James B. Eads

Between the election and the inauguration of Lincoln, Eads and three other prominent citizens of Saint Louis wrote a letter to him, expressing their fears that an attempt at secession would be made, and urging the policy of having a secretary of state from one of the slave States. And they recommended, for "purity of character, stern integrity, exalted patriotism, and enlightened statesmanship," Edward Bates, born in Virginia, married into a South Carolina family, and long resident in Missouri. A first draught of this letter is in Eads's handwriting. When the new cabinet was formed, Bates, a personal friend of Lincoln's as well as of Eads's, was given a position in it, that of attorney-general. It was he who, three days after Sumter was fired on, wrote the letter, already quoted, telling Eads to expect a telegram calling him to Washington for consultation on the best method of defending and occupying the Western rivers. Eads himself was by this time no believer in a defensive policy for the government. After Sumter he had already written to Bates advocating determined and vigorous measures. So, when the telegram soon followed the letter, he was glad to hasten to Washington in order to be of use. There he was introduced to the Secretary and to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

The importance of controlling the Mississippi River was well seen by the great strategist, Lincoln, who called it "the backbone of the rebellion"—"the key to the whole situation." If it could be held by the government, the Confederacy could neither move its troops up and down it, nor—thus cut in half—could it bring over from Texas and Arkansas the many men and the quantities of food greatly needed by its armies east of the river. Realizing this, the Confederacy was already beginning to fortify the Mississippi and the Ohio with its branches. To dislodge the rebels Bates proposed a fleet of gunboats. The Secretary of War, however, thinking this idea of gunboats either useless or impracticable, showed at first no interest in the plan. But at the request of the Secretary of the Navy, who realized the importance of the subject, Eads prepared a statement of his views, embodying Bates's project. In it he also suggested, besides the best kind of boats for the service, batteries, to be erected at several points. Commodore Paulding, on reading this statement, at once reported in favor of it. Suddenly, the Secretary of War, when he saw that the scheme was coming to something, claimed jurisdiction over the whole matter, but finally he agreed to order the same officer already appointed for the purpose by the Navy to go west with Eads and purchase vessels to be armed. All necessary approvals having been made, the two went to Cairo, where they examined the Benton, one of the former snag-boat fleet. Afterwards Eads proposed the strong and swift Missouri River steamboats. But neither of these suited his colleague, who at last went to Cincinnati, and buying three boats there, armed them himself: and very useful boats they were.

The gunboat scheme had been first proposed in April; it was now June, and excepting these three wooden boats, nothing seemed to have come of it. So in July the quartermaster-general advertised for bids for ironclad gunboats. In 1861 ironclads were a rather new thing. France and England had a few of them, but at the time the Merrimac was begun no ironclad had been finished in America. On August 5, when the bids were opened, that of Eads was found not only to be the lowest, but to promise the quickest work. On August 7 the contract was signed for seven gunboats to be delivered at Cairo on October 10,—sixty-four days later. This contract, it has been said, would under ordinary circumstances have been thought by most men impossible to fulfill. And the circumstances then were anything but ordinary: it was a time of great financial distress; in the border slave States the pursuits of peace were interrupted; all was in turmoil and confusion; rolling-mills, machine-shops, foundries, forges, and sawmills were all idle, and many of the mechanics had gone to the war. The timber for the boats was still growing in the forests; the iron was not yet manufactured. And so short was the time that two or three factories alone, no matter how well equipped they might be, were not to be depended upon. Yet Eads had undertaken to start up the factories, to gather the materials, and to build his boats in two months. Never were the self-reliance and the energy of the man better exhibited; but his keen business sense might have hesitated, had not his patriotism shown him that the Union needed the boats quickly.

