“I’m afraid you have me, Captain. I’m just a soldier and no naval expert.”
Wolseley had been following all this carefully. His good eye widened a bit.
4
WASHINGTON NAVY YARD, WASHINGTON, D.C., 8:00 AM, AUGUST 7, 1863
The President’s carriage clattered through the Navy Yard’s brick gates to the precision salute of the Marine guards. Superintendent Hardwood was aware of Lincoln’s fascination for all things mechanical, and the Yard drew him like a magnet. It was an opportunity to polish the Navy’s reputation with a smart military display. He never did figure out that Lincoln simply didn’t care about that aspect.
What Lincoln cared about was winning the war. He may have been a lawyer from the Prairie State, but he had an instinctive appreciation for the budding technologies of the new and vigorous industrial age. He found the Army and Navy departments hopelessly mired in their own red tape at the expense of innovation. It was as if both services had missed the business revolution that had accompanied the Industrial Revolution. Once he was presented with a committee report on a new naval gun. He glanced at the report that had consumed an entire tree’s worth of paper and exclaimed, “I should want a new lease of life to read this through.” He hurled it on the table. “Why can’t a committee of this kind occasionally exhibit a grain of common sense? If I send a man to buy a horse for me, I expect him to tell me his points-not how many hairs there are in his tail.”
The man with the common sense Lincoln had been seeking had been Capt. John A. Dahlgren, Yard superintendent at the beginning of his administration. He was an officer with an international reputation for technological innovation in naval gunnery and for deft management, and Lincoln had come to depend on him for advice in such matters and naval and military affairs in general. Finally in June he had reluctantly agreed to release now Rear Admiral Dahlgren to command the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron off Charleston.
When Sharpe stepped out of his door that morning to walk across the square to the White House, he was surprised to be greeted by a familiar voice from the carriage parked outside. He looked up to see a stovepipe hat nodding down at him. “Good morning, Sharpe. Jump in.” It was not every day that a President picked up a colonel. “If you were expecting us to wait on ceremony, my apologies, but we need an early start thing morning.”
As they drove away, Lincoln said, “I thought your stay in Washington might be put to good use by broadening your horizons. The Navy Yard is just such a place. It is the most fun I have. I feel like a little boy who has escaped from some evil chore whenever I can sneak away from the White House. That reminds me.”
By the time they were riding through the Navy Yard gate Lincoln had finished his fourth story, and Sharpe was laughing. Only later would he consider how much of his policy Lincoln had passed to him through his wit. He only regained his composure after they had passed the smoking cannon foundries and stopped near the towering and cavernous wooden dry dock into which the seven hundred-ton Margaret and Jesse was being drawn. Gus Fox had driven straight to the Yard after leaving the White House to put things in motion. The skilled workers and masters of the Yard were paid overtime to work through the night. But the ship was a trim and graceful thing at seven hundred tons and slipped easily into the dry dock.
Sharpe and Lincoln saw Gus Fox and young Lamson standing nearby, watching the ship’s progress. It was a grand sight, Sharpe thought. He could tell the President was enjoying himself as much as a boy in a toy shop watching the latest windup gadget. When Fox and Lamson saw the President, they hurried over to pay their respects. “Good to see you boys at work so early. So, Gus, what are you planning to do to this leviathan?”
She did look a bit petite in the dry dock meant for a ship at least four times her size. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll let the ship’s new captain explain,” Fox said, turning the floor over to Lamson.
The young man was not shy at all but rather bursting with such enthusiasm that he was eager to share his delight in his new command. “Sir, the first thing we are going to do is inspect her engines and weight-bearing structures, then reinforce the decks and ribbing to take the guns. We decided on three Dahlgren XI-inch guns per side and a seventh as the forward pivot gun. We’ll round it out with an 8-inch Dahlgren rifle on the aft pivot.”
Lincoln whistled softly. “That’s a huge weight of metal. Are you sure she can bear it?”
“Yes, sir. The Yard shipwrights have been all over her, and she is a remarkably strong ship. We are reinforcing her decks and hull with more iron bracing just to make sure. I’ve never had such firepower on the Nansemond, sir. These XI-inchers have an enormous advantage over British armament. Why, one XI-inch shell has more destructive power than three 32-pounder shot, even if they all hit close together. And it does twice the damage of two 8-inch shells with even more explosive power. It also means that I can fight the ship with fewer men.2 I won’t mind getting into a fight with these guns on the Margaret and Jesse.”
“Now that name, Margaret and Jesse is an awkward mouthful and none too martial either. This ship needs a new name, an American name,” Lincoln suggested.
Everyone paused in thought, until Sharpe said simply, “Gettysburg. Let her be named after Gettysburg.”
Lincoln slapped Sharpe on the shoulder. “Capital idea! USS Gettysburg, it is!” Fox and Lamson took a minute to digest that their prize would be named after the Army’s greatest battle. But with the President having pronounced, they accepted Sharpe’s fait accompli gracefully.
Lincoln turned to Fox, “Gus, I haven’t heard much about the new shallow-draft monitors from the Navy Department. How are they doing? I’ve heard rumors that Stimers is having problems. Does this mean another delay?”
Alban Crocker Stimers was Fox’s protégé and project manager for this ambitious twenty-ship Casco class of follow-on monitors to the Passaic class. They were designed for operations in the shallow coastal waters and harbors where the Navy was doing most of its fighting. Immense resources in materials and skilled labor had been devoted to the project. These resources were tight and much was expected of Stimers, who had successfully pushed the Passaic class, also based on Ericsson’s design, to completion. The shallow-draft monitors were also originally an Ericsson design, but other priorities had pushed the genius Swedish designer on to new projects, leaving the project completely in Stimers’s control.
Unfortunately, Stimers had been trying to outdesign Ericsson, and the scale and complexity of ambitious redesigns had overwhelmed the project. It had experienced delay after delay, and this had come to Lincoln’s attention. Fox himself had begun to worry, but every inquiry had drawn the same responses from Stimers-that the ships would meet the new deadlines and that Ericsson had fully approved the changes. Fox was unaware that Stimers had merely assured Ericsson that things were under control. Welles was also on his back, suspicious of Stimers, whom he described as “intoxicated, overloaded with vanity,” and “more weak than wicked.” Making things even worse, the larger Tippecanoe class was also late. Before Fox could answer, Lincoln said, “Gus, I think it would be a good idea to take a good look yourself.”