In keeping with his Jeffersonian predilections, Welles had always advocated strict construction of the Constitution and staunchly defended states’ rights, believing it was the states, not the federal government, that could best safeguard the rights and liberty of the individual. Yet unlike many proponents of strict construction and states’ rights, northern as well as southern, his thinking took a decidedly anti-slavery turn. He viewed the Constitution’s fugitive slave clause as exclusively an agreement among the states to return runaways to their owners, not a grant of power to the federal government. Thus he thought the Fugitive Slave Act adopted as part of the Compromise of 1850 was unconstitutional. He also rejected slaveholders’ claims that they had the right to take their human property into the territories, since he found nothing in the Constitution that authorized the federal government to establish or protect slavery anywhere that it had exclusive jurisdiction, which he believed it did in the territories.
As to slavery in the southern states, Welles deemed it a local institution that was created by state law and shielded from federal interference by the Constitution. Under the impact of secession and war, however, he, like Lincoln and many other northerners, concluded that the president, as commander in chief of the armed forces, could emancipate the slaves in the rebellious states on grounds of military necessity, which overrode the constitutional protection slavery enjoyed as long as the people of those states had remained loyal to the Union.
Welles was sincere in espousing states’ rights and always feared that creation of an over-mighty central government would jeopardize individual liberty. Thus he was privately critical of the Lincoln administration’s wartime infringements of civil liberties.20 And as will be seen in the Afterword, his states’ rights convictions caused him fervently to oppose the entire Reconstruction program the Republican-controlled Congress adopted after the war. Yet he was also a nationalist. Like Andrew Jackson, he rejected John C. Calhoun’s theory that each state’s rights included the right to nullify federal laws. And he of course denied that states had a right to secede.
Finally, Welles personified many traits of character and personality associated with the stereotypical Yankee. He was a man of stern moral rectitude who set great store by honor, integrity and propriety. Strong-willed, high-minded, and judgmental, he sometimes fell prey to self-righteousness and was frequently irascible and short on tact. He occasionally lost his temper, but rarely lost his composure during a crisis. Conscientious to a fault, he had an abiding sense of patriotic duty (a word that appears frequently in his diary) and was severely critical of men he thought were putting personal or partisan interests ahead of their country’s welfare. He believed politics should be about principle, not the mere pursuit of power and patronage. He drove himself hard, since his conscience would tolerate nothing less. (On March 31, 1863, he noted in the diary that during a two-week illness he had missed only one day at work.) He had a pessimistic streak and was something of a stoic, which helped him cope with political disappointments and military setbacks – and also with the ordeal of having six of his nine children predecease him. Despite his sometimes unruly wig, in photographs the mature Welles looks very much the dignified, sober-sided, austere Yankee gentleman that he was.
During the Civil War, a number of Connecticut men won distinction for their contribution to the Union cause. For example, William A. Buckingham, the “War Governor” who worked tirelessly to promote enlistments in the army; New Haven-born Admiral Andrew Hull Foote, whose gunboat flotilla played a key role in the campaign against Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862; and General Alfred H. Terry, who commanded the troops that in combination with the navy took Fort Fisher in January 1865, thus sealing off Wilmington, North Carolina, the last major Confederate port that had remained open to blockade-runners. But it is Welles who stands foremost among them, for both his leadership of the Navy Department and the informative, insightful, often provocative diary he left to posterity.
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1 The first three were Oliver Wolcott, Jr., secretary of the treasury under Washington and John Adams; John M. Niles, postmaster general during the Van Buren administration; and Isaac Toucey, who was both attorney general in the Polk administration and Buchanan’s secretary of the navy.
2 Of the 671 warships, 559 were powered wholly or in part by steam, and more than 70 were ironclads. James M. McPherson, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861 – 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), pp. 35-36, 98-105, and 224. On the initiation of the blockade, see McPherson, Chapter 2, and Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Chapter 2.
3 This was not Welles’s first turn as a diarist. In earlier life he also had kept a diary periodically. The manuscript of his 1836 diary is on deposit at the Connecticut State Library, and diaries he kept in various years between the 1820s and the mid 1850s are held by the Connecticut Historical Society.
4 Published editions of the diary contain an opening chapter entitled “The Beginning of the War” in which Welles discusses such major events of 1861 and early 1862 as the Fort Sumter crisis, the Confederates’ seizure of the Gosport (Norfolk, Virginia) Navy Yard, the replacement of Secretary of War Simon Cameron by Edwin M. Stanton, and the panic in Washington that the Merrimack would steam up the Potomac and bombard the capital. Welles says nothing, however, about navy Captain Charles Wilkes’s forcible removal of two Confederate envoys, James Mason and John Slidell, from the Trent, a British mail packet, in November 1861, which precipitated a crisis in Anglo-American relations that could have led to war. It did not because the Lincoln administration decided in late December to free the envoys and allow them to go on their way (Mason to England and Slidell to France). The omission is curious given the episode’s intrinsic importance and the navy’s central involvement in it. In any event, this chapter was not a part of the diary per se, having been written no earlier than 1864 and probably not until the 1870s. Since it was not written contemporaneously with the events it recounts, it is used sparingly in this book. When it is cited, it is as “Chapter 1,” followed by the page number.
5 After the war – probably in the 1870s – Welles made numerous revisions to the diary. Some of them did reflect the influence of hindsight. For example, he softened some of his criticisms of the martyred Lincoln and modified some passages to cast a less favorable light on men with whom he had bitter political differences during Reconstruction. Further revisions were made by his son Edgar, who edited the edition published in 1911. How these revisions are treated in this book is explained in the Editorial Note following the Introduction.
6 Most passages are excerpted from diary entries in which Welles discusses multiple subjects. Some entries that deal exclusively with a single topic are reproduced in their entirety.
7 Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), pp. 212 and 247; Catherine Clinton, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), p. 248; and Welles’s diary entry for April 14, 1865.
8 Most of the factual material in this overview of Welles’s pre-war life and career is drawn from John Niven, Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973; paperback edition, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), Chapters 1 – 17. The Afterword also draws on Niven’s book, Chapters 26 – 30, as well as on the postwar portion of Welles’s diary.
9 This topic is treated in Richard J. Buel, Jr., and George J. Willauer, eds., Original Discontents: Commentaries on the Creation of Connecticut’s Constitution of 1818, published by the Acorn Club in 2007.
10 Connecticut held legislative and gubernatorial elections annually, in early April.
11 See Chapter 7 for an account of how Toucey, as Buchanan’s secretary of the navy, advocated