norton, a man he didn’t like. Welles had already become a skilled enough politician to unseat Norton with such sure-handed efficiency that for years afterward the total demolition of a rival was known in Connecticut legislative circles as “Nortonizing.”
Welles himself got the Hartford postmastership at the beginning of Jackson’s second term. By that time he had married. On a trip west to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to view the Democratic Party’s first convention, the twenty-four-year-old Welles had visited his uncle, Elias Hale, and met his daughter Mary Jane, a grave, brown-eyed ten-year-old. Six years later he gallantly offered to act as Mary Jane’s guardian during her stay at Brace’s Seminary for Young Ladies in Hartford. He met her at the steamboat landing on the Connecticut River and just days later wrote her much older brother Reuben, “Were I not so old and so foolish, I should believe myself more than half in love with my fair cousin.”
Soon he was pursuing a difficult courtship. Mary Jane’s mother was against the marriage; she had another suitor in mind for her daughter. After months of “sickening, deadening suspence,” Welles prevailed, and he and Mary Jane Hale were married on her eighteenth birthday in July 1835. It proved a remarkably happy match, although one often darkened. Of their nine children, only three lived to become adults. But the couple drew strength from one another through good times and bad for the rest of their lives.
IN 1844 THE NEWLY ELECTED James Polk rewarded his loyal Connecticut supporter by putting Welles in charge of the Navy Department’s Bureau of Provisions and Clothing.
The recipient’s enthusiasm for this bounty shows in one curt, joyless diary entry: “Business causes induced me to accept this place.”
Welles had been a good postmaster, and he was a good head of Navy supplies. The job was demanding. America was fighting Mexico, and although Welles had nothing to do with the operation of warships, he had to make sure the men working them were properly fed and clothed off Mexican shores in climates much warmer than they’d prepared for. He did well, and although his service taught him nothing about gunnery or the obstreperous new marine steam engines, it proved invaluable when he had to cope with broader naval duties.
Administrations changed, and Welles was out of office in 1849. The “business causes” that he’d gloomily invoked when offered his post were in far better shape. His investments in western lands had turned out well, but now he was unhappy about the course his party was taking.
He was not an abolitionist. He had no fondness for slavery, but he believed it had been recognized by the Constitution and so was part of the legal fabric. Now he was convinced that the Southern Democrats were trying to spread slavery into the territories in hopes of making the institution a national one. To him, this was an assault on the states’ rights that were so much a part of his Jeffersonian convictions.
He left the Democratic Party after thirty years, transferring his faith to the new Republican Party and becoming a member of its National Committee. Abraham Lincoln came to speak in Hartford on March 6, 1860. Welles would never have dreamed of presenting his ideas about slavery in the homely terms that Lincoln did, but the candidate’s ideas perfectly expressed Welles’s beliefs:
“If I find a venomous snake lying on the open prairie, I seize the first stick and kill him at once. But if that snake is in bed with my children, I must be more cautious—I shall, in striking the snake, also strike the children or arouse the reptile to bite the children. Slavery is the venomous snake in bed with the children. But if the question is whether to kill it on the prairie”—slavery in the territories—“or put it in bed with other children I think we’d kill it.”
When Welles came away the morning after the Hartford speech from his first meeting with the candidate, he was on Lincoln’s side. “This orator and lawyer . . . was made where the material for strong men is plenty, and his huge, tall frame is loosely thrown together. He is every way large, brain included, but his countenance shows intellect, generosity, great good nature, and keen discrimination. . . . He is an effective speaker, because he is earnest, strong, honest, simple in style, and clear as crystal in his logic.”
At the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Welles steered the Connecticut delegation into his candidate’s camp. In November Lincoln carried Connecticut, as he did all New England. Welles was “very jolly” over the outcome, but saw ahead “dissolution of the Union, and other terrible calamities.”
ON MARCH 1, THREE DAYS before Lincoln was to be inaugurated, Welles received a telegram from Hannibal Hamlin, the vice president–elect, summoning him to Washington. He left that same day, confident he’d be offered a cabinet position, and believing—and wanting—it to be that of postmaster general. He wasn’t able to get in to see Lincoln until the morning of the inauguration, when he discovered that “the President & Vice President prefer, I think, that I should take the Navy portfolio. The President stated that this was his arrangement.”
Welles went to his office, passing under the same portraits of the heroes of the War of 1812 that he had last seen when he was fired from his naval supplies job. As soon as he got behind his desk, chaos engulfed him. The last time Welles had been there, he’d been worrying about what kind of butter to purchase for the Navy; now he had to whistle up a fleet.
He had some ninety ships to work with, half of them out of commission, only twenty-four steam-powered, and few anywhere nearby. The Hartford, from whose deck Farragut would damn the torpedoes in Mobile Bay three years hence, was showing the flag off the Chinese coast. Some of the best were lying on the silt at the bottom of the Elizabeth River.
