Civil War for the day

For ten days, Washington City twisted in nerve-wracking isolation, deprived of mail, telegraph, and railroad service, bereft of any news except ever-escalating rumors of the thousands, nay, tens of thousands of rebel men from Maryland and Virginia who were about to converge on Mr. Lincoln’s bedroom. Had they come, they would have faced perhaps two thousand men combined from detachments of soldiers, marines, the Washington home guard, some veterans of the Bloody Kansas fighting under command of Senator James Lane, better known as “The Grim Chieftain”, and a contingent of Kentucky volunteers headed by Cassius M. Clay, the Bowie-knife-wielding abolitionist who paused in Washington en route to St. Petersburg to become minister to Russia.
A gallant group, though perhaps not enough to avoid a modern Thermopylae if they were assailed by the secessionist horde that was said to be massing from all over the South. As it happened, whatever forces had accumulated missed their moment for, on the 25th, the first troops of the Eighth Massachusetts arrived. Though tired and bedraggled after a long and roundabout journey, their spirits were high, and at long last the city — or at least that portion of the city that was loyal to the Federal government — could emit a sigh of relief.
Still, safeguarding the capital and preventing the government’s immediate decapitation was but a minimal achievement, and one that followed a series of setbacks: the loss of Fort Sumter, the loss of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and the terrible loss of the Gosport Naval Yard at Norfolk, Virginia. Were the government still in the hands of the ineffectual President Buchanan, or were the War Department still led by a contemptible traitor like John Floyd, the people might not be surprised at the woeful record. But people had hoped for more from President Lincoln.
In fairness, not all of these circumstances were under his control. A fully-garrisoned and provisioned Fort Sumter, armed with all its guns, might have survived the Confederate bombardment while inflicting a fair punishment on the city of Charleston in the process, but such an outcome was never within the power of the seventy-odd men of Major Anderson’s command.
The same is true of the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry; forty Federal soldiers were stationed there, but not even Achilles and his Myrmidons could have held that position against a numerically superior force. The Adams administration put an armory there, in 1799, because of the town’s fortuitous location at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers (an attribute subsequently strengthened with connections to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal), but the buildings sat on a flood plain at the bottom of a great gorge; it is not defensible, and as a result, it had never acquired defenses. You could take it with a key.
So, when word reached the armory that Henry Wise, the fire-eating ex-governor of Virginia, was sending a band of militia to seize the installation, the officers in command acted decisively to deprive the rebels of the weapons and machinery on hand. Using kegs of gunpowder providentially left behind by John Brown, the soldiers set fire to the arsenal and headed for the army post to the north in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
The blaze destroyed 15,000 rifles that would have surely ended up in rebel hands, and perhaps to immediate effect: Captain Kingsbury of the army, who stayed behind after the troops evacuated and who was briefly detained by the militia, says that he saw among the raiders a group of Marylanders with B&O railroad cars that were to have been used to carry the rifles to Baltimore. There, they would have been passed out to volunteers, quite possibly in time to have been turned on the men of the Sixth Massachusetts in the melee in Baltimore on the 19th; or perhaps they would have been distributed to Southern sympathizers, who would have combined with the Virginia militia to use the railroad to launch a strike into the heart of the nearly undefended Washington. But, although these possibilities were prevented, secessionists might yet take some solace from the work of salvage crews, hard at work attempting to recover the gunsmithing machinery and surplus parts, and shipping that hardware to the Tredegar foundry in Richmond.
Call the abandonment of Harpers Ferry at best a draw for the Union, at worst a small setback. The loss of the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk, however, was a catastrophe, requiring a combination of ineffectual policy, inept leadership, insufficient resources, and shockingly poor decisions.
Located on the Elizabeth River, which empties into the lower Chesapeake Bay, Gosport was one of the premier shipyards in the country. It featured a granite masonry drydock (the only other one in North America was at Boston’s Charlestown facility), foundries, machine and boiler shops, the navy’s largest arsenal, a powder magazine, gun carriage works, other invaluable facilities vital to building and refurbishing ships — in short, everything necessary to constructing and maintaining a modern navy, including 2,000 pieces of ordnance, among which were 300 of the most up-to-date weapons, the smoothbore Dahlgren guns. In routine times, Gosport would likely be hosting a flotilla of ships anchored there for refitting and refurbishment, and this month brought an unusually impressive collection: among the vessels on hand were the Cumberland, flagship of the Home Squadron, which was getting replenished; the smaller steamers Germantown and Plymouth, which had been refit but were still without crews; and the impressive forty-gun steam frigate Merrimack, a modern vessel only four years old, which was having her engines disassembled and rebuilt.
But populating all that mechanical perfection were several hundred men, a great many of whom were dangerously unreliable. The yard was a cesspool of corruption, where bribes and kickbacks were routine. The civilian workforce was full of secessionists, but no more so than were the many Southern-born officers and enlisted men of the Navy, whose compliance with orders ran the gamut from grudging to mutinous. Commanding this wormy den was Commodore Charles McCauley, a 68-year-old drunkard no longer fit for command.
