Its guns were condemned and obsolete, the report (published in Great Britain) stated, and the “system of armor plating is also unsound.” Nearly a decade later things had not improved all that much. On a visit aboard Alfred Thayer Mahan’s vessel, a French naval officer waxed nostalgically about a ponderous muzzle-loading pivot gun. “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” he commented wistfully. “Ah yes, the old system. We had it too.” George Dewey of Manila Bay fame complained when given command of the ancient steam sloop Pensacola in 1885 that “there was not a fourth-rate British cruiser of modern build that could not easily have kept out of range of her battery, torn her to pieces and set her on fire.”

Mahan and Dewey’s laments were not only for the obsolete vessels that they served on but the general condition of the Navy’s officer corps. Quite frankly, the United States Navy was stuffed with officers. If the battered ships had an opportunity to choose their respective commanding officer, each ship had a pool of nearly sixty to choose from. There was one officer for every four enlisted men and it might be said that once a lieutenant, always a lieutenant. It was not unusual for even the best officer to spend a decade in that rank, or for seamen to be commanded by fifty-year old lieutenants. The navy might have taken a lesson from the United States Army, whose “Benzene Boards” removed most of the deadwood accumulated during the Civil War. The navy’s manpower had been significantly reduced at the war’s end (by 1878 it was smaller than Andrew Jackson’s navy). In 1865 there were 7,000 officers and 51,500 enlisted men in the United States Navy. Within two years those numbers shrunk to 2,000 and 10,000 respectively but the scythe had stopped short of those who held power. It was as if, having won their war, the Old Guard was content to oversee, but certainly not care for the American navy. Trapped between politicians and shellbacks the service barely survived and even its occasional attempts to modernize were discouraged. Sometimes, out of the conviction that sail (at an average speed of 4.5 knots) was preferable to coal, navy leaders demanded that ships travel exclusively under canvas. Coal was costly, while the God-given wind was abundant and free.

In 1869, Vice Admiral David Dixon Porter ordered “commanders of fleets, squadrons, and of vessels…to do all their cruising under sail alone.” This hero of the Civil War, who had surely witnessed the potential of a modern navy, was content to command that the navy “return to the old custom.”

Some officers of the old school truly felt that engineers were a threat and fought their attempts to modernize the service. In fact, captains were held strictly responsible for their use of coal and if the consumption was considered in anyway wasteful, the errant captain found his account dunned for the coal. There was no cost to sail, the shellbacks thought, and no need to race about the seas faster than a good wind could propel you. But those sailors who tended boilers saw masts and yardarms as nothing more than clutter on a good ship’s clean lines. Unfortunately for these men, their voices were lost in the wilderness. “Lounging through the watches of a steamer,” one secretary of the navy stated, “or acting as firemen or coal heavers will not produce in a seaman that combination of boldness, strength and skill which characterized the American sailor of elder day.”

There were attempts to ignite an interest in a steam navy to rank with those of the other nations of the world. In her 1868 trials the sleek U.S.S. Wampanoag reached 17.7 knots using super-heated steam and averaged an impressive 16.6 knots over a 38-hour period. The special board appointed to oversee the ship’s performance was not impressed by the steam generated power that drove this new warship through the sea. Reverting to the time-honored practice of ships gliding through the waves under a bountiful array of white sails, the board ordered a number of her boilers removed “with the announced intention of improving her sailing qualities under canvas.”  U.S.S. Wampanoag, reduced to a gutted hulk, never felt the sea break against her bow again.   

As if the navy’s own desire to scuttle itself wasn’t enough, some leading politicians, particularly of the shameful Grant administration, felt it their duty to plunder the service. George Maxwell Robeson was Grant’s Secretary of the Navy during the former general’s tenure in office. Never especially competent in any field (“a first-rate judge of wines, a second-rate trout fisherman, and a third-rate New Jersey lawyer”), he was adept at relieving the navy’s budget to benefit his bank account. Things hardly improved after his departure. It is said that secretary of the navy Richard W. Thompson was surprised upon learning that ships were indeed, hollow. It might have been an apocryphal story but it did illustrate the miserable condition of the navy and the incompetent men that led it.

The navy would struggle to find its way out of the wilderness and that journey would not be without its trials. It was led by a group of patriotic, passionate, intelligent officers whose tentative steps in the 1873 were to begin a journey out of the dark ages and into an era of steel and big guns.