Chapter 6
The doldrums and the new navy (1865–1900)
Sailors refer to those areas near the equator in both the Atlantic and the Pacific where the prevailing winds are calm and unreliable as “the doldrums.” In the Age of Sail ships could find themselves becalmed there for days or even weeks. It is therefore an appropriate term to describe the U.S. Navy during the two decades after the end of the Civil War: an era of swift retrenchment with little forward progress. When the Civil War ended, the U.S. Navy boasted a total of 671 warships, all but a few of them steamers, many of them ironclads, and some that were the most advanced of their type. Yet within a decade all but a few dozen had been sold off, scrapped, or placed in ordinary—mothballed for a future crisis. Conforming to the now familiar pattern, after a dramatic expansion to meet a crisis, the navy swiftly contracted at almost the moment the crisis ended. By 1870 the U.S. Navy had only fifty-two ships on active service.
Champions of a large standing navy generally condemned this contraction. It seemed to them that the United States had been on the brink of establishing itself as a world naval power only to let the moment slip away as the country relapsed into semi-isolationism. However, among the 671 navy warships that existed in 1865 were 418 converted merchantmen and more than a hundred river ironclads—ships that were unlikely to affect the global balance of naval power in the postwar era. Fifty-two of the 671 were monitors with their characteristic rotating turret, yet given their low silhouette and marginal buoyancy, they were unsuited to service in the open ocean. Like Jefferson’s gunboats, they were useful primarily for coastal defense, and like the gunboats, most of them were laid up in ordinary to await a future crisis.
Retrenchment
Part of the reason for the swift cutbacks was simple economy. The Civil War had been hugely expensive, and the nation had gone heavily into debt to pay for it. In addition Americans continued to look mostly inward in the postwar era, toward the South, where Reconstruction dominated national politics, and to the West, where the Homestead Act of 1862 made free land available and where the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 made those lands more accessible than ever.
In addition to reducing the number of ships, the navy also appeared to be willing to abandon at least some of the new wartime technology. While steam power and iron armor had characterized much of the Navy’s wartime fleet, after 1865 the warships that resumed the duty of patrolling distant stations overseas were wooden-hulled and unarmored. Though they all possessed steam engines as well as masts and sails, they navigated most of the time under sail power alone because the United States still lacked secure overseas bases where its warships could refuel. The country acquired its first overseas possession in 1867, when it annexed the unpopulated atoll of Midway in the Pacific, but aside from that it had to rely on bases controlled by foreign powers. Unwilling to become dependent on others for fuel, American warships relied primarily on wind power and used their steam engines only in emergencies. As a result they were known as “auxiliary steamers,” and captains were sometimes required to defend in writing a decision to light the boilers.
These auxiliary steamers reprised their prewar roles of protecting American merchant shipping overseas and representing the nation abroad. Though a number of submarine telegraphic cables now made possible swifter communication between Washington and other world capitals, the lack of wireless telegraphy meant that U.S. Navy captains at sea remained all but sovereign when serving on these distant stations. As they had before the war, they authorized or led occasional expeditions ashore to punish bad behavior or to subdue perceived threats. Though such expeditions were never directed toward a European power, it was universally understood that Western navies could punish non-Europeans without consequence. In the five years after Appomattox, U.S. Navy officers sent landing parties ashore in Formosa, Japan, Uruguay, Mexico, Panama, and Korea. The Korean landing in May and June 1871 was one of the largest. Rear Admiral John Rodgers (son of the John Rodgers of the War of 1812) had been dispatched to Korea in the hope of opening the “Hermit Kingdom” to Western trade, as Matthew Perry had done with Japan twenty years earlier. When Korean forts fired on his ships, Rodgers demanded an apology, and when it was not forthcoming, he landed a party of 684 men who stormed the fort and killed 243 Koreans. Rodgers behaved fully in the nineteenth-century tradition, but he also failed in his mission. Not until 1878, when Commodore Robert W. Shufeldt arrived in the USS Ticonderoga, did the United States begin to lay the groundwork for an eventual trade agreement with Korea that was ratified in 1883.
Occasionally it was evident that the lack of a robust naval force could limit the nation’s ability to influence events abroad. In 1873 the Spanish Navy captured the side-wheel steamer Virginius, which was engaged in running arms and supplies to rebel groups in Cuba, and took it into Santiago Harbor, where the officers and crew were tried as pirates and sentenced to die by firing squad. Though the ship was Cuban owned, it flew an American flag, and her captain was a U.S. citizen named Joseph Fry. Most of those on board were American or British citizens who either sympathized with the Cuban rebels or who were in it for the money—or both. Fifty of them, including Fry, were shot before Sir Lambdon Lorraine, commanding HMS Niobe, threatened to bombard Santiago unless the executions were halted.
News of the executions provoked widespread outrage in the United States, and the Ulysses S. Grant administration demanded an explanation from Spain. At the same time, Grant also ordered the navy to prepare for war, more to underscore his seriousness than to engage in actual hostilities. The incident was eventually resolved peacefully when the Spanish agreed to pay an indemnity to the families of the slain, yet the haphazard mobilization effort revealed the appalling unreadiness of the U.S. Navy to fight a European power, even a declining European power such as Spain.
