Commanding Lincoln’s Navy: Union Naval
Like the U.S. Army, the Navy began the Civil War hopelessly under-equipped for the tasks which the war laid upon it. Unlike the Army, however, the Navy rose with astonishing speed to swell the size of the fleet, create new organizations, shut down Confederate ports, and impose the first large-scale inshore blockade seen since the Napoleonic Wars. All this took place in spite of the Navy being, if anything, an even more conservative service than the Army — not only politically, but also in its slavish attachment to promotion by seniority and its hidebound notions of what qualified as meritorious service. How the Navy pulled off this transformation is the basic story of Stephen Taaffe’s Commanding Lincoln’s Navy. Following hard on the heels of his examination of corps-level command in Commanding the Army of the Potomac (2006), Taaffe turns the same curiosity onto the 19 naval officers who commanded the U.S. Navy’s six Civil War squadrons — North and South Atlantic, East and West Gulf, Mississippi, and West Indies — to look for the patterns of qualifications, chain-of-command and personality he featured in his previous book. As the subtitle underscores, this is not a naval history of the Civil War, but a study of the elusive quality of leadership and what constituted leadership in naval affairs in the 19th century. Even with that caveat, there is still more than enough on the principal naval actions of the Civil War to satisfy any navy enthusiast. The six squadrons were, after all, combat units, and their commanders necessarily featured prominently in the early-war occupation of the Carolina Sea Islands and the Hatteras Banks, the capture of New Orleans, the siege of Charleston, the closure of Mobile Bay, and, finally, the shut-down of Wilmington in January 1865. But the famous Rebel commerce-raiders are absent (they did not fall within the jurisdiction of the six squadrons except when passing through), and so, for the most part, is the romance of the blockade-runners, the ironclads and the submarines. What Taaffe concentrates on instead is the dynamic of command-and-control, beginning with Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, a landsman and a newspaper editor whose shrewd common sense was a far greater asset in working the Navy up to war than all the epaulettes combined. Welles and his tireless assistant secretary, Gustavus Fox, dominate the book. They are the ones who direct policy, select (and de-select) personnel, and create the squadron organization which maintains the blockade. Their principal enemies, apart from the Confederates, were in officers who were splendid squadron administrators but unaggressive combat officers (John Dahlgren and Samuel Du Pont being the lead examples), and in officers who had aggression wired into them (David Farragut and David Porter), but who were indifferent administrators and, in Porter’s case, shameless back-stabbers. Taaffe lays a great deal of emphasis on leadership “traits” — aggressiveness, foresight, cooperativeness — and on inter-personal relationships to explain the rise and fall of Welles’ squadron commanders. There is a good deal less here (as there was in his book on the Army of the Potomac’s corps commanders) on the actual responsibilities of flag command, the work of staff, the responsibilities for logistics, and the knowledge requisite for all three. Just as there were many division commanders who never successfully got the hang of corps command, so there were ship captains who never quite mastered the differences between that and flag rank. It would have been helpful if Taaffe could have told us what made the difference. After all, squadron organization was as much a novelty to the U.S. Navy as corps organization was to the Army, and sometimes with the same lethal after-effects. With this book, we finally have a spotlight on the command structure of the Civil War Navy. It is not the last word; but it is, for many of the characters and situations Taaffe deals with, very close to the first one that Civil War naval historians have uttered. Let those historians take their future bearings from Taaffe’s work. Dr. Allen C. Guelzo Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College.
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Introduction, notes, bibliography, maps, index, 324 pp., 2009. Naval Institute Press, 291 Wood Rd., Annapolis, MD 21402, $37.95 plus shipping, www.usni.org.