“the Monitor Is Mine!”

JOHN ERICSSON SPENT MUCH OF HIS LIFE in high dudgeon. His temper could be ignited even by a subordinate’s most minor incompetence, but the stubborn Swedish-American engineer reserved a special wrath for officialdom, which repeatedly failed to value his astonishingly prescient inventive designs. So resentful was he of past slights by his particular nemesis the U.S. Navy that in 1861, when his proposal for the epochal Monitor was stalled in a highly conservative naval committee, it took the personal pleading of a high federal official, who traveled to New York expressly for the purpose, to persuade him to go to Washington and explain why his revolutionary craft would work. Appearing before the Ironclad Board the next day, he summarily addressed the questions of stability, maneuverability, and invulnerability with such assurance and such a persuasive command of mathematical equations that the board approved the project on the spot. A scant six months later the hastily built Monitor took on the Confederacy’s marauding Merrimack in Hampton Roads, Virginia, and gave her a pummeling that changed the course of the Civil War. As President Calvin Coolidge asserted during the 1926 dedication of the monument to Ericsson that stands near the Lincoln Memorial, “The Monitor did for the Union cause on the sea what the Battle of Gettysburg did for it on land.”

If his warship brought Ericsson world renown, it was only one of many significant innovations produced in a career that lasted almost seven decades. And as with the Monitor , virtually all his radical notions—from new kinds of steam engines to the first workable screw propeller and pioneer metalhulled warships and submarine torpedoes—were initially greeted with hostility and derision by men in positions of power. Each time, confronted anew with bureaucratic rejection, Ericsson would explode. Then he would quiet down and go back to work.

He never apologized for his outbursts. In the words of his friend and biographer William Conant Church, “With his great mental power and intense nervous force were combined enormous muscular strength and corresponding physical passion. He was … in every respect a high-pressure engine.” When his illegitimate son, whom he had begotten at a young age in Sweden and never met until many decades later, hesitantly urged Ericsson to be “mild in words and strong in deeds,” the old man put him straight: “The hammer is my weapon, and if I had not understood how to handle it rightly, I should long ago have been in the poor-house.” In his workroom in lower Manhattan, he would vent his rage by hurling objects at the fireplace grate, but elsewhere his ill humor could be frightening. On one occasion he spotted a faulty casting and ordered two foundry workers to break it up. When they were unable to do so with their heavy sledgehammers and proposed tackling it later, Ericsson stared at them, picked up one of the hammers, and shattered the iron mass with a single blow. Turning away, he growled, “Now you may attend to it.”

In his youth he had no reason for anger, for everyone acknowledged his unusual gifts. He was born on July 31, 1803, in Langbanshyttan, a mining village in central Sweden. When his father, a former mine inspector, was hired for a canal project administered by the Swedish navy, John went to work in the~map division and was so proficient that at the age of thirteen he was placed in charge of a surveying crew; still not full-grown, he had to stand on a portable platform to look through the theodolite. At seventeen, seeking wider opportunities, he transferred to the engineering corps of the Swedish army and soon was designing and building steam engines for mining work. (In this period he fell in love with a young woman whose father forbade their marrying. Unbeknownst to him she gave birth to the son he met many years later.)

Work in steam led him to the study of “caloric” engines, which ran on hot air rather than steam, and one of his engines so impressed the Swedish Engineering Society in Stockholm that they urged him to show it to the Institute of Civil Engineers in London, offering to pay his way. The trip led to what can be considered the first of Ericsson’s brilliant failures. His engine had been designed to run on pine chips, but in London the only fuel he could get was raw coal, which caused the engine to rapidly overheat and burn up. Stranded—the Swedes had paid his fare only one way—he decided to stay in London and try his luck. He never returned to Sweden. He was twenty-three.

Soon finding work with an engineering firm, he devised among other things an apparatus for drawing the salt out of water, a depth finder for ships, and a hydrostatic weighing machine. For a brewing firm he built a steam fire engine that could hurl jets of water to the tops of the tallest buildings (including fire-prone brewery chimneys), but insurance companies and the London Fire Brigade rejected it, saying it took too long to heat up its boilers and anyway it used too much water. Mark this as Ericsson’s first setback at the hands of convention-bound officialdom. Soon thereafter, for an Arctic explorer named John Ross, he designed a marine steam engine whose bellows and copper tubing arrangement (which served as a surface condenser) allowed its boiler to be located below the waterline, a first. Ross installed it, over Ericsson’s protests, in a ship that was too big for it. The craft drew three feet more than the engine was designed for, got locked in the Arctic ice, and had to be abandoned. Ross unfairly blamed Ericsson’s firm for the disaster and refused to pay for its work, further embittering the young inventor.

