Gideon Welles - Secretary of the Navy

[Jim Klag]

When the Civil War began, the US Navy possessed only 76 ships. A highly capable administrator, Gideon Welles presided over a massive expansion of the Navy’s size and capabilities. By war’s end, the Navy had used 671 ships and had grown into the largest navy on the planet.

Here is a link to a brief biographical article.

https://connecticuthistory.org/gideon-welles-us-secretary-of-the-navy-and-lincolns-neptune/

 

[5fish]

Welles was next to President Lincoln and his wife was good friends with Mat Todd... Welles wrote several books about his time in office and a diary... I figured they be not properties for historians but no... Why? Maybe they are poorly written...

He spent his remaining years living in Hartford and writing; he authored several books on his years in the presidential cabinets and numerous articles. During this time, he also amended and edited his three-volume diary relating his experiences in presidential cabinets from 1861 to 1869. The diary was not published until 1911 and presents Lincoln as a great leader and statesman “…a towering figure, coping admirably with herculean tasks.”

 

[5fish]

When the Civil War began, the US Navy possessed only 76 ships

Welles inherited an ineffectual and demoralized Navy. Less than half of its 90 vessels were serviceable and these were undermanned with only 1,500 officers and 7,600 enlisted men scattered about the world. When the Civil War broke out, more than 200 officers defected to the South. The Navy was left with gaps in its lines of command and those officers and men from the South who remained were suspect. In addition, the Union’s principal naval facility, the Norfolk Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, was in jeopardy due to its southern location.

The Navy had grown from 45 or so service-worthy vessels to 671 and from 7,600 to 51,000 sailors in just four years, making it a first-class power. Appropriately, President Lincoln referred to Welles as his “Neptune,” after the ancient god said to rule the seas.

 

[5fish]

View as the war ends... https://www.historynet.com/gideon-welles-view-of-war.htm

In the summer of 1864, Welles wrestled with how harshly the war should be prosecuted. “I have often thought that greater severity might well be exercised,” he observed, “and yet it would tend to barbarism. No traitor has been hung—I doubt if there will be, but an example should be made of some of the leaders….Were a few of the leaders to be stripped of their possessions, and their property confiscated—their families impoverished, the result would be salutary….But I apprehend there will be very gentle measures in closing up the rebellion. The authors of the enormous evils that have been inflicted will go unpunished—or will be but slightly punished.”

snip...

On April 10, 1865, Welles celebrated the news from Appomattox: “This surrender of the great rebel Captain and the most formidable and reliable army of the Secessionists virtually terminates the rebellion.” He added, “Called on the President, who returned last evening, looking well and feeling well.” On April 14, Lincoln told the Cabinet that reconstructing the Union “was the great question now before us, and we must soon begin to act. Was glad Congress was not in session.” Welles next saw Lincoln slipping toward death at the Petersen House.

 

[5fish]

His Diary ...

Happily, a new edition of Welles’ wartime diary appeared in 2014. Edited by William E. Gienapp and Erica L. Gienapp under the title The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy, it marks a milestone in the published primary literature. Meticulously faithful to the original document, it renders sections in both earlier editions entirely irrelevant (except perhaps to specialists charting changes between the original manu- script and the 1911 and 1960 sets).

And... https://www.amazon.com/Civil-Gideon...s&sprefix=Gideon+welles,stripbooks,179&sr=1-2

Perhaps the hardest-working member of the cabinet, Welles still found time to keep a detailed diary that has become one of the key documents for understanding the inner workings of the Lincoln administration. In this new edition, William E. and Erica L. Gienapp have restored Welles’s original observations, gleaned from the manuscript diaries at the Library of Congress and freed from his many later revisions, so that the reader can experience what he wrote in the moment. With his vitriolic pen, Welles captures the bitter disputes over strategy and war aims, lacerates colleagues from Secretary of State William H. Seward to General-in-Chief Henry Halleck, and condemns the actions of the self-serving southern elite he sees as responsible for the war. He can just as easily wax eloquent about the Navy's wartime achievements, extoll the virtues of Lincoln, or drop in a tidbit of Washington gossip.