It is impossible to know if Wilkes anticipated what happened next, but when Smith learned that he would not have Wilkes as a surveyor, he – like so many captains had done before him – declined the offer to command the Expedition. Soon after, Secretary of War Poinsett began to consider offering the post to Wilkes. Even though the lieutenant lacked comparable command experience, he was clearly a competent surveyor. And besides, who else was there? The navy rumor mill would later accuse Wilkes of having schemed to wrest the command from Smith, but Wilkes insisted, “I never thought of such a thing. I was too young an officer to aspire and did not dream of it.”
On an evening in March, Poinsett requested that Wilkes meet with him at his home. The two men sat beside the fireplace in Poinsett’s parlor. The secretary began by asking Wilkes to describe how he thought the Expedition should be organized. It was, of course, a topic that he had been considering for most of his life. The squadron should be made up of only young officers with the technical training required to conduct a nautical survey. The scale of the Expedition must be reined in. Instead of large and unwieldy ships, a brig similar to the Porpoise and several even smaller schooners should be used; they were the only craft suitable for surveying the coral-fringed islands of the South Pacific. As part of this reduction in scale, the scientific corps must be cut by at least two-thirds to less than a dozen men.
Poinsett asked if he thought an expedition along the lines he’d just described could be quickly and successfully organized. Wilkes insisted that it could. Poinsett had been staring at the fire; he now turned to look directly at Wilkes. “I have been authorized by the President,” he said, “to offer you the command of the expedition.” Wilkes was unable to respond. “Why do you hesitate?” Poinsett asked. “Are you afraid to undertake it?” Wilkes struggled for words. “No sir, but there are very many reasons that crowd upon me why I should not accept it.” They continued to talk, and once Poinsett made it clear that he would have almost total control in organizing the Expedition, Wilkes tentatively accepted the appointment. “[I]t was so entirely unexpected,” he remembered, “I [told him] I must have time to think the matter over.”
That night Wilkes and Jane had what he later described as “a good cry.” Jane assured her husband that he had acted honorably throughout these difficult proceedings and that he would “establish a name which both she and our children would glory in.” When they finally went to bed, Wilkes almost immediately nodded off. But Jane could not sleep. Her husband would soon be leaving on a voyage that would last at least three years, and Jane, already a mother of three, was five months pregnant.
Almost immediately, enormous pressures came to bear on Poinsett to rescind Wilkes’s appointment. The young lieutenant might be one of the navy’s top surveyors and a creditable scientist, but this meant nothing to the naval officers who outranked him, almost all of whom, it seemed, joined in a shrill chorus of dissent. Letters of outrage poured into the War Department. “The year Lieutenant Wilkes entered the Navy,” Captain Beverley Kennon wrote Poinsett, “I was the third lieutenant of the Washington 74; the year he was made a lieutenant, I commanded a ship of war in the Pacific Ocean.” Kennon insisted that he be given the command. But Kennon had already been offered the position, only to refuse it back when the voyage had become a laughingstock. But now, with a lowly lieutenant given the command, it was no laughing matter. The navy’s pride was at stake.
Wilkes was not without his proponents. In a most extraordinary gesture of support, Joseph Smith, the captain under whom Wilkes had refused to serve, wrote to wish the lieutenant well. Smith reported having been roundly criticized by “his brother officers” for providing Wilkes with the opportunity to gain the command. But he assured Wilkes that no “blame can attach to you.” “I hope now you will be off & off soon,” he wrote. “I have faith in your acquirements of science, in your industry & in what is still more important, your boldness of purpose & boldness of execution. I wish you all success & every propitious breeze.”
The controversy made its inevitable way to Capitol Hill. During a debate over a naval appropriations bill in April, a congressman brought up Wilkes’s appointment, calling it “a violation of rank.” Another congressman pointed out that the rules of seniority applied only in a time of war. It was only right that someone of Wilkes’s scientific expertise be appointed to the command. Even the sainted James Cook had been “made a Lieutenant for the purpose” of leading an exploring expedition. Yet another congressman claimed that a reputable source had told him that Wilkes had been appointed because he had agreed to dismiss Jeremiah Reynolds, who had become “obnoxious to the Department.” So it went, a ceaseless din of outrage that would continue long after the squadron had sailed.
Wilkes might have easily been overwhelmed by the pandemonium. But by keeping the details of the Expedition to himself and Jane and by focusing solely on the tasks ahead of him, he plowed ahead. First he had to determine what vessels were to be included in the squadron. Two sloops-of-war, the 127-foot Vincennes and 118-foot Peacock, were already slated to be part of the Expedition, as was the 109-foot storeship Relief the only vessel remaining from Jones’s original squadron. In keeping with what he had outlined to Poinsett, he added three smaller vessels – the 88-foot brig Porpoise and two 70-foot schooners, former New York pilot boats that were rechristened the Flying Fish and the Sea Gull.
What Wilkes needed to find as quickly as possible were commanders for the Peacock, the Relief, and the Porpoise who did not outrank him, not an easy task given his lowly place on the list. He first appealed to Lieutenant William Hudson from Brooklyn, New York. Although without any surveying experience, Hudson, forty-four years old, had a reputation as an excellent seaman and had already expressed interest in joining the Expedition back when Jones was to be the leader. He was also one of Wilkes’s closest friends in the navy. Unfortunately, even though Hudson and Wilkes had been promoted to lieutenant on the same day, Hudson ranked slightly above his putative commander, and to serve under a junior officer was unheard of. Only after Poinsett had assured Hudson in writing that the Expedition “was purely civil” did he agree to take the position.
Wilkes’s choice to command the Relief was another old friend, Lieutenant George Blake, who had served with him during the survey of Narragansett Bay. When it looked like Hudson might not sail with them, Blake asked Wilkes if he would make him second-in-command. Wilkes equivocated, and Blake decided to back out of the Expedition altogether. This forced Wilkes to go with Lieutenant Andrew Long, the man Jones had chosen for the Relief and who only agreed to the position once Wilkes had promised that the commander of the Porpoise would not outrank him. Wilkes chose Lieutenant Cadwallader Ring-gold, thirty-five, from a prominent Maryland family. With the loss of Blake, Wilkes was left without a single commanding officer with previous surveying experience.
Wilkes claimed that his most difficult task involved the scientific corps. He must eliminate twenty of the twenty-seven scientists. First to go was the head of physical sciences. Wilkes would take over that department, along with all subjects related to surveying, astronomy, meteorology, and nautical science. It was a tall order for one man, even without the extra burden of leading the Expedition. Wilkes’s choices for the rest of the corps proved to be quite good. The naturalist Titian Peale, son of the famous painter and museum founder Charles Willson Peale from Philadelphia, had already accompanied expeditions to Florida and the West. A capable artist and a crack shot, Peale was a collector par excellence. James Dwight Dana, the Expedition’s geologist, was just twenty-five and had already published his System of Mineralogy, the standard text on the subject. In the weeks before the squadron’s departure, he would undergo a sudden religious awakening and, at the urging of his evangelical parents, join the First Church of New Haven. Dana was destined to become a giant in his field, and while his Christian beliefs would sometimes lead his science astray, the strength of his conversion appears to have made possible the startling breakthroughs