In the Shadows of Victory by Thomas D. Phillips

Author:Thomas D. Phillips [Phillips, Thomas D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military, History, World War I, United States
ISBN: 9781612005461
Google: 3jgbnQAACAAJ
Publisher: Casemate
Published: 2017-09-21T00:43:33+00:00

DAVID PORTER

Porter helped wrest control of the great river systems in the western theater and, working with Grant and Sherman, contributed measurably to the Union victory at Vicksburg. Later, he led the naval component of the amphibious assault on Fort Fisher, “the Gibraltar of the Confederacy,” closing the South’s last remaining port at Wilmington, North Carolina.

The Civil War is rightfully recalled mainly for massive encounters waged across the American landscape from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River and beyond. It was primarily a war of ground combat fought by infantry, artillery, and cavalry deployed in numbers unprecedented in the nation’s earlier wars. Most of the war’s 625,000 military deaths can be traced to those branches of the combat arms of the Union and Confederate armies. Almost all of the war’s famous names are those of generals on both sides. To the extent that Civil War naval officers are remembered, it is David G. Farragut’s name that is most prominently recalled—most often because of his association with a single event and a remarkable phrase: the fabled “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” command during the chaos of the attack on Mobile Bay.

The role of the U.S. Navy is too often lost amidst descriptions of titanic collisions of blue and gray armies. However, while lesser known, the navy’s contributions played an important part in the North’s ultimate victory. The navy’s increasingly effective blockade of Southern ports along 3,500 miles of coastline on the Atlantic seaboard and Gulf of Mexico strangled the Confederacy, shutting down commerce and gradually closing off the flow of war-sustaining materials.

In the interior, the navy’s control of America’s great river systems fragmented the Confederate states and enabled the Union to employ freer movement of men and supplies across theaters of war notable for their vast distances. In the West, particularly, the navy directly supported the combat operations of the Federal army.

At the time the U.S. military establishment had nothing like a Joint Chiefs of Staff organization to plan, coordinate, and conduct combined operations of the nation’s military services. In the Civil War in the West, cooperation evolved with considerable success primarily because of a partnership between two Union leaders: General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army and Admiral David Dixon Porter of the U.S. Navy.

Porter’s name first surfaced, briefly, at the very outset of the war. When the Lincoln administration resolved on an attempt to hold Fort Pickens in Florida as well as Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Porter was one of a small group of strategists who developed a plan to re-provision and retain the Florida post. It is indicative of the internal chaos in the early days of the new regime as well as the general apprehensions of the time that Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, who was concurrently planning the Fort Sumter relief mission, was not advised of the efforts of Porter’s group.

The key component of the Fort Pickens plan involved the use of the steam frigate U.S.S. Powhatan, commanded by Porter, to carry supplies and reinforcements to the fort.

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