Fearful that in a war against a European power the government might need to issue letters of marque to augment its inferior forces, the United States had declined to ratify the agreement. As the superior power against the South, the Lincoln administration now sought to sign the Declaration of Paris, but the British and French demurred until the conclusion of hostilities. Lincoln’s resolve was tested when Confederate privateer William W. Smith was captured, tried for piracy, found guilty, and sentenced to die. President Davis asserted that Smith was not a common criminal and that his government would execute one high-ranking Union prisoner of war for every Southerner executed for piracy. The U.S. court’s ruling was overturned, and Smith and other Confederate privateers were thereafter treated as prisoners of war.
At the same time, Lincoln declared a blockade to prevent the Confederacy from trading cotton for munitions and other necessities. Stopping trade at Southern ports without involving foreign powers posed a different problem for Lincoln. Issuing an executive order to close ports and arresting ships for violating municipal law would uphold the government’s position that the United States faced nothing more than a domestic insurrection and that the Confederacy had no standing as a sovereign state. However, the detention of foreign ships for smuggling would antagonize Britain and France, which were already suspected of Southern sympathies. The alternative was to blockade the South, an act of war that gave the Confederacy the status of an independent belligerent and required the deployment of massive numbers of blockading ships. Lincoln chose the latter option and by July there were squadrons off most major ports along the twentyfive-hundred-mile coast from Virginia to Texas. The dramatic escapades of blockade-runners give the impression that the blockade was ineffective, yet more than two-thirds of the three hundred blockade-runners were eventually captured or destroyed. Moreover, there were only thirteen hundred attempts to slip the blockade. Before the war, the country’s largest export ports after New York were New Orleans, Mobile, Charleston, and Savannah, and more than three thousand ships cleared the port of New Orleans alone. The blockade drove up the cost of imports, reduced the government’s revenues from trade, and hobbled the South’s ability to pay for or import war matériel from abroad.
The Confederate States Navy’s offensive capability depended on nine commerce raiders, five built in Great Britain, which between them captured more than 250 merchantmen. After the war the United States argued that in letting the Confederacy acquire ships from English and Scottish yards, Great Britain had violated its neutrality and was therefore liable for the destruction wrought by the British-built raiders. The Alabama claims (so-called because the CSS Alabama alone accounted for five million dollars in losses) were resolved under the Treaty of Washington (1871), by which an international tribunal found that Britain had not exercised “due diligence” and awarded the United States $15.5 million in damages. The outright loss of merchant ships was aggravated by the tenfold increase in the cost of insurance on American ships and the consequent transfer of more than a thousand vessels—more than eight hundred thousand tons of shipping—to foreign, mostly British, registry to give them the protection of a neutral flag. The American merchant marine never recovered, thanks to a combination of protectionist legislation that prevented the purchase of foreign-built ships or the return to American registry of any ship sold foreign; prohibitive tariffs that inhibited the growth of iron shipbuilding; and a redirection of national investment toward inland development.
Ironclads and the River War
Lacking the wherewithal to build a fleet comparable to the Union’s, Confederate navy secretary Stephen Mallory determined to shift the terms of the contest. “I regard the possession of an iron-armored ship as a matter of the first necessity,” he wrote in May 1861; “inequality of numbers may be compensated for by invulnerability; and thus not only does economy but naval success dictate the wisdom and expediency of fighting with iron against wood.” The South embarked on a campaign to convert existing vessels into ironclads that could operate with impunity against wooden ships. The first was built around the hull of the screw frigate USS Merrimack, which was captured with the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk, Virginia. The result was the central battery frigate CSS Virginia, with a forty-three-meter-long casemate consisting of a sixty-one-centimeter-thick shell of oak and pine sheathed with ten centimeters of rolled iron and armed with twelve guns.
