At the beginning of the decade of the 1850s, the U.S. Navy was a half century old. It had entered into the era of steam navigation, conducted successful voyages of scientific exploration, pioneered the study of oceanography, and fought with distinction in three major wars. Its personnel structure and policies were the only aspect of its existence that had remained almost totally unchanged since its inception in 1798. It still had no admirals, possessed no general staff, selected its officers through political appointment and patronage, and recruited its seamen from among the denizens of the world’s waterfronts.
In matters of discipline, the Navy’s Articles of War, written and adopted in 1800, could be traced back in an unbroken line of development to the earliest English Articles of War, dated to 1652. The English articles were based on the Magestri Militum, which governed the fleets and legions of the Roman Empire and were derived from the Nomos Nautikos, the ancient Rhodian Sealaw dated to the seventh century B.C.' Thus the 19th-century punishments had been in use for so long that they were referred to, even in legal documents, simply as “the ancient customs of the sea-service.”2
Of the many punishments that had been practiced over the centuries, the American Navy had deliberately avoided the most cruel and revolting examples. Keelhauling, dismemberment, marooning, and other draconian correctives were not practiced in the service. Instead, the overwhelming preponderance of disciplinary offenses were punished by flogging with a cat-o'-nine-tails. Up to 12 lashes could be inflicted for a minor transgression, and from 12 to 100 could be assessed by a court-martial board, with the further customary usage that any number of lashes over 100 could be assessed in lieu of a death penalty if the offenses were capital. The Articles of War mentioned 22 capital crimes.3
Under these circumstances, the number of floggings administered each year in the Navy was quite large. During 1846 and 1847, for instance, the Navy inflicted a total of 5,936 floggings on board the 60 ships then in commission for an average of four floggings per ship per month. The lash was used to correct every imaginable offense quickly, graphically, and usually without any really elaborate or scrupulous legal proceedings.
Because of its starkness, flogging was an obvious target for persons bent on reforming American society in general and naval justice in particular. By the 1840s, the attempts to abolish it had become one facet of a greater movement that concerned itself with conditions prevailing in prisons, insane asylums, and factories; the abolition of slavery; and other retrograde features of American life. In 1850 the reformers scored a major victory, and, by an act of Congress, flogging legally and officially ceased to be a mode of punishment in the Navy.
The naval establishment had tenaciously fought the movement to abolish flogging. It had been an article of faith since Captain Thomas Truxtun’s day, early in the century, that the enlisted personnel of a man-of-war were: “a crew of abandoned miscreants, ripe for any mischief or villainy . . . equally destitute of gratitude, shame or justice, and only deterred from the commission of crimes by punishment. . . .”4 Over decades of service life, officers had become convinced that only flogging could provide a suitable punishment “for the thousands of faults [the men] were daily committing.”5 Even the seamen supported the practice, because it was customary, well understood, quickly over with, and protected the majority of them from the relative handful of true sociopaths that formed a part of every ship’s company.
Flogging, as practiced by the Navy, had the added virtue of being a tremendously flexible punishment that could be inflicted in finely graduated doses. Minor offenses such as spitting on the deck, “skulking,” petty theft, or drunkenness could be assessed 6, 8, 10, or 12 lashes at the mere word of a commanding officer upon complaint by any of his commissioned or noncommissioned subordinates. Punishments of more than 12 lashes could be contrived without convening a court-martial by resorting to breaking an offense down into multiple charges and assessing 12 lashes for each. In this way some commanding officers contrived to inflict 36 or 48 lashes on their own authority whenever they felt circumstances warranted it.
Under these conditions, flogging had become an instrument of great power and simplicity. When it was abolished, the Navy had nothing with which to replace it and, consequently, underwent a five-year period of extreme difficulty. The number of courts-martial, which had averaged 63 per year for the decade of the 1840s, jumped to 127 in 1851. That amounted to a ratio of one naval court for each 78 officers and men in the service. Sentences of naval courts, which had formerly been noted briefly in terms of the number of lashes awarded, suddenly blossomed into long and complex documents stipulating various combinations of ironing, confinement, reduction of rations, monetary fines, and methods by which offenders were to be “dismissed [from] the service.”6 Sub-judicial punishments were rendered equally irregular and complex. Tattooing, branding, and the wearing of signs or badges of disgrace had all been relatively rare before 1850, but each enjoyed brief popularity in the post-flogging era. New punishments such as sweat- boxes, stringing up by the thumbs, bucking and gagging, the wearing of straitjackets, tricing up to the rigging, and prolonged dousing with bilge water were all tried at one time or another.
