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In 1861 the U.S. Navy was redirected from fighting small wars to focusing its energies on the deadliest conflict in American history. This required a buildup of startling proportions. At the beginning of the Civil War, the Union Navy had deployed just 68 vessels. It emerged from the conflict with 626 ships, including 65 ironclads. If it had desired, the United States could have challenged the Royal Navy for command of the seas. But for the time being, America had its fill of martial splendor.
The pacifist mood that so often takes hold after a big war gripped the country again. The army was demobilized, the navy scrapped. By 1881 only 50 vessels remained in the fleet, most of them obsolete hulks. That was just fine as far as the post–Civil War administrations were concerned. One story that gained wide circulation had Rutherford B. Hayes’s navy secretary, upon first boarding a warship, exclaiming in surprise, “Why the derned thing is hollow!” Though undoubtedly apocryphal, this tale accurately conveyed the lack of interest in all matters naval displayed by the politicians of the time.
The crabby, conservative naval establishment, riven by feuds between line and staff officers, and run by autonomous bureau chieftains, did not help its own cause by resisting innovations such as steam power and rifled cannons. Its senior officer from 1869 until his death in 1891 was Admiral David Dixon Porter, an aging relic of the old navy forged by his father and the rest of “Preble’s Boys”—a force, it was said, composed of wooden ships and iron men.
As the navy declined, so did the frequency of small wars overseas. In the 20 years between 1841 and 1861, the marines landed abroad 24 times. The next 20 years saw half as many landings—only 12. There was a similar falloff in diplomatic negotiations by naval officers—from 201 in the 20 years before the Civil War, to 101 in the 20 years after. This was related to another trend: While American overseas trade soared in the years after the Civil War, the percentage carried in U.S. flag ships plummeted—and so did the need for naval protection of commerce. Congress subsidized the building of Western railroads as a national priority but did not think the decline of the merchant marine was important enough to warrant much action.
The nation’s attention and energy were directed elsewhere: to the Reconstruction of the South, the winning of the West, and the industrialization of the Northeast and Midwest. What little military activity the U.S. engaged in for the next few decades was primarily directed against Plains Indians who had the misfortune to find themselves in the path of Yankee settlers. After 1890, the year when the frontier was officially declared closed, America’s attention would once again focus on expansion abroad. In the meantime, one of the few expeditions undertaken in the spirit of Porter and Perry was the foray to Korea in 1871.
Korea
Appropriately enough, the commander of this fantastic voyage was the scion of a great naval dynasty stretching back to the service’s early glory days. Rear Admiral John Rodgers was the son of Commodore John Rodgers, who had served in the quasi-war with France, the Barbary Wars, and the War of 1812, and had gone on to become the navy’s senior officer from 1821 to 1839. The family was linked by marriage to the illustrious Perry clan; one of John Rodgers Sr.’s sisters married the brother of Commodores Oliver Hazard Perry and Matthew C. Perry.
Young John Rodgers became a midshipman in 1828 at 16 and learned his trade the old-fashioned way—aboard ship. Unlike most naval officers of his era, he attended college, spending a year at the University of Virginia, but he headed back to sea without graduating. Promotion in those days was entirely on the basis of seniority, so a man could wait decades in rank until someone above him died or retired. Rodgers made rear admiral—a new rank—only after the Civil War, where he distinguished himself as a commander of ironclads in the Union navy. (It was by no means certain which side he would fight for, since his father, the commodore, had been a Maryland-born slave owner.)
In 1870, at age 58, stout and white-haired, having already spent 24 years at sea, Rodgers took over the somewhat ramshackle Asiatic Squadron (formerly the East India Squadron), based in Hong Kong. He had three steam-powered iron gunboats—the Ashuelot, Monocacy, and Palos—along with three wooden ships, the Colorado, Alaska, and Benicia, that combined sail and steam power. The navy still had reservations about the new-fangled, steam-belching monsters, and anyway coal was hard to come by, so captains had instructions to use sails whenever possible and resort to steam only when necessary in battle.
