 Well good afternoon welcome back to the issues in national security lecture series again I'm professor John Jackson. I'll be the emcee for the fourth in our series We're going to do ten of these and so we're at number four at this point Before we turn it over to our speaker. I just like to mention a number of visitors who are here with us And they will make themselves available after the lecture if you have any questions about life in at naval station Newport they will help you answer some of your questions. Perhaps we have Anne Champney and Laura in the back with the fleet and family support center Thank you very much for joining us once again Dean Whiteman and his club manager Lindsay are down here and they can talk to you about Food service options available here on base if you'd like to throw a wedding or anything else They can they can help you with any and all of that and for the first time We have a eugenie general from Humana military and that's the contractor that is the interface for all Tri-care issues that the u.s. Families may have and she's here with some handouts and some other information So after the lecture if you get a chance go up there and chat with her so So now to our distinguished guest speaker Dr. Craig Simons currently serves as the Ernest J. King distinguished professor of maritime history at the US Naval War College and he is a professor of history emeritus from the United States Naval Academy Where he taught for 30 years and served as department chair He's the author or editor of more than 20 books Including Lincoln and his admirals Abraham Lincoln the u.s. Navy in the Civil War which won the Lincoln Prize the barrendess prize the Laney Prize the layman Prize and the Abel Abraham Lincoln Institute book award the only prize He's not won his best-in-show at the Westminster dog show, but I understand he came close. I understand you come close His current faculty appointment is actually return engagement since he served on the Naval War College faculty While Admiral Stanfield Turner was president back in the early 1970s American historians as well as the general public have consistently ranked Abraham Lincoln as America's best president Tonight's lecture will use the prism of Lincoln's relation with and management of the US Navy during the Civil War To assess the particular characteristics of his leadership style that made him so effective at this point Dr. Simons the podium is yours, sir Thank you John for that introduction and thank you all for coming here on this rainy afternoon It occurred to me though that this is the last chance to party hardy You know this is Mardi Gras, and if this is your idea of how to celebrate those last moments We're all in trouble I'm going to talk about this fellow Abraham Lincoln, this is my favorite photograph of him. This was taken the same month That he delivered his most famous speech at Gettysburg on November 19th 1863 to dedicate the cemetery there. It's often used as the cover of books or other public venues I Think it shows a 54 year old man and what the presidency can do to you in very difficult times and Yet as John mentioned Abraham Lincoln is almost always rated Usually in the top two he sometimes Has a little face-to-face with George Washington for the best president in history of the United States But it's usually a blinkin on the top. I'm on the 100-man committee of historians that makes those decisions every year And every year we talk about what are the characteristics? That made him the best president now one surely is the degree of difficulty that he confronted I mean he's obviously the president who presided over a civil war Which is no other president yet has had to do So that was difficult for him and he did so with very little Preparation beforehand at least no formal preparation. He entered the White House with Relatively little political experience a one term as a congressman from Illinois in the 1840s and no other governmental experience other than that of a prairie lawyer And yet he presided over as I mentioned the most difficult Circumstances in the nation's history He was commander-in-chief But exactly what that meant was unclear. I think the founding fathers who wrote the Constitution Did that in part because they knew who the commander-in-chief was going to be once the Constitution was ratified It was going to be George Washington and you didn't have to tell him what his duties were as commander-in-chief What it says in article two section one is that the president is the commander-in-chief of the army and the Navy full stop It does not say what that entails what obligations are incurred thereby George Washington took it quite literally in his first term There was a uprising of individuals in Western New York who didn't want to pay an excise tax on whiskey the famous whiskey Rebellion George Washington put on his old uniform got on a horse and led the militia out to Western New York until they said okay, okay, we'll pay the tax in other wars. However James Madison for example stayed in the White House He wrote out in a carriage to watch the Battle of Bladensburg, but that didn't go our way So he went quickly back to Washington DC where he famously packed up the portrait of George Washington and left town What exactly are the duties of a commander-in-chief particularly in a time of civil war Lincoln had so little to go on So what were the elements of his leadership style and to try to plumb that question? I'm going to look at three Call them case studies if you like from a very broad lens I'm going to look at sort of an international Event early in the war that Lincoln had to deal with that required him to figure out Exactly what those duties might be and then I'm going to narrow it down to kind of an operational Case study if you would Theater-wide case study, and then we'll get really down into the weeds and look at a darn near tactical Circumstance he had to deal with so those will be my three goals kind of imagine a funnel as we narrow down that aperture looking at Problems that Abraham Lincoln confronted and how he confronted them and then maybe we can winkle out some of the characteristics of his leadership style To figure out why he was successful in doing so We'll start with this guy Not exactly a household name Charles Wilkes was a naval officer as you can see him here in a naval uniform His great claim to fame prior to the civil war was the fact that he had led what was known as the great United States exploring expedition from 1838 to 1842 This was a period