Lakes a-Mercy! (3)

At last - humans!


We are told of the British and Canadians that:

As admirable as the spirit shown was, however, the largest problem was the “professional officers” had little to no experience with steam, and the merchant mariners and lake sailors with experience with steam had none with gunnery. The result was the merchant mariners were commissioned as “auxiliary masters” and the five men with Navy experience were only in nominal command of their vessels. The “auxiliaries” did include Captain William McAuslan, the government inspector of shipping, who took on the role of naval constructor

This paragraph should immediately start to ring alarm bells in the head of the thinking reader. For a start, it is not impossible that a given set of British officers would have less experience with steam than a given set of Union officers. However, the fact that the Royal Navy made the sail-steam transition far more quickly means that it would require a very particular set of officers on both sides for this to be true. And, as we know from his treatment of the ADC issue, TFSmith is prone to picking a bad set of British officers and then concluding that the British were weak overall.

The reason he believes there are so many officers available to the Union army is because (as we have seen) he went through the West Point register and signed every living non-Confederate officer up for duty. Has he gone through the Royal Navy list and worked out where all the recently-retired officers were? Conversely, has he gone through trade directories for Canada and worked out whether any steamboat captains had Royal Navy experience? Of course he hasn't! As we know, 'I found my quartet with one search of the DCB; it certainly was not difficult.'

TFSmith's unwillingness to do research into both sides of the question causes many, many issues. For instance, his decision to put William McAuslan in charge of naval construction at Kingston is undoubtedly influenced by his belief that 'who and what is available in BNA' are 'not the men who were last in Upper Canada ten years earlier, obviously'. In fact, a much better selection would have been Henry Roney. Roney was a captain in the Garden Island Naval Company, one of the many Canadian militia organisations which TFSmith deletes from history. More importantly, he was an ex-employee of the Admiralty Dockyard at Kingston who had risen to superintendant of the yard at Garden Island. TFSmith completely overlooks the existence of this kind of individual, because researching them would be too difficult.

TFSmith's laziness permeates this section. For instance, Rear-Admiral John Kingcome is shunted into the relatively minor St Lawrence squadron. Why Kingcome? Because, in late 1862, Kingcome was assigned to replace Sir Thomas Maitland as the commander of the Pacific station. There is obviously no comparison between the two posts: between 1860 and 1867, the Pacific station numbered 12 to 16 warships, from frigates to gunboats. The St Lawrence squadron, however, consists of a single steam frigate, some unfinished ironclads, and a handful of gunboats over which Kingcome does not even have day-to-day control:

The Royal Navy, with a Saint Lawrence Squadron based at Quebec under Rear Admiral John Kingcome, 67, with his flag in the steam frigate Sutlej (51), Capt. Matthew Connolly, had a detachment of coastal gunboats, some dating back to the Russian War, for duty on the river. These included Lt. John B. Creagh’s squadron of Amelia, Britomart (flag), Escort, Heron Linnet, Rose, Skipjack, and Trinculo...

Creagh’s vessels were supposed to have been reinforced by additional steam gunboats, but... they had all gone elsewhere... Creagh’s squadron had been augmented by sail and steam vessels taken up from local trade in Lower Canada and the Maritimes, mostly as transports but including a few auxiliary steam gunboats... as of September, HMS Ontario and Quebec were launched but still fitting out; HMS Acadia and HMS Canada were in commission, but both, the first ships of the type to ever be built in Quebec, were still undergoing trials. 

TFSmith could have looked through the Navy List, researched its members, and found a suitable individual to take charge of the squadron. For instance, Captain Astley Cooper Key would have been a sensible choice: he had commanded HMS Sans Pareil and its flotilla of gunboats during the Crimean war, and his pre-war role as Captain of the Steam Reserve at Devonport would suit him to dealing with questions of naval construction. However, as we have seen already in this section, TFSmith has no real interest in researching members of the British military.

