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On The Fringe

Starboard Batteries Engaged During the American Civil War, when Union forces blocked Confederate ports, the Confederacy countered by waging guerrilla warfare on Union merchant shipping. One of the most skilled Confederate raiders was the sloop-of-war Alabama. On June 19, 1864, the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the C.S.S. Alabama (foreground) fought off the coast of Cherbourg, France. The Alabama sank less than two hours after the first shot was fired.

During the Vicksburg campaign, sailors from the Manitou of the Mississippi Squadron found themselves grounded on battery emplacements constructed by General William T. Sherman's soldiers. Off the boat for the first time in months, the sailors followed their normal routine. Working with instinctual determination, they re-created their ship on shore. They quickly constructed a wooden plank floor similar to the deck of a ship. Over this, they raised a tent and slung their hammocks. Every morning, to the continuing amazement of onlooking soldiers, they pulled a stone attached to ropes back and forth across their miniature wooden deck until it was declared shipshape. After cleaning, the sailors sat down in their mess groups and ate from nautical mess tables using knives. Amused soldiers who saw this odd re-creation knew they were witnessing a service and brand of men entirely different from their own.

Reactions like these replayed themselves throughout the war. As soon as sailors sailed into port or made landfall, curious civilians, watchful policemen, and mindful Northern soldiers dropped whatever they were doing and gawked. "We are a great curiosity to them," wrote landsman Joseph Fry from Pensacola, Florida, "and they make the most original remarks you ever heard." The Cincinnati Daily Commercial reported that residents of Cairo, Illinois, proved instantly intrigued by the sailors landing in their town. Even though they had witnessed thousands of soldiers pour through their rumpled village, the newspaper reported that the sailors' black-ribboned hats, short blue jackets, and voluminous breeches drew the rapt attention of Cairo's citizens. As one onlooker wrote as he gazed upon a group of sailors working and playing aboard a blockade vessel: "There are characters enough among them to furnish material for a volume."

Yet no volume exists. Even though sailors proved instrumental in the North's victory by manning the blockade and helping subdue the Mississippi River, the Civil War was and continues to be a soldiers' war. During hostilities, politicians, newspapers, and citizens ignored the contributions made by sailors. After the war, sailors enjoyed little of the hallowed glow enjoyed by soldiers. In 1894, a still angry Cornelius Cronin, a gunner on the Brooklyn, grumbled, "The sailors were first in the war, and last out of it; and last 'In the hearts of their countrymen.'"

Without question, the attention to soldiers has been rightly justified. Common Union soldiers did most of the fighting, suffering, and dying during the war. Part of the reason for the neglect was the nature of the naval war. Since the Confederates possessed a small navy, there were, save the Monitor and the Merrimac, no epic battles to memorialize and no myths to mount. Moreover, Union sailors served on the fringes of the war, severed from land, severed from home, and severed from the persistent gaze of war correspondents and politicians. As a result, soldiers garnered the lion's share of attention, and Union sailors languished on the conflict's periphery as oddities, sidelights, or sources of amusement.

More important, common Union sailors—known as "bluejackets" or "Jacks"—never fully registered in the nation's consciousness for two reasons. First, their numbers paled in comparison to the over two million men who served as Northern soldiers; only 118,044 men enlisted as sailors during the war. Second, Union sailors bore little resemblance to the mythical and historical portrait of the war's poster boys, common Yankee soldiers. Sailors tended to come from different segments of society and enlisted for different reasons. They came from the poor and working classes of Northern cities rather than rural towns and farms. Many sailors were foreigners fleeing hunger and economic turmoil and slaves running to freedom.

On a deeper level, the men who enlisted as sailors also possessed a markedly different set of values and ideas. The typical Union sailor was a hard, pragmatic, and cynical man who bore little patience for patriotism, reform, and religion. He drank too much, fought too much, and prayed too little. He preferred adventure to stability and went for quick and lucrative jobs rather than steady and slow employ under the tightening strictures of the new market economy. He was rough, dirty, and profane. Out of date before his time, he was aggressively masculine in a Northern society bent on gentling men.

Overall, Union sailors proved less committed to emerging Northern values and were less ideological than soldiers for whom the broader issues of freedom, market success, and constitutional government proved constant touchstones during the war. Sailors possessed weaker support for the war. Most did not join the navy to save the Union, free the slaves, or prove their courage. Instead, the decisions by sailors to join the war proved more dependent on the practical factors of economic need, ethnic tendencies, class outlook, and race. In short, huge numbers of immigrants, former slaves, and working-class men enlisted as sailors and did so based on individual rather than collective reasons.

Yankee sailors also fought a different type of Civil War. Although they participated in traditional naval campaigns, their wartime experiences were marked by a number of personal battles—with training, with monotony, with officers, and with religion. Many struggled with the bottle. Others violently contested the presence of former slaves who shipped as new sailors. In the process, Union sailors carved out a war, shipboard lives, and a maritime culture that was uniquely their own and unquestionably different.