While engrossed in such projects, Ericsson learned that his leave of absence from the Swedish army had expired and that technically he was a deserter. Through friends back home he was reinstated and even promoted to captain, at which point he formally resigned his commission—although for the rest of his life he invariably signed himself “Captain John Ericsson.”

IN AUGUST 1829 ERICSSON LEARNED that the directors of the proposed Liverpool & Manchester Railway were offering a prize of five hundred pounds for the “most improved” steam locomotive, the winner to be chosen at trials two months hence. In just seven weeks Ericsson built the tiny, slim, but impressively swift Novelty , which weighed only two tons. At the trials, held over several days in Rainhill, between Liverpool and Manchester, the competition soon narrowed to two: the Novelty and the much heavier and less radical Rocket , built by the wellknown engineer and railroad pioneer George Stephenson and his son Robert. It was hardly a contest, for the Novelty consistently outsped the Rocket . The rules required entries to surpass ten miles per hour while hauling three times their weight. During early, unladen runs the Novelty effortlessly clocked in at thirty and during one run covered a mile in only fifty-three seconds, the greatest speed ever achieved by man. Pulling the specified load, the Novelty exceeded twenty miles per hour, about twice the Rocket ’s top speed.

The railway directors were stumped. Ericsson’s machine was clearly faster, but they feared it was simply too fast and too unstable-looking to be accepted by a public still frightened by steam travel of any kind. They had hoped to award the prize to a more dependable-looking, sensible machine. At length, after issuing a new set of rules in the middle of the trials, they seized on the appearance of a small leak in the Novelty ’s boiler to disqualify it and give the nod to the Rocket . Ericsson harbored no bitterness against George Stephenson, whom he later referred to as “that truly great engineer,” but he could not forgive the judges, and for the rest of his life he insisted he had designed the superior entry.

Eight years later he received another reverse. He had been experimenting with designs for a screw propeller, admittedly not a new device—it went all the way back to Archimedes—but one whose configuration had not been perfected for use with marine steam engines. In 1836 he patented a design that provided for short planes “coiled round [an enclosing] cylinder spirally, like the thread of a screw,” a device so efficient that it soon found wide acceptance. The following year he installed one on a steam tug that became known to Londoners as The Flying Devil , so named for her speed, the pounding of her engine, and the huge plume of smoke she sent up. Surely, Ericsson thought, she would be of interest to the Royal Navy. But the Lords of the Admiralty turned thumbs down. They gave no reason, but one of them was heard to remark at a dinner party that of course no propeller-driven craft could be steered. (The Devil had steered perfectly before their eyes.) The rejection bankrupted Ericsson’s firm and briefly landed him in debtor’s prison. In his mind was registered another mark against shortsighted bureaucrats.

Hardly giving up, he found temporary employment as a railway superintending engineer and soon met a man who encouraged him to travel to the United States. That man was Robert Stockton, the scion of an aristocratic old New Jersey family and a sometimes U.S. naval officer who had heard about The Flying Devil and thought a similar but much bigger vessel would make a fine warship. He would persuade the U.S. Navy to build her, he said, but urged Ericsson to come to New York to oversee construction. The ship would be named the Princeton (for the town where Stockton’s mansion, Morven, was and is located). So, although he was now doing well in England—boats driven by Ericsson propellers would soon come into use on canals everywhere—in 1839 he packed up and, leaving his wife of three years (she would briefly join him later), set sail for America. With him he carried, as cargo, a large gun he had designed, called the Oregon .