Another illustration of both his laziness and his bias is that he has Lieutenant Richard Bateman attached to the Sutlej to command one of the newly-built Canadian ironclads. Bateman was attached to the Sutlej when it actually commissioned in October 1862 under Captain Matthew Connolley, to take Admiral John Kingcome out to his new command of the Pacific Station. However, Sutlej was due to be completed on 10 January 1862, at which time Bateman was attached to HMS James Watt in the Mediterranean. Because TFSmith needs to give the Union the advantage, Sutlej commissions months later than it was supposed to in the event of war; because not doing research makes TFSmith's life easier, it commissions with the exact same personnel from October 1862.

Ironically, though TFSmith did not apparently pick up on this fact- Bateman has experience with ironclads. While attached to HMS Cumberland in April 1861, he commanded the floating battery Aetna when it was sent to protect the mouth of the Thames. As such, Bateman probably had more experience with ironclads than anybody on the American continent until March 1862. Sadly, this is the sort of fact that TFSmith's laziness leads him to overlook.
 
More importantly, he fails to recognise that his own hand-picked choices for the Union navy on the Lakes present exactly the same problem that he assigns to the British: that 'the “professional officers” had little to no experience with steam, and the merchant mariners and lake sailors with experience with steam had none with gunnery'.

For instance, TFSmith's choice for naval commander on the Lakes is Silas Stringham. TFSmith's claim that Stringham 'had been commissioned in 1810 and spent the next 50 years in sail and steam warships' is a lie. In the fifty years between 1810 and 1860, Stringham never commanded a single steam warship. His first appointment to one was on 4 April 1861, when he hoisted his flag in USS Minnesota as commander of the Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Moreover, in the 20 years before the Civil War, Stringham spent only six of them at sea: 1843 in the sailing frigate Independence, 1847 in the sailing ship-of-the-line Ohio, and 1852-5 in the sailing frigate Cumberland.

We are told that Stringham 'had commanded the successful amphibious operation in August against the rebel forts at Hatteras Inlet,' and that he was 'Relieved by Flag Officer Louis Goldsborough in September'. We are not, however, told that Stringham was relieved from duty at his own request, after a storm of negative publicity around his handling of the operation, or that he was never given another active service command. Yet another Union officer is given a glowing panegyric, when if they were British they would be utterly condemned under the exact same circumstances.

TFSmith's choice to command Lake Ontario is Melancthon B. Woolsey, who he describes as 'acting commodore'. This description is fatally flawed for two reasons. Firstly, prior to July 1862, commodore was always a temporary appointment given to a captain commanding an extemporarised group of ships. Secondly, Woolsey was ineligible for the appointment in the first place. He had only reached the rank of lieutenant before his forcible retirement in 1855, and would only be made a captain in July 1866. The most important factor, however, is that Woolsey had no experience with steamships either. His first appointment to a steam ship came on 2 May 1862, when he was ordered from the receiving ship Vermont to USS Ellen in the South Atlantic Squadron.

The main reason, apparently, that TFSmith appoints Woolsey to this position is that his father Melancthon T. Woolsey had commanded at Sackett's Harbour in the War of 1812. Coupled with the involvement of the van Rensselaer dynasty in the Quebec campaign, there seems to be a remarkable amount of nepotism in TFSmith's selection methodology. Fortunately, it's only the British for whom ability isn't heritable.

TFSmith's other appointment in Ontario is Commander Albert Briggs, to the ironclad USS Missouri. However, Albert Briggs was actually the civilian captain of a propeller ship at Buffalo (p151). There is no indication he had any real naval experience, any more than the Canadian 'auxiliary masters'. Once again, we see TFSmith's American exceptionalism: Union ships crewed with 'an equally wide mix of active and reserve officers from the Navy and Revenue Marine, as well as merchant mariners commissioned as naval volunteers' function as well as can possibly be expected, while their Canadian counterparts are deemed to be 'the seagoing equivalent of Dad's Army'.

The real equivalent of 'Dad's Army,' of course, would be the Union militia by January 1862. Most of their best members had volunteered for active service, and those who remained lacked training and had substandard equipment. If TFSmith is so sceptical about the value of these kind of extemporarised and poor-quality units, presumably this is reflected elsewhere in the- oh, right.