Eads and the Navy of the Mississippi

IN DECEMBER 1860, WITH SECESSION IMMINENT AND ARMED CONFLICT certain to follow, William Tecumseh Sherman, superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy, warned a colleague: “You people speak so lightly of war. You don’t know what you are talking about. War is a terrible thing. … You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people and will fight too. … The North can make a steam-engine, locomotive or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined people on earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail.”

In the four years that followed, Sherman’s prophecy was to be abundantly fulfilled. Despite mismanagement, ineptitude, and on occasion downright corruption, the Union demonstrated over and over that the Northern people were indeed “powerful, ingeniously mechanical and determined.”

Few examples support Sherman’s prediction better than that of James Buchanan Eads and his almost single-handed construction of the world’s first fleet of ironclad river gunboats. Eads was a remarkable engineer whose career encompassed major accomplishments in shipbuilding, bridge building, civil engineering, and more—all involving, in one way or another, the Mississippi River. The river’s story cannot be told without including Eads’s story. Neither can the story of the Civil War.

Less than a year after Sherman spoke, on October 12, 1861, the first of Eads’s seven ironclads slipped easily into the Mississippi at Carondelet, Missouri, just south of St. Louis. Many people had gathered to watch, and it was a fine launch. In the words of an observer, the first ironclad to be built in this hemisphere “was gradually lowered into the ‘father of the waters’… and such was the noiseless, and almost imperceptible manner of the operation that we found the boat floating gracefully upon the water, and nobody hurt, and not even a lady frightened.” This first boat, the St. Louis , was joined within weeks by six sisters. Three of these were built at Carondelet; the other three at Mound City, Illinois, on the Ohio River just north of Cairo, where it joins the Mississippi.

Every American schoolchild learns about the engagement between the Confederate ram Merrimack (also called the Virginia ) and its unique antagonist, the Monitor , in March 1862. While these were the first American ironclads to face each other, they were neither the first built nor the first to see action. Both those honors go to Eads’s gunboats.

For its first two years the Civil War in the West was primarily a river war. Its key confrontations took place on and around the Mississippi and its major tributaries. The Mississippi and the smaller Tennessee and Cumberland systems flowed more or less parallel to invasion pathways, providing navigable waters through much of enemy territory.

From early 1862 through July 1863, Federal forces moved steadily down the Mississippi from Cairo and up from the Gulf of Mexico. Eads’s seven sisters were all commissioned by mid-January 1862, and less than a month later (February 6) three of them, along with three wooden gunboats and the Essex , a ferry that Eads had converted to an ironclad, led a waterborne assault against Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Within hours, before land troops supporting the assault even arrived, the fort capitulated to the gunboats. From then until July 1863, when the Confederate citadel at Vicksburg fell, the Eads ironclads were at the heart of Federal power on the rivers. Despite shortcomings in their design and some tactical setbacks, they destroyed or neutralized Confederate forces afloat and defenses along the shoreline, giving vital support to the land armies.

James Buchanan Eads was born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, in 1820. (He was named after James Buchanan, a maternal cousin who later became President of the United States.) In the following years his father, attempting to improve the family’s fortunes, moved them to Cincinnati, Louisville, and, in 1833, St. Louis. James had almost no formal education, but he was intelligent, imaginative, and energetic, with a special talent for practical matters. He was, in the words of the historian Fletcher Pratt, “one of those characters so readily thrown off by the second generation of pioneering stock, with a vivid drive toward building, doing things better. When their skills were insufficient, they learned new ones and when their tools were inadequate they invented better ones.” He demonstrated his precocity at things mechanical by building a working steam engine when he was eleven; among his other mechanical contrivances was a toy wagon powered by a live rat.

The riverboat that brought the Eads family to St. Louis fascinated James, and he explored it from stem to stern. Unfortunately it caught fire just before landing, and virtually all the family’s belongings went up in smoke. His mother responded by renting a house and taking in boarders while James set out to earn his share. (His father would join the family as soon as he had raised enough money to open a store.) James was soon in business for himself, peddling apples. Before long one of his mother’s boarders offered him a “lad-of-all-work” job in his dry goods business. In addition to his three-dollar weekly pay, James would have the use of his employer’s excellent library, much of it devoted to scientific works. This fortunate turn of events would amply nourish the young man’s imagination and energy, and he took full advantage of it.