of peacetime when the Navy was sort of looking for things to do and one of the things was explore Parts of the world that were as yet unexplored This is the era after all when Charles Darwin on board the Beagle made great scientific discoveries With those kinds of things in mind the Navy decided it would create an expedition of five ships To sail literally around the world taking samples of flora and fauna making notes of scientific Things and they would carry with them a gaggle of scientists and of botanists and biologists and all sorts of people and As they offered this plum Assignment to a number of the Navy senior captains you could almost see them working it out now wait a minute I'm going to be gone for What almost five years I'm not a bunch of scientists on board and we're just going to go collecting rocks and stuff I Think maybe I'll pass and That happened often enough that the assignment actually got all the way down to then lieutenant Charles Wilkes Who happily took the job? It perhaps was not the best possible assignment Wilkes turned out to be not a particularly good on board commander Those of you who walked along Thames Street downtown and noticed in that wonderfully named shop hay sailor The t-shirts that are for sale saying the beatings will continue until morale improves his motto He was not a popular commander So much so that about a year or two into the voyage Many of the enlisted men said well our our terms have expired so we're going to Leave the ship He said no that would not that's not going to happen and he Just simply said I'm sorry you you may not I'll tell you what I will do if you really want to leave the ship I'll leave you on this abandoned uncharted unnamed desert island and wave you goodbye as we sail over the horizon Well, no, okay, maybe we will re-enlist after all interestingly enough when the Marine contingent on board Took him up on that and said yeah fine. We can do that He instituted a new protocol, which is quite literally to beat them until they re-enlisted It's a good recruiting ploy if you can get away with it My point in telling you all that was to point out that Charles Wilkes was a somewhat shall we say problematic commander and so after the great exploring expedition which turned out to be by the way a great success the collection that he brought back that flora and fauna and stuffed animals and rocks all became part of a collection that was housed on the National Mall in Washington DC and Put into a building paid for a by a man named Smithson. It's the beginning of the Smithsonian Institution in addition to which he also discovered when sailing along the ice pack At the bottom of the earth if we can describe it that way that underneath all that ice was an actual no-kidding continent So he's the discoverer of Antarctica And if you look at your atlases after you get home, you will notice about a third of it is still labeled Wilkes land So he did literally put his stamp on the map But he never got another sea command when the Civil War broke out in 1861 he was the manager of the lighthouse board But in civil war the Navy needs all of its officers even the indifferent ones And so he was recalled to active duty and given the command of a ship the USS San Jacinto named for the battle in Texas that helped win Texas independence and In command of the San Jacinto he received a set of orders telling him to go to Hampton roads and join up with a squadron that was forming for an attack on Port Royal South Carolina that would be commanded by Samuel Francis Dupont But Wilkes is one of those officers who considered orders to be Suggestions and so he thought he had a better idea He had read in the newspapers Accurately that two Southerners named James Murray Mason and John Slidell Had been appointed by the Confederate government to be ambassadors of The Confederacy to the court of st. James to Britain and to Napoleon the Third's court in Paris and their job of course was to convince Britain and France to join in the war as An ally of the Confederacy break the blockade when southern independence break up that American Union that threatens British trade and so on and Wilkes decided it was his duty to make sure they never got there He knew that they had run through the blockade and made it to Havana in Cuba and From there they actually bought tickets on a British packet steamer the HMS Trent now the HMS is important there because this is not simply a Passenger steamer. It's not the SS Trent. This is a ship of Her Majesty's government. It's a mail carrier and In that capacity it has official status But none of that bothered our friend Wilkes in the San Jacinto he actually Stopped the Trent just just outside Cuban waters Spanish waters Send a boarding party on board as you can see down here Told the captain to line up everybody on board because he was going to take two of his passengers off this ship To which of course the British captain said like hell you are I will not cooperate get off of my ship You are violating international law upon hearing that John Slidel the Louisiana who'd been tapped for the court of Napoleon the third raised his hand and said I'm one of the guys you're looking for Recognizing that it he could probably do much more good in breaking diplomatic relations between the United States and France By allowing himself to be captured than he could by convincing the French government to get into the war so sure enough the Marine boarding party from the San Jacinto laid hands on them the literal term put their hands on their shoulder Walked them over to the side down into a boat to them and their two male Secretaries on board the San Jacinto and brought them back to the United States. It was a boffo hit with the public This is in November of 1861 The battle at Bull Run the battle at Bald's Bluff neither of which had gone the way of the Union had Depressed public morale to the point that the public really needed some good news and to them this looked like good news This looked like the cop on the bead our friend Wilkes here is arresting these two fellows. They look like near-dwells. Don't they and was hauling them off notice They represent chivalry down here hauling them off to jail where they belong But the captain of the Trent was right it was a violation of international law and this created an enormous problem for Lincoln He could do one of two things. He could take advantage of this groundswell of public Heroism that the American people had endowed on Wilkes and congratulate him Give him a medal you