As Perry had opened Japan, so Rodgers set as his objective opening Korea. The Hermit Kingdom was nominally a vassal of Peking but in reality had control over its own destiny. Its de facto ruler was the regent, Yi Ha-ung, known as the Taewongun (“Prince of the Great Court”), part of the Choson dynasty that had ruled the peninsula since the fourteenth century. The xenophobic Taewongun was determined to keep Korea closed to the West. In 1866 he launched a campaign to eradicate Christianity, executing nine French missionaries and some 8,000 of their converts. France sent a punitive expedition, but it was repulsed by the Koreans.
The Koreans generally treated shipwrecked mariners more kindly, returning a number of American sailors safely to China. But in 1866, a U.S.-registered merchant schooner, the General Sherman, was burned and its 27 crew members (mainly Chinese) killed near Pyongyang. The Koreans later explained that the crew had brought this fate upon themselves by entering interior waters without permission, kidnapping a Korean official, and firing into a crowd on shore. This incident nevertheless prompted the Grant administration to mount a major effort to secure from Korea treaties governing shipwrecks and, if possible, trade. Chosen to carry out this assignment were Rear Admiral Rodgers and the U.S. minister to China, Frederick F. Low.
On May 16, 1871, five ships of the Asiatic Squadron, mounting 85 guns and carrying 1,230 officers and men, set off from Nagasaki, Japan, headed for the great unknown—a land where, it was rumored, the natives diced and pickled unwelcome visitors. “Whether this is positively true or not I can’t say,” Marine Captain McLane Tilton wrote to his wife, “but you may imagine it is not with a great pleasure I anticipate landing with the small force we have, against a populous country containing 10,000,000 savages!”
The expedition reached Chemulpo (now Inchon), Korea’s premier port, by the end of May and tried to open diplomatic negotiations. While this was going on, Rodgers sent small boats to do surveying work on the Han River leading toward Seoul. The Koreans naturally took umbrage at foreigners conducting a military survey of one of their most strategically sensitive waterways. On June 2, one of these surveying parties was fired upon by forts on Kangwha Island. The USS Palos and Monocacy promptly returned fire, silencing the fort. Afterward, Minister Low demanded an apology. The proud Koreans refused; they thought it was the foreign barbarians who should apologize. So, in the time-honored fashion of the navy, Rear Admiral Rodgers decided to mount a punitive expedition.
The attack got under way on June 10, 1871, a clear, warm day, with steam launches and cutters landing 542 sailors and 109 marines. The first two Korean forts fell with little trouble. The next day—after becoming the first Western troops to spend the night on Korean soil—the expedition faced its toughest challenge: the hilltop fort known as Kwangsong (“the citadel”). To reach it, the Americans had to race down a hill into a ravine and then back up—straight into the mouth of the Korean cannons. The first man over the parapet was killed, and so was the first who entered the fort, but then the Koreans ran out of time to reload and it became a savage hand-to-hand struggle. “Corean sword crossed Yankee cutlass,” wrote a contemporary chronicler, “and clubbed carbine brained the native whose spear it dashed aside.” The defenders fought valiantly, but they were no match for the Americans, who had much more modern weapons, and less than an hour later Old Glory was fluttering overhead. Virtually all of the 300 defenders had been killed or wounded, or had committed suicide, while only three Americans were killed and 10 wounded. Nine sailors and six marines won Medals of Honor for their heroism.
Having “avenged” this “insult to the flag,” the Americans reboarded their ships and spent three monotonous weeks waiting for the Koreans to answer their requests for trade negotiations. After it became clear that Seoul had no interest in reaching a deal, Rear Admiral Rodgers had no choice but to sail away on July 3, 1871, no treaty in hand.
