d
Dr. Johnson: "No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to
get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail with the
chance of being drowned"; and further to overwhelm me, he clinched the
saying by a comment of his own. "In a ship of war you run the risk of
being killed as well as that of being drowned." The interview left me
a perplexed but not a wiser lad.

Late in the ensuing spring Mr. Murray wrote me that he would nominate
me for the appointment. Just what determined him in my favor I do not
certainly know; but, as I remember, Mr. Davis had authorized me to say
to him that, if the place were given me, he would use his own
influence with President Pierce to obtain for a nominee from his
district a presidential appointment to the Military Academy. Mr.
Murray replied that such a proposition was very acceptable to him,
because the tendency among his constituents was much more to the army
than to the navy. At that day, besides one cadet at West Point for
each congressional district, which was in the gift of the
representative, the law permitted the President a certain number of
annual appointments, called "At Large"; the object being to provide
for sons of military and naval officers, whose lack of political
influence made it difficult otherwise to enter the school. This
presidential privilege has since been extended to the Naval Academy,
but had not then. The proposed interchange in my case, therefore,
would be practically to give an officer's son an appointment at large
in the navy. Whether this arrangement was actually carried out, I have
never known nor inquired; but it has pleased me to believe, as I do,
that I owed my entrance to the United States navy to the interposition
of the first and only President of the Southern Confederacy, whose
influence with Mr. Pierce is a matter of history.

I entered the Naval Academy, as an "acting midshipman," September 30,
1856.

FROM SAIL TO STEAM

RECOLLECTIONS OF NAVAL LIFE

I

NAVAL CONDITIONS BEFORE THE WAR OF SECESSION

THE OFFICERS AND SEAMEN

Naval officers who began their career in the fifties of the past
century, as I did, and who survive till now, as very many do, have
been observant, if inconspicuous, witnesses of one of the most rapid
and revolutionary changes that naval science and warfare have ever
undergone. It has been aptly said that a naval captain who fought the
Invincible Armada would have been more at home in