He began summoning home the ones still afloat and started building, he said, “a class of vessels different in some respects from any that were in service, to act as sentinels on the coast.” These were wooden, shallow-draft steamers that could carry their eleven-inch bow gun across bayous and up skinny rivers. The name they acquired, 90-Day Gunboats, said how quickly they got built. But even three months was too long, and Welles began buying civilian ships indiscriminately. Anything with a working steam plant would do: towboats, excursion steamers, harbor tugs, right down to the ferries that plied Manhattan’s East River (these tough city kids would give a surprisingly good account of themselves in the years ahead). The motley assemblage gained a less dignified nickname than the gunboats: the Soapbox Navy.
The secretary chose as his main hiring agent George D. Morgan. Welles trusted him, and with reason. In six months Morgan bought eighty-nine ships for $3.5 million, which was close to a million under the initial asking prices. But he was also Welles’s brother-in-law, and he made $70,000 in commissions, a huge amount of money for half a year’s work. That did not sit well with the press. Nothing Welles did seemed to.
The war went badly for the North from the start. In the first big battle, Confederate soldiers routed the Union army thirty miles west of Washington at Bull Run on July 21. Less than a month later, Northern forces met Southern ones at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri, the result codified in the name that immediately attached itself to the engagement: Bull Run of the West.
Two days after the earlier reverse, Lincoln had drafted a nine-point memorandum on what his forces should do now. Item 1 was “Let the plan for making the Blockade effective be pushed forward with all possible despatch.” But the gathering of blockaders went largely unnoticed by the press, which felt things were being handled as ineptly at sea as they were on land.
That was all Welles’s fault, wasn’t it? He became the object of angry glee in the Northern press: that wig, his whole appearance—a lot of reporters mysteriously decided that he bore a physical resemblance to Marie Antoinette—came under steady written and drawn assault. The popular Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper published a quatrain about him:
Retire, O Gideon, to an onion farm,
Ply any trade that’s innocent and slow.
Do anything, where you can do no harm.
Go anywhere you fancy—only go.
He didn’t go. But his job was intolerable. Lincoln had asked for a blockade not just of Southern ports, but of the entire coastline. Welles initially opposed the strategy. Blockades were deployed by nations at war with one another, and he feared that imposing one on the rebellious states would amount to recognizing the Confederacy as a legitimate entity. Better, he said, to close Southern harbors, as any nation would do had they been seized by pirates.
Lincoln, however, looked overseas. Great Britain, having used blockades as a strategy, would respect one: the practice had been codified by international law. But Britain would not tolerate the arbitrary cordoning of various cities, especially by the United States, this bumptious newcomer that had already proved such an irritant during its young life. That would be seen as trifling with England’s maritime rights, which her famous fleet could assert.
So Lincoln ordered a blockade, and Welles found himself responsible for policing thirty-five hundred miles of coast from Cape Henry to the Rio Grande, the same length of rivers, and two thousand miles of the Gulf; in all, just over nine thousand hostile miles of notched, broken, rocky, fort-studded, swampy, and forested shoreline. No navy had ever attempted so immense a job.
Welles ignored as best he could the ridicule and, scaling what he called a “mountain of letters,” assembled his converted ferryboats and summoned-from-afar men-of-war. After a grueling half year he could take some satisfaction in having one hundred ships on station.
He had also assembled a cadre of officers he could trust. In the beginning he was as unsure as poor McCauley had been about the loyalty of his captains. Many of the Southern-born ones resigned their commissions at once; others asked for foreign duty so they would not have to fight their countrymen. The latter group angered Welles just as much as those who immediately went South. To all who did not support the Union, he was implacable, never forgiving “the host of pampered officers who deserted their flag . . . when their loyalty should have upheld it.”
But the winnowing was over. The blockade had been established and would stand and grow stronger. The secretary of the navy was well along with his blockade by August when he almost certainly read a newspaper item from the South (where reporters weren’t nearly as merciless to him as his countrymen were). Attempts at military secrecy in the war’s early years were all but nonexistent. On August 11, 1861, the Mobile Register published, “It would seem that the hull of the Merrimack is being converted into an iron-cased battery. If so, she will be a floating fortress that will be able to defeat the whole Navy of the United States and bombard its cities. Her great size, strength, and powerful engines and speed, combined with the invulnerability secured by the iron casing, will make the dispersal or the destruction of the blockading fleet an easy task for her. Her immense tonnage will enable her to carry an armor proof against any projectile and she could entertain herself by throwing bombs into Fortress Monroe, even without risk. We hope soon to hear that she is ready to commence her avenging career on the seas.”