Back in 1812 the New Orleans , built at Pittsburgh, had become the first steamboat to navigate the mighty Mississippi upstream as well as down. In the years that followed, steamboat traffic on the river burgeoned. New Orleans saw 21 cargoes unloaded in 1814, 191 in 1819, and 1,200 in 1833, the year the Eads family reached St. Louis. From 1820 to 1860 the value of goods reaching New Orleans doubled every decade.

But the great river took as it gave. It was a treacherous highway, with sharp curves, sandbars, and often unpredictable currents. Even more dangerous were the river’s many “snags,” dead trees toppled from the banks by surging currents and undermining floods. Held by the soft mud bottom, they lay beneath the surface like giant lances to impale steamboat hulls and sink the vessels. In 1829 Henry M. Shreve introduced a twin-hulled (catamaran) snag boat, and the ensuing rapid clearing of the underwater forests in the Mississippi and other rivers greatly reduced the snag hazard. Still, new snags appeared each year, and many boats continued to be sunk, making the riverbed a potential cornucopia of salvageable goods. James Eads would before long address this situation.

In 1837 his father and mother moved farther upriver on a new venture, leaving James on his own. Two years later James found a position as second (“mud”) clerk—more or less equivalent to a modern purser—on the Knickerbocker . This marked the start of his lifelong association with the great river and its tributaries. Before the season ended, the Knickerbocker , rounding from the Mississippi into the Ohio, was ripped open by a snag and went down with its cargo of lead. This was Eads’s second halfdressed early-morning escape from a doomed vessel, and it set him thinking about the valuables waiting to be retrieved from the riverbed.

Over the next two years, while working on other riverboats, Eads invented and patented a practical diving bell and designed a salvage vessel from which to operate it. (For more on underwater salvage, see “Deep Sea Diving a Century Ago,” page 58.) In 1842 he offered to take a St. Louis boatbuilding firm, Case & Nelson, into the salvage business with him if it would build his boat. His sketches for the Submarine showed a stout twin-hulled vessel with derricks and pumps rising from its deck and, of course, his diving bell. Impressed with his idea, Case & Nelson became partners with the twenty-two-year-old and started building his boat.

Their first contract, entered into before the Submarine was completed, was for the recovery of a hundred tons of lead from a barge that had sunk in the rapids near Keokuk, Iowa. The diver hired for the task tried to work in his own diving suit but was hampered by the currents, so Eads had to improvise. He bought a forty-gallon whiskey barrel and transformed it into a diving bell, with several lead pigs to take it down and a system of ropes and pulleys to hold it in position and move it about over the wreck. The diver, however, refused to enter the device, so Eads got his baptism as a bottom worker. Most of the lead was recovered.

The Submarine went into service soon after this initial success. Eads supervised every job personally from the tender and often went to the bottom in his bell. The business was successful from the start. His haul was varied; according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica , “on one occasion he retrieved a cargo that included a large crock of butter in a good state of preservation.” Several successor boats, all named Submarine , were built, each more powerful than its predecessor. The fourth, launched in 1851, was equipped with steam-driven machinery capable of removing the sand and pumping the water from underwater wrecks. These, along with more-powerful derricks, allowed the raising of complete hulks as well as their cargoes.

The success of the salvage business made Eads a rich man, allowing him to buy a farm for his nomadic parents to settle on. In 1845 he had married and, at his bride’s instigation, sold his interest in the salvage enterprise and organized a glass factory in St. Louis. This venture failed, however; it was Eads’s only loser. The reverse left him deep in debt, but with an advance from his creditors he returned to the salvage business, and by 1857 he had paid off his debts and again amassed a considerable fortune. He had also come to have an influential voice in the affairs of St. Louis and the river basin.

