Researching Stephen Mallory

Although he was not a leader in the secession movement, Mallory followed his state out of the Union. When the Confederate States of America was formed, he was named Secretary of the Navy in the administration of President Jefferson Davis. He held the position throughout the existence of the Confederacy. Because of indifference to naval matters by most others in the Confederacy, Mallory was able to shape the Confederate Navy according to the principles he had learned while serving in the US Senate. Some of his ideas, such as the incorporation of armor into warship construction, were quite successful and became standard in navies around the world. On the other hand, the navy was often handicapped by administrative ineptitude in the Navy Department. During the war, he was weakened politically by a Congressional investigation into the Navy Department for its failure in defense of New Orleans. After months of taking testimony, the investigating committee concluded that it had no evidence of wrongdoing on his part.

Mallory resigned after the Confederate government had fled from Richmond at the end of the war, and he and several of his colleagues in the cabinet were imprisoned and charged with treason. After more than a year in prison, the public mood had softened, and he was granted parole by President Andrew Johnson. He returned to Florida, where he supported his family in his final years by again practicing law. Unable to hold elective office by the terms of his parole, he continued to make his opinions known by writing letters to newspapers. His health began to deteriorate although he was not incapacitated until the very end.

He was the father of Stephen Russell Mallory, a U.S. Representative and Senator from Florida.

He was born in Columbia, Richland County, South Carolina. During the American Civil War he entered the Confederate Army in the fall of 1864; appointed midshipman in the Confederate Navy in the spring of 1865 and served until the end of the war; graduated from Georgetown College, Washington, D.C., in 1869, where he then served as instructor in Latin and Greek until 1871; studied law; admitted to the bar in Louisiana in 1872 and commenced practice in New Orleans; moved to Pensacola, Florida, in 1874 and continued the practice of law; member, Florida House of Representatives 1876; member, Florida Senate 1880, and reelected in 1884; elected as a Democrat to the Fifty-second United States Congress and Fifty-third United States Congress (March 4, 1891 – March 3, 1895); was not a candidate for renomination in 1894; elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1897, subsequently appointed and then elected to the Senate in 1903, and served from May 15, 1897, until his death in Pensacola, Florida, December 23, 1907; chairman, Committee on Corporations Organized in the District of Columbia (Sixtieth United States Congress); interment in St. Michael's Cemetery.