Brain Top Off!

During the American Civil War, president Abraham Lincoln’s administration determined there was a real need for a shallow draft boat that could extend the Union’s mobility and help to bring the fight to the Confederacy with greater efficiency.

Congress was petitioned for $1 million by Union General-in-Chief Winfield Scott to meet these goals, and to conduct naval operations on the Mississippi River.  This was a hefty weapons procurement for the day and request for proposals went out to Midwest boat builders for competitive bids to make ironclads.  James Buchanan Eads, an industrious and well-connected boat builder, landed the lucrative contact, using his contacts in the Lincoln Administration towards that end. (Note 1)

Eads’s was an acclaimed engineer-inventor.  He won the contract because he boldly proposed that he could build the state-of-the-art gunboats in only sixty-three days, for $89,000 per boat.  He incentivized the Federal Government by proposing to forfeit $250 for each day he missed the deadline. (Note 2)

Eads ignored a chorus of naysayers who said he couldn’t build gunboats and he sought creative solutions to build is boats on time. The keels of the gunboats were laid in Carondelet, Missouri, outside St. Louis, and Mound City, Illinois, by Cairo. Using his master organizer skills, Eads subcontracted out separate piece work to numerous contractors located in a variety of cities such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St.Louis. Being ahead of his time, Eads networked and coordinated these efforts using telegraph communications.

Eads was a diligent taskmaster and ’stickler for details’, allowing him to successfully push nearly 800 construction workers day and night at a relentless pace. The largest foundries and machine shops in St. Louis constantly produced parts for his gunboats.

The Union’s new flotilla of gunboats received their ‘baptism of fire,’ in the battles of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, Tennessee and played prominent roles in the Union’s victories and subsequent control of the crucial waterways in the Tennessee River Valley and the Mississippi River. (Note 3)

All totaled, 14 ironclad gunboats and 11 other boats that were converted to be armed for military service were the result of Ead’s Herculean efforts.  His gunboats were characterized as indispensable in the defeat of the Confederacy. (Note 4)

The genesis of the Union gunboats, and a significant factor in the outcome of the Civil War, stemmed from the creative genius and iron-willed determination of James Buchanan Eads.

1. Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Forts Henry and Donelson, The Key To the Confederate Heartland (The University of Tennessee Press Knoxville, 1987), 23.

2. Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Forts Henry and Donelson, The Key To the Confederate Heartland (The University of Tennessee Press Knoxville, 1987), 24.

3. Timothy John Myers, Caged Confederates, Capturing The Heart of the Confederacy (Thornton Publishing, Inc., 2010), 45.

4. James Buchanan Eads: Biography from Answers.com, 7/26/2010.

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