Civil War Navy played critical role, says reenactor

Geoffrey McLean, as Captain Percival Drayton, explains the volume of gunpowder needed to fire a canon during the Civil War. Photos by Janice Steinhagen.

It’s Jan. 9, 1862. The Civil War has been raging for less than a year. Or has it?

Even though history books mark the April 1861 attack on Fort Sumter as the spark that ignited the War Between the States, the U.S. Navy had been engaged in hostilities against the South for five months before Sumter fell.

Geoffrey McLean, portraying Captain Percival Drayton, USN, recently offered listeners a status report of the war at sea, as of Jan. 9, 1862, at Norwich Free Academy. His report, similar to what would be presented to the president or Congress, was fully accurate in historical detail – save for the accompanying PowerPoint presentation.

The talk was part of the Civil War Round Table’s ongoing observance of the Civil War’s 150th anniversary. It’s an anniversary that McLean is observing on his website, www.mcleanresearch.com, by publishing a daily “this day in history” account of U.S. Naval action, encounters and correspondence from the era. His running account of the war aboard ship will eventually become a book, he said.

While the bulk of military engagements during the War of Rebellion (as it was termed in the North at the time) took place on land, the Navy was extremely active on many fronts during the war, McLean said. There were separate blockading squadrons for the North and South Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, as well as squadrons assigned to the Potomac River and to Western waters.

The Navy’s primary goal was to stop the flow of guns, ammunition and other supplies to the South.

That job was made harder by Great Britain’s early sympathy for the rebel cause, as well as by its active trade in Southern cotton to supply the textile mills of England. For some time, England supplied the South with guns and ammunition and actually threatened to enter the war on the Confederate side, said McLean. That, combined with sympathetic overtures to the Union from Russia, could have turned the conflict into the first true “world war.”

At the onset of the war, the Union had a mere 38 vessels, 28 of them in mothballs, McLean said. They were hampered by archaic regulations, such as one allowing canons to use only half the requisite powder, thus reducing the guns’ effective range. “A lot of the war was being fought… with our hand tied behind our backs,” he said.

But the North was developing a “secret weapon” – the USS Monitor, an ironclad warship with a submarine propeller. The ship was under construction in New York 150 years ago, McLean said.

He said that he recently unearthed records for a gunboat christened the USS Norwich, which he plans to research further. “I will endeavor to find out what happened during her career,” he told his listeners.

McLean, a former Navy officer, began delving into Civil War-era Navy history when his daughter, Elizabeth, was studying the Civil War in school. Curious about what role the Navy played, he conducted his own research, eventually connecting with the Navy and Marine Living History Association. In his persona as Captain Drayton, he has made appearances at historical re-enactments such as Norwichtown Days, as well as at schools.

Elizabeth accompanied him on his journey through time, McLean said. Now in high school, as a child she often accompanied him to reenactments, portraying a “powder monkey” - one of the boys who provided the gunners aboard ship with powder. “She’s 17, so she’s a Boy First Class now,” he quipped.

In reality, powder monkeys had one of the ship’s most dangerous jobs. “Orphans went [to work the job] because mothers in their right minds would never send their kids off to be a powder monkey,” McLean said. “Next to the captain, they were the first target to be killed” by enemy gunners.