The Princeton was by far the most advanced ship of her time. In the words of Ericsson’s latter-day biographer Ruth White, “she was the first metal-hulled, screw-propelled steamship of war; the first with all her machinery below the waterline; the first with boilers designed to burn anthracite; the first to substitute the forced draft of centrifugal blowers and a small, collapsible pipe for the customary natural draft of a tall, fixed smokestack; the first to couple her engines directly to her counter-rotating propeller shafts.” She was, furthermore, very fast. It may have been Stockton who announced that the Princeton would “race” Britain’s elegant paddle-wheel liner Great Western in New York Harbor. As the British ship, under full steam and with sails set, headed down the harbor one day in 1843 at full speed, the Princeton suddenly appeared from the Hudson River side, overtook her rival, and proceeded to sail completely around her not once but twice with the Great Western ’s passengers looking on in disbelief. The next day the New York Herald announced the triumph: THE GREAT AQUATIC RACE—GREAT BRITAIN AGAINST AMERICA, AND AMERICA AGAINST THE WORLD !

But the tale turns ugly with Stockton’s announcement to Ericsson that he was mounting not only Ericsson’s Oregon on the ship but a much larger gun, which he himself had designed and which he dubbed the Peacemaker . Ericsson looked at the drawings and told him it was unsafe, but Stockton ignored him. Taking the craft to Washington without Ericsson, Stockton proceeded to entertain influential citizens on board while demonstrating the craft’s maneuverability and her guns. On February 28, 1844, with not only President John Tyler aboard but also the Secretaries of State and the Navy and two senators, he fired the Peacemaker once too often, and it exploded, killing both Secretaries and several others, wounding many, and only by chance sparing the President. The desperate Stockton blamed Ericsson for the disaster, calling him an “ingenious mechanic” who had come to the United States uninvited and had insinuated himself into the project. Upon reading Stockton’s accusations, Ericsson scribbled a page of exclamations like “Pettifoggery!,” “Slave payer!,” and “Another era damned!” He also responded formally to the allegation by quoting numerous letters Stockton had sent him begging for his help. He added that he had never been paid a cent for his services, and he sent the Navy a bill for $15,080, which included $1,150 for out-of-pocket expenses. It would be several years before he was exonerated and even allowed to collect his expenses on the project. The rest of his claim would not be honored during his lifetime.

Ericsson went back to designing engines and propellers and saw his work incorporated into a great many ships, among them the 188-ton twinscrew Midas , the first American steam schooner to round the Cape of Good Hope. The Navy would have nothing to do with him; the screw propeller, said the admirals, was unaesthetic and unorthodox and therefore unacceptable. (“Do you not know,” Ericsson remarked to a visitor, “that you can never convince a sailor?”) He was living alone now at 95 Franklin Street because his wife had returned to England after only a year or so in the United States. He had been paying no attention to her and had filled their rooms with machines and engine parts, and although he had once joked that she was “jealous of a steam engine,” he sensed that marriage was not for him. It involved, he later wrote, “giving a promise too difficult to keep” to “a wife who had a full right to live with me.”

In truth he was not an endearing person. Although his manner was courtly, his reserve and his invariably somber dress made him seem austere. He focused totally on his work; it occupied him from early in the morning until late at night, seven days a week. Once after the Princeton disaster a friend urged him to take some time off to forget his troubles. “I’ve got it!” said the friend. “Have a look at Niagara Falls!” Ericsson glanced up from his drawing board. “Niagara Falls? What’s wrong with them?”

But he had become something of a celebrity by now. Peter Cooper was a frequent caller, and when Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” came to the city, she paid him a visit and sang some simple Swedish airs for him. Also a visitor was another Swede, a seven-teen-year-old named Alfred Nobel, who came away fascinated by Ericsson’s wide-ranging mind. Ericsson became a U.S. citizen in 1848.

IN THE 1850S HE RETURNED TO his old notion of a hot-air engine and built the caloric-powered Ericsson , a big side-wheeler capable of getting up to six or seven knots. Reporters marveled at her quietness (one wrote that she was driven by “that life-giving fluid, the atmosphere … that unseen element which sighs in the breeze and roars in the hurricane”) and were allowed to sit on her massive pistons as they gently rose and fell. But even Ericsson realized she was underpowered, and of course the Navy showed no interest. It did not help when the Ericsson on April 27, 1854, got caught in a sudden storm in New York Harbor, was swamped (a fireman had neglected to close her ports when the weather worsened), and sank. She was subsequently raised and converted to steam. Although much smaller caloric engines designed by the inventor found ready acceptance for such lighter tasks as driving printing presses and pumping water, he never quite got over the ship’s failure. It was the only major misstep of his long career.