As a result of these new punishments—unsanctioned and arbitrary as most of them were—morale plummeted and crews became intractable and mutinous. In 1850 some 300 men refused duty and walked off the frigate Brandywine to protest the abolition of flogging, rendering the ship unable to proceed to her duty station at the beginning of a commission.7 Instances of insubordination, defiance of authority, and other irregularities became increasingly numerous. In August 1852, for example, the officers of the sloop-of-war Cyane awoke one morning to find their rigging festooned with “Irish pennants” (swabs and chairs hoisted to the mastheads and yardarms) and the white gunport stripe smeared with coal tar.
A court of inquiry was convened by the commander of the Norfolk Navy Yard “for the purposes of ascertaining the perpetrators of certain acts of indiscipline,” but no charges against specific individuals resulted. Frustrated in their effort to apprehend the offenders, the court used the occasion to launch an inquiry into the general state of discipline on board the Cyane since the burial of the cats.
"Q. [by the court to Lieutenant William D. Hurst] Do you think it is possible since the abolishment of the cats to discipline a man-of-war’s crew?
A. As far as I have had the opportunity of judging and from my experience, I think a ship’s crew cannot be properly disciplined without flogging.
Q. [by the court to Surgeon Solomon Sharp] What were the methods of punishment in use aboard the Cyane?
A. Tricing the men up on the inside of the rigging by their wrists and legs, making them sit on the outside of the rigging, stopping their grog, and confinement in irons.
Q. Are these punishments adequate to prevent offenses in the service? If not, why not?
A. I think they are not, because they are inflicted without proper form and tend to irritate and exasperate the men. . .”
After several of the Cyane’s officers had testified in this vein, the court delivered itself of the opinion that discipline on board was as good as on any other ship in the Navy “and as efficient as it is in the power of the officers, under the present system to maintain. . . .”
“The Court is of the opinion and regretfully reports that the origin of these violations of discipline, is to be ascribed in great measure to the removal of those wholesome restraints which are imposed on the vicious by the judicious exercise of corporal punishment: that the acts referred to were acts of malice and mischief, perpetrated in all probability by dissatisfied and discontented persons, and that the system of punishments, at the present authorized, and in use, is inadequate to maintain good order and discipline in the service, and that in its inefficiency, it tends directly to the fostering of such insubordination and offences.”9
In 1855 Congress finally rectified the problems created by the abolition of flogging when it revised the naval regulations to include a new military tribunal, the summary court-martial. Summary courts were designed to fill the gap that had been created when the abolition of flogging did away with the range of moderately severe punishments that commanding officers used to curb offenses that were serious but did not warrant court-martial proceedings. The summary court system provided an orderly and effective way by which a range of official punishments such as bad conduct discharges, solitary confinement in single or double irons and on diminished rations, long-term confinements to regular cells ashore, losses of rank, pay or liberties, and extra duties could be meted out. These punishments were intended to be the equivalent of a severe flogging; once they were in operation, dependable discipline returned to the berth deck.
No sooner had this storm passed, however, than an equally traumatic crisis developed over the problem of indiscipline and unfitness for duty among the officers. By 1855 the Navy list had become top-heavy with officers who were too old for active duty, prone to drunkenness, or suspected of shirking sea service. The custom of disciplining officers through the mechanism of court-martial had been rendered largely meaningless because the only serious punishments that could be assessed were suspension from duty—sometimes with loss of pay—and dismissal from the service. Over the decades, officers had learned to work with their home-state congressmen so that
any adverse court- martial sentence could be overturned by political influence and pressure on the Navy Department or President. Subjudicial punishment for officers was limited to temporary suspension from duty or confinement to quarters, neither of which was very effective in the crowded ships of that era.
Since promotion was strictly by seniority, a record of numerous disciplinary infractions, or even a long string of adverse court-martial verdicts, was no barrier to advancement. No machinery existed for surveying an officer as permanently unfit for duty or inquiring into his degree of competence, and there was no such thing as retirement. Once commissioned, an officer was entitled to remain on the Navy list and accumulate seniority until he died. If an officer was willing to accept half pay, he could decline orders for active service for 20 or 30 years at a stretch without forgoing promotion.