To counter the threat posed by the Virginia, the U.S. Navy ordered prototypes of armored steamships of distinct design: two broadside ironclads, and one with a revolving turret, John Ericsson’s Monitor. Revolutionary in the extreme, the Monitor was the first practical warship built without a sailing rig or oars. The vessel consisted of a hull fifty-five meters long by nearly thirteen meters in beam upon which rested an iron “raft,” the dual function of which was to protect the hull from ramming and to provide the vessel with stability in a seaway. Driven by a single propeller, she could steam at six knots. Visually and technologically, the Monitor’s most distinguishing feature was its rotating turret. Measuring six meters in diameter and nearly three meters high and mounted on a steam-powered spindle, it incorporated two seven-ton Dahlgren smoothbore shell guns. The resulting profile earned the Monitor the epithet “cheesebox on a raft.”
The Virginia handily sank two wooden steam frigates and damaged a third off Norfolk before being brought to battle by the Monitor on March 8, 1862. The ships fought at close range for four hours, but neither was able to inflict decisive damage on the other. Injuries were few: the Monitor had 1 wounded, and the Virginia 2 dead and 19 wounded. (By way of comparison, in 1812 a fifteen-minute engagement between the evenly matched wooden frigates USS Chesapeake and HMS Shannon killed 78 and wounded more than 150.) The Confederates were eventually forced to destroy the Virginia on their retreat from Norfolk, and the Monitor sank at the end of the year while under tow to Wilmington, North Carolina. Their premature ends notwithstanding, it was clear that though the two ships had failed to destroy each other, they had rung the death knell of the wooden warship.
This was most evident in the river war, a cornerstone of Union general Winfield Scott’s strategy of drawing a noose around the Confederacy by sea and river, a program dubbed the Anaconda Plan. Scott felt that victory over the Confederate states could be achieved most quickly and economically by “enveloping them all (nearly) at once by a cordon of posts on the Mississippi to its mouth from its junction with the Ohio, and blockading ships of war on the seaboard,” and on tributaries of the Mississippi and Ohio as well. He further noted that “the transportation of men and all supplies by water is about a fifth of the land cost, besides the immense saving in time.” Scott’s plan was adopted piecemeal, but the strategic mind-set that underlay his idea is clear from the fact that virtually all Union armies were named for rivers; the Southern preference was to name armies for states and military districts. The most important of the river campaigns was fought for control of the Mississippi. In April 1862, Flag Officer David G. Farragut sailed up the Mississippi to capture New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Natchez, while to the north gunboats helped secure the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. With its sixty-meter-high bluffs, Vicksburg, Mississippi, held out until July 4, 1863. Fort Hudson, Louisiana, soon followed, and the heart of the Confederacy was encircled.
Naval Doctrine and Three Short Wars
The technological novelties displayed in the Civil War and refined thereafter had profound consequences for the function, composition, and strategy of naval forces as well as for seemingly unrelated issues such as colonial expansion. Well into the twentieth century, naval strategists tended to draw on traditional rivalries of the age of sail, with the actions and composition of the Royal Navy taken as the benchmark against which to measure success or failure. Warfare under steam required new theoretical assessments, but the empirical evidence for combat under steam derived from naval operations that were brief in duration or limited in scope, did not involve the Royal Navy, and were uncharacteristically decisive in the
ir effects. By far the most forcefully articulated, patriotically satisfying, and enduring of these naval doctrines was that espoused by Alfred Thayer Mahan. A veteran of the Civil War and a vigorous advocate of American expansion, in 1886 Mahan joined the newly established U.S. Naval War College to develop principles of naval strategy drawn from history. Four years later he published a collection of his lectures as The Influence of Sea Power upon History. Mahan argued that the chronicle of naval operations offered teachings of universal applicability that “can be elevated to the rank of general principles … notwithstanding the great changes that have been brought about in naval weapons … and by the introduction of steam as the motive power.”