invite him to the White House and risk the wrath of both Britain and France or He could chastise him Punish him in some way thereby perhaps perhaps avoiding war with the European powers But at the risk of fragmenting his administration remember he had been elected with thirty nine point six percent of the vote Eleven states had left the Union He's in the middle of a civil war and even his own party is fragmented into pieces that can't agree on such critical issues as the future of slavery if He cannot hold together as political coalition. He cannot fight the civil war. He has to do one or the other So what does he do and here's the first insight I think into Lee Lincoln's management style. I'll tell you what he does Nothing and Sometimes that's the right answer In 1858 a sub aqueous cable had been laid between Washington DC and London, but it broke in 1859 so the communications between Europe and the United States took place the old-fashioned way you wrote it down on a piece of Paper you put it in an envelope. You gave it to a ship which crossed the Atlantic Then that government thought about it decided what to do wrote a response put it in an envelope put it on Another ship to recross the Atlantic Lincoln knew he had at least five weeks before anything hit the fan and In five weeks lots of things could happen for one thing the public enthusiasm for Wilkes might Disseminate we are I think as a people I'm not surprising anybody not letting any cats out of the bag here Kind of impatient and short-sighted. We want it. We want it right now, but we forget about it tomorrow So that might go away Secondly it allowed Britain and France to think about it to see just how harsh their response would be What kind of reaction would there be from Britain? So let's wait. He didn't promote Wilkes. He didn't chastise Wilkes He waited so did everybody else Here's Britain in a you saw a previous cartoon from an American paper is one from punch Britain waiting for an answer When the answer from London came it was pretty startling It said you must immediately Release both Mason and Slidell from custody. They were being held on Governor's Island in New York Harbor You must release them immediately you must Apologize to her Majesty's government and you must swear you will never do it again Or we will withdraw our ambassador and begin preparations for a declaration of war Okay, now I see what the Constance will be what to do in truth Lincoln got a bit of help on this from this man, this is William Henry Seward his secretary of state previously his rival for the Republican nomination now his Closest advisor. I have no idea why Seward decided to be photographed in profile His staff referred to him as the great McCaw But Seward was a sharp cookie especially politically and it was Seward and Lincoln together talking it over who came up with the idea of how to respond to this ultimate him from London And here's what they said Well, thank you We now Realized that finally you appreciate how wrong you have been We have been saying since 1812 that ships of a foreign government cannot stop other ships on the high seas and take people off Them without permission that's called impressment We went with the war with you in 1812 and now finally you admit that we were right and you were wrong So, okay, we'll release Mason and Slidell and it worked It worked because releasing Mason and Slidell did not cause a reaction at home politically the fragmented his party It worked because enough time had passed that the release of Mason and Slidell, which was actually the scenic one on of the demand kind of met what was expected and so He survived that's case study number one. Here's number two This is John Rogers another naval officer a little bit different from our friend Charles Wilkes John Rogers Famously of a Navy family his father was the John Rogers of the war of 1812 who won some frigate duels in that war was a senior officer In fact during the war of 1812. This is his son. He also had a brother Christopher Raymond Perry Rogers, so it was a Navy family from way back and This John Rogers had been in the Navy for 42 years and was a lieutenant Not because he's a bad officer's because that's how fast promotions came In the 19th century so you can imagine when the Civil War broke out he thought oh my gosh Here's my opportunity at last and he got a set of orders here They come from Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells his hands probably trembling as he tore open the letter in red Oh, I'm gonna get at least command of a ship maybe a squadron a Fleet come on Let's dream and he read his orders that you were hereby directed to report to Cincinnati, Ohio There are no ships in Cincinnati, Ohio But there would be because in the American Civil War the rivers Particularly the Mississippi the Ohio and the Cumberland and the Tennessee were the key elements of transportation in the West railroads were important But you could burn railroad bridges you could cut telegraph lines You can't stop a river and river communication and river transportation were absolutely key To winning the war in the West and winning the war in the West was key to winning the war So it actually was an important assignment not that John Rogers is very excited about it But he went he got there. He bought some steamships began putting them together Here you see how centrally located Cincinnati is to this whole situation this whole Transportation network here was what he was working with and to do that. He built some gunboats Wood clads they were called everybody's heard of the iron clads it became famous in 1862. Well had a few of those two But most of them were wood clads here. You can see the USS Lexington Which had been just a conventional river steamer But he rerouted the steam lines to put them below the water line clad it with six inches of timber armed it with some six six inch rifles and Commissioned it as a warship They say in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king and these ships are absolutely dominant on the river but the whole campaign also involved developing technology and one of the interesting pieces of technology that Developed in this was something called a mortar boat and I always have to be careful when I say that because it's not a motor boat There's no motor on this. It's a mortar boat those big gigantic witches brewing pots of mortars Fired shells just a little bit bigger than a basketball Filled with powder on a high arcing trajectory that could go around the bends and rivers over