Most of the machine-shops and foundries of Saint Louis were at once set to work night and day; and for hours at a time the telegraph wires to Pittsburg and to Cincinnati were in use. Twenty-one steam-engines and thirty-five boilers were needed. Prepared timber was brought from eight different States, and the first iron plating used in the war was rolled not only in Saint Louis and Cincinnati, but in small towns in Ohio and Kentucky. Within two weeks 4000 men were at work in places miles apart,—working by night and seven days a week. To the workmen on the hulls who should stick to the task till it was done Eads promised a "handsome bonus;" and in this way gratuitously paid out thousands of dollars. The building of this little fleet has been called "a triumph of sagacity, pluck, and executive ability unsurpassed by any exploit in the military or civil history of the times."

To be sure, the seven boats were not finished at the time called for. That they were all launched within a hundred days of the signing of the contract is amazing enough, but if they had been built after designs of Eads's own, so that he would not have been delayed by sudden changes necessitated when he found weaknesses in the plans furnished him, or when the designer changed the specifications, and if the government, harassed and driven as it then was, had been able to pay him according to its part of the contract, there is little doubt that he would have had the vessels finished in time according to his agreement. Even as it was, it was legally decided later that he was not at fault. When he entered into the contract he was a rich man; and as he was not to receive his first payment from the government for twenty days, probably only a rich man could have had the credit necessary to put so much machinery into motion. As it proved subsequently, the government was so lax in its payment, and demanded work so much more expensive than the specifications called for, that before the work was finished Eads was in a hard way financially. He had been much worried and distracted in obtaining funds: after exhausting his own fortune he had sought the aid of patriotic friends, and it was principally in order to pay them back that he made his appeal to the government. By the terms of his contract he might have delayed the work until his payments were received, and might thus have saved himself great distress and worry, but, as I have said, he realized how much the Union needed the boats. He himself said that it was "of the utmost importance that these boats should be made as effective as possible, without reference to how I was to be affected by delays, … and that their completion should be pushed with the utmost energy, whether the government failed in its part of the bargain or not." Their rapid completion then was a proof not only of Eads's masterful energy, but of his self-sacrificing patriotism as well. Ultimately he was paid most of the money for the gunboats, and as a result of his patriotism won back the fortune he had risked; but at the time of course it hampered him intolerably to be without funds. He had, besides, other difficulties to contend with. At least one of his sub-contractors or head-workmen was a disappointed bidder for the gunboat contract, and was on a salary which ran till the boats were finished; and while Eads would not mention such a suspicion in public, he suggested in a private letter that this had been an additional cause of delay.

After all, the seven boats had been launched and were ready to be put into commission by Flag-Officer Foote, before he had more than one third of the necessary crews ready for them.

These seven, the Saint Louis (afterwards De Kalb), the Cairo, Carondelet, Cincinnati, Louisville, Mound City, and Pittsburg, were all alike. The Saint Louis, as Eads wrote to Lincoln, when he sent him a photograph of her, "was the first ironclad built in America.... She was the first armored vessel against which the fire of a hostile battery was directed on this continent; and, so far as I can ascertain, she was the first ironclad that ever engaged a naval force in the world." In reading the descriptions of them, and in reading in the naval histories of their undeniable faults, it must be remembered that Eads "had no part in the modeling of these boats, and is therefore relieved of all responsibility as to their imperfections." They were 175 feet long, 51½ feet beam. Their flat sides sloped upward and inward at an angle of about 35°, and the front and rear casemates corresponded with the sides, the stern-wheel being entirely covered by the rear casemate. It was a large paddle-wheel, placed forward of the stern so as to be protected. The whole thing was like a tremendous uncovered box, with its sides sloping up and in, and containing the battery, the machinery, and the paddle-wheel, while the smoke-stacks and the conical pilot-house stuck up out of the top. Captain Mahan says that they looked like gigantic turtles. Underneath the water, they were simply like flat-bottomed scows. As they were intended always to fight bows on, they were built with that in view. In front they were accordingly armored two and a half inches over two feet of solid oak. The only other armor they carried was abreast of the boiler and engines. The stern, therefore, and the greater part of the sides were decidedly vulnerable. Their armament consisted of three guns forward, four on each broadside, and two at the stern.