The result of these omissions was that the condition of the officer corps and the obvious unfitness of many naval officers became a national scandal. Sparked by a group of reform-minded officers led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry and Commander Samuel Francis Du Pont, Secretary of the Navy John C. Dobbin established a special board consisting of 15 active officers to identify all passed midshipmen, masters, lieutenants, commanders, and captains who were “incapable of performing promptly and efficiently all their duty both ashore and afloat.”10 Under the authority of “An Act to Promote the Efficiency of the Navy," passed by Congress in February 1855, men identified as physically, mentally, or morally unfit were to be placed on a “reserved” list with furlough pay, placed on a “retired” list with leave- of-absence pay, or dismissed from the Navy. In his instructions to the Naval Efficiency Board, the secretary emphasized his determination to eliminate undisciplined officers:
“You are required to advance a step further in your examination, and report the names of such officers as you ‘believe’ have become incompetent ‘from any cause implying sufficient blame on the part of the officers to justify’ your recommending them ‘to be stricken altogether from the rolls.’ And on this point I venture to suggest the opinion that an officer is to ‘blame if he has become incompetent from neglect of duty and inattention and indifference to his profession as well as from dissipation and immoral indulgences.”11
The officers of the “plucking board” began their deliberations in June 1855. From the start the board adopted the general procedural methods of the deliberative phase of a court-martial. They were sworn to secrecy, could call no witnesses, did not confront the men whom they were discussing, and kept no official minutes of records or their deliberations. Commander Du Pont did, however, keep a private journal listing all the cases they considered, excluding those of the captains, which sheds considerable light on the way the board functioned. Du Pont’s journal clearly shows that the members had little regard for the requirements of orderly inquiry and occasionally used their power to pursue private feuds and vendettas.
Starting at the bottom of the Navy list, the plucking board’s members considered each officer in turn. If any member had reservations about the competence, sobriety, health, or physical or moral fitness of an individual, he would state his reasons and the rest of the board would discuss the case, usually drawing on personal recollections of the man in question but occasionally consulting Navy Department records. After such discussion, the board voted. If a simple majority voted to dismiss or retire the man, it was so noted, and the board moved on to the next name on the list. Out of some 700 commissioned officers, 415 were passed over in silence while 285 excited some discussion, and 201 were subsequently removed from the active list and placed in one of the alternate categories or dismissed. Among these men were 52% of the Navy’s captains, 40% of its commanders, and 26% of its lieutenants.12
Many of these officers were retired for reasons of advanced age or physical disabilities, but the entire Navy had been kept in ignorance of the board’s methods and criteria for the judgments it reached. Consequently, its findings were unanimously interpreted as reflecting on the “honor” and “morality” of the men being “sloughed over.”
The Navy Department did nothing to alleviate this situation. Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury, for example, was recommended for elimination from the active list on account of a crippled leg, suffered in a carriage accident, which made it doubtful that he could successfully discharge the duties of a senior lieutenant at sea. In a curt official letter, the department informed him that:
“The Board of Naval Officers assembled under the Act to promote the efficiency of the Navy, approved February 28th, 1855, having reported you as one of the officers who in their judgment should be placed on the Reserved List on leave-of-absence pay, and the findings of the Board having been approved by the President, it becomes my duty to inform you that as of this date you are removed from the Active Service List and placed on the Reserved List on leave-of-absence pay.
You are, however, not detached from the Naval Observatory. I avail myself of the authority of the law to direct that you continue on your present duty.”13
Such treatment could not fail to provoke a groundswell of adverse opinion, which quickly became public. The affected officers, their friends, relatives, and political allies launched a tenacious campaign to have the work of the plucking board set aside. Criticism of President Franklin Pierce, Secretary Dobbin, and the individual members of the board grew in intensity, especially in the southern states. Congress reverberated with angry speeches both for and against the board. Finally, in January 1857, a new law, an “Act to Amend ‘An Act to Promote the Efficiency of the Navy,”’ was passed. This gave all officers dismissed, retired, or reserved by the board the right to request a naval court of inquiry where they could show cause why they should not be removed from the Navy list.14
Of the affected officers, 118 availed themselves of this law, and their chances were greatly improved by the fact that the Pierce Administration left office just as the courts of inquiry were being formed. The incoming government of President James Buchanan was much less eager to promote naval reform, especially after the depths of heat and passion stirred up by the Naval Efficiency Board had become obvious. Ultimately, three separate courts of inquiry, each consisting of three captains and a judge advocate, spent the entire year of 1857 sitting in continuous session hearing cases arising out of the controversy.
