David Dixon Porter

• 1. Introduction

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  David Dixon Porter went to sea for the first time at age ten, standing watch on his father's frigate as a midshipman. By the time he died on the 13th of February, 1891, he had spent 62 years on active duty in the United States Navy, one of the longest careers in its history. He was only the second officer ever to hold the rank of admiral, following his adoptive brother David G. Farragut. Along the way he commanded the Mississippi River Squadron through the siege of Vicksburg, led a punishing mortar flotilla at New Orleans, and directed the final significant naval operation of the Civil War at Fort Fisher. He also walked through the captured Confederate capital of Richmond beside Abraham Lincoln, and later said Lincoln was the best man he ever knew or ever would know. What made Porter who he was is a layered question. His family had supplied officers to the Navy almost since the Republic began. His character, by the accounts of both friends and enemies, was combustible, brilliant, and deeply contradictory. And his career traced the arc of the entire American Navy from the age of sail to the age of steam.

• 2. A Navy Family

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  David Dixon Porter was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, on the 8th of June, 1813, into a family that had given officers to the sea for generations. His great-grandfather had captained a Massachusetts vessel in the American Revolutionary War, and so had a great-great-uncle. His father, Commodore David Porter, and his uncle John both served with distinction in the War of 1812. Of David Porter's six sons, five grew to adulthood and all five became officers. One, Hambleton, died of yellow fever while a passed midshipman. Another, Theodoric, was killed at Matamoros in the Mexican-American War. David Dixon would outlast them all and rise higher than any of them.

  The family's naval reach extended through adoption as well as blood. When the mother of a boy named James Glasgow Farragut died in 1808, his father George, a naval officer who had served in the American Revolution, could not care for all his children. Commodore David Porter offered to take the boy in. In 1811, James began serving as a midshipman under Porter and changed his first name to David. That boy became David G. Farragut, the first officer ever promoted to the rank of admiral. The two men who would become the first and second admirals in American naval history were raised in the same household.

• 3. Early Voyages

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  After a reprimand in 1824, Commodore David Porter resigned from the U.S. Navy rather than submit to official censure. He accepted an offer from Mexico to become commander of their navy and took two of his sons with him: David Dixon, then twelve, and Thomas, ten. Thomas died of yellow fever soon after arriving. David Dixon survived and was made a midshipman in the Mexican Navy, serving on the frigate Libertad and later on a captured merchantman called Esmeralda during a raid on Spanish shipping in Cuban waters.

  On the 10th of February, 1828, the young Porter accompanied his cousin David Henry Porter, captain of the 22-gun brig Guerrero, in another raid off the coast of Cuba. They encountered a flotilla of about fifty schooners guarded by two Spanish brigs, attacked, and drove the flotilla into harbor at Mariel, 30 miles west of Havana. When the Spanish 64-gun frigate Lealtad put to sea, Guerrero could not escape. In the battle, Captain Porter was killed along with much of the crew. David Dixon was slightly wounded, taken prisoner, and held in Havana until exchanged. Commodore Porter then sent him back to the United States through New Orleans.

  He re-entered the U.S. Navy as a midshipman on the 2nd of February, 1829, at sixteen, older than most because of his years at sea. His experience made him confident to the point of insubordination. Only the intervention of Commodore James Biddle, who acted favorably because Porter's father was considered a hero, saved his warrant from cancellation.

• 4. Character Under Fire

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  Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles captured Porter's contradictions plainly when he wrote in his Diary about the decision to appoint him to command the Mississippi River Squadron. Welles described Porter as having "stirring and positive qualities," fertile in resources, great energy, and bravery. He also noted excessive and "not over-scrupulous" ambition, a tendency toward exaggeration, a habit of belittling superior officers, and favoritism toward juniors. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton called him "a gas bag... blowing his own trumpet and stealing credit which belongs to others." Historian John D. Winters wrote that Porter "revealed a weakness he was to display many times: he belittled a superior officer."

  Those assessments did not stop him. Porter skipped the ranks of captain and commodore entirely when Welles appointed him Acting Rear Admiral in the fall of 1862. He was one of only three U.S. Navy admirals ever promoted to rear admiral without having first served as a captain, the others being Richard E. Byrd and Ben Moreell. He arrived in Cairo, Illinois, on the 15th of October, 1862, to take command of the Mississippi Squadron and immediately set about building a fighting force.