But his probing mind had been moving in other directions as well. In 1846 a congressional committee had asked him for ideas on “the practicability of rendering an iron vessel shot-proof.” Ericsson replied that the notion was not only impractical but impossible with a conventional ship. Tests had shown, he pointed out, that heavy projectiles could ultimately pierce impressive thicknesses of armor, and the net result was that any vessel so thickly armored as to be truly invulnerable would be too heavy to float. The answer, he thought, lay in maneuverability, stealth, and placing a ship’s vital machinery out of reach. He sent the committee a drawing of a totally new kind of craft: a raftlike iron-clad with her engines below the deck and her guns mounted on circular rails for easy aiming in any direction. It was the seed of the Monitor concept. The committee ignored it.

Eight years later, in 1854, with France fighting Sweden’s ancient enemy, Russia, in the Crimean War, Ericsson sent the French emperor, Napoleon III, a small cardboard model of a proposed craft that carried his warship concept a step further. Now the raft would not carry its guns on rails but rather within a single revolving turret. The package arrived just as France and her allies were winning the war, and the emperor returned it with his thanks. Ericsson put it away in a closet.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, all sorts of experts in the North were asked to help the Union, but not Ericsson. It was not that he was unknown to the Navy Department; he was too well known.

The Union needed armored ships, however, and during the summer of 1861 an Ironclad Board of three experienced naval officers was set up to solicit plans for such vessels. The board did not send for Ericsson. On his own the inventor on August 29 wrote to President Lincoln describing his new design and offering to come to Washington to explain it. Nothing happened; the letter apparently never reached the President.

But word reaching Washington from within the Confederacy brought a new sense of urgency. At the war’s outbreak, when the Southern forces had captured the Norfolk (Virginia) Navy Yard, a U.S. warship, the Merrimack , had been scuttled and sunk. The South had raised her and was now converting her into an ironclad by rebuilding her superstructure with sloping armored sides. Such a vessel could not only wreak severe damage among the North’s wooden warships in nearby Hampton Roads but potentially break the North’s blockade of the Confederacy. (The vessel was renamed the Virginia , but in the North she was still called the Merrimack and in history books since then has been so referred to—and will be here.)

By chance an acquaintance of Ericsson, in Washington on business in August, happened to meet up with Cornelius Bushnell, a New Englander who had submitted a design to the Ironclad Board. The acquaintance told him of Ericsson’s many ideas about ironclad construction, and Bushnell took the night train to New York to see the inventor. The next day, as Bushnell recalled later, Ericsson “produced a small, dust-covered box, and placed before me the model and plan of the Monitor , explaining how quickly and powerfully she could be built.” Delighted, Bushnell asked to borrow the model and hopped a train for Hartford, Connecticut, where the U.S. Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, was supervising his family’s move to Washington. “The country is safe!” he exclaimed to Welles. “I have found a battery which will make us masters of the situation.” Welles too was impressed.

The model was in turn shown to Lincoln, who throughout his life was receptive to ingenious inventions. After gazing at it for a moment, the President supposedly remarked, “All I can say is what the fat girl said when she put her foot into the stocking. It strikes me there’s something in it.” The Ironclad Board was less sanguine. “Another Ericsson failure,” said one member, and they voted it down. Bushnell knew there was only one thing to do: Get Ericsson to meet with the board. Hastening once again to New York, he was careful not to tell the inventor that the board had said no; he merely said it needed more information. Ericsson, remembering all the past slights, refused. But at length his desire to help his adopted homeland won out. Only when he arrived in Washington, on September 16, 1861, did he learn of the board’s rejection, and he was naturally infuriated. But his masterful presentation, during which he promised to deliver the craft in a hundred days at a cost of only $275,000, turned the board around.

If he had worked hard before, it was nothing compared with the way he drove himself over the next several months. Every evening, often until well past midnight, he made detailed drawings; then early the next day he would bring them to the shipyard across the East River and stay to supervise the construction. “Mr. Ericsson,” said one observer, “was in every part of the vessel apparently at the same moment, skipping over planks and gangways, and up and down ladders, as though he were a boy of sixteen. It seemed as though a plate could not be placed or a bolt struck without his making his appearance at the workman’s side.”