mountains and Hit targets more than three miles away something conventional artillery couldn't do So they were extremely useful But the dilemma that emerged is and this often happens in areas of shifting technology as some of you must know Who's in charge? The Navy looked at this and said you know what that is not That is not a ship and the army said well now, but it floats Right, so this is yours It'll be meant by sailors You'll pay them You'll provide the ammunition and the food you'll house them. You'll take care of no way. That's you're I'm not doing that Now remember that at the time of the Civil War There is no Department of Defense the National Security Act that created that dates from 1947 there is a Department of War Which manages the army and a Department of the Navy which manages the Navy? They're both full cabinet officers. They sat on the cabinet and competed with one another for resources There was no individual who had simultaneous authority over both the army and the Navy below the President of the United States I Tried to explain this once to my midshipment at the Naval Academy is classful of plebes taking naval history And I said you realize of course at the highest ranking General the Army Winfield Scott himself could not give an order to the lowest semen recruit They said well, sir, that's exactly the way it ought to be. That's that's right But it's also awkward if you're going to manage what today we call joint operations Then called combined operations where the army and the Navy cooperate together to secure important points Somebody's got to be in charge and so Lincoln said I'll do it You got a lieutenant in the White House staff and made him his liaison And he ran them back and forth to telegraph office and he told everybody all right They're going to be sailors manning the boats, but the army is going to supply the ammunition and And the food supply that's going to come from the army, but the Navy will manage them Well, sir, they're what about where they're going to stay. I mean look at this There's a tent inside one of these things expecting to sleep on that. All right. Here's what we're going to do We're going to buy a steamer There it is We're going to buy a steamer and the men will all sleep on the steamer It will accompany the mortar boats, which will operate as a squadron. He laid all this thing out present the United States And the lieutenant then would telegraph it off to the western thing. Okay, fine. We'll do it and it worked They turned out to be pretty useful. Here they are Here's the mortar boats. You can see them anchored along the side of the stream and attacking island number 10 at a bend in the Mississippi right at the Kentucky Tennessee borderline, which cuts right through there The capture of island number 10 was sufficiently important Strategically that it actually broke the defensive line of the Confederacy in the West and it might not have happened If Lincoln hadn't said look can't we just figure out a practical way to figure this out And if nobody else can do it, I'll I'll do it myself Here's the third case study now. We're really going to get almost tactical on this This is a contemporary map of Norfolk Hampton Roads area The US Army had landed a major force here So there's a camp in and about Hampton Fortress Monroe, which of course is still there was the reason why it was pretty much commanded This is where they the Baybridge Tunnel crosses right here. Here's where all those carriers are now Home ported these days But in effect, this was Union held and down here. This was all Confederate held and Lincoln went down to this area personally because he was trying to get his Reluctant general George McClellan To get moving he had brought an army of a hundred thousand men down to the Virginia Peninsula But he seemed to be happy just to go on a camping trip and he couldn't get him going So he arrived personally seasick all the way by the way poor Lincoln And he got up the next day and the cat on the on board the It's not on the other it is the Minnesota here. He is on board the Minnesota and the Commodore in charge of the squadron is giving him a tour to horizon. He says well over here, Mr. President This is Fortress Monroe where we landed and over here is This is Newport News Point where the Congress and the Cumberland were both attacked by that Dastardly ironclad that the Confederates have Which northerners called the Merrimack and Southerners called the Virginia and over here. He said that's Sewell's point That's where the Confederate batteries are Lincoln said excuse me Admiral. Can I interrupt you? He says yes. He says those Confederate batteries Are they within the range of your guns? Well, yes, sir. They are well Have you tried shooting at them? No, we really have not done that because a variety of reasons and want to waste our shells and we're not really shit Well, I think that would be a good thing to do maybe this afternoon and so Lincoln went out it was called the rip wraps Originally called Fort Calhoun, but after secession renamed Fort wool and watched from the ramparts While the Union ships attacked the Confederate batteries on Sewell's point and after about three broad sides the Confederates raised a white flag and fled Well, that was easy Lincoln said Admiral I have another idea You can just seem to oh good And yes, mr. President. What is that? He says well? I think we could take some of these hundred thousand men that are camped in and around Hampton roads and the canal boats That we've captured from the Virginia canal and we could cross the point we could land over here And we could march down here and capture Norfolk. Oh Well, mr. President you see we We don't really have any protocol from that and And and and there really is no good landing beach where they could go ashore. I See for this a thank you Which is how it came about that Abraham Lincoln and his secretary of the Treasury who happened to have come with him on on the trip This is salmon Pete Chase whose pictures on the thousand dollar bill I think I'm sure you have some of those in your wallet got in a rowboat with six sailors and Did a recon? And they found a beach right over here Kind of where all the pilots have their beachfront condos these days That was a perfect landing beach and he went back and he told the Commodore about it I found a beach where we can land. Oh good Well, we'll form a committee we'll get right to work on this He says I think we can do this tomorrow morning because the boats are already there the men are in