In general, part of the problem of studying sailors of the past has been that they tended to be peripatetic. They wrote less, moved around more, and left fewer reminders of their presence except for the wonderful lore and stories. This source problem has largely held true for Union seamen except for a couple of critical and fortunate differences. First, the majority of Union sailors were not sailors before the war and as a result possessed sufficiently more education than the typical nineteenth-century sailor. This meant that Union sailors, although they wrote little, probably wrote more than the average sailor. Second, owing to the years many of them spent floating on ships with no respite, many men, who may not have been inclined to write had they had something else better to do, did write because they had the time.

Sailors helped perpetuate the stereotypes by living up to them, as can be seen in the observations of certain valuable "intermediaries" aboard ship, men in service who were neither officers nor sailors. They possessed no formal rank but had constant contact with sailors owing to their official duties. Often they had never previously met or seen sailors. Many were civilians before the war and were not steeped in naval culture and prejudice. They tended to marvel at what they saw and drank deep of the odd and fascinating world of the common Union sailor. The most formidable of these intermediaries were surgeons, chaplains, and paymasters, who took care of sailors when they were ill, heartsick, and broke. Their observations, while harsh, were honest since they dealt with sailors at first hand and without the blurring quality of rank.

Michael J. Bennett. Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War. University of North Carolina Press. 2004.

The Signal Corps The U.S. Army Signal Corps, which began with the appointment of Major Albert J. Myer as its first signal officer just before the war and remains an entity to this day. The Confederate States Army Signal Corps was a much smaller group of officers and men, using similar organizations and techniques as their Union opponents. Both accomplished tactical and strategic communications for the warring armies, including electromagnetic telegraphy and aerial telegraphy ("wig-wag" signaling). Although both services had an implicit mission of battlefield observation, intelligence gathering, and artillery fire direction from their elevated signal stations, the Confederate Signal Corps also included an explicit espionage function. The Union Signal Corps, although effective on the battlefield, suffered from political disputes in Washington, D.C., particularly in its rivalry with the civilian-led U.S. Military Telegraph Service. Myer was relieved of his duties as chief signal officer by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton for his attempts to control all electromagnetic telegraphy within the Signal Corps. He was not restored to his role as chief signal officer until after the war.

Communication

The line of communication is also important to an army. Orders, information, and intelligence information travel along these lines to allow the commander to make timely and effective decisions. In the Civil War, lines of communication were either telegraph lines or individual riders on horseback, known as couriers, carrying dispatches. Information also traveled with supply trains or boats. Commanders without the necessary information are blind; they can only guess where the enemy is and can be led to make disastrous mistakes. So just like the line of supply, the line of communication keeps the army effective. A threat to the line of communication represents a serious danger and must be eliminated.

Large-scale use of the telegraph for military communication began with the Civil War in America. Transmission of information was the responsibility of Signal Corps troops, who sent messages by means of flags or lights. Codes based on numerals were used. Where troops were to be in position for any length of time, high signal towers were constructed.

Far surpassing these primitive visual methods was the "electromagnetic telegraph," used from the first days of war. Alert generals were quick to seize upon this method of message transmission but operation of the telegraph system in the Union army was hindered by red tape from the start.

The telegraph had burst into American life in 1844, when Samuel Morse first transmitted, from the Supreme Court chamber in the capitol to Alfred Vail in Baltimore, his famous words "What hath God wrought!" The advent of this fresh form of communication greatly facilitated the operation of the railroad lines. Telegraph lines ran along the tracks, connecting one station to the next and aiding the scheduling of the trains.

The South, unimpressed by this new modern technology and not having the money to experiment, chose not to delve very deeply into its development. Pity, they would learn to regret it. By 1860, the North had laid over 90 percent of the nation's some 50,000 miles of telegraph wire. The North, as with all telegraph lines, embraced its relatively low cost and ease of construction.

The telegraph service was a civilian bureau attached semiofficially to the Army. Operators, many of them young boys, remained civilians, while top officers received commissions. Telegraphers accompanied troops in the field but there was constant friction between them and army commanders. The disputes were jurisdictional ones, operators feeling they were responsible only to the War Department, and field officers attempting to keep the civilian personnel under direct control.

Despite such difficulties, telegraph men laid more than 15,000 miles of wire and sent 6,000,000 military telegrams. The Southern troops lacked the organization of Northern telegraphers, but used commercial lines wherever possible. Operators on both sides became adept at tapping enemy wires and taking off confidential messages.

Both sides began encrypting high-level messages to be transmitted on the telegraph. More importantly, for the first time it became possible to collect such messages from the enemy in volume and in near real-time. Further, both sides established cipher bureaus in their respective capitals to work on enemy encrypted messages, one of the early examples of a centralized intelligence activity in the United States.

Behind Enemy Lines This book's stories of espionage, raids and guerrilla warfare provide riveting accounts of the often overlooked heroes and heroines of unconventional warfare during the Civil War and examines how the South - with its daring cavalry and constant struggle for supplies - at times resorted to brutal attacks and bloody guerrilla warfare.

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