When Eads was given a chance to alter a boat from his own designs, he made it a much better one than these. It was a boat ordered by General Fremont in September, 1861, in excess of the government appropriation for the river fleet. This was the same snag-boat which three months before had been suggested for alteration by Eads, and refused by the army's agent. In this case, as in so many afterwards when Eads knew himself to be right, he stuck persistently to his own opinion; and out of the heavy old boat, despised and objected to by so many persons, he fashioned the "old war-horse," the Benton, which, slow as she was, Spears, the naval historian, calls the most powerful warship afloat at that date. As a snag-boat, formerly used by Eads, she had "had two hulls so joined and strengthened that she could get the largest kind of a cottonwood tree between them, hoist it out of the mud, and drag it clear of the channel." These hulls were now joined together; and while the boat was armored on the same general plan as the seven contract gunboats, she was so much more completely iron clad as to avoid the danger that they were exposed to of having their boilers burst and great damage and death caused thereby. Her tonnage was twice that of the others; her size about 200 by 75 feet. She was entirely iron clad. In her gun-deck casemate the twenty inches of timber under the plating had "its grain running up from the water instead of horizontally, by which means [wrote Eads] a ball will strike, as it were, with the grain, and then be more readily deflected. On the same principle that a minie ball will penetrate five inches of oak, crossing the grain, while it will not enter one inch if fired at the end of the timber." This detail illustrates the care and interest with which Eads built his boats.

The eight of them, Captain Mahan says, "formed the backbone of the river fleet throughout the war," and "may be fairly called the ships of the line of battle on the Western waters." He speaks also of their "very important services." This is milder praise than has been given them. Commander Stembel said that he had heard them called equal to 5000 men each; Boynton, the naval historian, goes so far as to say that the permanent occupation of the South was rendered possible by the ironclad navy of the Western waters. Though the naval battles in the Atlantic were perhaps more brilliant, he says, none, unless that between the Merrimac and the Monitor, had more important results. Eads has been called as potent as a great general in clearing the upper Mississippi. He did not, to be sure, build the entire gunboat fleet, but he did build, as Captain Mahan says, the backbone of it; and that the praises for that fleet, which I have quoted, are not altogether extravagant, is further shown by the comments of Mr. John Fiske. He says, "While it was seldom that they ["these formidable gunboats"] could capture fortified places without the aid of a land force, at the same time this combination of strength with speed made them an auxiliary without which the greater operations of the war could hardly have been undertaken."

These eight boats figured in many a fight on the great river and its branches. They "were ever where danger was." A month and more before the Merrimac and the Monitor were finished, the important capture of Fort Henry "was a victory exclusively for the gunboats." It was the Carondelet that ran the gauntlet past Island Number 10, a feat as full of romance and daring as any that the Civil War tells us of. And these things were done with vessels still unpaid for and the personal property of their builder. Their usefulness was a great satisfaction to Eads, and he rejoiced, as he wrote to Foote, with "the prideful pleasure of the poor armorer who forged the sword that in gallant hands struck down the foe."

When the Benton left her dock for Cairo, Foote requested Eads to see her there in safety. Eads, who was so deeply interested in his boats that on another occasion he was narrowly prevented from going into action with one of them, gladly agreed. Before long the Benton grounded. As Eads was merely a guest, and as there were naval officers aboard, he did not feel called upon to interfere with any suggestions. But after the officers and crew had labored all night trying to float her, then with his aptitude for emergencies he used his scientific knowledge to suggest another scheme. The captain at once gave him leave to command the entire crew, and by means of hawsers tied to trees ashore and then strongly tightened, the vessel was floated. In this case the old river man knew more than the naval officers.