In his years on the Mississippi, Eads had developed a deep interest in the mechanics of the mighty river. From his studies of its flow patterns and the deposits it laid down, he devised a plan to combat the destructive action not only of the Mississippi but of all rivers. In 1856 he proposed that Congress have him remove all snags and wrecks from the Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, and Ohio rivers, but the bill authorizing action died in the Senate. In 1857 Eads, who had been plagued with various ailments throughout his life, put aside his business affairs on the advice of doctors. For the next four years he and his second wife (the first one had died in 1852) lived in semiretirement, even taking a trip to Europe.

When the Civil War broke out, plans for a river navy arose from several sources. In the war’s early days the federal government faced a daunting array of problems. Armies and naval forces would have to be created virtually from scratch, and weapons and munitions would have to be manufactured on an unprecedented scale. And a grand strategy to destroy the military power of the Confederacy was needed urgently.

Many politicians and influential newspapers trumpeted a simplistic “On to Richmond!” approach, but there were other ideas. The most important of these was the Western strategy—strangling the Confederacy by cutting off its waterborne trade routes. Lincoln was a Westerner, of course, as were several members of his cabinet. Edward Bates (Attorney General) and Montgomery Blair (Postmaster General), who had both lived in Missouri, were especially forceful advocates of a Western alternative.

St. Louis, the largest city west of the Mississippi and a major commercial center for the entire Mississippi Valley, had considerable pro-Southern sympathies but, like the rest of the state, opposed secession. It quickly became a center for supporters of action in the West. One of these was Eads, a strong Union man and an old friend of Bates. In April he wrote to Bates arguing that control of the Mississippi would be needed to defeat the Confederacy.

Bates had had similar ideas, and four days after Fort Sumter fell he invited Eads to visit Washington and present his proposal to the government. A few days later Eads, just short of his forty-first birthday, was on his way. He explained his ideas to the cabinet and then made rough drawings for the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles. No definite plans ensued, and Eads went back to St. Louis in frustration.

In May Eads again journeyed to Washington, this time to meet with Simon Cameron, the Secretary of War. Eads urged that Cairo, with its commanding location at the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi, be fortified and that a base for a river gunboat fleet be established there. Cameron refused to commit himself, and Eads, discouraged, returned to St. Louis once more.

Meanwhile, in early May, Winfield Scott, general in chief of the Union Army, had proposed a scheme similar to Eads’s as part of a comprehensive Federal effort. It was known as the Anaconda Plan, and its main elements were, first, a naval blockade of Southern ports; second, a thrust down the Mississippi with an army of 60,000 men, coordinated with a naval attack up the river from the Gulf; and, third, the establishment of a line of Federal positions along the river. Scott also recommended that the army’s down-river campaign be supported by a fleet of at least twenty gunboats.

At about the same time, Gen. George B. McClellan, commanding Federal forces in Ohio, suggested that Union troops occupying Cairo be protected by a force of gunboats. In response, Secretary Welles sent Commander John Rodgers to Cincinnati to confer with McClellan on the establishment of a “naval armament” on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Eads was asked to join these discussions.

The men reported that a force of at least three boats was required. Eads offered his last and most powerful salvage boat, Submarine No. 7 , to the government for conversion, but Rodgers was not impressed with it. (The Eads boat was later converted into the ironclad Benton , the most powerful vessel on the rivers.) Rodgers then found and purchased three river steamers and had them converted to “timberclad” gunboats. He did so without authorization, leading to recriminations from Secretary Welles and an agreement that operations on inland waters should be the army’s province. The navy would cooperate by offering technical advice and, later, officers to command the vessels.

With a serious effort to assemble a river force now under way, plans were initiated to build new fighting vessels. But river naval combat was a new concept. America’s rivers had never before carried warships (except for a few small craft below New Orleans during the War of 1812), and their topography would impose particular limitations on design, requiring shallow draft, excellent maneuverability, and enough power to battle strong currents. Furthermore, the warships would require ingredients never before tested in battle: steam, powerful new guns, and armor.