their tents If you call them out four o'clock tomorrow morning we could have been there Which is how it came about That a large almost a division-sized unit landed here at Ocean Beach and marched along these roads Down to this little crossing by the way before they did that it was kind of interesting Lincoln did not go ashore with them There's some sources that say he did but I've investigated this pretty closely and he didn't but salmon Pete Chase did Salmon Pete Chase went ashore and and it was a mess It was just chaotic people milling about smartly going in no particular direction And he walked up to the commander said general what's going on here? Why aren't you advancing into the interior? We'll lose our moment of opportunity said well here something you don't understand about the army you see we have to advance in the order of The seniority of the kernel of each regiment and we're not sure of the commissioning dates of some of the kernels So we're investigating that now So Chase said general let me make this easy for you I order you in the name of the president of the United States to march to Norfolk now Okay, so off they go down this road and they got to this little there's a little bridge over Tanners Creek right here And there was a guy in a carriage who got out of the carriage and walked up to the lead unit and started giving a speech It's the mayor of Norfolk with the keys to the city That was a ploy of course the Confederates were stalling to get as much out of there as they possibly could before the Yankees arrived And one of the things they wanted to get out of there was the CSS Virginia formerly the Merrimack Into which they had poured so much energy effort and material Well, they couldn't go up river because it's too shallow and they couldn't go out into the Chesapeake because it's too unstable So they blew it up So the next time you hear somebody talking about how the monitor in the Merrimack fought to a draw and nobody won You say yeah somebody won and I'll tell you who sunk the Merrimack Abraham Lincoln Had he not been there? None of this would have happened at least it wouldn't have happened at that time When he was headed back by the way There was a newspaper reporter from the Washington Star on board and he showed miss president I've written an article about the impact that you had on events in Hampton roads and Lincoln said oh Started reading so no no you can't you can't publish this. This is all this is about me This is not about me. None of this is about me It's about the people who did it the people who crossed in those little canal boats who landed on that beach you marched down in Norfolk It's about them. Don't write about me And he didn't Which is how most people don't know this story But here's a couple of things About this man that I think we can pull out of these three case studies. What are the characteristics that made him successful number one? patience You don't always have to act immediately To every single provocation Sometimes taking a good ready is a good idea Lincoln was maybe too patient some said with George McClellan Maybe he should have fired him sooner. Maybe not but maybe But patience was a characteristic he often employed and more often than not it worked in his favor Number two in dealing with the problem of the mortar boats in the Western theater Here's a logistical snafu that needed to be straightened out and instead of saying well We're going to rewrite the the regs and we're going to check. No, let me just handle this myself He's pragmatic What's the easiest most immediately available solution that will resolve the problem? Thirdly down in Hampton Roads Pragmatic maybe a little less patient but also Refusal to make it about him His lack of ego investment in the decisions that he made and the policies he promoted Patience pragmatism an absence of ego investment and There's one more. I'm going to add I'll end with this one My friend Jean Baker who taught at Goucher College for many years says you always have to say I'll end with this one somewhere in the speech So people have hope but I'll end with this one and That is I think one of the things that kept Lincoln stable and sane was his sense of humor He had a famous sense of humor and he deployed it with great deliberateness People would come into his office and those days you could literally walk into the president's office and say I got a bone to Pick with you mr. President And Lincoln would sit down and listen to him and he'd hear him out and then he'd say That reminds me of a story And he'd start to tell it and it would be a kind of a shaggy dog story And we're going on a little while and then Lincoln would laugh at his own jokes He'd throw his head back and he'd laugh and he'd slap his knee He'd get up and the guy would of course get up to and Lincoln would walk him in the door Thank him for coming to see me and off he go and the guy get halfway down the hall and say wait a minute What just happened here? But Lincoln used that sense of humor a lot. He was it tactically strategically diplomatically any number of ways I'll tell one Lincoln story. I asked John Jackson if I could tell this story. He told me it would be all right Lincoln as you probably know used to ride the circuit in Illinois before he was a politician when Stephen Douglas later his rival for both the Senate and the presidency was the judge of the circuit and Lincoln and a team of other lawyers would all travel together and they'd show up in a town and all the accumulated cases would come before the Court and they'd sometimes flip a coin decide who his offense and defense and Prosecute or defend as the case might be and Lincoln was charged in this particular case with defending someone who committed a crime And I have to confess. I don't even remember what it was But the prosecuting attorney got up in front of the jury at the end after all the witnesses had spoken He said gentlemen of the jury and they were only gentlemen in those days gentlemen of the jury This is a cut and dried case. There is no doubt whatsoever as a decision. You must turn this man is guilty Look at the facts. You have this fact motive opportunity circumstance witnesses fact fact fact fact He sat down Now it's Lincoln's turn Unfolds himself from his chair and he walks over in front of the jury and he says, you know facts are interesting things and That reminds me of the story Seems there was this farmer out and then wherever he is, you know and in Indianapolis or whatever And he had to get his hay crop in well, you