hance to alter a boat from his own designs, he
made it a much better one than these. It was a boat ordered by General
Fremont in September, 1861, in excess of the government appropriation
for the river fleet. This was the same snag-boat which three months
before had been suggested for alteration by Eads, and refused by the
army's agent. In this case, as in so many afterwards when Eads knew
himself to be right, he stuck persistently to his own opinion; and out
of the heavy old boat, despised and objected to by so many persons, he
fashioned the "old war-horse," the Benton, which, slow as she was,
Spears, the naval historian, calls the most powerful warship afloat at
that date. As a snag-boat, formerly used by Eads, she had "had two
hulls so joined and strengthened that she could get the largest kind of
a cottonwood tree between them, hoist it out of the mud, and drag it
clear of the channel." These hulls were now joined together; and while
the boat was armored on the same general plan as the seven contract
gunboats, she was so much more completely iron clad as to avoid the
danger that they were exposed to of having their boilers burst and
great damage and death caused thereby. Her tonnage was twice that of
the others; her size about 200 by 75 feet. She was entirely iron clad.
In her gun-deck casemate the twenty inches of timber under the plating
had "its grain running up from the water instead of horizontally, by
which means [wrote Eads] a ball will strike, as it were, _with
the_ grain, and then be more readily deflected. On the same principle
that a minie ball will penetrate five inches of oak, crossing the
grain, while it will not enter one inch if fired at the end of the
timber." This detail illustrates the care and interest with which Eads
built his boats.

The eight of them, Captain Mahan says, "formed the backbone of the
river fleet throughout the war," and "may be fairly called the ships of
the line of battle on the Western waters." He speaks also of their
"very important services." This is milder praise than has been given
them. Commander Stembel said that he had heard them called equal to
5000 men each; Boynton, the naval historian, goes so far as to say that
the permanent occupation of the South was rendered possible by the
ironclad navy of the Western waters. Though the naval battles in the
Atlantic were perhaps more brilliant, he says, none, unless that
between the Merrimac and the Monitor, had more important