John Lenthall, the navy’s chief naval constructor, was asked to prepare drawings for the new vessels. He did so, but in rather sketchy form. Lenthall said frankly that his long experience with “blue water” ships did not qualify him to design boats for “brown water” service. His sketches were therefore sent to Cincinnati, where Samuel M. Pook, a naval constructor, had been helping Rodgers with his gunboat project. Pook had profited much from discussions with James Eads and many other boatbuilders, engineers, and river captains in and around Cincinnati, and he produced a design quite different from that of his chief.

The “Pook turtles” looked like nothing any naval officer had seen before—squat and ugly, but formidable nonetheless. Oceangoing warships of the day were long and thin, with a length-to-beam ratio as high as 10 to ensure seaworthiness in rough waters. For the relatively calm, shallow Mississippi, Pook made his boats fatter, with a length-to-beam ratio of 3.5, allowing them to draw only six feet of water. The ships, the first class of vessels designed for war on the rivers, were meant to replace a makeshift miscellany of converted riverboats, ferries, and other craft that had been improvised out of necessity.

Except for small fore and aft decks, the hull of each turtle was covered with an inclined rectangular casemate pierced for thirteen guns: three through the bow, four on each broadside, and two in the stern, one on either side of the paddle wheel. Pook’s most important contribution to the design was the addition of iron armor. British and French experience in the recent Crimean War strongly supported the use of armor, especially since the gunboats were expected to do much of their fighting against Confederate land batteries.

Pook’s directions on this point were vague; he simply recommended that the boats be covered with iron plates two and a half inches thick “in a suitable position” to provide protection. Because he had no experience with the plating of war vessels, he left the details to be worked out by the builder, who turned out to be Eads. Eads would eventually decide to use “charcoal iron” plates thirteen inches wide and eight and a half to eleven feet long, bolted together to cover the forward position of the casemate (because the boats were expected to fight “bows on” in most cases) and the central part of its sides (to protect the boilers and machinery).

In July advertisements for bids to construct several such vessels and their engines were inserted in newspapers in the Ohio and upper Mississippi valleys. On August 5, 1861, Quartermaster Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs and his staff opened the seven bids that had been received. The best one came from Eads. Eads signed an exacting contract in General Meigs’s office on August 7. He agreed to build seven gunboats, as prescribed by the printed specifications, by October 10. He could not sublet the contract or any part of it, and for each boat he would receive $89,600 in installments.

Government superintendents were to inspect the vessels every twenty days and estimate the work that had been completed to that point. Eads would then be paid 75 percent of that estimate; the government would retain 25 percent until the vessel was finished. Eads would forfeit $250 a day for each vessel not completed by the October deadline. All materials used would be subject to inspection and rejection by the superintendents, but they were not to order any deviation from the specifications that might delay completion of the boats.

Eads adhered to his part of the bargain faithfully, but the government’s performance was hardly as exemplary. Not only were many modifications called for during construction, but payments for work completed were not made. Construction of the riverboat fleet was therefore covered by Eads’s personal credit; indeed, he ended up financing most of the venture himself. By late October, with the first boats finished, his bank credit was exhausted, and he had to borrow from friends to meet his payroll. (In fact, when the boats first went into action, against Fort Henry in February 1862, they were still legally the property of James Eads.) Despite these vicissitudes, Eads managed to complete all seven boats within a hundred days of signing the contract. He later sued the government over its late payments and design changes; the government, in turn, sued Eads over his late delivery. The suits were eventually settled without penalty by either side.

With the signing of the contract, Eads faced a formidable task. First, he had to fill in design details for a type of fighting craft never before built anywhere. Although Pook had provided an overall plan, it was only an approximation of the final design; many vital details were left to Eads. Then he had to improvise an organization capable of supervising the undertaking, arrange to use the Mound City yard, develop sources of supply for the materials required, and hire carpenters, machinists, steamfitters, and shipwrights. When he began, the wood from which the boats were to be built was still standing in the forests, their iron armor was neither forged nor even ordered, and the fabricating machinery had yet to be built. Finally, thirty-five boilers and twenty-one engines (two main ones per vessel plus a smaller “doctor” [auxiliary] engine to run their water pumps) had to be produced. Nevertheless, Eads carried it off, and the first of his seven boats hit the water just two days after the contract date.