The records of the deliberations of these courts are not to be found among the normal records of courts-martial and courts of inquiry maintained by the office of the Judge Advocate General of the Navy. We do know, however, that they did not call members of the Naval Efficiency Board to testify, as all their deliberations were secret, nor did they enable the aggrieved officers to confront members of the board in their presence. They also made no effort to secure records or documents of the board, which were likewise secret, and they did not attempt to systematically reconstruct any of its actions.
All that they did do was try to decide independently whether or not an officer appearing before them was fit or unfit for active duty on the basis of individual arguments and evidence brought to their attention by the complaining officer or his representative or the judge advocate. When the arguments were concluded, the court of inquiry reached a decision by majority vote of its members and passed the result along to President Buchanan, who reviewed each case personally and made the final decision as to whether to uphold the efficiency board’s original recommendation or go with the new recommendations of the court of inquiry in case of disagreement.
In this way, 84% of all the officers who challenged the findings of the efficiency board received some sort of mitigation of its verdicts. One quarter of the 61 officers retired were fully restored to active duty, while 38 dismissed or furloughed officers had their status upgraded and some of their pay restored. Perhaps typical of such cases was that of Commander Cadwalader Ringgold, who was dismissed from the service by the board after Commodore Perry had claimed he was “incompetent by reason of insanity.”15 Ringgold challenged the board’s decision, proved his sanity, and won reinstatement. He served competently throughout the Civil War, winning a gold medal for his seamanship in carrying out the rescue of the crew of a gunboat that foundered in a gale in 1863. He retired as a rear admiral.
The discipline and morale of the Navy were seriously damaged by the failure of this badly needed but thoroughly botched effort at naval reform. The reinstated officers took their places again alongside men who had been promoted in their absence, so that the Navy’s rolls were even more clogged than usual. Progressive officers were embittered by the failure of their efforts, while the example of messmates successfully defying official actions of the Navy Department through the application of political pressure and the playing off of an incoming administration against an outgoing one on a massive scale encouraged further insubordination. Grudges and factionalism, the result of the Navy's ingrained thinking in that era, became even more pronounced.
Thus it was that the Navy passed through two separate disciplinary crises during the decade of the 1850s: one involving the enlisted men and one embracing the officers. Both crises had grown out of longstanding problems, coupled with clumsy and badly administered efforts at reform. Under normal circumstances, it doubtless would have taken several more decades for these problems to be resolved, but the purifying fires of the Civil War intervened, and under the impetus of hard campaigning, the Navy made a start at putting its house in order.
1. George Bass, ed. A History of Seafaring (New York: Walker and Co., 1972), p. 139.
2. George Hannay, Naval Courts Martial (London: Cambridge University Press, 1914), Introduction.
3. Naval Orientation (NAVPERS 16138 revised and restricted) (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Naval Personnel, 1945), p. 288.
4. Quoted in Christopher McKee, Edward Preble, A Naval Biography, 1797-1807 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1972), p. 221.
5. Commodore Matthew C. Perry as quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, “Old Bruin," Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967), p. 292.
6. United States Judge Advocate General’s Department, Records of General Courts Martial and Courts of Inquiry of the Navy Department, 1799-1867, National Archives and Records Service, Index volume. (Hereinafter cited as JAG Records.)
7. Charles Oscar Paullin, Paullin's History of Naval Administration, 1775-1911 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1962), pp. 231-234.
8. JAG Records, case number 1399.
9. Ibid.
10. The Henry Francis Du Pont Collection of Winterthur Manuscripts, Group 9, Series A, The Letters and Papers of Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont, The Hagley Foundation Library, Wilmington, Delaware, Document No. W9 18475, Inside front flyleaf. (Hereinafter cited as SFDP Papers.)
11. Ibid and Document number W9 18476. Table is derived from a tabulation of the cases discussed.
12. John D. Hayes, ed. Samuel Francis Du Pont, A Selection of His Civil War Letters, 3 vols. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), vol. I, p. lxiii.
13. Letter, Secretary Dobbin to Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury, 17 September 1855, Quoted in Frances Leigh Williams, Matthew Fontaine Maury; Scientist of the Sea (New Brunswick, NJ; Rutgers University, 1963), p. 274.
14. Ibid pp. 292-294.
15. SFDP Papers, Doc. No. W9 18476, pp. 255-256.