January 2011

For Americans of all ages who are disappointed by today’s mild winters, when a fall of snow turns to slush overnight or is shunted aside by the relentless plow, here is Roxbury, Massachusetts, a century ago, just after a “regular built, old fashioned snow storm.” Past the Norfolk House ( right ) sweeps the great New England sleigh Cleopatra’s Barge . It was named after the first American seagoing yacht, built by George Crowninshield of Salem. Its warmly bundled cargo is pulled by eight spirited grays, their reins in the hands of an accomplished “whip.” “Not for years have we had such a plethora of snow as during the present season,” wrote the editor of Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion , which published this engraving in 1856, “and never did more persons avail themselves of the pleasure of sleighing … on every pleasant day, for weeks, all the roads have been thronged with gay parties, all the hotels in the vicinity crowded with company, and all the stablers made happy by a golden harvest.”

Era of Transition War of the Amateurs Old-Time Army Time of Maturity

What was true on the land was also true on the water. The sea raid was like the cavalry raid. It was bold, eye-filling, inspiring, and in the grand tradition, and it could be done (given the right leader) with the materials at hand. But it did not—in the nature of things, it could not—lead to final victory. Undying legends could be erected on the exploits of a Confederate cruiser like Alabama , which flitted across the seven seas like a destroying wraith, a great ship under a. great captain; but to destroy the Northerners’ ability to go on with the war something quite different was needed—something like the makeshift improvisations that produced the ironclads Merrimac and Tennessee , which could hit the Yankees where they really lived.

Perhaps General William Tecumseh Sherman had caught the idea. It might be going too far to say that he had thought the thing through, but something in him seemed to respond instinctively to the changed condition. He fitted in, where Stuart and Semmes did not. He was no man for the knightly gesture or the grand flourish that both of these men understood so well, but he knew precisely what to do when he came across the enemy’s corncribs and machine shops and he did it without a qualm. What he did finally won the war, but it was not very pretty.

For a firsthand glimpse of it you might read When the World Ended , which is the diary of a seventeenyear-old girl who lived in Columbia, South Carolina, edited by Earl Schenck Miers and brought forward here as an illustration of the unhappy fact that war in the modern world embodies things which the romantic outlook overlooks.

Bear in mind that this romantic viewpoint was by no means confined to the South. It was all but universal, and you can see it in the North as well as in Dixie. It is eminently visible in the history of any of the hundreds of volunteer regiments which wore the Federal blue; very strikingly so, at this moment, in an excellent new book, The Twentieth Maine , by John J. Pullen, which tells how a typical regiment was organized, what it did, and how its members reacted to the whole affair.

George Coggeshall of Milford, Connecticut, was a sea captain in the great Yankee tradition. His father had been a successful shipmaster but was ruined by repeated confiscations of his cargoes by British and French vessels in the years after the Revolution. Young George, too poor to attend school, had been sent to sea as soon as he was old enough to carry a message from the quarter-deck to the forecastle. In 1809, when he was only 25, he received his first command and altogether spent some sixty years of his life at sea.

Like so many American shipmasters, Coggeshall turned to privateering after the War of 1812 began. It was a risky business, but a profitable one if managed right. With regular channels of trade closed by hostilities, it was a financial necessity for most shipowners. During the war years American privateers ranged the oceans of the world from the Bay of Biscay to the China Sea and captured some 1,350 prizes. By 1814 privateers were bagging an average of three merchantmen a day. In fact, they did more actual damage to British shipping than the much-publicized American Navy.