know how difficult that is you got to beat the rain So he's getting in his hay cup and he hired a sort of extra man a handyman a Tenor worker and and he's helping him get the hay in and he'd gone into the house to get something and as his little son Comes running he says pa pa. We got trouble. We're in terrible trouble. He's his son. What's the matter? What is it? And he says Well, it's sis and the handyman they're out in the barn and Sis she's got her dress pulled up like this and the handyman. He's got his pants pulled down like that Pa they're fixing to pee on our hay To which Lincoln says Which shows you can have all the facts, right? Still come to the wrong conclusion And he won the case. Thank you very much John says we have time for some questions. I don't know any more Lincoln jokes. No, it's not true. Oh dear You didn't tell me that You come on It's like this in Spruin's auditorium at strategy and policy lectures and what the what the professors do is just wait I'm out you can't leave till somebody asks a question Who's gonna take one for the team? Right here So you talked about Lincoln actually getting in the boat going out to the battlefield down in Hampton Road Whether he had been there previously before you talked about he went out and did recon Was he the kind of gentleman that would do that and in research what he was Before he was about to ask somebody to do something was he aware of Hampton roads and what it was or was that just a Fly on the wind. We got to go down there. We're gonna figure it out. I think more of a ladder I think his view was that look if it's true that you really are Avoiding confronting the enemy because you do not see where a land of troops could possibly land I'm just gonna take a look and see if I can discover a place where they land It was not that he made a practice of second-guessing commanders in the field That was not the way he did business He liked to hire a general whoever it might be whether it's McClellan who proved disappointing or Grant who proved very satisfactory and say You're the expert. Tell me what you need. I will provide you with what you need and support you I'll hold your coat. I'll hold your hold your horse. I'll do whatever is necessary but in this particular case he saw that things had hit a roadblock because there was a lack of information and nobody had picked up the obligation to Follow through and so he did it himself I think it was part of that pragmatism as much as anything else. Is there a way to solve this? It just is commonsensical Got another one. Ah oh You mentioned briefly that There was a lot of new technology at this point in time How did President Lincoln prepare himself or did he surround himself with people who were aware of these emerging technologies? And how did he position himself to take advantage of them? Yeah, actually, that's a great question. If I could have bribed you to ask that question I would have done it Lincoln was a gadget guy by instinct one of the characteristics that he had if we add more characteristics He really was into gadgets. He remains to this day the only president in the history of the United States to have a patent Which he which as it turns out had to do with naval things He invented a device that could be used for lifting river steamers over sandbars It got a patent approval and actually turned out not to be a financial success But he still holds it and the model is in the Smithsonian Institution to this day So he was really interested in new technology and he used to go down to the Washington Navy Yard routinely sometimes just to get out Of the White House, but also because he liked to see new things tried out people who invented repeating rifles early machine guns extra large Caliber naval guns John Adolphus Dahlgren was a close friend of his they both had Children who died young and that bonded them but also they were really bonded over that technology and that ordinance famously when the Monitor the the North's ironclad that fought in Hampton Roads. Let me go back and see that There we go Would not have been built at all but for him It was presented to him as this novel little device And of course you can imagine this six foot four inch band leaning over the table and playing with this little model toy But and he asked it's it's promoter Cornelius Bushnell. He said what do you what's happening now? He said well, I have to go present this to a board of Navy captains who would previously said ironclads Lincoln said you know what? I think I'll go with you So he went and they're in this room gathered around the table and Bushnell makes his presentation This can do this it's got a rotating turret can fire in any direction Hardly exposed at all because a very low freeboard and the captains are looking at this and saying this does not look like a ship to me But everybody's waiting to see what the president's gonna say So finally the chairman of the board turned to the president mr. President. What do you think? Lincoln well, it reminds me of What the girl said when she put her foot in the stocking? I Think there's something in it. So they bought it They gave him 100 days to build it completed it on the Fourth of March and two days later was in Hampton Roads fighting the Merrimack But for Lincoln it would not have happened. So he was very much a gadget guy He was on the front edge of whatever technology he thought Pragmatically could promote a successful outcome to the war Thank you for that anybody I Was just gonna ask that Charles Wilkes. Is there any Relationship between him and John Wilkes Booth. Ah, no no the Wilkes John Wilkes was a British Anti-monarchical politician and a lot of people named children For John Wilkes including mr. And mrs. Booth apparently But this Wilkes was completely independent of him interesting question because I had to look too and the answer is no Yes, if I recall correctly And if I don't recall correctly, please let me down gently, but if I recall collect correctly Lincoln actually studied warfare strategy and tactics some while he was president in order to suit himself more Sufficiently to be commander-in-chief What do you how much did that help him in his duties as commander-in-chief? Great question You know when the Naval Academy was founded in the middle of the 19th century There are a lot of people who opposed to the Naval Academy of Beijing You can't teach ducks to swim in an attic the way to become a naval officer is to get out to see and do it Well, no in an age of advancing technology There are things