A Connecticut Yankee in Lincoln’s Cabinet - Gideon Welles

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P. DeVane, Donald B. Engley, Ellsworth S. Grant, Edward W. Knappman, and Edward W. Sloan III.

      A number of individuals – both Club members and non-members – were instrumental in moving this book from conception to publication. As the editor, I am pleased to acknowledge their contributions.

      First, I am grateful to the five Club members who volunteered to serve on the publications committee for the book. Richard Buel, Jr., who edited or co-edited the last three Acorn Club volumes, made astute comments about an early draft. Briann Greenfield did a similarly thorough and constructive critique of the manuscript and offered thoughtful advice throughout the project. Richard Malley, the Club’s secretary, provided assistance with multiple matters, great and small. Patrick Pinnell not only reviewed the manuscript but took the excellent photograph of the statue of Welles at the State Capitol and worked with the book’s designer to incorporate it into the book’s cover. William Peterson recommended several important additions to the text and stood watch to prevent the editor, a landlubber, from making mistakes about maritime matters.

      Several other Club members also helped make the book a reality. During a conference call of the Club’s executive committee in March 2013, Helen Higgins, the Club’s treasurer, asked a question that prompted me, on the spur of the moment, to propose a book based on Gideon Welles’s wartime diary. George Willauer, who stepped down as the Club’s president in May 2012 following six years of service, generously agreed to reassume the presidency on an interim basis so I, who had succeeded him, could concentrate on preparing this book. James English, a member of the Club for more than 30 years, was a source of encouragement from the project’s start, and his close reading of the manuscript caught many infelicities I had missed. Ann Smith cast her lawyerly eye over the publication and distribution agreement between the Club and the Wesleyan University Press. And Robert Smith, Jr. arranged for Jacqueline Pennino Scheib, a publications and copyright specialist at his law firm, to advise me on copyright issues and also to review the agreement with the Press.

      Michael Lestz, chair of the history department at Trinity College, granted me permission to use departmental equipment to make scans of the 1911 edition of Welles’s diary; and Gigi St. Peter, the department’s administrative assistant, made sure I knew how to operate it. Jack Chatfield, my longtime friend and colleague in the department, reviewed the introduction. The book also benefitted from the attentions of Suzanna Tamminen, the director and editor-in-chief of the Wesleyan University Press, and David Wolfram, the book’s designer.

      Finally, a special note of appreciation to two people who provided indispensable help from start to finish. Louis P. Masur, who became a valued friend during his nine years as a member of the Trinity College faculty and is now Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, confirmed my initial sense that the book was worth doing, critiqued the manuscript with care and discernment, and provided good counsel each of the many times I sought it. My wife, Linda S. Spencer, who was a National Register Specialist-Historian at the Connecticut State Historical Commission and its successor agency for nearly three decades, not only tolerated endless table talk about Welles’s diary but also read the manuscript at multiple points in its evolution and each time made recommendations that significantly improved it.

      Thanks to all.

       J. Ronald Spencer, Editor

       November 1, 2013

      INTRODUCTION

      Gideon Welles, a native of Glastonbury, Connecticut, was one of the state’s most influential journalists and politicians during the three decades preceding the Civil War. Today, however, he is usually remembered as Lincoln’s secretary of the navy – “Father Neptune” (or just “Neptune”) as the president called him. He was only the fourth Connecticut resident appointed to a cabinet post, which he continued to hold throughout Andrew Johnson’s presidency.1

      Historians usually credit Welles with being an energetic and effective administrator who did much to modernize a service in the grip of an aging uniformed leadership that was rigidly set in its ways. When in July 1861 Congress authorized him (and also the secretary of war) to take into consideration merit as well as seniority in making assignments, Welles proceeded to appoint younger, less tradition-bound officers to key positions. He also oversaw the Navy’s growth from fewer than 100 ships to 671 and the organization and implementation of the increasingly effective blockade of 3500 miles of Confederate coastline. Furthermore, after some initial hesitation, he pushed for the development of ironclad warships, including the famous USS Monitor that fought the ironclad CSS Virginia (formerly the USS Merrimack) to a draw on March 9, 1862, thereby saving the wooden Union warships stationed in Hampton Roads, Virginia, from virtually certain destruction.2 He was, in short, one of the architects of Union victory.

      For many historians, however, what is most interesting about Welles is the extensive diary he kept during the war.3 It provides first-hand information, and often perceptive insights, about Lincoln, Welles’s cabinet colleagues, and their conflicts and rivalries. It also covers a wealth of other topics – topics as varied as a cabinet discussion of what the track gauge of the planned transcontinental railroad should be (Welles favored 4 feet, 8½ inches, which became standard for American railroads); home-state pressure on Welles to establish a navy yard in New London; the July 1863 New York City draft riots, which Welles blamed mainly on New York’s Democratic governor, Horatio Seymour, whom he dubbed “Sir Forcible Feeble;” Welles’s fear, as a lifelong hard-money man, that the government’s issuance of paper currency not convertible to gold would lead to financial disaster; and the cabinet’s opposition to a proposed constitutional amendment declaring the United States a Christian nation.

      Despite his achievements as navy secretary, Welles was often the target of public criticism. When rebel cruisers wreaked havoc on American maritime commerce, merchants and ship owners blamed him for their losses. Newspapers regularly faulted him because so many blockade-runners managed to evade navy patrols and bring cargo into and out of Confederate ports. Armchair admirals were quick to second-guess his decisions. And cartoonists had a field day at his expense. Welles rarely replied to his critics, but he sometimes vented his anger in the diary. For instance, on December 26, 1863, he wrote

      In naval matters … those who are most ignorant complain loudest. The wisest policy receives the severest condemnation. My best measures have been the most harshly criticized…. Unreasonable and captious men will blame me, take what course I may.

      The diary also provided an outlet for Welles’s resentment that the War Department failed to give the navy due credit for its contribution to such successful combined army-navy operations as the capture of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River in 1863. He was confident, however, as he wrote on August 23, 1864, that “history will put all right,” although he predicted it would be a generation or more “before the prejudices and perversions of partisans will be dissipated, and the true facts be developed.”

      Welles began the diary sometime between July 14 and August 11, 1862 (the first entry is not dated), started keeping it on a regular basis shortly thereafter, and continued to make regular entries in it through the Johnson administration.4 In the entry for October 20, 1863, he noted that work on it “usually consumes a late evening hour, after company has gone and other labors of the day are laid aside.” He rarely went more than a few days without making an entry.

      The diary has an immediacy rarely found in memoirs, since it records the rush of events as they happened, when it was uncertain what they signified, how the Lincoln administration should respond, or how they would look in retrospect. As Welles acknowledged in a passage inserted into the September 19, 1862, entry at a later date, “I am not writing a history of the War…. But I record my own impressions and the random speculations, views, and opinions of others also.” Moreover, since he usually wrote about events the day they occurred or soon thereafter, the diary’s pages are largely unaffected by the hindsight that often distorts the recollections of memoirists writing well after the events they discuss.5 The sense of immediacy is further heightened by Welles’s forceful, often impassioned prose.

      This book contains some 250 excerpts from the wartime

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