In April, 1862, the Navy Department called Eads to Washington to make designs for more ironclads,—or rather boats made wholly of iron. These were to be of very light draught and turreted. He submitted plans for boats drawing five feet. The department insisted on lighter draught, but still on heavy plating. So he revised his designs once, and then once more. Finally the draught was reduced to only three and a half feet. Eads has himself described his going back to his room in the hotel, and in a few hours making over his designs. When these boats were finished they were found to draw even less than had been contracted for, so that extra armor was ordered for them, and three of them exceeded the contract speed. At first two boats were ordered, later four others. For the turrets Eads submitted designs of his own, but as it was then only a month after the Monitor's fight, Ericsson's turrets were insisted on for the first two boats, although modifications were allowed. As the other four had two turrets each, Eads was allowed on two of them to try one turret of his own, with the guns worked by steam, on condition of replacing them at his own cost with Ericsson's in case of failure. This was the first manipulation of heavy artillery by steam. The guns were fired every forty-five seconds, or seven times as fast as in Ericsson's turrets.

In addition to the fourteen gunboats, Eads also converted seven transports into musket-proof "tinclads," and built four mortarboats. "Such men," says Boynton, "deserve a place in history by the side of those who fought our battles."

The career of some of the gunboats subsequent to the war is interesting. In 1880 the Chickasaw and the Winnebago, which were two of the six iron boats, and both of which took part in the naval campaign at Mobile, had come into the hands of Peru; and old as they were, they were used very effectively against some of the larger and more modern boats of the Chileans.

During those trying war times all of Eads's tremendous energy had by no means been exhausted by the gunboats. In more ways than one he had been showing himself a good citizen and a kind-hearted man. Much as his fortune had been drained by the boats, he still found money to give to the sufferers in the war. Out of a belated partial payment on the Benton he at once sent money to Foote for use in relief work, and with characteristic persistence he sent several letters and telegrams to make sure of the money's arriving. A month or so later he sent a check from Washington to Saint Louis to the Sanitary Commission, asking that its receipt might not be made public. In the letter sent with this he speaks of the war as "an accursed contest between brothers," but adds that the "cause is most worthy of the sacrifice." From the niece of the Secretary of the Navy we also find a letter of acknowledgment of money to be used in relief. But it was not only to the soldiers that he showed his tenderness: to Foote, the gallant "Christian commander" of his fleet, he sent various friendly gifts when that brave man lay dying,—grapes from his own vines, a portrait he had had painted of his friend. And even to those on the other side he showed an unusual consideration. Towards the end of the war there seemed to be no means of feeding the many refugees in Saint Louis but by levying a tax upon Southern sympathizers. Eads, who foresaw what bitterness such a course would produce, offered, in the name of a bank in which he was a director, $1000 to start a subscription to be used instead, and the invidious assessment was never levied again.

To his personal friends he was always generous and thoughtful, sending them many presents, defending them from misrepresentation, and helping them in their chosen careers. By means of his influence and tact he procured the release of an indiscreet person who had talked himself into McDowell's College prison as a suspected enemy to the government. Giving to others seemed a trait in Eads's character which afforded him an intense pleasure; and though a man of great dignity, he used with his intimate friends a charming playfulness and affection. He could be extremely mild in correcting faults; and while he was inclined to bear with others, he could be stern. His manners were rather those one expects in a European gentleman of leisure and high breeding, than in a former steamboat clerk and a man who had worked hard most of his life. His hospitality was princely. In his large house in the suburbs of Saint Louis he received not only the young friends of his five daughters and his own friends, but also officers of the river fleet and of the army, officers sent west on inspection duty, and foreign officers following the course of the war and of the improvements in gunboat building.