Focusing on fleet engagements between European powers from the Second Anglo-Dutch War to the American Revolution, Mahan viewed sea power as the ability to strike at an enemy’s economic well-being, and he maintained that navies were essential to protect a nation’s overseas commerce and its colonies, and to interdict enemy trade through blockade: “It is not the taking of individual ships or convoys, be they few or many, that strike down the money power of a nation; it is the possession of that overbearing power on the sea which drives the enemy’s flag from it, or allows it to appear only as a fugitive; and which, by controlling the great commons, closes the highways by which commerce moves to and from the enemy’s shores.” Although The Influence of Sea Power upon History is couched in appropriately objective terms, Mahan’s larger aim was to encourage the revitalization of the U.S. Navy. In an article published the same year, he inveighed against American apathy toward the development of a fleet adequate to containing and profiting from the “unsettled political conditions, such as exist in Haiti, Central America, and many of the Pacific islands, especially the Hawaiian group.” Foremost in his mind regarding the Americas was the prospect of opening a canal across the Isthmus of Panama (which Ferdinand de Lesseps had attempted in the 1880s), and the fear that European powers already present in or with designs on the Caribbean would be able to build fortresses “which will make them practically inexpugnable,” at a time when “we have not on the Gulf of Mexico even the beginning of a navy yard which could serve as the base of our operations.” He was likewise concerned that the kingdom of Hawaii could fall into European or Japanese hands.
In sharp contrast to Mahan’s views were those of the Jeune Ecole, a school of thought developed in France that focused primarily on guerre de course, or commerce warfare. Whereas Mahan advocated a strategy that took the almighty Royal Navy as its ideal, the Jeune Ecole is generally dismissed as the “strategy of the weak.” While this is not an inapt description, it was by no means a strategy of the meek. In its original formulation, the Jeune Ecole anticipated total war against all of a nation’s economic and military resources—including its “overbearing power on the sea”—as well as the abrogation of international law regarding neutral shipping, contraband, and civilians. Inspired partly by the success of Confederate raiders during the Civil War and by the potential of the torpedo and submarine, advocates of the Jeune Ecole eschewed engagements between fleets of capital ships—that is, warships of the largest class. They reasoned that a large number of torpedo boats offered the prospect of breaking blockades by targeting enemy warships and of bringing the war to the enemy by sinking its commerce. Moreover, many torpedo boats could be built for the cost of one battleship and they could be dispersed among a number of smaller ports. Advocates of the Jeune Ecole were a minority even within the French naval establishment, and they never advocated the wholesale abandonment of capital ships. They viewed these as an appropriate weapon against Italy, whose navy was smaller and whose modest foreign trade made the country less susceptible to commerce warfare than Britain. The outcome of three relatively unheralded naval conflicts—the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, Spanish-American War (1898), and Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905)—seemed to vindicate Mahan’s advocacy of capital ships as a way of keeping the enemy not only “out of our ports, but far away from our coasts.” These conflicts had several features in common: they were brief; they were the first to involve flotillas of modern seagoing warships; the victories were one-sided; and, more important for the fate of the Jeune Ecole, they entailed virtually no commerce warfare. They consequently had a disproportionate impact on the evolution of naval strategy and the conduct of the two great naval wars of the twentieth century.
The Chinese defeat in the First Opium War had been emblematic of a general decline in the authority of the Qing Dynasty, and between 1850 and 1873 China endured four overlapping internal rebellions in the midst of which they had to fight the British and French in a Second Opium War (1856–60) and make further concessions to western powers. One was the establishment by the British, French, and American consuls of the Maritime Customs Service to collect duties from foreign traders. Considered the most scrupulous branch of the Chinese government, under the leadership of Robert Hart from 1864 to 1907 the service accounted for a quarter of the government’s income and instituted innumerable improvements to navigation at the treaty ports (more than forty by the 1900s) and on major rivers. Following the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion in 1864, the Chinese undertook to modernize its industry and military through the “self-strengthening movement.” Included among the reforms was the creation of four regional navies, the most important being the Beiyang Navy at Weihai, on the Shandong Peninsula. Yet improvements were sporadic and even the most promising efforts were marred by a degree of corruption that confounded foreign observers.
The submarine tender USS Bushnell raising the bow of the submarine AL-3 to inspect its torpedo tubes. This World War I–era photograph was taken off Queenstown (Cobh), Ireland, where the U.S. Navy maintained a significant presence designed to counter the German U-boat threat to convoys. Photograph by Burnell Poole; courtesy of the family of Burnell Poole.
