Glory in the Name

Historical Note

How much I owe of the pleasure of my life to these much reviled writers of fiction.

— Mary Boykin Chesnut, February 25, 1861

Glory in the Name is fiction, of course. There never was a Samuel Bowater or Hieronymus Taylor, the ships that they sailed did not exist. The men, however, and their ships are based on real men and vessels of the period. Further, the situations in which they are involved, the battles, the trials, of the Confederate Navy, are all real, and portrayed as accurately as I was able, basing my depictions on copious primary source evidence. Other than Bowater and company, the people and events are described as they were.

Here, then, are a few comments on the action covered in this book.

In early 1861, months before the firing on Fort Sumter, which is generally considered the beginning of the Civil War, the Confederate government began its military organization. Initially, already existing militia units were formed into Southern regiments, their numbers swelled by the thousands of men who rushed to join.

For the Confederate Navy, things were not so simple. Officially established on February 20, 1861, the navy had no ships and little means of obtaining them. Sailors were scarce, since the Southern states had never possessed much of a merchant marine. The only thing that the Confederate Navy had enough of was officers, and that was only because they had so few ships that needed them.

The Confederacy had enough officers, but they did not have a glut of them. Officers of the United States Navy showed a greater reluctance to resign and support their home states than did their brother officers in the United States Army. In the spring of 1861 there were 1,385 active-duty officers in the navy, including the midshipmen at the Naval Academy. Of those, only 375 chose to join the Confederacy, and a third of those were Academy midshipmen. Only twelve of seventy-eight captains joined the South. Clearly there was, as Mary Boykin Chesnut put it, “an awful pull in their divided hearts.”

Perhaps the foremost example of that divided heart was Franklin Buchanan, who had entered the navy as a midshipman during the War of 1812. Thinking his home state of Maryland would secede, Buchanan tendered his resignation. Then when Maryland stayed in the Union, “Old Buck” tried to take his resignation back. But it was too late in the eyes of Navy Secretary Gideon Welles.

Buchanan’s predicament illustrates the kind of uncertainty that was rampant in the early months of 1861. With five states seceded from the Union within months of his taking office, Abraham Lincoln wanted very much not to make things any worse than they were. That was the thinking behind the administration’s handling of the threat to Gosport Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, which turned into a debacle for the Union.

In April, Virginia, the most influential of the Southern states, was still teetering on the brink of secession. Lincoln and his cabinet were afraid that any little offense might tip the state into the Confederate camp. So, despite clear threats to the naval yard, Lincoln and Gideon Welles did nothing to defend the place, since that, they felt, would be seen as an act of aggression against Virginia. Nor did they send the ships off to the safety of Fortress Monroe or Washington.

To make matters worse, the yard was commanded by the old and uncertain Charles McCauley, and many of the officers under him were Southern men whose real objective was to see the valuable navy yard in Southern hands. The growing tension both inside and outside the yard and the threat of state militia massing in Norfolk finally reached the boiling point on April 20, 1861. Swept by panic, the Union officers decided to scuttle and burn the ships and flee from the shipyard, burning it in their wake. Even this was poorly done. A wealth of ordnance was left intact, and the fires did not do nearly the damage intended. The sailing vessel Cumberland, all but obsolete in the age of steam propulsion, was towed to safety, while the Merrimack was burned and sunk. A year later, the Merrimack, reborn as the Confederate ironclad Virginia (and commanded by Franklin Buchanan), would batter the Cumberland to death, killing nearly half her crew.

It would be some months after fighting began before the United States Navy could organize itself enough to bring its power to bear. But when the first hammer blow fell, it fell on Hatteras Island in North Carolina.

Hatteras Island is one of the barrier islands that line the southern coasts of the United States like a castle wall. Behind Hatteras Island lies Pamlico Sound, which connects to the north with Albemarle Sound. Apart from being an ideal spot for privateers to lurk and dash out at Union ships rounding Cape Hatteras, the sounds connect to five major rivers which run into the heart of North Carolina and southern Virginia. Strategically, it was a valuable spot, and it was here that the United States Navy chose to bring its overwhelming force to bear for the first time.

Forts Clark and Hatteras were no marvels of construction, and they were weakly defended. In fact, the Confederate government never made any great effort to defend the valuable sounds, perhaps because they recognized from the onset that it would be impossible in light of Federal naval superiority, which it certainly was.

On August 27, 1861, a little more than a month after the First Battle of Bull Run, the United States Navy arrived off Hatteras Inlet. Steaming in an oval pattern, they poured their fire into the forts, while the forts’ guns could not even fire far enough to hit back.

In his report to Secretary Mallory, written while he was a prisoner aboard the flagship Minnesota, Samuel Barron wrote:

They the Union ships, after some practice, got the exact range of the IX, X, and XI-inch guns, and did not find it necessary to alter their positions, whilst not a shot from our battery reached them with the greatest elevation we could get.

With the situation hopeless, Barron ordered the white flag run up.

It was not until February of the following year that the Union forces followed up their victory at Cape Hatteras with the obvious move on Roanoke Island, which would close off Albemarle Sound and threaten Norfolk from the south. When they did come, they once more came in overwhelming strength, and brushed aside the three thousand Confederate troops and the small mosquito fleet that the Confederate government allocated for defense of the island and sound.

The naval battle at Elizabeth City, a fleet action fought by two fleets of small gunboats, was one of the only such naval fights in the Civil War. Indicative of the changing nature of warfare at sea, it is also one of the few instances of hand-to-hand fighting during naval combat in that war.

In the Gulf of Mexico, Confederates and Federals played at the same game, with the Union navy attempting to further its stranglehold on Southern ports, and the Confederacy resisting with all means available, which, in the largely agricultural South, was not much. Many of the ambitious ironclad projects begun by the Confederate Navy ended up as bonfires on the ways before the ships were ever in the water. Delays were epidemic, with so few facilities in the South able to manufacture the many elements that went into an ironclad vessel.

One ship that did become operational, the first ironclad ever built in the United States, was the Manassas, built as a privateer and commandeered for naval service. In the end she proved to be more of a psychological threat than a physical one, and though she did deliver a few good hits, and stove in some planks, she was never able to sink a Union vessel. Nonetheless, she was enough to frighten Captain John Pope into abandoning the Head of the Passes, in one of the most shameful of all Civil War naval episodes, known today as Pope’s Run.

Despite that one victory, the small fleet of gunboats and even the two big forts south of New Orleans were not enough to stop Farragut’s heavy ships from fighting their way past. Had the ironclad Louisiana been operational, she might have tipped the balance in the South’s favor, but like so many of the Confederacy’s naval efforts, she was hampered by design and manufacturing problems. In the end she was no more than a floating battery, and not a terribly effectual one at that.

Like the fledgling United States Navy during the Revolution, facing the might of the Royal Navy, the Confederate Navy had an impossible task from the onset. Eighty years after the Revolution, the problem was exacerbated by technological advances that made it more difficult to compete with the industrialized North. Benedict Arnold could build a fleet of ships in the woods of New York and take on the British on Lake Champlain, but by the mid-nineteenth century, naval warfare was too sophisticated for that sort of thing. The brave men of the Confederate Navy stood up to the Union juggernaut with whatever they had that would float and mount a gun, but in the end they could do no more than delay the inevitable.