Stopping at the Water’s Edge?

Abstract

Stopping at the Water’s Edge? Howard J. Fuller (bio) James M. McPherson . War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–1865. Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press , 2012 . 288 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 . Fans of James M. McPherson’s work, myself included, have waited a long time for this volume: the Pulitzer and Lincoln Prize–winning historian’s take on the strictly naval dimension of the American Civil War. Whereas his Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988) treated with many of the episodes found in here, from McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign and the Battle of Hampton Roads between the ironclads Monitor and Virginia (or “Merrimack”), to the combined operations against Vicksburg, War on the Waters fans out to explore in some depth other pivotal events such as the Union naval coup de main against New Orleans (April 24–29, 1862) and the U.S. Navy’s repulse at Charleston (April 7, 1863). The epic Battle of Mobile Bay the author now considers—from the first paragraph of the first page—one of the most important Union victories of the war, and Rear Admiral Farragut he ranks of “equal status with Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman in winning the war.” High praise indeed. He also wonders if “the Union navy deserves more credit for Northern victory than it has traditionally received” (p. 1). Exactly why and how the naval side of the story remains overshadowed by political giants like President Abraham Lincoln, marbleized military icons like Confederate General Robert E. Lee, or bloody battles like Gettysburg (even during the current sesquicentennial of the Civil War), is, however, an issue that McPherson studiously ignores. This rather disappointed me. His literature review/annotated bibliography in Battle Cry was masterful and useful, placing the value of his own valiant, one-volume history of the conflict into sharper context. The 2003 Oxford University Press paperback reprint edition also gave him a chance to offer the reader an “Afterword,” which not only further addressed the vast array of scholarship available on this subject, but famously attacked the “libertarian” and pro-Southern revisionists so hard at work in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, his introduction here is an outline of the book’s events; and the concluding chapter, scarcely two and half pages, is also more of a summary than a full-on analytical allegro. Something is [End Page 433] missing here in this academic study of “The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–1865.” Perhaps after 150 years, the Civil War—even at sea—remains too “American” for its own good: too bound by the water’s edge. After all, this was, among other things, the greatest maritime war of the nineteenth century. Naval historians tend to gauge events in relation to Great Britain, the British Empire, and the Royal Navy, first, and then work between the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on the one end to the First World War on the other. There was the great Battle of Trafalgar (which accomplished much tactically but was already strategically irrelevant since Napoleon Bonaparte had taken his Grande Armée elsewhere by the autumn of 1805) and the not-so-decisive Battle of Jutland (which accomplished more strategically in 1916, many scholars have tried to argue, by at least keeping the Germans largely in port). History, in the meantime, becomes a “Pax Britannica” narrative, and naval power itself is seen as “world policeman.” Both are convenient myths for more easily understanding the modern world—things like globalization or “superior technology.” But then there is the anomaly of the American Civil War, and Civil War histories such as War on the Waters brace the Victorian era in different terms and offer stubborn facts. Take, for instance, the Union combined operations by the end of 1864 against Fort Fisher, guarding the approaches to the last great Confederate seaport open to blockade-running on the Atlantic: Wilmington, North Carolina. Armed with some of the largest artillery in the world (including a British 8-inch, 150-pound rifled Armstrong gun smuggled through the blockade) and boasting massive earth and sand ramparts several yards thick, connected by sophisticated underground...