• 5. The Mississippi War

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  Porter's first major Civil War action came before the Vicksburg campaign, at the mouth of the Mississippi. The Navy Department gave him the job of organizing roughly twenty mortar boats to reduce the forts guarding New Orleans from the south, as part of a force commanded by his adoptive brother Farragut. The bombardment of Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip opened on the 18th of April, 1862. Porter had said two days of concentrated fire would be enough. After five days the forts still stood. Farragut chose to bypass them in the night of April 24, running past while Porter's mortars kept the Confederate gunners distracted. New Orleans fell on April 29. When Porter's mortars resumed pounding Fort Jackson, the garrison mutinied and surrendered. Surrender of both forts was accepted by Commander Porter on the 28th of April.

  The work at Vicksburg the following year was harder and required far closer cooperation with the army. Grant had asked for a few gunboats to shield a river crossing; Porter persuaded him to send more than half the Mississippi Squadron downstream in darkness. After nightfall on the 16th of April, 1863, the fleet moved past the Vicksburg batteries. Only one vessel was lost. Six nights later, a similar run gave Grant the transports he needed to cross the river. On the 29th of April, the gunboats spent most of a day bombarding two Confederate forts at Grand Gulf; they silenced one but not the other, and Grant shifted to Bruinsburg for an unopposed crossing. When Vicksburg finally surrendered on the 4th of July, 1863, Grant praised Porter's contribution unstintingly. Porter's acting rank was made permanent from that same date.

• 6. Setbacks and the Last Battle

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  The Red River campaign that followed Vicksburg was the low point of Porter's war. Political general Nathaniel P. Banks pushed the Lincoln administration to mount an expedition across Louisiana toward Texas along the Red River, partly to seize cotton. Porter was against it; he thought Mobile should be the next target. He received direct orders to cooperate and complied, but the campaign went badly from the start. Navigation of the river was treacherous. Banks and Porter barely cooperated and at times raced each other to capture cotton rather than fight Confederates. After Major General Richard Taylor defeated Banks at the Battle of Mansfield, Banks abandoned the expedition. Porter then faced the difficult task of extricating his fleet from a river whose water levels were falling. Soldiers stayed behind to protect the fleet and helped make its escape possible.

  At Fort Fisher in late 1864, Porter found a more capable partner. Fort Fisher defended the last Atlantic port still open for Confederate blockade runners, at the New Inlet to the Cape Fear River. When Major General Benjamin F. Butler proposed blowing up a powder-laden ship near the fort, Porter agreed; the old steamer was packed with powder and detonated in the early morning of the 24th of December, 1864, with no discernible effect on the fort. Butler landed troops, judged the situation hopeless, and withdrew. Porter went to Grant and demanded Butler's removal. Grant agreed, replacing him with Major General Alfred H. Terry. The second assault opened on the 13th of January, 1865. Porter assigned each ship a specific target and ordered bombardment to continue even after troops began their assault, with guns shifting aim ahead of the advancing men. On the 15th, Terry's soldiers and 2,000 sailors and marines stormed opposite faces of the fort and took it. Fort Fisher was the last significant naval operation of the war.

• 7. After the War

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  Secretary Welles appointed Porter Superintendent of the Naval Academy in 1865. The academy had a reputation for producing cadets who were poorly educated, prone to misbehavior, and lacking professional standards. Porter resolved to make it the rival of West Point. He revised the curriculum, encouraged organized sports, enforced discipline, taught social graces, and installed an honor system, aiming, in his words, to send honorable men into the Navy. He brought in younger officers who had distinguished themselves in the war to lock his reforms in place after he left.

  When his friend Ulysses S. Grant became president in 1869, Porter's influence over the Navy Department grew so large it amounted to informal control. Grant's Secretary of the Navy, Philadelphia businessman Adolph E. Borie, had no naval knowledge and deferred to Porter on routine matters. After three months Borie resigned under heavy criticism, and his replacement, George Robeson, curtailed Porter's powers and eased him toward semi-retirement by 1875.

  The rank of admiral was created in 1866. Farragut was named the first; Porter became vice admiral. When Farragut died in 1870, Porter eventually became the second admiral, though not without controversy stirred by the enemies he had accumulated across his career. He reached the mandatory retirement age of 62 in June 1875 but was permitted to remain on active duty. For the last two decades of his life, he wrote naval histories and novels published by D. Appleton in New York, including Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War in 1885. In 1890 he became the founding president of the District of Columbia Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, assigned national membership number 1801. He suffered a heart attack in the summer of 1890, survived, then died the following February. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.