Lincoln and the Permanent Commission of the Navy

Lincoln’s enthusiasm for mathematics, science, and technology made him a national sounding board for innovations, but he simply could not handle all the inventors pouring letters into his mailbox or showing up at the White House expecting a stamp of approval for their miraculous “war-ending invention.” Unlike today, there was no military-industrial complex developing new weapons during the Civil War. When it came to innovation, the government relied on “the chance, unreliable labors of inventors and amateurs of science” who “literally besieged official Washington after the outbreak of the war.”

Probably with Lincoln’s knowledge, Joseph Henry proposed to Secretary Welles an advisory board to serve as a more efficient mechanism for evaluating new ideas to aid the war effort. The navy had earlier tried a similar idea with its Naval Examining Board, but it failed in six months due to insufficient funding. By early 1863 Welles was willing to implement Henry’s idea, in part because any experimental research would be conducted by the originator, not the navy. With Lincoln’s approval, Welles created the Permanent Commission of the Navy Department “to which all subjects of a scientific character on which the Government may require information may be referred.” The three-member commission—Henry was joined by equally ubiquitous Alexander Dallas Bache (superintendent of the Coast Survey) and Charles Henry Davis (chief of the Bureau of Navigation)—met several times a week to evaluate the stream of proposals. After more than three dozen meetings in the first few months, Henry grumbled to Harvard botanist Asa Gray that his duties on the commission were overwhelming; the commission “occupied nearly all my time” other than that devoted to Smithsonian business.

From its creation in early 1863, the commission evaluated over three hundred proposals ranging from warship designs to underwater guns to torpedoes, all of which their originators claimed would immediately end the war in the Union’s favor. Despite the optimism of the inventors, mostly these ideas were oversold and underperforming. After the war, Henry bragged that the Permanent Commission kept the government “from rushing into many schemes which, under guise of patriotism, were intended to advance individual interest.”

The commission relieved Lincoln of the steady stream of inventors that had besieged him since the beginning of the war, but it did not stop all of them. Lincoln continued to receive letters and visits for the remainder of the war, and the always curious commander-in-chief continued to personally test some of the weapons that came his way. As the burdens of war became overwhelming, more and more often Lincoln would refer inventors to the Permanent Commission or directly to the military personnel most likely capable of evaluating the proposal.

And yet inventors still badgered Lincoln even after their proposal had been evaluated by the commission, either because the commission had refused their self-professed miraculous discovery or because a decision was bogged down in endless bureaucratic delay. John H. Schenk angrily wrote to Lincoln in early 1864 complaining he had been waiting a year to get approvals, yet the evaluation “is still throttled nearly to death with Red tape.” A few months later, John D. Hall wrote to Lincoln about his idea to lay cable across waterways to cut enemy obstructions lower than the keel of Union ironclads. He had originally written to Gideon Welles, who forwarded it to the Permanent Commission, and now impatiently was writing Lincoln. He complained that “notwithstanding these devices are so simple that any mechanical mind may easily comprehend them in the space of ten minutes of time,” he had yet to receive any report after thirty days. He asked Lincoln to speed up the acceptance. He received a reply that his invention was under consideration. Sometimes even Lincoln’s positive intervention had no effect. Inventor Peter Yates had proposed an “Improvement on Steam Engines” that was the subject of several letters between Yates, Lincoln, Welles, and the members of the commission. In the end, Charles Henry Davis grumbled to Welles that the “invention has not been described with sufficient clearness to be perfectly understood,” but based on what he could infer, “the loss of power which this invention is intended to prevent does not exist.”

On the other hand, Thomas Schuebly wrote Lincoln in late 1863 enthusiastically thanking him for supporting development of his new “impregnable” ironclad steamer, which the Permanent Commission told him to build at his own expense. Testing of this new ironclad, Schuebly cautioned in his letter, would be delayed slightly. It apparently was never built.

Despite its name, the Permanent Commission petered into nonexistence midway into 1865 as new weaponry became less important than mass manufacture of conventional rifles for the postwar occupation. The idea has been resurrected over the years as new wars required evaluation of new technology. One such board, the Naval Consulting Board, was chaired by Thomas Edison during World War I and led to the creation of the internally integrated Naval Research Laboratory, which still exists in Washington, DC.

[Adapted from Lincoln: The Fire of Genius]