Japan’s engagement with western powers had proceeded far more smoothly. In 1869, the Japanese founded a naval academy and with British and French help expanded its indigenous shipbuilding capacity. They also began to expand overseas, briefly occupying Taiwan and formally annexing the Ryukyus in 1879. More significant still was Japan’s interest in Korea, where the tectonic plates of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian ambition grind together. The “hermit kingdom” of Korea had been a tributary of China since 1637 and its trading relations with Japan were governed by a treaty of 1609. In 1875, Japan forced the government to agree to the “unequal” Treaty of Kanghwa granting Japan trading privileges and specifying that Korea was a sovereign nation, a blatant effort to remove Chinese influence from Korean affairs. Nevertheless, Chinese advisors persuaded Korea to accept treaties with the United States and the leading European powers, partly to counter Japanese influence.
In 1894, a peasant rebellion led to Chinese and Japanese intervention in Korea. Japanese cruisers sank two Chinese vessels and captured a third near Incheon and a week later Japan declared war on China. The Chinese fleet thereafter sailed no farther east than the mouth of the Yalu River and thousands of Japanese troops landed unopposed at Wonsan and Busan. On September 17, a Japanese cruiser squadron overwhelmed a Chinese flotilla plagued by weak leadership, inadequate training, and useless ordnance. Two months after the battle of the Yalu, the Japanese took the undefended ports of Dalian (then called Dairen) and Port Arthur (Lüshunkou), and they later captured Weihai and with it the Beiyang Navy’s battleship. Under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Japan acquired Taiwan (which it held until the end of World War II) and the Liaodong Peninsula, while Europeans took advantage of China’s unexpected defeat to wring further territorial concessions for themselves.
The origins of the Sino-Japanese War had as much to do with relations between Japan and Russia as between Japan and China. While western European states had nibbled at China’s seaward flanks in the wake of the Opium Wars, Russian diplomatic successes proved more enriching, enduring, and destabilizing. Russia had been humiliated in the Crimean War and it failed to modernize at a rate comparable to that
of the leading European nations, but between 1858 and 1864 the empire permanently acquired by treaty 1.7 million square kilometers of Chinese territory—an area the size of Alaska (which it sold to the United States in 1867). This included part of the Pacific coast north of the Korean Peninsula, where the Russians established a naval base at Vladivostok in 1871. The potential for conflict between Russia and Japan was widely acknowledged, and in the spring of 1895 the Russian minister responsible for the Trans-Siberian Railway observed that “The hostile actions of Japan [against China] are directed mainly against us,” while just after ratification of the Treaty of Shimonoseki the Japanese minister to Russia noted that “Russia does hope ultimately to bring the entire area from northeastern Manchuria down to Manchuria’s southern coast under her influence.” Eager to acquire a warm-water port on the Pacific (Vladivostok was icebound several months a year), Russia convinced Japan to cede the Liaodong Peninsula back to China in exchange for additional reparations payments. Three years later, the Russians obtained a twentyfive-year lease on the peninsula and the right to extend the Trans-Siberian Railway to Dalian and Port Arthur. Hostilities with Russia were now imminent, and Japan dedicated its reparations revenue from China to quadrupling the size of its navy. The czar responded in kind by calling for a Pacific fleet 30 percent larger than Japan’s.
Biding their time, the Japanese remained reliable allies of the western powers. During the Boxer Rebellion in 1900–1901 they helped lift the siege of the western enclave at Tianjin, and in 1902 they signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which recognized that Japan was “interested in a peculiar degree, politically as well as commercially and industrially in Korea,” and that it would be admissible for the Japanese “to take such measures as may be indispensable in order to safeguard those interests if threatened either by the aggressive action of any other Power, or by disturbances arising in China or Korea.” The Russians had taken advantage of the Boxer Rebellion to send a hundred thousand troops into Manchuria, where they remained, and in 1903 they occupied the Korean port of Yongamp’o just south of the Yalu. The Japanese called for negotiations, and when these collapsed, Admiral Heihachiro Togo launched a destroyer attack against Port Arthur on February 8, 1904—two days before a formal declaration of war. Only three of twenty Japanese torpedoes hit their targets, but the Russians never gained the initiative. Seven months later, the Japanese intercepted the Russian fleet as it tried to run for Vladivostok and forced it back to Port Arthur where it remained until the Japanese army overran the base in January 1905.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 77
