papers, and was soon after informed by the pension clerk that a pension had been ordered for me as a captain, because I had been appointed and had been recognized as a captain, from the date of the action. I waited on the Secretary and explained to him my desire that this arrangement should be changed, and the pension be predicated on my rank as a lieutenant. This I desired because I had considered, and still wished, my appointment as captain to have been given as a reward for my conduct as a lieutenant, which required the pension to take effect after the action, and before my promotion, which would leave me as a lieutenant when the injury was received. The Secretary was unwilling to take this view, from a doubt of its legality, but, at my request, took the decision of the President on the subject. The President assented to my request, and my certificate was granted as a lieutenant, by which I received only half the amount that would have been given if it had been made as captain.

Congress repealed this law soon after, but not before the whole of the fund had been exhausted. By subsequent laws, the receipt of pensions was properly prohibited to any person while he was in the receipt of his pay, unless the disability had prevented his promotion to a higher grade.

In preparing the ship-of-the-line Ohio for sea the Navy Commissioners arranged sleeping rooms for the officers on the orlop deck, for the purpose of keeping the gun decks always clear and ready for action, and from the belief that such an arrangement would contribute to the comfort of the officers themselves, as it would relieve them of the inconvenience of removing their clothing and other effects, whenever the ship was prepared for action. She was also provided with a poop cabin, as the commander of the squadron was to embark in her. When Commodore Hull joined the ship he preferred to mess separately from the captain. This required, in his opinion, that the poop cabin should be assigned to his exclusive use, and rendered it necessary for the captain to occupy the cabin on the main or upper gun deck. The ward-room officers had anticipated that the captain and commodore. would mess together, and leave the upper gun deck cabin for their use instead of the lower one, to which the separation of the commodore and captain assigned them. Some of them imagined this separate accommodation to have been owing to the fact that the commodore was to take his wife and her sister with him, and on that assumption endeavored to produce an impression that the ward-room officers had been deprived of accommodations to which they were entitled of right.

The Board resisted this claim, and, by their advice the separate arrangements were confirmed by the Department.

An attempt was made by some of the officers to have this decision reversed, by appeals to the public in newspaper publications, in which many facts were misstated, and much false coloring employed. As auxiliary to their main object, the sleeping arrangements were represented as connected with the other question, and these were described as not only exceedingly uncomfortable, but very dangerous to health. The main foundation for their complaints was that when the commodore of a squadron was assigned to any vessel, no arrangements which previously existed could be changed for his accomodation, without an infringement of the absolute rights of the other officers. Carried to an extreme this would exclude the commodore from any accomodation which should not be added for his special use, as he could be placed nowhere on board, without interference with some one already established in rooms allotted by usage. The Commisioners, therefore, resisted the demands of the officers, and took the ground that the commander of a squadron was entitled to the first choice of accomodations, within the limits of usage, by his superior rank, as an extension of the general principle which regulated the assignment of accomodations to all other officers in vessels, and in fact to all officers of both Army and Navy, in all countries where quarters are provided for them. In this case I felt justified in departing from my usual course, and had an article published in one of the New York papers, and in a periodical in Washington. The arrangements were continued, and were eventually the cause of further difficulties between the commodore and some of the ward-room officers, in which the latter gained advantages by their own coolness, and by the want of it in the commodore.

At a subsequent period the same arrangements were adopted in the Delaware, and the sleeping rooms were preferred by a large majority to the old arrangements which placed them on the gun decks. The immediate effect, however, was to increase the dislike towards the Board of Navy Commissioners, which had been so industriously promoted during the preceding six or seven years.