The Taewongun claimed that the “barbarians” had been repulsed, but the ease with which the Americans had destroyed Korea’s most formidable fortifications gave added impetus to pro-Western modernizers, who toppled him two years later. Japan became the first foreign nation to sign a treaty with Seoul, in 1876; the second was the U.S., in 1882, thanks to the skillful diplomacy of Commodore Robert W. Shufeldt. Commander Winfield Scott Schley, Rodgers’s adjutant, thought in retrospect that the treaty was made possible by the Koreans’ memories of their defeat at the hands of warlike Americans a decade earlier. Perhaps. But the 1871 expedition had at most an indirect influence. And by fostering ill will on both sides, it may actually have delayed the establishment of U.S.-Korean relations.
Panama
The Korean expedition was the second biggest U.S. landing abroad between the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War. The biggest occurred in Panama in 1885. This was the culmination of U.S. landings almost too numerous to list throughout Latin America in the nineteenth century. U.S. sailors and marines landed in Argentina in 1833, 1852, and 1890; Peru in 1835; Nicaragua in 1852, 1853, 1854, 1896, and 1899; Uruguay in 1855, 1858, 1868; Mexico in 1870; Chile in 1891; and in Panama, part of Colombia, in 1860, 1873, 1885, 1895. Many of those countries would see even more numerous American interventions in the twentieth century.
These landings were so frequent in part because U.S. embassies and legations did not have permanent marine guards until the twentieth century; whenever trouble occurred in the nineteenth century, marines had to be put ashore. A familiar pattern developed: A revolution takes place; violence breaks out; American merchants and diplomats feel threatened; U.S. warships appear offshore; landing parties patrol the city for several days; then they sail away. The 1885 landing in Panama differed from the normal pattern only in the size of the landing force, in part a product of the fact that even before the construction of a canal, the U.S. had more pressing interests in the isthmus than in the rest of Latin America.
In 1846 Colombia had signed a treaty giving the U.S. transit rights across Panama. Nine years later, the world’s first intercontinental railroad opened, running the 48 miles from Colón on the Caribbean to Panama City on the Pacific. This became a vital transit route between the eastern United States and California, acquired from Mexico in 1848. The Panama Railroad Company and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which used the railroad to transport mail under a federal subsidy, were both owned by wealthy New Yorkers who got considerably more wealthy as a result of these lucrative ventures. Unfortunately for them, the government in Bogotá always had a tenuous grip on its Panama province. The resulting revolutions led to frequent marine landings.
In 1885 an insurrection elsewhere in Colombia depleted the Colombian army garrison in Panama, leading two different sets of rebels to try their luck. Former Panamanian president Rafael Aizpuru seized Panama City, killing at least 25 people and disrupting the Panama Railroad. Aizpuru threatened “to kill every American on the isthmus.” Meanwhile, a Haitian mulatto named Pedro Prestan, fired by a hatred of all white men, led a small band of followers to terrorize Colón, a small, pestilent town with no proper sewers or bathrooms, garbage piled in the streets, and an abundance of oversized rats.
On March 29, 1885, a Pacific Mail steamer, the Colon, arrived from New York full of arms. Prestan seized six Americans—the Pacific Mail superintendent, the general agent of the steamship line, the American consul, the superintendent of the Panama Railroad, and two officers from the USS Galena, a gunboat anchored in the harbor—and threatened to kill them if the arms from the Colon were not turned over to him. The American consul gave in and told the Pacific Mail company to release the weapons. Upon hearing this, Prestan released his hostages. But Theodore F. Kane, skipper of the Galena, blocked the weapons transfer, leading Prestan to seize two of the Pacific Mail employees once again. The following day, March 31, Kane landed 126 men in Colón to protect American property but, strictly following his orders, he refused to arrest Prestan. Before long Colombian troops also arrived and engaged Prestan’s followers in a pitched battle outside of town, during which the two American hostages managed to escape. Prestan retreated into Colón and set it afire, reducing the town to cinders.
The Cleveland administration had just taken office, and the new navy secretary, a corporate lawyer named William C. Whitney, decided enough was enough. Under the terms of the 1848 treaty with Colombia, he ordered the navy and marines to scrape together an expeditionary force consisting of eight ships and more than 2,000 officers and men. This was pretty much the outer limit of what the U.S. could muster in those days. But it was enough. By the end of April 11, 1885, the expeditionary force had control of the entire length of the Panama Railroad, with marine guards in white pith helmets posted along the route.
