a
change of system is apt to be marked by anomalies.

These eighteen vessels were the nucleus of the fighting force with
which the government met the war of 1861. In the frigates and sloops
steam was purely auxiliary; they had every spar and sail of
the sailing ships to which they corresponded. Four of the
larger sloops--the _Hartford_, _Richmond_, _Brooklyn_, and
_Pensacola_--constituted the backbone of Farragut's fleet throughout
his operations in the Mississippi. The _Lancaster_, one of the finest
of these five sisters, was already in the Pacific, and there remained
throughout the contest; while the _San Jacinto_, being of different
type and size, was employed rather as a cruiser than for the important
operations of war. It was she that arrested the Confederate
commissioners, Slidell and Mason, on board the British mail-steamer
_Trent_, in 1861. The corvettes for the most part were also employed
as cruisers, being at once less effective in battery, for river work,
and swifter. They alone of the vessels built in the fifties were
engined for speed, as speed went in those days; but their sail power
also was ample, though somewhat reduced. One of them, the _Iroquois_,
accompanied Farragut to New Orleans, as did a sister ship to her, the
_Oneida_, which was laid down in 1861, after many Southern Senators
and Representatives had left their seats in Congress and the secession
movement became ominous of war; when it began to be admitted that
perhaps, after all, for sufficient cause, brothers might shed the
blood of brothers.

The steam-frigates were of too deep draught to be of much use in the
shoal waters, to which the nature of the hostilities and the character
of the Southern coast confined naval operations. Being extremely
expensive in upkeep, with enormous crews, and not having speed under
steam to make them effective chasers, they were of little avail
against an enemy who had not, and could not have, any ships at sea
heavy enough to compete with them. The _Wabash_ of this class bore the
flag of Admiral Dupont at the capture of Port Royal; and after the
fight the negroes who had witnessed it on shore reported that when
"that checker-sided ship," following the elliptical course prescribed
to the squadron for the engagement, came abreast the enemy's works,
the gunners, after one experience, took at once to cover. No barbette
or merely embrasured battery of that day could stand up against the
twenty or more heavy guns