The craft, which was unlike anything previously constructed, drew on the experience and observations of a lifetime. The low profile, Ericsson said later, stemmed from his recollection of timber rafts on Swedish lakes, which could ride out storms unaffected. His knowledge of steam engines enabled him to design a most efficient power plant, while his work on the Princeton and other projects had made him an artillery expert as well as an authority on armor. For a warship the Monitor was small. Her flat deck, just 18 inches above the water, was only 172 feet long and 41 feet wide, extending over the hull at the bow to protect the anchor and over the stern to protect the propeller. The deck was made of wood covered by a 1-inch layer of iron deck plating. But the turret, 20 feet in inside diameter and 9 feet high, was encased in 8 inches of armor and carried two 11-inch Dahlgren guns that fired through gunports that could be slammed shut during reloading. A small pilothouse with sloping sides rose just 3 feet 10 inches above the deck near the bow. Nothing else broke the flat expanse (a smokestack aft of the turret would be collapsed during battle). Belowdecks there were quarters for the crew of fifty-six plus the engine room, yet the vessel drew only 10½ feet, enabling her to operate in shallow rivers and harbors.

Many trials bedeviled the inventor during construction. The Navy’s contract—when it arrived weeks after work had begun—was prohibitive: Ericsson would be fully paid only if the ship proved herself in battle; if she failed, all monies would have to be returned. He stifled his rage and continued. And the chairman of the Ironclad Board, Commodore Joseph Smith, consumed with anxiety about the project, subjected him to a barrage of demanding letters warning that the deck might split, that the gunners would suffer from the concussion, that the craft would capsize, and that the sailors would languish from lack of sunshine. Ericsson painstakingly responded to each complaint; Smith years earlier had been the man who directed the raising of the caloric Ericsson from the waters of New York Harbor, and the inventor forgave him his misgivings.

ONE TRIAL TURNED OUT TO be amusingly harmless. During the construction the Navy sent Commander David Dixon Porter to the shipyard to assess the craft’s capabilities. Knowing that Ericsson had a short temper, the mischievous Porter baited him with stupid questions, pushing the inventor to exclaim, “On my word of honor, young man, I am a fool to waste my time with you.” At length, after an hour poking through the vessel’s innards, Porter emerged and gravely explained that there were those who said the ship violated every nautical principle. Then, just as Ericsson was about to erupt, Porter announced that he had also discovered that she was “the most remarkable vessel the world has ever seen—one that if properly handled can destroy any ship afloat and whip a dozen wooden ships together.” Only then did Ericsson smile and say, “My God, and all this time I took you for a damned fool!”

Up to now the ship had not actually been named. On January 20, 1862, however, Ericsson wrote the Assistant Secretary of the Navy proposing that she be called the Monitor , as she would prove a “severe monitor” to Confederate leaders who hoped to destroy Union shipping. The name was adopted.

One final trouble intervened. During the trial runs the rudder failed to work properly, and the Navy ordered the ship dry-docked. “The Monitor is mine!” Ericsson raged, “and I say it shall not be done.… Put in a new rudder! They would waste a month in doing that; I will make her steer in three days.” Which he did.

The sheer drama of the contest between the Monitor and the Merrimack has overshadowed the fact that the Monitor almost did not get to the battle at all. As she was proceeding down the New Jersey coast, a furious storm struck, and she almost went down; an overly cautious shipyard hand, without Ericsson’s knowledge, had stuffed the turret track with oakum in a misguided attempt to make it watertight, and when sections of the oakum washed away in the storm, the water poured in. The pumps could not keep up, and only the providential relenting of the storm saved the vessel. When she arrived in Chesapeake Bay on March 8, 1862, her crew was exhausted—no one had slept for forty-eight hours—and many were sick.

As she made her way toward Hampton Roads, the crew heard the sound of explosions and saw black smoke to the west. That very day the just completed Merrimack had emerged from Norfolk Harbor and was attacking the wooden Union warships blockading the port. Before the day was over, she had destroyed two major ships and was severely threatening a third. That evening Union leaders were in a state of near panic. There was no knowing what might happen; in theory the Merrimack could steam right up the Potomac and shell Washington. As an emergency White House meeting broke up, President Lincoln was heard to mutter, “Frightful news!”