The marines next captured Panama City without a shot being fired and arrested Rafael Aizpuru. He offered to declare Panama a sovereign state with U.S. backing, but the expedition’s commander, Rear Admiral James E. Jouett, declined. Nobody had given him orders to carve out a new country. The rebel leader was turned over to Colombian troops, and by May 25, 1885, less than two months after landing, the entire U.S. force had withdrawn. Rafael Aizpuru received only 10 years in exile; Pedro Prestan was hanged by the Colombian government.
While the U.S. had not exactly been isolationist or even neutral—“It cannot be denied that our presence on the Isthmus was of great value to the Government forces,” remarked Admiral Jouett—the Cleveland administration had been determined to avoid a long-term entanglement in Panama. That resolution, harking back to the admonitions of Washington and Jefferson, was now on its last legs.
The New Navy
In the 1880s, the U.S. Navy was sufficient for chastising errant Koreans or Panamanians, but by Great Power standards it was a joke, ranking twelfth in the world in number of ships, behind Turkey and Sweden, among others. One midshipman complained in 1883 that his ship, the Richmond, was “a poor excuse for a tub, unarmored, with pop-guns for a battery and a crew composed of the refuse of all nations, three-quarters of whom cannot speak intelligible English.” During a crisis in 1891 caused by an altercation between some drunk and unruly American sailors and a Valparaiso mob, the Benjamin Harrison administration was brought to the sobering realization that Chile’s navy might be more powerful than America’s.
This was an intolerable state of affairs, and the U.S. did not long tolerate it. The creation of the New Navy began in 1883, during the Chester Arthur administration, when Congress approved the construction of three steel cruisers—the Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago—that had partial armor plating and breech-loading, rifled cannons (as opposed to the smoothbore muzzle-loaders of old), though they also retained sails to supplement their steam plants. Three years later, during the first Cleveland administration, the Maine and Texas, America’s first battleships powered exclusively by steam propulsion, were authorized by lawmakers.
In 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a 50-year-old professor at the Naval War College whose long career had hitherto been distinguished only by his hatred of sea duty and his affinity for alcohol and high-church Episcopalianism, published a work that would define an age: The Influence of Sea Power upon History. It both grew out of, and contributed to, the revolution in naval thinking. Previously the navy had been designed to protect U.S. shipping and the U.S. coastline and, in wartime, to raid enemy shipping. Now Mahan urged the U.S. to match the Europeans in building an armada capable of gaining control of the seas. There was some opposition, including from the complaisant military establishment, but the critics were pounded into submission by the rhetorical broadsides fired by Mahan and his influential friends, a circle that included Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, philosopher Brooks Adams, Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce, and, not least, a rising young politician named Theodore Roosevelt, who displayed his genius for invective by denouncing “flapdoodle pacifists and mollycoddlers” who resisted the call of national greatness.
The navalists’ triumph has been much written about but remains insufficiently appreciated. It was by no means foreordained. In the late nineteenth century the U.S. faced no outside imperative, certainly no major foreign threat, necessitating the construction of a powerful navy. Some historians argue that economic uncertainties—a recession occurred in 1873, a depression in 1893—gave added impetus to military expansion, as part of a search for overseas markets. But hard times could just as easily have led to a contraction of the armed forces and foreign commitments, as they would in the 1930s and 1970s. Instead, in the 1880s and 1890s, Mahan and his cohorts convinced their countrymen that they should propel themselves into the front rank of world powers. The result was the first major peacetime arms buildup in the nation’s history, a buildup that gave America a navy capable of sinking the Spanish fleet in 1898.
