Mahan in Dock: Reassessing the Navy and the Navalist

Abstract

Kenneth J. Hagan, ed. In Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History, 1775-1978. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.368 + xii pp. Royce G. Shingleton. John Taylor Wood: Sea Ghost of the Confederacy. Athens : University of Georgia Press, 1979. 242 + xiv pp. Craig L. Symonds, ed. New Aspects of Naval History : Selected Papers Presented at the Fourth Naval History Symposium, United States Naval Academy 25-26 October 1979. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1981. 398 + xv pp. Gordon H. Warren. Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981.301 + xiv pp. Since the publication in 1972 of Peter D. Karsten's The Naval Aristocracy : The Golden Age of Annapolis and the Emergence of Modern American Navalism, American naval historians have been conducting a major overhaul of the subject. They believe their discipline has broken from its past con- straints of adulatory biography, a narrow concentration on fleet tactics to illustrate "command of the seas," and a long-lasting reverence for anything written by the high priest of navalists, Alfred Thayer Mahan. Kenneth J. Hagan, for example, whose own book in 1973—American Gunboat Diplo- macy and the Old Navy—helped to challenge the hegemony of the Mahan- ians, opens his edited collection of essays on the re-interpretation of the U.S. Navy from 1775-1978 by quoting Richard W. Leopold's comment, made in 1973, that naval history remained "a field sorely in need of the scholarly touch" (p. xi). Hagan, however, points to Karsten as an epitome of younger scholars "who have turned their attention toward American naval history in the past decade. The result has been a series of monographs, essays, and papers that attempt to assess the navy as an institutional expression of the American experience. Gone today is the hagiographie and eulogistic tone so characteristic of earlier American naval historiography. In its place can be heard the dispassionate voices of careful scholars" (p. xi). Likewise, Craig L. Symonds, in the foreword to New Aspects of Naval History, praises the selections printed from among the papers delivered at the Fourth Naval History Symposium, held at Annapolis, by claiming that "they demonstrate that naval historical scholarship is no longer exclusively concerned with battles, leaders, and tactics....Naval scholars in the 1980's are addressing themselves more to issues of political and international dimension than to the frequency of Admiral Jellicoe's crossing of the "T" at Jutland" (p. ix). Readers are reminded, furthermore, of the suggestion by David Trask, the keynote speaker at the 1977 Annapolis symposium, that this was a type of coming of age: "If we do not yet constitute a school, we are at least a kindergarten." Symonds argues that the quality and intensity of the papers from the 1978 symposium suggest that "this new aspect of naval history has now passed well beyond that modest claim" (p. ix). All well and good. Firing celebratory salvoes has always been a part of naval ritual. The works under review in two edited volumes—containing some forty-six papers, three com- ments and a personal memoir—and in two monographs which cover aspects of Union and Confederate Civil War naval history, give a reader the chance to see whether the salvoes contain smoke or substance.