Straws in the Wind
The revival of the U.S. Navy in the last two decades of the nineteenth century resulted from a variety of circumstances. The most immediate was the simple fact that the several dozen ships retained from the Civil War were getting so old that they had become antiques. Indeed the British wit Oscar Wilde made the U.S. Navy the butt of a joke in an 1887 story entitled “The Canterville Ghost.” When an American character in Wilde’s story asserts that the United States has no ruins or curiosities like those found in Europe, the ghost of the story’s title replies, “No ruins! No curiosities! You have your Navy and your manners.”
If the U.S. Navy was not quite a “ruin” in the 1880s, it was evident that thirty-year-old warships could no longer carry out the nation’s overseas duties efficiently. In 1883 therefore Congress authorized the construction of three new cruisers and one dispatch vessel, its first important naval appropriation since Appomattox. Because these ships were subsequently christened Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Dolphin, they came to be known as the ABCD ships. Though they still carried masts and spars for sailing, they also incorporated most of the new technologies that European navies had embraced over the previous twenty years, including steel hulls with watertight compartments and an electrical system to replace the use of lanterns below decks. Their construction did not, however, mark a significant change in national naval policy, for the missions assigned to these new ships were the same as those of the “auxiliary steamers” they replaced.
Nevertheless other straws in the wind suggested that a true revolution was coming. In October 1884, Commodore Stephen B. Luce founded the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. There, middle-grade navy officers studied not only the new technology but also the more philosophical subject of naval strategy. Opponents of a standing peacetime navy had long argued that a permanent naval establishment would generate a class of self-perpetuating senior officers—a naval aristocracy—that would constitute, by its very existence, a threat to democratic values. The founding of the Naval War College was significant therefore not merely because of its official role of preparing senior officers for command positions but also because it demonstrated that this long-standing prejudice was weakening.
At the same time, the enlisted force of the U.S. Navy became less eclectic and international. The smaller size of the navy meant that recruiters could be more selective, and the steam engine plants and long-range guns required greater technical knowledge than had been needed during the Age of Sail. This resulted in a concerted effort to recruit U.S. citizens and train them ashore in specialized schools before sending them to the fleet to learn on the job, as had been common practice in all navies for centuries.
Another harbinger of change came in 1886, when Congress approved the construction of the first U.S. warships to bear the designation “battleship.” The two ships were subsequently named Maine and Texas, beginning a tradition of naming battleships for states. Like the ABCD ships, however, this was another false dawn, for not only were the ships relatively small for battleships (at 6,300 and 6,600 tons, respectively); they were also “short-legged,” that is, designed primarily for coastal operations. The assumption that a naval force could be quickly conjured up in an emergency remained a central argument in the annual report of Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Franklin Tracy in 1889. Tracy conceded that the navy was hardly thriving. “The wooden ships are a makeshift,” he wrote. “The old monitors are worse than useless.” He concluded, “At no previous time in the present century has the country been relatively so powerless at sea.” Yet Tracy clung to the traditional view that the U.S. Navy should be “adapted to defensive war,” and (quoting John Adams) that it should be a navy that could be “quickly brought into use.” It was a view that had dominated U.S. naval policy for more than a century, but it was about to change.
The new navy
If there was a single moment in history when the United States abandoned its historic commitment to a militia navy and embraced the idea of a standing peacetime navy, that moment was in 1890, when the confluence of three developments produced a sea change. The first of these was a congressional decision to fund three new battleships, subsequently named Indiana, Massachusetts, and Oregon. Displacing ten thousand tons each, they were much larger than the Maine or the Texas authorized just four years earlier, and they had a more modern look as well, with massive 13-inch rifled guns housed in giant turrets fore and aft. More significant, they were not replacement vessels for aging auxiliary steamers but true seagoing battleships whose primary mission was to fight and defeat other battleships. They were numbered BB-1, BB-2, and BB-3, implying that there could well be others to follow.
The second event of 1890 was the publication of a book burdened with the rather cumbersome title of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. The work of a previously little known navy captain named Alfred Thayer Mahan, who had spent the previous three years lecturing at the new Naval War College, the book was an analysis of how the relatively small nation of Great Britain had managed to evolve into the most powerful country in Europe and arguably the most powerful in the world, with a global empire on which, as the saying went, the sun never set. The British had been able to do all this, Mahan explained, by seizing command of the seas with its battleship fleet (ships of the line). From that single circumstance flowed all the rest: the wealth that came from trade, the power that came with wealth, and military dominance. Moreover Mahan presented this remarkable achievement as a kind of blueprint, appending a general introduction to the book that itemized the preconditions of naval dominance, and implying (at least) that nations possessing these characteristics could duplicate Britain’s rise to power.
The third circumstance that fed the naval revolution of 1890 was the U.S. census report of that year, which noted the disappearance of the western frontier, suggesting that America’s future growth might extend beyond the boundaries of her continental limits. The construction of the new battleships and the widespread popularity of Mahan’s book seemed to offer both the means and the rationale for the United States to accept the challenge and to duplicate Britain’s success. Mahan’s book did not cause a change in U.S. naval policy, but it provided an intellectual rationale and justification for a policy that was already evolving.