If the U.S. was to have a two-ocean, blue-water, steam-powered navy, it would need plenty of coaling depots to supply it. The old sailing navy had enjoyed a degree of freedom from fixed bases that would not be rivaled until the advent of nuclear propulsion. Square-riggers could go wherever the winds carried them, repairing and replenishing themselves in virtually any harbor—even on an undeveloped island like Nukahiva, site of David Porter’s 1813 landing. Steamers, by contrast, needed assured access to coal and modern repair facilities. The search for coaling depots had already been a powerful impetus for colonialism by the European powers, as it was believed that no navy could ensure access to this vital fuel supply unless it controlled its own stockpiles scattered around the world. The need for secure coaling stations would likewise spur American annexations overseas.
The U.S. acquisitive impulse had been building for some time and, contrary to the popular impression today, did not arrive full grown, as if by immaculate conception, in 1898. William H. Seward, the great apostle of empire who served as secretary of state in the Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson administrations, succeeded in buying Alaska and acquiring Midway Island in 1867 after it was claimed by Captain William Reynolds of the screw sloop Lackawanna. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to acquire British Columbia, Greenland, the Danish West Indies (Virgin Islands), and naval bases at Samaná Bay in Santo Domingo (the Dominican Republic) and at Môle Saint-Nicolas in Haiti. Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, in 1869, and Benjamin Harrison, in 1891, attempted to revive plans to buy Samaná Bay and Môle Saint-Nicolas, respectively, but nothing came of it.
The U.S. was more successful in expanding its control over Hawaii. With the signing of a free-trade treaty in 1875, the islands became so closely integrated economically with the U.S. that they were, in the words of one senator who voted for the pact, “an American colony.” In 1887 Hawaii granted the U.S. Navy exclusive use of Pearl Harbor, giving America a strategically vital Pacific base. In 1893, American residents overthrew the native queen and asked to join the United States. The local U.S. consul landed 164 bluejackets and marines from the U.S. cruiser Boston, proclaiming the islands a U.S. protectorate and urging Washington to annex them. The outgoing president, Benjamin Harrison, signed the annexation treaty. But newly inaugurated Grover Cleveland looked this gift horse in the mouth; he withdrew the treaty from Senate consideration. The U.S. would not acquire Hawaii for another five years, by which time America had become a full-fledged imperialist power.
Samoa
America’s deepening involvement in Hawaii reflected its growing orientation toward the Pacific Ocean. As early as 1875 Congressman Fernando Wood had declared, rather prematurely, “The Pacific Ocean is an American Ocean.” Well, not quite. But the U.S. was certainly trying to secure its interests all over the Pacific, and nowhere more so than in Samoa, a chain of 14 volcanic islands conveniently located midway between Hawaii and Australia. These islands, populated by 28,000 people in 1881, became the center of increasingly nasty competition between Britain, Germany, and the U.S. in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
The first U.S. warship had reached Samoa in 1835, but America did not become deeply enmeshed in its affairs until 1872, when Commander Richard W. Meade of the USS Narragansett concluded a treaty with local chieftains that, in return for extending a U.S. protectorate over Samoa, granted Washington the right to construct a naval station at the first-rate harbor of Pago Pago on Tutuila Island. The Senate declined the protectorate, but in 1878 agreed to take the harbor in return for mediating Samoan disputes with outside powers. The following year, Germany and Britain demanded and won similar privileges at other Samoan harbors. Not content with this concession, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck tried to extend German control over the entire islands in 1887 by installing a favored candidate on the Samoan throne. When a revolution broke out, German forces landed, only to be repulsed by the Samoans.
The Cleveland administration was so upset by this act of German aggression, which threatened America’s Pacific flank, that it sent Rear Admiral Lewis Kimberly to Samoa with three warships from the Pacific Squadron. He arrived at the same time as three German warships and one British. All sides were eyeing one another warily when, on March 15, 1889, a mighty hurricane ravaged Samoa, wrecking almost all the foreign warships in the harbor, including the bulk of America’s Pacific Squadron. The war fever was literally blown away, at least temporarily.
