American Civil War
When the Civil War began in 1861, Vanderbilt attempted to donate his largest steamship, the Vanderbilt, to the Union Navy. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles refused it, thinking its operation and maintenance too expensive for what he expected to be a short war. Vanderbilt had little choice but to lease it to the War Department, at prices set by ship brokers. When the Confederate ironclad Virginia (popularly known in the North as the Merrimack) wrought havoc with the Union blockading squadron at Hampton Roads, Virginia, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and President Abraham Lincoln called on Vanderbilt for help. This time he succeeded in donating the Vanderbilt to the Union navy, equipping it with a ram and staffing it with handpicked officers. It helped bottle up the Virginia, after which Vanderbilt converted it into a cruiser to hunt for the Confederate commerce raider Alabama, captained by Raphael Semmes. Vanderbilt also outfitted a major expedition to New Orleans. But he suffered a personal loss when his youngest and favorite son and heir apparent, George Washington Vanderbilt, a graduate of the United States Military Academy, fell ill and died without ever seeing combat.
Read more about this topic: Cornelius Vanderbilt
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, american, civil and/or war:
“To the cry of “follow Mormons and prairie dogs and find good land,” Civil War veterans flocked into Nebraska, joining a vast stampede of unemployed workers, tenant farmers, and European immigrants.”
—For the State of Nebraska, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“One American said that the most interesting thing about Holy Ireland was that its people hate each other in the name of Jesus Christ. And they do!”
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“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
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“Thus do I want man and woman to be: the one fit to wage war and the other fit to give birth, but both fit to dance with head and feet.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)