you have to learn and Lincoln was an autodidact anyway famously taught himself Literally taught himself to read had very few books to hand But whenever he could get a book he studied it and when he became president We know this because he's actually wrote his name on the checkout list at the Library of Congress for books by Jomini and other theoreticians Not Clausewitz by the way Clausewitz had not been translated into English yet But every book on military engineering military technology military leadership that he could get his hands on and what it equipped him to do Was talk to his generals and to his admirals in their language? I mean sometimes there's a tendency for an expert to start using jar expertise jargon to intimidate your audience Well, you don't really know because you don't know what a whatever the latest acronym is Lincoln learned all that didn't have so many acronyms in those days But he did learn the language that and and the the general understanding the general Lexicon of military decision-making and I think that combined with his Natural pragmatism patients like a ego investment and sense of humor Enabled him to make sound decisions in the long run There's a wonderful book. I mean my book is called Lincoln is admirals There's a wonderful book called Lincoln and his generals by T. Harry Williams Published in 1952 where William shows time and again how Lincoln grew as a Commander during the war in 1861 he was unsure of himself Let other people make decisions that probably he wouldn't have made or approved But by 1864 he was the master of not only the practical events But also the theoretical events and it's because he read because he taught himself Military strategy from books out of the Library of Congress It's too bad. He never had a chance to go to the Naval War College How are we doing the Naval War College if I could Craig So the US Navy during the Civil War is pretty impressive pretty innovative and whatnot What happened between the end of the Civil War and the 1880s when Stephen B. Loos Help founded this institution and why was it necessary to that be done? Well as a rule of if you measure navies in terms of the size of the fleet They can put to see the Navy's history is like a sine wave We as a people kind of let things go Fallow in peacetime and then we get panicky and all of a sudden they fire back up again So if you actually measure that in terms you can see where they go up dramatically during the Civil War Then drop off dramatically in the 1870s and 1880s shoot up again in the 1890s And then level a little bit then way up in World War one and so on and Many historians have looked at that period between 1865 and 1898 between the end of the American Civil War and the Spanish-American War as a kind of a as one of those troughs But I think Lincoln would have looked at that. This is only opinion This does not represent the views of the Department of Defense didn't learn all that I Think Lincoln would have looked at that as a pragmatic way to respond the technology was coming so fast ships are moving Not only from sail to steam but from paddle wheels to screw propellers The triple expansion engine came into play for the first time so that the efficiency of marine engines Improved dramatically and those changes were taking so fast were taking place so fast along with Technology the guns got bigger the army armor got thicker until the armor was so thick the ships could barely move In which case well, maybe not that's not the way to go Britain tried to keep up with all of these and went through generation after generation a very expensive warship types while the United States watched So that by the time it did adopt a new Navy in the 1890s and brought about those first steam and steel ships that Subsequently became the great white fleet. We took advantage of all that accumulated technology and did it all at once So it looks like oh what a terrible policy making decision This is to allow the Navy to go from I think at the end of the American Civil War We had 671 commissioned warships roughly almost three times as many as we have today more than double what we have today and Had 75 years later. Oh Tragedy Not necessarily because American national interests were never imperiled We took advantage of everybody else's experiments including their dead ends and then built the fleet we needed for the 20th century So I would argue that even though it looks like a period of disappointment. It was actually a period of very clever patience Thank You, sir. You're welcome. I I just wondered what kind of education they had had Training, you know as a progression from cadet to whatever and the related question would be Was there no interplay between the army and the Navy or or even just Thinking we've got a goal to take this thing and then who's Analyzing anything that the present has to come down and do it for them that to me is Unbelievable that somebody beside the president didn't Do exactly what he did Okay, those are two questions. Let me do the first one first. I know it was two That's okay. Let me do the first one first and that is that the very senior officers In the United States Navy were not Naval Academy graduates Naval Academy was founded in 1845 It didn't have a four-year program until 1850 so the people who graduated from the Naval Academy the earliest in 1854 were still relatively junior when the Civil War broke out. So some of the Lieutenants and ensigns and so forth they were Naval Academy products, but the commanders of the fleets were Had learned the old way on the job They become midshipmen when they were 13 years old took the midshipman's exam at 1617 became past midshipmen and then got promoted to lieutenant when an opening took place And promotions were very very slow as John Rogers exemplifies It's a system that worked well at the time It's not a system that works well with the new technology because you can't just learn Calculus by watching the wind blow across the surface Unfortunately, I found that out but in any case The second answer your question is it does seem Remarkable that the Army and the Navy were almost like allies on the same side But not part of the same country and that is absolutely the case as remarkable as it seems and the best example of that I suppose is the Vicksburg campaign Grant took Vicksburg in 1863 at virtually the same time in the Battle of Gettysburg was being fought the two twin events that broke the Confederacy and the taking of Vicksburg was impossible without a joint operation It's up on