One of the complaints urged against the Board was that without any sufficient knowledge to justify it, they had interfered with the naval constructors, and imposed upon them such restrictions as prevented them from giving us vessels with the good qualities that they ought to have possessed, and would have received, if the constructors had been left to exercise their own judgment. In proof of these charges, it,

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was asserted, that none of the ships which had been built after the establishment of the Board were at all comparable to those which had been built before, excepting always the Ohio, ship-of-the-line. This ship, according to the complainants, was superior to any of our other shipsof-the-line, and its superiority was said to be owing to the fact that Mr. Eckford, the superintending constructor, had refused to accept any of the suggestions of the Board, and had followed his own views. Besides the general object of discrediting the Board, there was a more special object on the part of the naval constructors, which was to obtain a situation for the Chief Constructor, independent of the Board, and that the constructors of the yards should only receive their orders from the Chief Constructor. Not a few of the lieutenants exercised their pens and personal influence in giving publicity to their complaints, and amongst them one using the signature of “ Harry Bluff" was the most prominent, from his boldness and from the superiority of his style.*

Notwithstanding these bold and long continued charges, they were entirely destitute of all just foundation, so far as the Board was concerned. In the first place, the records of the office showed conclusively that the Board had never interfered at all with the building draughts of the ships-of-the-line and frigates begun just after the close of the war, in 1815, with the single exception of the Ohio, and in this case not in a manner to affect the form of the immersed part of the hull. With respect to the ten ships or sloops authorized or begun in 1825, restrictions were imposed as. to their maximum draught, the dif ference of draught aft and forward, and capacity required for a given arrangement and complement. With these restrictions, however, the five vessels which were built from the draughts made by the Chief Constructor, conformed to all the requirements of the Board, and were vessels of uncommonly good sailing and other qualities. This fact was a full refutation of the charge, so far as the interference of the Board was concerned; but it better suited the purposes of the complainants to refer to the vessels which were built from the draughts of other constructors, and which had not equally good qualities, and to

* The attacks upon the Navy Board finally resulted in its abolition. By the Act of August 31, 1842, it was replaced by the present Bureau system. That the fault lay with the system rather than with the officers who carried it out is clearly shown by the subsequent appointment of Morris, as Chief of the Bureau of construction in 1844, and of ordnance in 1851, and by his successful administration during the eight years in which he held these offices.

OPPOSITION TO THE BOARD OF NAVY COMMISIONERS.

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charge these draughts boldly to the Board. It did not seem to strike the writers that it was rather absurd to assume the Ohio to be superior to the other ships-of-the-line before her qualities had ever been tested, notwithstanding two of the others had been tried, and very favorable reports made upon them by those who had sailed in them.

As little atention was paid to the truth in the comparisons of the vessels built under the Board and those which were built before as in relation to the interference with the constructors. No fair and candid officer would hesitate to admit that frigates like the Brandywine, Potomac, and their class, were more powerful than the Constitution or the United States-or to give the same decision in favor of the Delaware and North Carolina, over the Franklin and Washington. With respect, to sailing qualities, the old ships-of-the-line might be slightly superior, but for working and all other qualities the new ships-ofthe-line were fully equal or superior. The frigates could compete fairly in all respects, even in sailing. The Brandywine, on her first cruise, outsailed all competitors. This was sufficient to establish her capabilities, and all the other frigates of her class were built from the same moulds below the bends, and with trifling differences above. Subsequent inequalities in her sailing and that of others were fairly attributable to other causes than their forms, and had been experienced by all the older ships.

Unfavorable comparisons were also frequently made between our ships and those of other nations, but no reference was made to the fact that our vessels were designed and begun twenty years before, and had formed the models which it had been the object of other nations afterwards to equal, and if possible to surpass. Neither was any mention made of the surprise and admiration with which all these vessels were viewed by foreign officers, when they first made their appearance abroad. Many of these attacks, the greater part perhaps, were made by persons entirely ignorant of many important facts, some, and not a few, by those who were imcompetent to judge correctly upon the subjects on which they wrote, and some, again, from sinister or malicious motives.

The Board made no replies to these anonymous attacks but willingly left their reputation for intelligence, capacity, and honesty, to be determined by time, which rarely fails, sooner or later, to render something like substantial justice, when the subject matter is of sufficient importance to be remembered. When it is not of such importance. an honest man may generally afford to be satisfied with his own approving conscience.