On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era by Claude Berube

Abstract

Reviewed by: On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era by Claude Berube David Head (bio) Keywords U.S. Navy, Andre Jackson, Maritime history, Naval history On Wide Seas: The US Navy in the Jacksonian Era. By Claude Berube. (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2021. Pp. 248. Cloth, $54.95). Claude Berube once asked Robert Remini, the late Andrew Jackson biographer extraordinaire, what Old Hickory thought of the navy. "He didn't like it," Remini replied. "He didn't understand it, and he didn't use it" (xii). Remini's assessment reflects the conventional wisdom. Jackson was an army man, after all, a nationalist who was thrifty with a dollar—not the kind of person to project American power across the globe with expensive ships. But as Berube shows, this view of Jackson is inaccurate, a result of a lack of serious engagement with Jackson's relationship with the navy. It turns out that because of Jackson's support, the U.S. navy emerged from the 1830s as a larger, better organized, more technologically advanced, and more professional service than it had ever been. In six thematic chapters, Berube gives a full appraisal of the antebellum navy. He discusses how the navy differed from the army—cruising distant seas, for example, meant going months without orders from Washington and depending on foreign governments for port access to resupply. The book covers as well how the navy was governed, shipbuilding and the adoption of steam power, the development of a strategy that prioritized protecting commerce through the selective use of force, and the professionalization of an officer corps that participated in a self-conscious maritime republic of letters. Berube deftly uses traditional sources, such as presidential speeches, official correspondence, and magazines, in addition to less often used documents including records of the House and Senate Naval Affairs Committee, which show legislators hashing out policy before it got to the floor of Congress and into the Congressional record. Berube also mined some 16,000 pages worth of courts-martial records. Berube's background as a former Senate staffer allows him to offer insight on the budget process and the nitty-gritty politics of appropriations. Overall, Berube argues that Jackson's presidency was a vital period of growth that left the United States poised to take its place among the naval [End Page 634] powers of the Earth later in the century. The navy created international squadrons. It built ships—seventeen of them, the same number as under James Madison and behind only John Adams, both administrations that fought naval wars (69). It began the transition to a steam fleet, with small steam-driven vessels that would be especially effective during the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) along the coast and through the rivers of Florida. Jackson's administration reformed the naval bureaucracy and brought order to issues of personnel, supply, construction and maintenance, logistics, and budgeting. The officer corps professionalized, particularly in educating new officers. The haphazard system of teenage midshipmen learning math, science, and literature from the ship's chaplain, who was often someone mostly interested in having a naval rank and not an actual clergyman let alone a teacher, gave way to more rigorous shipboard training and, eventually, the founding of the Naval Academy in Annapolis (1845). Though Jackson is present in some chapters more than in others, there's plenty for Jackson scholars to learn about his presidency. For example, Berube argues that the naval dimension of Jackson's foreign policy, centered on protecting American commerce, showed restraint dictated by America's position in the world. Berube discusses four incidents in which American ships suffered attacks in far-flung locales: in the Falkland Islands (1829–1831), Quallah Battoo in Sumatra (1831), Savai'i in Samoa (1834), and the Namorik Atoll in the Marshall Islands (1835). A belligerent Jackson would have authorized naval reprisals in all four, but as Berube points out, Jackson authorized force only for the Falkland Islands and Quallah Battoo, because he saw both as critical to U.S. trade. A naval officer acting on his own attacked Savai'i, which Berube doubts Jackson would have approved, and he ordered no response to the...