This monumental achievement attests to Eads’s exceptional entrepreneurial and organizational skills as well as his engineering abilities. The task that faced him would have been demanding in normal times, but under the conditions it was staggering. With the Confederacy holding the lower Mississippi, river commerce and its supporting industries had declined precipitously. Mills, machine shops, and foundries were closed, and many of their workers had dispersed to join the fighting. One biographer of Eads writes, “In a veritable tornado of energy he laid about him, tied up telegraph lines for hours at a time getting mills and shops in several states opened and manned, new ones hastily put up, machines for fashioning the armor plate built, materials shipped and foremen instructed.” In two weeks he put together a labor force said to have numbered more than 4,000 at its peak. He paid premium wages for work that went on seven days a week, in shifts throughout the daylight hours and—spurred by tempting bonuses—at night, on anything that could be done under the limited artificial lighting then available.

The gunboats had their failings. They proved to be inadequately powered for maneuvering upstream, and their top (or hurricane) deck was vulnerable to plunging fire from guns on high ground. Still, the boats were potent and reliable weapons. After the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862—the Union’s first important victories of the war—Secretary Welles wrote to Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote, who commanded the river fleet: “We all know the Navy’s value and necessity for exterior purposes but were not aware of its internal strength in sustaining the government. Our armies in the west would have been comparatively powerless but without the gunboats.” Later Adm. David Dixon Porter, who took over as commander of the river flotilla in September 1862, wrote to Secretary Welles about the successful attack on Fort Hindman (Arkansas Post), on the Arkansas River: “No fort ever received a worse battering, and the highest compliment I can pay to those engaged is to repeat what the rebels said: You can’t expect men to stand up against the fire of those gunboats.”

And what of Eads, the archetypical engineer-entrepreneur? He may not have realized any profit at all from his enormous efforts. When one recalls the amounts paid to defense contractors in recent times for such humble items as bolts, hammers, and toilet seats, the mind fairly boggles at Eads’s selfless achievement.

With the first batch of boats in action, Eads went on to design and build seven more armored gunboats, including several “monitors,” for the river navy. These incorporated numerous ordnance innovations, such as improved turret mountings, which he patented. Eads also planned and oversaw the conversion of seven transports into lightly armored “tinclads” and built four heavy mortar boats. Before all this was completed, he became quite ill, but he managed to pull through, and by war’s end he was fit again.

Eads’s engineering feats were hardly at an end. Starting in 1867, he planned, designed, and supervised construction of the first bridge across the Mississippi, completed at St. Louis in 1874. This magnificent steel and masonry structure, with a center span of 520 feet and one of its piers based 136 feet below high water, stands today near the city’s famous arch as a fitting memorial to a great engineer.

The Eads Bridge was not the last of his major accomplishments along the Mississippi. He also devised and carried out a plan to clear one of the mouths of the river, at New Orleans, and maintain a channel, a task completed in 1879. All of Eads’s projects, going back to his snag-boat and salvage days, required an intimate knowledge of the river and its behavior—the endless variety of its currents and its ever-shifting physical landscape. Eads was not a civil or mechanical or naval engineer but rather a Mississippi River engineer.

From 1880 until his death in 1887, Eads finally turned his attention away from the great river and worked tirelessly on a plan to build a ship-carrying railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico. The project would have made possible a route 2,000 miles shorter from coast to coast than the one through Panama, but despite Eads’s strenuous efforts, he could never arrange the necessary funding.

In August 1863, after the fall of Vicksburg gave the Union complete control of the Mississippi, Lincoln remarked, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” These words foreshadowed a growing popular sense that Federal victory in the West was the real deathblow to the rebellion. Without Eads’s ironclad gunboats this victory would have been far more difficult. Indeed, it might not have been won at all.

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For more on Civil War ironclads, see <i> The Old Steam Navy, Vol. 2: The Ironclads, 1842-1885</i> , by Donald L. Canney (Naval Institute Press, 1993).