By 1896 all five of America’s new battleships had been completed and launched, and a sixth (the Iowa) joined them a year later. None of these ships had been built to meet a perceived crisis or a national emergency. Instead the United States had finally embraced the navalist argument that a mature nation-state required a naval force of the first rank. Soon enough circumstances would offer an opportunity to test both the ships and the theory.
A splendid little war
For more than a quarter of a century Americans had watched events in Spanish Cuba with varying degrees of concern and disapproval. In 1873 the United States had declined to go to war with Spain over the interception of the Virginius, but unrest in the island continued, and a new outbreak of violence in 1895 led the Spanish to adopt more draconian countermeasures against the rebellious elements. American newspapers deplored the new tactics, and in 1898 President William McKinley approved the suggestion of America’s consul general in Cuba to send one of America’s new battleships to Havana on a courtesy visit as a signal of American concern. The ship McKinley sent was the USS Maine.
On the night of February 15, 1898, the Maine was quietly at anchor in Havana Harbor when an explosion sent her to the bottom, taking 260 Americans down with her. Though the cause of this disaster was eventually determined to be the detonation of coal dust in the bunkers, Americans at the time believed that the Spanish had somehow destroyed the ship. That assumption led to a popular clamor for war, a clamor that McKinley was unable to resist, and the United States declared war against Spain on April 25, 1898.
The United States had not fought a European opponent since the War of 1812. Though impressive by national standards, its new navy paled next to those of Britain, France, or even Germany. Spain’s navy, however, once the greatest in the world, was now a mere shadow of its former self. Nor was Spain’s heart in the struggle. In effect the upward trajectory of American naval expansion had crossed the downward trajectory of Spanish retreat from great power status.
From the U.S. Navy’s point of view, the war with Spain in 1898 was, in the words of Secretary of State John Hay, “a splendid little war.” Active hostilities lasted barely six months and were punctuated by two entirely one-sided naval engagements on opposite sides of the world that seemed to validate both the decision to build the new battleships and Mahan’s theory about the wellspring of national greatness.
The first of those battles took place on May 1, 1898, in Manila Bay in the Philippines, almost exactly halfway around the world from Cuba. One of Mahan’s postulates was that it was essential to seize control of the sea at the outset of any war by destroying the enemy’s principal battle fleets. Since Spain had a small naval squadron in the Philippines, Commodore George Dewey, commanding the American Asian Squadron at Hong Kong, was ordered to find and destroy it.
He did so in one of the most complete and one-sided naval victories in history. Dewey did not have any of the new U.S. battleships in his squadron, but he had several heavy cruisers, and with them he entered Manila Bay and took the anchored Spanish squadron under fire. In the steamy tropical climate the gunners on the American ships stripped to their waists and bound up their heads in water-soaked rags. They kept their shoes on, however, so that their feet did not burn on the hot deck plates. Down in the fire room, where the temperature neared 200 degrees, the stokers sang, “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”
5. An artist’s depiction of the Battle of Manila Bay, on May 1, 1898, in which Commodore George Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron destroyed the Spanish fleet in a single afternoon. It was a turning point for both the U.S. Navy and for the nation, since it led to American occupation of the Philippines and established American interests in the western Pacific.
Despite the high morale, American marksmanship was abysmal (only 141 of 5,859 shells actually hit their targets), but Spanish marksmanship was worse, and within a few hours all of the Spanish ships were smoking wrecks. Those few hours successfully eliminated Spanish sea power from the Pacific and led, unavoidably, to the question of what was to be done with Manila and, for that matter, the entire archipelago of the Philippines. In the end McKinley decided that it was the duty of the United States to assume the responsibility and annex the islands.
Two months later, on July 3, the American victory at Manila was matched by a triumph off the south coast of Cuba. Spain had dispatched its Home Squadron from Cádiz to the Caribbean to defend Cuba, but it was soon trapped inside Santiago Harbor by a larger American squadron under Rear Admiral William T. Sampson. The approach of an American land force convinced the Spanish squadron commander, Admiral Pascual Cervera, to make a run for it. As he charged out of the harbor, the American fleet was waiting for him. In a running fight U.S. Navy ships destroyed the entire Spanish squadron, killing three hundred men, wounding five hundred more, and taking 1,800 prisoners. American casualties consisted of one man killed and one wounded.
With the peace treaty signed in Paris in December 1898, Spain granted Cuba its independence, though the United States assumed significant authority on the island and in 1903 negotiated a lease that gave the U.S. Navy control of Guantánamo Bay on Cuba’s south coast. Spain also ceded the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Wake Island to the United States, which paid Spain $20 million for them. Separately but simultaneously the annexation of the Kingdom of Hawaii, along with the previous annexation of Midway, gave the United States a series of Pacific Ocean stepping stones, each a potential refueling stop, that led from Hawaii to Midway, to Wake, to Guam, and to the Philippines. It made the United States not merely a continental power but a global power.