Sea of Glory

1860, at the age of sixty-two, he got his second chance: the Civil War.
     
    In August 1861 Wilkes was given what he craved—command of a vessel. The steam sailer San Jacinto was on station along the west coast of Africa, and he was ordered to deliver her to Philadelphia. Quickly reverting to his old, impetuous ways, Wilkes decided, instead, to go in search of rebel privateers.
    He eventually made his way to the West Indies, where he learned that two Confederate commissioners, James Mason and John Slidell, were in Cuba, awaiting passage to England on the British vessel Trent. By this time, Wilkes had been instructed to join Commodore Samuel Du Pont’s impending attack on Port Royal, where the North hoped to establish a base of operations off the coast of South Carolina. But he had other ideas. He would remove the rebel diplomats from the British ship. That there was no legal precedent for such an act did not greatly concern Wilkes, who hastily consulted several books of international law and convinced himself that the seizures were justified.
    On November 8, 1861, the San Jacinto lay in wait off the Bahamas. “It was a beautiful day and the sea quite smooth,” Wilkes wrote. “The lookout descried the smoke of the Steamer, and it was then time to inform my officers of my intentions.” Wilkes positioned the San Jacinto in the path of the Trent and fired a warning shot. The British vessel stopped, and Wilkes ordered First Lieutenant Donald Fairfax to board the Trent and return with the commissioners. Despite being slapped in the face by Slidell’s daughter, Fairfax succeeded in arresting the diplomats, and the San Jacinto was soon on her way north. Wilkes described it as “one of the most important days in my naval life.”
    It was a brazen and illegal grab for celebrity, but it worked. When Wilkes arrived in Boston, he had already been declared a hero. A nation that was still reeling from a Confederate victory at Bull Run was desperate for some good news. Wilkes and his officers were whisked away to a reception at Faneuil Hall, where Boston’s mayor extolled Wilkes for his “sagacity, judgment, decision, and firmness.” As the joyous mob cheered, Wilkes affected humility: “I have only to say that we did our duty to the Union and are prepared to do it again.” He would shake so many hands that day that his fingers became covered with blisters. “[A] pretty severe punishment,” he wrote, “for the honor of a public reception.”
    As the city debated the legality of his actions (the author and lawyer Richard Henry Dana claimed the Trent was “a lawful prize”), there was a run on books of maritime and international law. Then it was on to New York, where the president of the city’s historical society remarked, “It is, sir, your prerogative to make history; ours to commemorate it.” When Wilkes finally returned to Washington, President Lincoln assured him “that I had kicked up a breeze, but he intended to stand by me and rejoiced over the boldness, as he said, of my act.” But as an outraged British government threatened to enter the war on the side of the Confederates, the Lincoln administration was forced to hand over Mason and Slidell. Convinced that “my conduct had been correctly American,” Wilkes “felt a glow of shame for my country.”
    Just as he had done so many times during the Exploring Expedition, Wilkes’s subsequent actions would sabotage everything he had so far achieved. His new status as a hero won him the rank of acting rear admiral (marking the fulfillment of Mammy Reed’s prophecy), and in September 1862 he took command of a “flying squadron” in the Caribbean that was to search out and capture the notorious raiders Alabama and Florida. The assignment had been forced upon Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, who had already seen enough of Wilkes’s reckless arrogance. “He is very exacting toward others,” Welles recorded in his diary, “but is not himself as obedient as he should be. . . . He has abilities but not good judgment in all respects. Will be likely to rashly assume authority, and do things that might involve himself and the country in difficulty, and hence I was glad that not I but the President and the Secretary of State suggested him for that command.”
    As Welles had predicted, Wilkes almost immediately began to make trouble for himself and his country. Claiming that he was without sufficient means to achieve his goals, Wilkes detained several U.S. naval