Stephen R. Mallory – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

An original oil painting by Rudy Simons depicting the 1862 battle between the CSS Virginia and USS Cumberland went to auction in June 2017.

By Jim O’Neal

Stephen R. Mallory was born in Trinidad, British West Indies. In 1850, the Florida legislature elected Mallory (1812-1873) to be a U.S. Senator and he was re-elected in 1856. He was appointed to the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs and was unsuccessful in appropriating funds for the development of an ironclad floating battery, a forerunner of armor-clad ships.

In 1858, President Buchanan offered to appoint him Minister to Spain, but he declined. Although a strong supporter of the South, he opposed secession. Nevertheless, he resigned on Jan. 21, 1861, after Florida left the Union.

Jefferson Davis quickly named Mallory head of the Confederate Naval Department on Feb. 25, 1861. He had not sought the office and was not even aware of the nomination. One reason for his appointment was that he came from Florida, which had been given a prominent Cabinet post as a reward for its early date of secession. However, the Florida delegation opposed his nomination over a misunderstanding about his actions involving Fort Pickens, but he was finally confirmed as Confederate States Secretary of the Navy on March 4.

Mallory’s department at the start of the war consisted of 12 smallish ships and 300 officers who had left the Union Navy. In May 1863, Mallory was able to persuade the Confederate Congress to create a Provisional Navy and this gave him the opportunity to recruit and train more sailors. Many of these men eagerly transferred from the Army, despite significant opposition from a series of Secretaries of War.

When the Civil War got under way, Union anchorages were crammed with wooden warships mostly obsolete. Unable to compete with the U.S. Navy on numerical terms, the South saw an opportunity to seize a technological edge to negate the advantage in timber and guns. Since Mallory had to purchase ships built abroad, he emphasized the building of several powerful ironclads, along with gunboats and other vessels.

Mallory also played an active role in the development and use of torpedoes (mines). These devices became one of the most successful aspects of the navy throughout the war. Confederate minefields helped keep the Union Navy from entering Charleston Harbor and delayed the attack on Mobile Bay. By the end of the war, torpedoes had sunk or damaged 43 enemy vessels, including four monitors. These devices destroyed more Federal warships than the entire fleet of Confederate gunboats.

Mallory also championed the development and employment of torpedo boats and submarines. One of the first submarines was Pioneer, which was built at New Orleans, but scuttled when the city fell, never having an opportunity to attack the enemy. The H.L. Hunley became the first submarine in history to attack and sink an enemy, the ocean steam sloop USS Housatonic.

But it was the showdown on March 8-9, 1862, between the CSS Virginia (a rebuilt frigate that never shook her original name, Merrimack) and the USS Monitor that generated the most news on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The Battle of Hampton Roads was the most important naval battle of the Civil War and was an effort of the Confederacy to break a Union blockade that had cut off international trade from Virginia’s largest cities of Norfolk and Richmond.

It was the first combat meeting of the famous ironclad ships and they dueled for four hours with neither inflicting damage on the other. Despite this strategic draw, The New York Times ran 17 articles on the battle. Harper’s Weekly thrilled its readers with an action-packed cover story, while Currier & Ives issued three different lithograph versions titled “Terrific Combat.”

Of interest was that the commander of the CSS Virginia, Franklin Buchanan, an officer in the U.S. Navy, became the only full Admiral in the Confederate Navy. Earlier in 1845, at the request of the Navy, he submitted plans for a naval school that became the United States Naval Academy and Buchanan became the first superintendent.

He resigned his commission in 1861 in anticipation of Maryland seceding. When that didn’t happen, he tried to recall his resignation but Gideon Welles – President Lincoln’s Secretary of Navy – refused, citing “half-hearted patriots.”

Stephen Mallory spent several years in prison and then returned to Pensacola and his law practice. He and Confederate States Postmaster General John Reagan were the only two men who remained in their Cabinet positions throughout the entire war.

Complicated times.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

The oil on canvas *Sinking of the Alabama*, circa 1868, by American marine painter Xanthus Smith (1839-1929) sold for $38,837 at a June 2008 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

By the time Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861, seven of the Southern slaveholding states had seceded from the Union before even hearings his inaugural address. In it, he declared, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

During the run-up to the 1860 election, Lincoln had chosen not to actively campaign and simply refused to comment on the issue of slavery. However, his Democratic opponent, Stephen A. Douglas (the “Little Giant”) campaigned across the country. In the South, he denounced threats of secession, but warned that Lincoln’s election would inevitably lead to that tragic end.

I have often wondered if the Civil War could have been averted if Lincoln had taken his inaugural speech to the South before the election or if a civil war was the only alternative to end slavery permanently. I suspect emotions were too high and that many actually hoped for a war, especially after all the heated rhetoric in places like South Carolina.

It became a moot point when barely a month later on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on the Union garrison Fort Sumter and forced it to surrender. Now president, Lincoln announced that part of the United States was in a state of insurrection and issued a call for military volunteers. Four states – Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina – refused to provide troops and instead joined the Confederacy.

As positions hardened, Lincoln proclaimed a naval blockade against the seceded states, however, this was a futile effort since the Navy only had 42 ships to monitor 3,500 miles of Confederate coastline. They started chartering ships for blockade duty and soon there were 260 warships in service. Their task was made easier since the Confederate “Navy” consisted of 10 river craft armed with a total of 15 guns and not a single ship on the high seas.

Even the South’s military mobilization was devoted almost exclusively to ground forces since this was clearly the most urgent short-term priority.

However, one man was determined to change that. His name was Raphael Semmes (1809-1877) from Mobile, and following Alabama’s secession from the Union, Semmes was offered a Confederate naval appointment. He resigned from the U.S. Navy the next day, Feb. 15, 1861, and set off to the interim Confederate capital of Montgomery. There, he met with Jefferson Davis – the newly inaugurated president of the Confederate States of America – and Stephen R. Mallory, Secretary of the Navy. He outlined his plan to take the war to the enemy … not the federal Navy (that was too large to challenge), but to the U.S. merchant fleet.

In 1861, the U.S. Merchant Marine was the largest in the world. No one surpassed the skill and ingenuity of Yankee shipwrights in the design and construction of wooden vessels. America’s carrying trade had steadily increased in the 1840s-50s, fueled by the discovery of gold in California, treaty ports in Japan and China, and the whaling fleet that operated from the North Atlantic to the Bering Straits.

Semmes theory was that if Confederate cruisers could disrupt the merchant marine, the powerful shipping interests in the North would force the Lincoln administration to reconcile with the South and end the war. After studying naval commander John Paul Jones, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812, Semmes was convinced a weak naval power could neutralize the merchant marine of a more powerful adversary.

President Davis approved the concept and thus launched the career of Raphael Semmes as one of the greatest commerce-raider captains in naval history. Along the way, he traveled 75,000 nautical miles without ever touching a Confederate port and is credited with 64 of the 200-plus Northern merchantmen destroyed by Confederate raiders, many as the commander of the cruiser CSS Alabama. (The warship was eventually sunk in battle with the USS Kearsarge in 1864.)

Fittingly, he is a member of the Alabama Hall of Fame and a monument by sculptor Caspar Buberl (1834-1899) still stands proudly in Mobile … unless, of course, Monument Marauders figure out who he was.

Tag: Stephen R. Mallory

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