Stephen Russell Mallory was an American politician and lawyer. He was a Civil War Confederate States Cabinet Secretary.
Background
Stephen Russell Mallory was the son of Charles Mallory, a civil engineer, of Reading, Connecticut, professionally engaged in public work in Trinidad Island, near Venezuela, where he had met and married the sixteen-year-old Ellen Russell, recently of County Waterford, Ireland. They had two children, John, born about 1811, and Stephen Russell Mallory, born in Trinidad about 1813, though it is worth noting that his tombstone in St. Michael's Cemetery, Pensacola, bears no birth date.
About 1814, the parents moved first to the United States, then to Havana for Charles Mallory's health. In 1822, the father died of tuberculosis, and John did not long survive him. Stephen and his young mother lived on at Key W. Thus the future naval secretary grew up by the sea, loving and learning about ships.
Education
Before settling at Key West around 1820, Mallory Stephen entered the school on Mobile Bay, where he remained six months or a year.
When he was fourteen, his mother sent him inland to the Moravian school for boys (now Moravian Academy) at Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Three years in this institution of about eighty youths completed his meager schooling, but not his opportunities to learn and grow.
About 1833, he began to study law with Judge William Marvin of the local United States district court. Admitted to the bar before 1840, he forged ahead.
Career
In 1833, Stephen Russell Mallory was appointed an inspector of customs at Key West. In 1845, President Polk made him collector of customs at Key West. Meanwhile, he had fought in the Seminole War and married Angela, the daughter of Francisca and Josefa Moreno of Pensacola, Florida.
In 1850, Mallory was sufficiently prominent to be picked by his state as a delegate to the Southern convention at Nashville. Though eleven years later a secessionist, he did not attend this abortive convention. In 1851, the Florida legislature elected him to the United States Senate. His opponent, David L. Yulee, with Edwin M. Stanton for an attorney, failed to convince the United States Senate that Mallory had been irregularly elected.
Mallory was doubtless genuinely interested in the navy. Active in congressional naval reform, he was reelected senator in 1857 and appointed chairman of the committee on naval affairs. Possibly his ability to speak Spanish correctly, as well as French, had something to do with President Buchanan's offering to send him as United States minister to Spain in 1858. Mallory refused.
When Florida seceded he gave up his seat in the Senate, returned to Pensacola, his home since 1858, and took an emphatic stand for peace. But in February 1861, he accepted from President Jefferson Davis the office of the secretary of the navy of the Confederacy.
Here was a challenge to all of Mallory's ability. Well versed in the advanced naval experiments of the American, Robert L. Stevens; aware that England and France were actually building iron fleets, he saw that the confederacy must instantly stimulate her young naval experts to lead the world in the naval invention.
As early as May 10, 1861, he wrote that the South should fight wood with iron. He dreamed of securing at once two ironclads from England or France. He hurried Lieutenant James H. North in May to London, but he did not wait for North's report, or for Congress to sanction the building of an ironclad at home.
Having discovered a brilliant naval inventor in John Mercer Brooke, by March 1862, he had afloat in Hampton Roads that strange murderous craft, the Merrimac-Virginia. He pinned greater hope on the Mississippi, an ironclad, more like the European models, which in April 1862, the Tift brothers, eagerly aided by the secretary, were feverishly completing at New Orleans.
Within about two weeks of successful launching of the Mississippi, the Tifts were forced to burn her to keep her from falling into the hands of the approaching enemy. Mallory failed to secure a single up-to-date ironclad, but his wide naval horizon, his grasp of naval construction, and his tireless endeavor so stimulated specialists like Brooke and George Minor, chief of ordnance and hydrography, to naval organization and invention that the Confederacy, which started without ships or navy yards, anticipated modern naval invention in deadly torpedoes and submarines to such extent that it terrorized the Federal navy and effectively delayed it from penetrating the great rivers of Virginia.
Insight into Mallory's vehement, unconquerable nature, inherited possibly from his Irish mother, may be seen in his ardent wish to burn the Tredegar Iron Works before the Davis government evacuated Richmond. Retreating with President Davis in April 1865, Mallory joined his wife in La Grange, Georgia, and was hauled out of bed there by armed men just past midnight, May 20, 1865, and hustled off half-clothed, a prisoner of the state.
Until March 1866, he was held in Fort Lafayette, New York Harbor. Released on parole, he returned to Pensacola with his family and resumed his law practice. But he did not have long to live.
On 21 July 1838, Mallory married Angela Sylvania Moreno in Pensacola, Escambia, Florida. They had two daughters and three sons, one of whom, Stephen Russell Mallory, Jr., a bachelor until his death, served for years with distinction in the United States House and Senate.