Instead of fighting, the three powers negotiated and in 1889 agreed to divide control of Samoa among them, just the sort of “entangling alliance” the U.S. once would have rejected. Nine years later the old king of Samoa died and a civil war broke out pitting the followers of Mataafa, the German candidate, against Malietoa Tanu, the Anglo-American choice. Mataafa gained control of the government—but not for long. Viewing Mataafa’s usurpation as a violation of the 1889 Treaty of Berlin, U.S. Rear Admiral Albert Kautz, aboard the cruiser Philadelphia, coordinated a counterattack with the Royal Navy. In the interest of unity of command, some American sailors were placed under the command of British officers and some British bluejackets were placed under the command of American officers.
On March 13, 1899, an American landing force was put ashore to begin the occupation of Apia. On March 15 and 16, the USS Philadelphia along with HMS Royalist and HMS Porpoise bombarded the area around the towns of Apia and Vailoa, targeting Mataafa’s followers but also hitting, allegedly by accident, the German consulate and a German gunboat. On March 23, wearing an ill-fitting British naval officer’s dress uniform and borrowed canvas shoes, Malietoa Tanu was crowned king of Samoa under the protective guns of the Anglo-American force. But far from surrendering, the followers of Mataafa, the German-backed pretender, fired into Apia from the bush and constantly skirmished with U.S. and British troops. The Anglo-American forces found it relatively easy to operate along the shoreline, where they could be covered by naval guns, but on April 1, 1899, they made the mistake of leaving the safety of shore to pursue Mataafa’s followers inland.
Sixty Americans joined 62 Britons and at least 100 of Tanu’s men on this expedition, commanded by Lieutenant A. H. Freeman of the Royal Navy. They were ambushed by Mataafa’s men firing guns from well-prepared positions in the tall grass. The Anglo-American soldiers put great store by their machine gun; in the past, the Samoans had fled in terror before its bark. This time, however, the Colt gun jammed, Westerners began dropping, and it looked likely that the column would be annihilated. U.S. Marine Lieutenant Constantine M. Perkins organized a desperate rearguard action around a wire fence, holding off the Mataafans long enough for the column to retreat to the beach, where it was saved by covering fire from HMS Royalist. It was only then that they discovered that two American officers and one British officer were missing. The following day the three men were found buried, their heads and ears cut off. In all, four Americans were killed and five wounded in this expedition. Three marines received the Medal of Honor for their bravery on April 1.
The British and Americans continued their sorties and bombardments against the Mataafans until April 25, 1899, when word arrived that Mataafa had agreed on cease-fire lines. An international commission subsequently ended tripartite rule in Samoa, dividing the islands between Germany and America, with Britain receiving compensation elsewhere. The U.S. won title to the island of Tutuila, where the navy set about building a coaling station. In World War I, an expedition from New Zealand expelled the Germans from western Samoa; the islands became independent in 1962. American Samoa never achieved much strategic importance, but it remains part of the United States to this day.
The larger significance of the Samoan adventure is twofold. First the U.S. was abandoning the old strategy of “butcher and bolt”; now U.S. forces were staying in foreign countries and trying to manipulate their politics, if not annex them outright. Normally this practice is known as imperialism, even though Americans, belonging to a country born of a revolt against an empire, are sensitive about applying this term to their own conduct. There is no doubt that at least one American would have been delighted to see this development, if only he had lived so long. The dreams of Commodore David Porter—America’s first, frustrated imperialist—were starting to be realized.
A second and perhaps related point is that American troops in distant lands were now encountering much more substantial opposition than they had in years past, due to the diffusion around the world of Western ideals, such as liberalism and nationalism, and Western technology, such as rifles and cannons. In 1841, Lieutenant Charles Wilkes’s men had burned three villages and killed countless Samoans without suffering any casualties. Fifty-eight years later, Admiral Kautz’s party was almost annihilated by Samoans firing rifles with great accuracy. After a cease-fire had been declared and a weapon buy-back program instituted, the Samoans turned over 3,631 guns. This was the start of a trend: During the Boxer rebellion, German marines would be killed with Mauser bullets and Krupp artillery. America had the misfortune of joining the imperial game just as it was becoming more dangerous.