His mind was as active as his heart was generous, and the course of his life mirrored that activity. Now he was at home, now in Washington, now at Cairo visiting the gunboats to see how they worked under fire. In Washington he was busy with plans and projects. An intimate associate said of him in his later life that he was always inventing some new gun or gun-carriage; and we may be sure that if he ever was doing so, he was in those war times. Besides inventing his own, he was also busy examining Ericsson's inventions, in making improvements on them, in applying steam in novel ways to the working of artillery and to the rotating and raising of turrets; in sending models of his inventions here and there, at home and abroad, to Germany, where the Prussian minister, a friend with whom he often dined, "wished they could get some of his boats on the Rhine;" having his turrets explained at a Russian dinner in New York or Washington; and receiving from the Navy Department an appointment as special agent to visit the navy yards in Europe. At home he was just as busy. With his house so full of company, he nevertheless found time somewhere for solid reading apart from his work—the Attorney-General sent him Cicero's letters, and he lent the Attorney-General King Alfred's works. There is a curious interest in knowing what two men so engrossed, and upon such necessary duties, were reading at such a time. While he was building the second batch of gunboats, he wrote to Bates in a personal letter that he believed he had the most complete and convenient works in the country for iron boat-building; that there and in other places he had as many as seventy blacksmith fires at work for him, and that his men were all sheltered from sun and rain. After those boats were finished, he went on planning others, and we have a letter from Farragut in which the admiral asks if some of them are not for his use at Mobile.

Eads, by this period in his strenuous life, knew a great many men, all of whom he treated with a uniform dignity and courtesy, even when they were unfriendly, and a few of whom he was on the most intimate terms with. Among all of them he was admired; perhaps already he was as prominent a citizen as there was in Saint Louis, and as it was still in the good old times when the mayoralty there was a high honor to the best men, it was suggested to him that he hold the office. Nor was this the first honor offered to be thrust upon him; early in the war Bates had wanted him appointed commissary of subsistence at Saint Louis, and though it was unusual to appoint a civilian to that position, Lincoln had been willing to do it to oblige Bates,—but Eads had not wished it. More than a year later he was given a commission of lieutenant-colonel by the governor, but he was never sworn in. Like all men in those troublous times, he took a peculiar interest in politics; and on being asked privately in a joint letter from the editors of three Saint Louis papers (two of them German) exactly what his politics were, he replied that he was as strongly in favor of emancipation as he was opposed to slavery, and that he believed in no "kid-glove policy;" but he remarked incidentally that if he were to be offered the mayoralty he should refuse it.

His work was for the whole country. While he was still too much engrossed with his turrets and his plans for new boats, he fell very ill. Indeed there can be no question that he sacrificed his health to build the gunboats. Never very robust, he was now so ill that eight doctors gave him up. His indomitable spirit pulled him through, but he was ordered away from his workshop to Europe, he and his family. His overburden of labor had crushed him,—before this his eyes had been tired out. Bates charged him to take care of himself; "the country can't spare you," he said "and I can't spare you."

Unless Bates was a prophet, we may well think the first of these statements unduly strong. To be sure, when in a crucial moment the gunboats were needed, and needed quickly, Eads's unparalleled haste in building them certainly did an inestimable service to the country. But so far in his career,—and he was over forty,—while he had shown a marked inventive talent, he had not as yet made clear his signal genius for engineering. And although he had exhibited wonderful executive ability and such true patriotism as made him a valued citizen, he had still to render himself indispensable to the development of the nation.

III

THE BRIDGE

Eads was bred to the Mississippi. He had mastered its secrets by hard experience; he had worked in successful opposition to its great wayward forces. But he was not to be content till he had tamed it, till he had saddled it, and, wild as it will always be, had made it nevertheless subservient to him. To his quietly stubborn spirit there was a delightful invigoration in using his brain to conquer the brute force of this capricious monster. For the river is the grandest power between our two oceans. Niagara is more sublime; but Niagara is constant, and therefore its immense strength has been easily set to a task. The Mississippi is so irregular that one tends unconsciously to personify it by calling it tricky. To find the causes of its sudden changes one must go back hundreds of miles to the mountains east and west. Seeming to delight in destruction, it tears down or eats away the checks that are put upon it. Only a mind never discouraged, a mind capable of discovering and comprehending the laws that after all underlie the apparently blind and brutal jests of this untiring giant, can, by the use of those very laws, tame it. And such a mind Eads had. "That everlasting brain of yours will wear out three bodies," said one friend.