Civil War Lincoln Welles Navy Commodore Senator Signed Document Boston 1862 Rare For Sale

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(1799 – 1889)

When Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States, he appointed Welles as his Secretary of the Navy. On the outbreak of the American Civil War Welles was responsible for implementing the Anaconda Plan. He gradually built up a fleet that was able to guard the South's 3,500 miles of coastline. With the support of the outstanding naval commander, David Farragut, Welles was able to gradually impose a naval blockade that isolated the South from the rest of the world. Welles resigned from office in 1869 and was highly critical of President Andrew Johnson and his reconstruction policies.

The document measures 8” x 10” and is in VERY GOOD CONDITION - An UNCOMMON AUTOGRAPH - APPEARS MUCH NICER THAN THE SCANNED IMAGES &Would look great framed with a period 19th century engraving of Welles!

An Excellent Piece of Union Militaria!

A RARE ADDITION TO YOUR HISTORICAL-POLITICAL-CIVIL WAR AUTOGRAPH & MANUSCRIPT COLLECTION!

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE HONORABLE GIDEON WELLES

Welles, Gideon (1 July 1802-11 Feb. 1878), journalist, diarist, and secretary of the navy, was born in Glastonbury, Connecticut, the son of Samuel Welles, a shipbuilder and merchant in the West Indies trade, and Anne Hale. Welles studied law with William W. Ellsworth in Hartford, Connecticut, but never practiced. In 1835 he married his cousin Mary Jane Hale. They had nine children, three of whom survived to adulthood.

In 1825 Welles became acquainted with John M. Niles, editor and proprietor of the Hartford Times and Weekly Advertizer, who espoused Andrew Jackson as the coming political figure in the nation. His opinion on states' rights, banking corporations, free trade, and hard money appealed to Welles, who joined Niles's publishing venture and soon gained a reputation for his support of Jackson and his attacks on the John Quincy Adams administration. He was elected to the Connecticut General Assembly in 1825 and served another term in 1835. That year he was elected state comptroller.

In 1846 Welles became the first civilian bureau chief in the Navy Department, responsible for the department's supply of provisions and clothing during the Mexican-American War. Though an honest and capable administrator, the Whig triumph of 1848 resulted in his dismissal.

Welles and Niles became involved in the antislavery movement that gained renewed impetus after the Wilmot Proviso debates in Congress, which made a resounding political statement for free soil in the Mexican cession after the peace treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Both men supported Martin Van Buren and the Free Soil ticket in 1848, Niles openly and Welles, still a jobholder in Washington, covertly.

Under pen names Welles wrote editorials or public letters for such journals as the New York Evening Post and the antislavery National Era in Washington. An opponent of the Compromise of 1850, he denounced the Fugitive Slave Act in the compromise on constitutional, political, and moral grounds. Nevertheless, he supported Franklin Pierce, the Democratic party nominee in 1852, and hoped that Pierce, if elected, would not adhere strictly to the party platform that accepted the compromise. As president, Pierce did not oppose the expansion of slavery. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 threw the territories open to popular sovereignty and the Hartford Times along with the Democratic organization in the state supported that legislation, Welles and Niles broke with the party and the paper and joined the new Republican party.

To give wider currency to the new party, Welles and Niles established the Hartford Evening Press. Welles became its first editor. He also ran for governor of the state on the Republican ticket in 1856 but was defeated.

After the election of James Buchanan as president, Welles condemned his administration for its Kansas policy, the Dred Scott decision, and the upsurgence of nativism, whose intolerance he had opposed over many years. Appointed a member of the Republican party's executive committee, he devoted himself to planning for the campaign of 1860. He advocated the publication and distribution at the party's expense of Hinton Helper's antislavery tract, The Impending Crisis of the South (1857).

By now Welles had gained a large following among Republican party leaders, especially in New England. As a result, he was pushed for a cabinet position when the party won the election of 1860. President Abraham Lincoln appointed him secretary of the navy on 4 March 1861.

When Welles took over the Navy Department, he was immediately faced with the loss of more than half of the officer corps, 300 of whom resigned or were dismissed for disloyalty. The Union fleet consisted of forty-five ships, most of which were obsolete. Only twelve vessels were ready for service. The navy was, therefore, unprepared to implement Lincoln's blockade of the southern ports. To make matters worse, Lincoln's attempt to placate Virginia before Fort Sumter resulted in the loss of the Union's best-equipped naval base at Norfolk, Virginia.

Welles moved rapidly to expand the navy. He initiated development of a river fleet that would assist the Treasury Department's internal blockade of the Confederacy as well as cooperate with the army in joint operations. Before northern shipyards could begin to build new vessels, Welles sought merchant shipping that could be quickly converted into gunboats and other auxiliary vessels. He dealt with his brother-in-law George D. Morgan, a New York merchant who purchased ninety vessels, and the Massachusetts magnate John Murray Forbes (1813-1898), who acquired ten more. Morgan drove hard bargains with ship owners and no doubt saved the department large sums, but he received commissions that amounted to $70,000 and that prompted a congressional investigation. Welles was not accused of any wrongdoing, but the unfavorable image fixed on him of a sleepy Rip Van Winkle was long the subject of cartoons.

