Herder Brian Lane - US Navy battleships 1886-98: the pre-dreadnoughts and monitors that fought the Spanish-American War

In 1865 the United States Navy (USN) had boasted one of the largest and most technologically advanced fleets in the world. But with the Confederate insurrection crushed, the USN was aggressively dismantled. The young wartime volunteers were discharged, returning the antebellum USNs aging, reactionary officer corps to prominence. Within two years, the civilian Secretary was returning naval funds to the Treasury. By the 1870s, the USN was a feeble shell of its former self, an object of domestic and international scorn. Junior officers reported professional embarrassment when hosting their foreign counterparts. It would take international events to convince politicians the USN was a national security liability.

In October 1873, Spain captured the American-flagged blockade runner Virginius , which had been illegally smuggling weapons to Cuban revolutionaries. Coincidentally, the Spanish ironclad Arapiles , superior to any US warship, was drydocked at New York at the time. Spanish authorities summarily executed 53 American and British prisoners as pirates, only finally stopping when threatened with imminent Royal Navy bombardment. The decrepit USN had been powerless to intervene. We knew long before that, a young officer wrote, that our so-called naval force wa s a sham.

Despite its vast economic power, the United States foreign policy pretensions would again prove feckless when trying to force a resolution to the 187983 War of the Pacific between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. The Garfield administration was forced to back down because, in the words of an Ohio congressman, the USN had not one ship that could stand 15 minutes against any one of the great Chilean war vessels. In 1882, false rumors that the Chilean fleet was approaching had gripped California in a statewide panic. A US admiral declared, The Chilean navy could have stood three miles beyond the range of the best guns we have at the Golden Gate and dropped 500lb shells into the heart of San F rancisco.

In November 1883, Brazil commissioned the British-built Riachuelo , a modern 5,029-ton steel battleship boasting four 9.2in guns. Alabama congressman Hilary A. Herbert warned, If all this old navy of ours were drawn up in battle array in mid-ocean and confronted by the Riachuelo it is doubtful whether a single vessel bearing the American flag would get into port. Then on April 28, 1885, US gunboats intervening in the Panamanian insurgency suddenly received a frosty visit from Chiles state-of-the-art, British-built 2,950-ton protected cruiser Esmeralda . After USN officers toured the cruiser, an American publication announced, The Esmeralda could destroy our whole navy, ship-by-ship, and never be touched once. The House Naval Affairs Committee declared, We are not only at the mercy of foreign nations, but our neighbor, Brazil, might exact tribute of any city along our Gulf or Atlantic coast while Chile could enforce similar demands on the shores of the Pacific. Increasingly lurid language described Riachuelo and her sister Aquidab leisurely cruising off Coney Island while raining shells on downtown New York. Domestic opposition to a modern, battleship-armed US Navy bega n to fade.

The Brazilian ironclad battleship Riachuelo , seen in 1885. The sudden appearance of powerful South American warships such as the Armada Nacionals Riachuelo and the Armada de Chiles Esmeralda provoked the United States into responding with its own battleships. (Public domain/Wikimedia Commons)

By 1880, the United States Civil War debt had been paid off and $100 million sat in the US Treasury. The following year, President Garfields Navy Secretary, William H. Hunt, convened the 15-member Rodgers Board to study building a contemporary steel Navy. In 1883, Congress approved three small cruisers and a dispatch boat ( Atlanta , Boston , Chicago , and Dolphin ), inaugurating a technological and cultural renaissance that would lead the USN into its current modern era. The virtually brand-new institution that emerged by the 1898 Spanish-American War would informally be called the Steel Navy, or simply the New Navy.

The New Navy also established institutions to further professional development and promote freer exchange of ideas. Officers had already founded the civilian Naval Institute in 1876. Its journal Proceedings provided an open forum for officers and civilians to debate naval issues, free from the trappings of rank or career. The Navy Department established the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1882, followed by Commodore Stephen Luces Naval War College (NWC) at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1884. From this intellectual nerve center, the USN would develop and disseminate its strategies and doctrines for moder n warfare.

Americans had traditionally associated battleships and battle fleets with the imperialist pretensions of European great powers. The United States had never built a modern battleship and had only ever commissioned nine wooden ships-of-the-line in its entire history; these fine vessels had then mostly languished in reserve. American naval strategy had historically emphasized guerre de course wearing down an enemy by destroying its wealth-making commerce. However, American commerce raiding had never proven decisive to winning a war, nor did it protect against an aggressors descent on the United States. The 1883 appearance of Brazils Riachuelo decisively reoriented USN intellectual thought towards active se a control.

On September 22, 1896, Indiana citizens presented the battleship Indiana with a Tiffany silver service and an American flag, seen here. The gifts accompanied Indiana throughout her career, including at Santiago. They are now on display at the Indiana War Memorials in Indianapolis, having been returned to the state in June 1922. (Indiana War Memorials)

The newly accepted theories became most strongly associated with a single 1880s NWC professor, Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan preached that the most efficient way a navy could protect its nation was on offense. A single concentrated battle fleet should be assembled to seek out and destroy its enemy counterpart on the high seas, far from American shores. Afterwards, the enemys commerce could be raided and its coastline blockaded at will. Mahan and his fellow reformers proved successful in converting American politicians to their ideas. By 1889, Secretary of the Navy Benjamin F. Tracy would declare proper US strategy was to divert an enemys force from our coast by threatening his own, for a war, though defensive in principle, may be conducted most effectively by being offensive in its operations. The new strategy required a concentrated fleet of battleships rather than the independently operating cruisers (frigates) of the traditional sailing USN. While expensive, capital ships carry unique prestige as symbols, making battleship names in a federal republic inevitably political. Indeed, 1819 federal law already mandated that all first-class warships be named after the States of this Union, a powerful inducement for battleships by Congress, which operated on state patronage.