to lieutenant commander, and in 1853 he was elevated to the rank of commander. Ward commanded USS Jamestown, a 20gun sailing sloop serving off the West Coast of Africa as part of the Navy’s anti-slavery squadron. In addition to his service at sea, Ward was one of the US Navy’s new breed of academic officers, a scholarly sailor who authored three highly respected treatises on naval tactics, steam power, and naval ordnance and gunnery. In the closing months of his administration, President James Buchanan struggled with what to do with Fort Sumter in South Carolina, which had barely enough provisions to sustain itself until the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln in March. The South wanted the fort evacuated, while sentiments in the North called for it to be resupplied and strengthened. James Ward was of the opinion that he could save the fort using a small flotilla of shallow-draft steamers commandeered from the US Coastal Survey. The plan called for his steamer force to enter the harbor and make a hasty run for the fort. Ward accepted that once his ships reached the fort they would likely not be allowed to escape back to open water, so his sailors would have to become part of the garrison. Buchanan rejected Ward’s idea, believing it would only further antagonize the secessionists in Charleston, resulting in an attack on the fort. Instead, in January 1861 the government secretly leased the Star of the West, an unarmed civilian merchant ship, to transport troops and supplies to the fort, but the ship was forced to turn back when it was fired upon while attempting to enter Charleston Harbor. Upon taking office, President Lincoln was consumed with the same issue. During his first weeks in office, Lincoln conferred with senior military and cabinet officials on the feasibility of supplying the fort. A variety of ideas were proposed, including the possibility of using a non-descript, large commercial merchant ship that could anchor at the mouth of the harbor, where relief supplies would be transferred to a fast flotilla of tugboats that would swiftly dash for the fort under cover of darkness. Having listened to Ward and received the advice of others, Secretary Welles
believed that the Navy could indeed supply the fort, but these notions were again overruled, this time by Lincoln. The new president ultimately did authorize a relief effort, but the rescue expedition arrived too late to do much more than evacuate the garrison. Protecting the Potomac If Ward couldn’t save Fort Sumter, perhaps his idea of creating a small flotilla on the Potomac could help save the capital. Ward envisioned creating a “flying flotilla,” a squadron of relatively small ships, mostly converted tugboats, for use on the Chesapeake Bay and the nation’s gateway river during the Civil War. Ward’s idea was shared with Welles, who this time gave it his blessing. Ward’s proposal came at just the right time. Events in 1861 unfolded quickly. The Confederate States of America was formed on 1 February. Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as the nation’s sixteenth president on 4 March. Fort Sumter was fired upon on 12 April and surrendered the following day. Lincoln called for the mobilization of 75,000 volunteers two days later, and on 19 April he ordered the blockade of much of the southern coast from Texas to the Carolinas. The first state militia troops arrived to defend Washington, DC, on 27 April. Lincoln added the coastline of Virginia to the blockade when that state formally seceded on 23 May. While Maryland officially chose to remain neutral, a large portion of its population living along the Potomac River were southern sympathizers. In the first half of 1861, thoughts of defending the lower Potomac River were largely eclipsed by national events. With most northern leaders distracted by what was going on elsewhere around the country, especially the unsettling talk of secession and of the prospects of hostilities erupting in Charleston Harbor, few were concentrating on the danger to the nation’s capital’s key waterway, sandwiched as it was between Virginia and Maryland, if the war came. Few were focused on the crucial role the Potomac River might play in keeping the federal city open if a sectional war indeed erupted. And, of course, the war began. In retrospect, Admiral David Dixon
Porter characterized the situation at the time by recalling that “the country was too busy watching the black clouds gathering in the South and West to note the ordinary events that were taking place on the Potomac, yet they formed the small links in the chain which, in the end, shackled the arms of the great rebellion.” Contrary to Porter’s recollection, events on the Potomac by mid-1861 had become far from “ordinary,” and luckily someone was mindful of the importance of the Potomac River in the survival of the capital. That person was James H. Ward. Against this backdrop, Ward wasted no time acting. In rapid succession, he assembled his small flotilla and began contesting southern strong points that challenged Union control of the waterway. Just as in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, during the formation of the 1861 brownwater fleet, secondhand or surplus vessels were used initially. During the Civil War, converted tugs and ferryboats assumed the role that leftover World War II craft, such as LCMs (Landing Craft, Mechanized) and LSMs (Landing Ship, Medium), would later fulfill in patrolling Southeast Asia backwaters and deltas. Ward’s little fleet lived up to expectations. It swiftly began neutralizing southern water-borne invasion threats, conducting critical reconnaissance missions, conveying important military dispatches, and enforcing the president’s blockade order of the South. The diminutive flotilla strike force also provided convoy protection for northern merchant traffic on the river. Forming the “Flying Flotilla” On 29 April 1861 President Lincoln wrote Gideon Welles, saying: “You will…have as strong a War Steamer as you can conveniently put on that duty, to cruise upon the Potomac, and to look in upon, and, if practical, examine the Bluff and vicinity, at what is called the White House [named after a white structure located at a landing near what is now Fort Belvoir, Virginia], once or twice per day, and, in case of any attempt to erect a battery there, to drive away the party attempting it, if practical, and, in every event to report daily to your Department, and to me.” This was accompanied by a private note, which observed:
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