… Buying in Great Britain.
"John Murray Forbes was feeling "half ill" and trying to rest in his Milton, Massachusetts, home on Saturday March 14, 1863. But resting was soon out of the question when the railroad magnate and a member of one of New England's leading maritime families received a "brief telegram" from Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. The secretary wanted to meet with him the next day at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan. Forbes, a man who once served tea to John Brown, "could not refuse" and hurried to New York. Without being explicitly told why the meeting was on such short notice, he likely knew it concerned frightening reports on Confederate buying of advanced, powerful warships in Europe.
With Chase, an ardent abolitionist, that day was Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, the founder of Hartford, Connecticut, Evening Press, and the New York-based William H. Aspinwall, the owner of the lucrative gold-hauling Pacific Mail Steamship Company and the builder of the trans-Panama railroad.
While not friends, the four were acquainted with each other. Forbes and Aspinwall came from tightly-knit Yankee families that pioneered America's China trade of tea, silk, and opium. Welles and Forbes met each other during the ill-fated Peace Convention in Washington in early 1861. That winter, Aspinwall had been in Washington discussing a plan with the Buchanan administration and the incoming Lincoln administration to relieve Fort Sumter. He met Forbes then. (1)
When war came in April, Forbes peppered Chase with ideas on how to finance the conflict. His suggestions on taxes and long-and short-term bonds, and short-term Treasury notes for unexpected expenses, were largely ignored. Aspinwall fired off his missives on graft in Navy acquisition to Welles and the energetic Gustavus V. Fox, assistant secretary, with little effect
But Welles, on the other hand, used both men to launch the Navy's war against the Confederacy. They were in the front ranks chartering and buying steamers to blockade Southern ports and to chase down Confederate commerce raiders.
On their own, Forbes, staunch Republican, and Aspinwall, long-time admirer of the cashiered George McClellan, rallied men like themselves into Union Leagues to back the war effort – politically and economically. They also launched Loyal Publication Societies to boost the Union cause. Forbes also threw himself into raising volunteer regiments in Massachusetts, including black troops. Certainly, three of the men in the room – Welles, Forbes, and Aspinwall – saw the United States as a naval power, but one facing the gravest threat in its history from the sea. The fourth man, Chase, had the money to eliminate that threat, the Confederate European shopping spree for oceangoing ironclads.
As Fox wrote to Forbes, "We have not a port in the North that can resist an ironclad over very moderate power." (2)
The Union Navy had escaped disaster in Hampton Roads the year before when John Ericsson's Monitor stalemated the iron-plated, slant-roofed CSS Virginia. They won reprieves later that spring when CSS Virginia was scuttled because its draft was too deep to make it safely to Richmond, and Captain David Farragut's flotilla rushed past the still unfinished ironclads on the Mississippi River to capture the Confederacy's busiest port and largest city New Orleans.
A desperate Congress authorized letters of marque to seize blockade runners bringing war materiel to the South. Even as the blockade tightened, Ulysses Grant marveled at the quality and quantity of the European-made rifles the Confederates carried at Vicksburg. But letters of marque were worthless pieces of paper in keeping European-built ironclads taking to sea for the South. (3)
The Union Army fared even worse on the land. The summertime fears of Washington under siege for the second time in two years had been palpable. After Second Manassas, "the rebels again look upon the dome of the Capitol," and the fears barely ebbed after the Battle of Antietam. Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia were still in fighting form. The two politically-driven, grand Union advances launched in early winter had faltered. The Army of the Potomac was again in disarray following the fiasco at Fredericksburg in December. The Army of the Cumberland had held its own a little later that month at Stones River in Tennessee, but with enormous casualties…"
Full article here.
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What difference which made a couple of ironclads for the Confederation?.
Amicalement
Armand
