One thing which occupied Perry’s thoughts for a number of years was the question of defending our Atlantic harbors from sudden attacks of a foreign enemy. Steam had altered the old time relations of belligerents. He saw the modern system of carrying on war was to make it sudden, sharp and decisive, and then compel the beaten party to pay the expenses. A few hostile steamers from England could devastate our ports almost before we knew of a declaration of war. While England was always in readiness to do this, there was not one American sea-going war steamer with heavy ordnance ready to meet her swift and heavily armed cruisers, while river boats would be useless before the heavy shell of the enemy. He did not share the ideas of security possessed by the average fresh-water congressman. The spirit of 1812 was not dead, in him, but he knew that the brilliant naval duels of Hull and Decatur’s time decided rather the spirit of our sailors than the naval ability of the United States. He proposed a method for extemporizing steam batteries by mounting heavy guns on hulks of dismantled merchant vessels. These were to be moved by a steamer in the center of the gang, holding by chains, and able to make ten knots an hour. If one hulk were disabled, it could be easily separated from the others. Such a battery could be made ready in ten days and fought without sailors. The engines could be covered with bales of cotton or hay made fire-proof with soap-stone paint. With the aid of his friend W. C. Redfield, he collected statistics of all the privately-owned steamers in the United States with their cost, dimensions and consumption of fuel, showing their possible power of conversion for war purposes. Encouraged by Perry, Mr. Redfield treated the whole question of naval offence and defence in a series of letters on “_The Means of National Defence._” These were printed in the New York _Journal of Commerce_ during the summer of 1841, and afterwards reprinted in the _Journal of the Franklin Institute_ in Philadelphia. His note-books with illustrations, diagrams and pen-sketches show that his coming ideal war-ship was like the _Lackawanna_ of our civil war days which, while but five feet narrower, is sixty-two feet longer than “Old Ironsides,” the _Constitution_ of 1812. His favorite type was a long narrow and comparatively low vessel like the _Kearsarge_ which is twenty-two feet less in breadth than an old “seventy-four.” Like Perry, he looked forward to the day when one eleven-inch shell gun would be able to discharge the metal once hurled by a twenty-gun broadside of the old _President_.