THE MONITOR WAS READY the next morning, however. When the Merrimack steamed out on the ninth to finish her work of the day before, the little craft—only one-fourth her tonnage—sallied forth to meet her. The two ships pounded each other for four hours. The battle has been called a draw, as neither vessel was put out of action, but at the end it was the Merrimack that withdrew. And her officers knew they had met a confoundingly better ship. The Monitor , after firing her guns, would revolve her turret to present a blank iron wall to the enemy, and as one Merrimack officer later said, “It did not appear that our shell had any effect” on her. Meanwhile the Monitor ’s shells—which, ironically, were driven by a partial powder charge because of a Navy cautionary rule dating from the Princeton disaster two decades earlier—were buckling the opponent’s armor plate. The Confederate officers also knew that one shot from the Monitor striking their waterline—which, luckily for them, never came—would, spell doom. And no matter which ship was technically the victor, the Confederate threat against the Northern blockade had been eradicated. The revolutionary Merrimack , which had suddenly made wooden ships obsolete, had been trumped by a ship that was even more revolutionary and showed the way to the warships of the modern era.

The Monitor ’s triumph made Ericsson a national hero, but it did not change his way of life. Until the war’s end the Navy kept him busy designing Monitor -type vessels, and more than a dozen were launched. In 1864, seeking quieter surroundings, he moved from Franklin Street to 36 Beach Street, a pleasant brownstone facing St. John’s Park. There he set up his workroom in the parlor and toiled all day long at his desk looking out at the park. If he became weary, he would nap by lying on his back on a nearby table with his head on a book and his legs dangling over the side. When St. John’s Park was sold to Commodore Vanderbilt in 1866 for the construction of a train shed (the site now handles traffic exiting the Holland Tunnel), Ericsson hardly noticed. He kept on working. If weapons became deadlier, he believed, mankind might perhaps realize the futility of war. The answer to ships like the Monitor was the torpedo, and in the 1870s he not only designed a twenty-five-foot torpedo carrying an explosive charge but built, at his own expense, a mean-looking low-lying craft named the Destroyer for launching the torpedo underwater—a forerunner of the modern submarine. Tests were successful, but the Navy and Congress were not interested. The old anger welled up and subsided. “I have important work to do,” he said, “and live like a man training for a fight.”

He was as caustic as ever to the incompetent. Returning some inept drawings to a hopeful inventor, he wrote, “Captain Ericsson declines to have anything to do with your clumsy invention.” When the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1879 voted to confer an honorary membership on him, he rebuffed them, saying they should have done so long before. He zealously guarded his privacy and quiet, obtaining permission from a piano-playing neighbor to enter his house and pad the party wall with mattresses to deaden the sound. Surprisingly he rejected the inventions of others, refusing to have a telephone installed in his house and banning the typewriter; any typewritten letter to him had to be copied over in longhand by his secretary before he would read it. His house had no bathrooms and no furnace. Every morning, winter and summer, he performed calisthenics for two hours and then took a sponge bath; the rest of the day and into the night he was at his drawing board.

The neighborhood was deteriorating and becoming overrun with rats, which provoked the old Ericsson rage, and he devised an elaborate rattrap in his workroom that included a trap door opening onto a vat of water in the basement. It was one Ericsson invention that did not work. “As a place for keeping cheese in safety,” remarked a draftsman working for the old man, “it answered admirably.”

BUT ON MORE SERIOUS MATTERS Ericsson continued to see into the future. The world would one day run out of conventional fuels, he said, and so must look to the sun for power. He built an observatory on his roof, and in his last years he was actively pursuing the DOtential of solar Dower, building seven “sun motors” fueled by varying intensities of radiant heat. One operated at four hundred revolutions per minute.

He died on March 8, 1889, at the age of eightyfive, and a year later his body was conveyed with honors back to Sweden. As the casket was brought down to the dock for shipment, six men who had been members of the Monitor ’s crew at Hampton Roads marched at its side, and as the ship bearing it sailed down the harbor, a line of modern U.S. warships—each of which owed its existence to the inventor’s foresight—fired salutes. Ericsson’s house on Beach Street (since renamed Ericsson Place) was torn down in 1921, but today on the wall of the larger building next door can be seen the mark of its roofline, the lingering vestige of the irritable genius who was the father of the modern warship and one of the most illustrious inventors of the nineteenth century.

One matter was cleared up shortly after his death. Too late for him to enjoy, Congress finally came to its senses in the early 189Os and paid him for his work on the Princeton .