In the days prior to the bombardment of Fort Sumter, it was widely recognized by the Navy Department that Gosport was a vital facility that should not be allowed to fall into rebel hands, and that ought to be defended, or destroyed. But during the first weeks of the Lincoln administration, the policy of the government was to avoid taking any action that would panic the people of Virginia into secession. As a result, no efforts were made to protect the seaport or the ships therein.
Once Virginia seceded, however, the administration was ready to move, only to discover that it had few resources at its command. With so many ships and seamen involved in the missions to Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens, the Navy no longer had enough seamen on the eastern seaboard to form even skeleton crews who could sail the ships to safe harbors. Meanwhile, some six hundred members of Virginia militia units arrived in Norfolk. They were poorly armed, but they began building breastworks, and it quickly became clear that they intended to take hold of Craney Island, a choke point on the Elizabeth about four miles down river. Fearing that McCauley might be losing his grip, Navy Secretary Welles sent Commodore James Alden to Gosport to take command of the Merrimack. He was ordered to get it up and running, and to get it to safety.
Over the next days, Alden pushed hard to get the engines reassembled and to scrape together a crew of thirty men (it usually takes six hundred) that could get the ship out of Gosport. After frantic negotiating and cajoling— Alden dramatically offered $1,000 cash to any civilian pilot who would take the ship down the Elizabeth and across Hampton Roads to Fort Monroe— the Merrimack was set to go. Instead, McCauley canceled the departure. When Alden went to McCauley’s quarters to demand an explanation, he found the commodore in a state of “complete prostration", incapable of articulating a reason. Alden says he contemplated taking the Merrimack out on his own authority but, after 32 years in the service, he did not find within him the initiative to countermand an order.
Friday the 19th was a momentous day for the Department of the Navy. President Lincoln ordered the Navy to institute a blockade of the entire coastline of the Confederacy, all 3,500 miles along the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, and the closing of a dozen ports, including New Orleans, Mobile, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and Wilmington, all in an effort to prevent the importation of war material, and to disrupt the export of cotton, the pillar of the South’s economy. Needless to say, the government anticipated needing the vessels docked at Gosport, but even more, it is going to need Gosport itself. Of course, any government interested in breaking the blockade would no doubt feel the same.
The 19th was also the day that Welles finally decided to relieve McCauley of command. He was replaced by Captain Hiram Paulding, himself a man with nearly 50 years of service, who was ordered to repel with force any attempts to seize the navy yard, to prevent anything from into rebel hands, and as a last resort, to destroy the navy yard and everything in it. Paulding departed immediately on the steamer Pawnee, accompanied by a group of senior officers who were carrying orders to take command of the various ships in Gosport.
Burning of vessels at the Gosport Navy Yard, Norfolk, Virginia on the night of 20 April 1861.
When they arrived on the 20th, however, they were shocked to discover that not three hours earlier, McCauley, panicked by the rebel presence outside the ship yard, and convinced that he could no longer depend on the loyalty of anyone in his command or employ, ordered that every ship, except the Cumberland, be scuttled. Seeking an explanation, Paulding summoned McCauley, who arrived “armed like a Brigand, with swords and pistols in his belt, and revolvers in his hand," and drunk to the point where he could no longer walk.
After ascertaining that the ships were beyond rescue, Paulding concluded that he could not hold the navy yard until reinforcements arrived. McCauley could at least argue that he was drunk when he arrived at that conclusion; Paulding was sober when he ignored the fact that at his disposal were 1,000 men and all the heavy guns aboard the Cumberland and the Pawnee, and gave the order that Gosport be destroyed. In short order, the scuttled ships, the shops and the guns were burned, and the dry dock packed with gunpowder and exploded. Fueling the fire with turpentine, Paulding’s men put everything to the torch, and before long, sheets of flame ignited the night sky. Commodore McCauley refused to desert his post, and Paulding had to send a party of men to drag the stupefied officer out of his and onto the Pawnee. Under the cover of smoke and fire, the Union vessels slipped down the Elizabeth, with the men on deck awaiting what promised to be a breathtaking explosion, the detonation of the gunpowder in the dry dock.
It never came. Someone or something interrupted the burning of the fuse, and in the morning, the rebel militia took possession of the charred facility. The damage seemed to be catastrophic, but it was soon realized that appearances were deceiving. The invaluable dry dock was intact. Nearly 1,200 guns were found to be intact. Shops were burned, but the machinery inside still functioned. And salvage crews were soon at work on the hulks of the scuttled vessels, optimistic that they could be recovered. Throw in recovered powder, shot, gun carriages — without suffering a casualty, without firing a shot or receiving one, without doing much besides digging some trenches, virtually unarmed Virginia militia men routed the United States Navy, sank its vessels, captured its guns and took possession of one of it's prized facilities.