A Wisconsin Lad in the U.S. Navy

(from our all-Wisconsin issue, July/August, 2001)

While one might not think of the Dairy State as producing sailors, it has sent a number of its sons into the Navy, including George W. Hayward.

Although Hayward was born in Ohio October 31, 1838, his family soon moved to Wisconsin. It was from there that he, chosing a career on the seas rather than on a farm, was appointed on September 26, 1857, to the U.S. Naval Academy.

Getting in was not the same as graduating. A.T. Mahan, a midshipman at the Academy at the same time as Hayward, later recalled in his class, “We numbered then twenty-eight, having started with forty-nine a twelvemonth before. Three years later we were graduated, twenty.”

Hayward, however, graduated with good grades in the Class of 1860. He was attached to the sloop Vandalia as his first duty assignment. It was not a prime assignment. The Vandalia was an old sloop, commissioned in 1828.   Nonetheless, everything that could float was needed for the blockade once the Civil War started, the the Vandalia was assigned to the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron.

The sloop was one of a squadron sent to take Port Royal in the fall of 1861. On her way there on November 1 the squadron ran into a hurricane. “It was a fearful storm, one of the worst known on the coast for years, and it a wonder we did not lose half our fleet,” recalled Albert B. Paine, a reporter covering the invasion. “As it was, the Isaac Smith was obliged to throw her guns overboard, and one steamer, the Governor, was lost, though her battalion of six hundred marines, all but seven were saved by the sloop-of-war Vandalia.”

After the capture of Port Royal, the Vandalia would be sent to serve as a receiving ship at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, naval yard. Hayward, then an acting master, was named executive officer of the U.S.S. Potomska, a three-masted schooner acquired by the Navy in 1861, in early 1862. He would not stay there long.

In 1863 he was assigned to the U.S.S. Sonoma, an un-armored, sidewheel gunboat commissioned in 1862. The Sonoma was first sent to the West Indies after the raider C.S.S  Alabama, missing engaging the Florida there to the regret of the Confederate captain, right after launching.

After a frustrating cruise, the Sonoma was attached to the South Atlantic Blocking Squadron and sent to guard Charleston. As a midshipman, Mahan said there was “scant respect” for training on shore, but Hayward must have been pleased to have had this training, as he was assigned to the Naval Brigade for shore duty. According to the Brigade’s commander, “Lieutenant Hayward, in charge of one of the howitzers, accompanied a regiment on a reconnoissance up the road, and the rifled howitzers on one or two occasions tried their range at the church, which, on being abandoned by our army, was occupied by the enemy.” Hayward then was given command of the naval battery of XI-inch guns at Cumming’s Point. He would finish the war here, but would continue in the Navy after the war.

His immediate post-war assignments were to sea duty, but when Rear Admiral David D. Porter took over the Naval Academy, his first thought was to get rid of many of the civilian instructors there and replace them with the best and brightest serving Naval officers. He turned to, among others, Hayward, who was thereafter assigned to the Academy, holding the rank of lieutenant commander.

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