Welles was fortunate to have associated with him a dynamic former naval officer, Gustavus Vasa Fox, first as chief clerk and ultimately assistant secretary. His staff also included a capable administrator, William Faxon, a business associate on the Press. In all, the navy purchased or had constructed 313 vessels, about one-half of its fleet, and bought or leased another 184 ships from private parties and the War and Treasury Departments. Personnel increased from 7,600 officers and men to 51,500 in 1865.

Welles complemented the navy's expansion program with a comprehensive study of naval strategy, setting up what was called the "Committee of Conference." The committee produced four "Memoirs" that analyzed the blockade problem, divided the southern Atlantic Coast into operational theaters, and recommended where specific lodgments be made. The job required the blockade of the outer coastline and inner bays from the Virginia capes to the Rio Grande.

First fruits of the committee's recommendations were the army-navy capture of the Hatteras forts on 28 August 1861 and Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont's seizure of the harbor of Port Royal, South Carolina, on 7 November 1861. On 6 February 1862 the navy silenced the batteries of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Two days later a joint army-navy expedition seized Roanoke Island, which dominated Albemarle Sound. On 16 February the army and navy cooperated in the capture of Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River in Tennessee, and they captured Island Number 10 in the Mississippi on 7 April 1862. The Union navy now controlled most of the inland waterways off the Confederacy's Atlantic Coast, the Tennessee River, the Cumberland River, and much of the Mississippi River. Although the blockade was never completely effective, it did cut off a major source of foreign munitions and other contraband supplies.

The committee also recommended that a squadron already operating in the Gulf of Mexico be made the core of another joint army-navy assault on New Orleans. By the end of 1861 the Navy Department had completed planning for this operation. Welles selected David G. Farragut to head the expedition. On 25 April 1862 Farragut ran the forts that guarded the approaches to New Orleans and captured the city. The army then took control. After the successes of the Port Royal, Fort Henry, and New Orleans expeditions, public and political criticism of Welles diminished, though it never completely ended.

The engagement between the Union ironclad Monitor and the Confederate ironclad Virginia on 9 March 1862 that ended the threat posed to the wooden Union fleet also solidified Welles's status within the Lincoln administration. However, the failure of the ironclads to capture Charleston in 1863 led to attacks on his department in Congress.

By the war's end Welles had been primarily responsible for building a navy second only to that of Great Britain. He had also reorganized the department, improved significantly contract administration, and established an academy of science, the forerunner of all government-sponsored research agencies.

As a cabinet member, Welles gave complete support and loyalty to Lincoln on broad policy measures. He retained, however, much of his Democratic political views. Though he backed emancipation, he was decidedly conservative on extending full civil rights to the former slaves. An ardent believer in states' rights, he insisted such legislation must be left to the states. His views on Reconstruction were similar to those of Andrew Johnson. Welles consulted on many of Johnson's veto messages and consistently approved of his stand against Congressional Reconstruction.

Welles is best known as a diarist. His voluminous journal, kept from 10 August 1861 until 6 June 1869, is the most comprehensive account available for the Lincoln and Johnson administrations. This document and the essays he wrote in retirement present a vivid though intensely personal record of the Civil War and Reconstruction. At the close of Johnson's administration, on 4 March 1869, Welles returned to Hartford, where he resided until his death there.

Bibliography

The Library of Congress has the major collection of Welles's papers, but significant additional collections are at the Connecticut Historical Society, primarily in the John M. Niles Papers; the New York Public Library; and the E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., which has portions of Welles's manuscript diaries for 1846, 1848, and 1860. The manuscript Welles diary, 1862-1869, is at the Library of Congress. First published as Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy under Lincoln and Johnson under the direction of John T. Morse (3 vols., 1911), it has been published and edited by Howard K. Beale and Alan Brownsword in a critical edition with the same title (3 vols., 1960). Welles's essays are available in published form in the Galaxy 10-14 (1870-1877); and in his Lincoln and Seward (1874). Two modern biographies of Welles are Richard West, Jr., Gideon Welles: Lincoln's Navy Department (1943), and John Niven, Gideon Welles: Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy (1973). A shorter version of Welles's career is in Paolo E. Coletta, ed., American Secretaries of the Navy, vol. 1, 1775-1913 (1980). Valuable material on Welles's administration of the Navy Department may also be found in Charles O. Paullin, "Half Century of Naval Administration in America: The Navy Department during the Civil War," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings (Dec. 1912), no. 1, no. 2, Mar. 1913. Substantive obituaries are in the Hartford Times and the New York Tribune, both 12 Feb. 1878, which may be supplemented by Gustavus Vasa Fox, Manuscript Diary, 12 Feb. 1878, in the New-York Historical Society. [SOURCE: American National Biography]

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