a bluff 200 feet high the ships can't go up there The sailors can't get to it unless they can go on the ships and so Grant went to his naval counterpart David Dixon Porter and said Admiral here's what I'd like you to do I'd like you to run your ships past that fort and transport my men across the river so I can get to the back door Now Porter doesn't have to do that Porter can say oh you'd like that would you well No, he can't take orders from a general any general But he did it because Grant went out of his way to do the kind of thing. I believe Lincoln would have done Saddam down said Admiral. I really admire your brilliant insight. Let's together Figure out how we can do this. Do you think this would work you do what what a great idea? Why don't we try that? So it had to be a case where the general knee Admiral agreed to cooperate Voluntarily because there was no joint commander in the Civil War Except Abraham Lincoln Yes Sir you've mentioned several times about Lincoln's sense of humor and how it got him through his presidency What lessons and resilience can our military and our Navy take from that now? I Think it's important not to take to take your job as seriously as you can but not to take yourself so seriously and It's an easy thing to say. It's a difficult thing to do. We're all human We all think we're the single most important person on the planet and to get yourself out of that is is a remarkable feat But I think it's necessary and I think a sense of humor contributes to that almost all of the jokes Lincoln told We're we're self-effacing Self-deprecating made himself the butt of many of those jokes one of my favorites is he was accused by Stephen Douglas during one of their debates of being too faced And Lincoln said too faced you think if I had another face I'd wear this one I mean that's the kind of thing that he could do and it eased him up It eased up the audience it eased up Stephen Douglas for that matter So I think having a sense of humor and being able not to take yourself too seriously is a critical element of effective leadership Yes, there's one over there So they're gonna be a quiz tonight. No quiz. No quiz Thank You professor 671 ships Lincoln and his admirals with that size Navy How many admirals were there in the US Navy the Union Navy at that time? Thank you A lot fewer than we have today. I don't know the exact number. It's it's in two digits And I'll I'll look this is what we learned to say at the Academy. I'll find out sir I'll look it up, but I I'm gonna guess and say something like 30 Total I mean at the at the at its peak Remember there were no admirals at all in 1861 the belief in the United States was that Navies are instruments of Empire so well, it's perfectly fine to have generals in command of an army because an army represents the people We've been used to thinking of Britain as the enemy and Britain's Navy was the one who always imposed those dreaded taxes We didn't want to pay so navies were instrument of Empire so that Admirals were somehow suspicious. There were no admirals in the history of the United States until 1862 When David Glasgow Farragut became the first and Even by the end of it at its peak. I think there was something like 26 28 and that's a guess But I take your point. We have a lot of chiefs and fewer Indians Then we had lots of Indians and fewer chiefs Whatever that may be worth Yeah, I don't know if it's relevant to this time period, but the term Commodore Yeah, it was Commodore in the age of sale was a term that simply referred to whoever was the senior captain Among a group of ships four ships escorting a convoy going on a mission whatever it might be Whoever was the senior captain in that group had the honorific of Commodore and he could fly the long pennant Later on then during the Civil War Commodore became a term that was used regularly interchangeably with flag officer that implies that he has a flag a pennant But he's still not an admiral because Congress just could not bring itself to create the rank until 1862 and that of course was a a thank you to Farragut for seizing New Orleans in April of 1862 but Commodore Now rear admiral or half the one-star rank we've gone back and forth figuring out what to call that the army's army Always thought this was a bad deal if you're a an oh six in the army and you get promoted You become a one-star if you're an oh six in the Navy and got promoted you were a two-star. Hey The army would say let that's not right Anyway, it's where we are Well any last question. Yes, sir last question on the aisle on this side so going along with that question about the Commodore made me think was especially given the the river maneuvers that were going on how much of Lincoln and in in his riverine warfare, I guess for lack of a better term Translated into the riverboat economy immediately post civil war Did it did any of that experience help foster that industry afterward? It's it's hard to make a direct connection between those two But you know Lincoln was a river guy, you know He first learned to hate slavery when he was a teenager and actually drifted down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and saw his first slave auction which he wrote later seared him for the rest of his life and made him The politician that he became and the president that he became as well So he was very interested in the rivers. He understood the commercial Importance of the rivers. He understood that that taking Vicksburg Famous phrase Vicksburg is the key to the Confederacy and we cannot win this war until that key is in our pocket Because The Mississippi River drained the entire Midwest all the products River railroads were becoming important now But most of the trade still went down the Mississippi and our greatest port of export was New Orleans not New York Because of the river system. So he was sensitive to all of that and knew about it But I think what he was trying to do was restore The commercial value of that river system that had existed before the war rather than to create a new kind of river system because his Interest in technology led him to support railroads as well And remember the transcontinental railroad bill was signed in his administration as well So, okay. Thank you very much everybody By the power vested in me as the master ceremonies. I declare you best in show Okay All right, our next lecture is going to be on Tuesday the 17th of March and Dr. Jim Holmes will be speaking about us naval power in the Pacific Jim is very bright and you'll enjoy that