Andrew Hull Foote

• 1. Introduction

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  Andrew Hull Foote wrote a letter to his three youngest children on the 31st of August, 1861, as the Civil War was just beginning to take shape. He told them he was going to war and might be killed. He closed with the words: "God grant that you all may at last rest in heaven my dear children, is the prayer of your affectionate father." Here was a man who had spent nearly four decades at sea, fought on the other side of the world, written a book on slavery's evils, and helped end the grog ration in the United States Navy. Now he was sailing into the Western rivers, commanding ironclads under an army general's authority. What drove Foote from the classrooms of West Point to the muddy waters of the Tennessee and Cumberland? And what does it mean that the country he served still names streets, forts, and ships after him?

• 2. An Unlikely Sailor

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  Foote was born on the 12th of September, 1806, in New Haven, Connecticut. His father was Senator Samuel A. Foot, and his mother was Eudocia Hull. As a boy, Foote was not known as a good student. His one persistent ambition was to go to sea. His father tried to steer him toward respectability and had him enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Six months in, Foote made his choice. He left West Point in 1822 and accepted a midshipman's appointment in the United States Navy. It was a decision that would define the next four decades of his life. Over the years between 1822 and 1843, he served in the Caribbean, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, along the African Coast, and at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. By 1830, he had been commissioned a lieutenant and was stationed in the Mediterranean. In 1837, he completed a circumnavigation of the globe.

• 3. Reform and Abolition

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  Foote's years at sea gave him something more than experience: they gave him causes. While ashore, he took charge of the Philadelphia Naval Asylum. When he returned to sea, he organized a Temperance Society aboard his ship. That effort grew into something lasting. The movement eventually brought an end to the Navy's practice of supplying grog to its personnel, a reform that touched every sailor in the fleet. From 1849 to 1851, Foote commanded a vessel cruising the waters off the African coast, where he worked to suppress the slave trade. That experience turned him into an abolitionist. In 1854, he published a 390-page book titled Africa and the American Flag. In it, he laid out the geography of the African continent, described the customs of many African peoples, examined the establishment of American colonies in Africa, detailed the slave trade and its evils, and argued for the protection of American citizens and commerce abroad. He also began speaking on the Abolitionist circuit, carrying that argument to audiences across the country.

• 4. Canton and the Pearl River

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  In 1856, Foote was promoted to Commander and given charge of a vessel in the East India Squadron. His assigned mission was to observe British operations against Canton, China, during the Second Opium War. It did not remain an observing mission for long. Chinese shore batteries attacked his command. Foote responded by leading a landing party that seized the barrier forts along the Pearl River. The reprisal produced a brief occupation of Chinese territory by the U.S. Navy. It was a sharp, small episode, but it showed the pattern: Foote, when attacked, did not wait for orders. He returned to the continental United States in 1858 and took command of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in Brooklyn, New York. He held that post until the Civil War began.

• 5. The Western Rivers

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  On the 29th of June, 1861, Foote was promoted to captain. The war had changed his command from the Brooklyn yard to the Western Gunboat Flotilla, a force that sat under Army jurisdiction despite being manned by Navy officers. Foote, holding the rank of flag officer, which is equivalent to a modern commodore, worked alongside General Ulysses S. Grant. In early February 1862, they moved against Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Confederate Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman sent out a flag of truce to ask the terms of surrender. Foote's reply was brief: "No sir, your surrender will be unconditional!" Despite heavy damage to one of the gunboats, the fort fell quickly. Days later, Grant and Foote turned to Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River, this time also joined by Captain Seth Ledyard Phelps and his fleet of timberclad warships. Fort Donelson's guns were better placed than those at Fort Henry. Three of Foote's gunboats were damaged, including his flagship, USS St. Louis. Foote himself took a wound to the foot. Congress formally thanked him for both engagements. After repairs, Foote joined General John Pope in a campaign against Island Number Ten on the Mississippi River. In July 1862, Congress extended that thanks to cover Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and Island Number Ten together.

• 6. Three Children in Seven Months

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  The year 1862 brought Foote grief that no battlefield could have prepared him for. Seven months after writing that letter to his children, his thirteen-year-old son William Leffingwell died on the 14th of March, 1862. On the 14th of October, his daughter Emily Frederica died at age ten. Six days later, his youngest daughter Maria Eudocia died at age seven. Foote and his wife Caroline Augusta Street Foote had buried three children inside a single year. When Foote died the following year, he left behind two sons, Augustus Russell Street, who was sixteen, and John Samuel, who was four. His adult daughter Josephine was from his first marriage, to Caroline Flagg. Caroline Augusta Street Foote outlived her husband by only two months, dying on the 27th of August, 1863. That left young John Samuel, whom Foote had nicknamed "Admiral Byng," an orphan at four years old.

• 7. Rear Admiral, and Gone

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  Later in 1862, while still in the field, Foote was promoted to rear admiral, one of the first naval officers to hold that then-new rank. In 1863, he was assigned to take command of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, a posting that carried the promise of still more significant service. He never arrived. On his way to assume that command, Foote died suddenly in New York, struck down by Bright's disease. He was 56 years old. His death shocked the nation. He was interred at Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, the city where he was born. Civil War Fort Foote on the Potomac, now a National Park, was named for him on the 17th of September, 1863. Three ships carried the name USS Foote in his memory. Foote Street NE, along with Foote Place, in Washington, DC, bears his name as part of a series of streets honoring Civil War figures. The boy who left West Point after six months had, by the end, earned a permanent place in the geography of the capital.