Review: Lincoln's Admirals

Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and his Admirals

Weeks into his presidency, Abraham Lincoln was confronted with his first naval question: What to do about Fort Sumter? First, should he re-supply it--and risk war--or not and concede defeat, thereby giving the secessionist South a valuable bit of propaganda? Was there a diplomatic solution? To help answer these questions, he turned to men, most of whom he barely knew, with military, naval and diplomatic expertise. He looked for conventional and unconventional solutions and, in the end, as he did so often, ultimately made the decision himself. An expedition was organized to help the fort. But his lack of experience, the disorganization of his nascent administration and deliberate nature doomed the expedition. Lincoln blamed himself, but learned from the experience. Lincoln's Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin agreed. Writes Symonds:

Hamlin argued that there were two Lincolns: the one who came from Illinois, inexperienced in wielding great power," and the one who emerged later as "the conqueror of a gigantice civil war, the emancipator of slaves, master of the political situation, and savior of the nation."

Lincoln improved upon his performance in matters naval by taking some those matters into his own hands. In the west, he championed a river campaign utilizing combined army and naval forces that could strike simultaneously at separate targets and force the South to split its military resources. While not as directly involved, he was similarly heartened by the success of Admiral David Farragut's taking of New Orleans and run up the Mississippi. These combined operations were part of the "Anaconda Plan" and succeeded in giving the North a toehold on both ends of the Mississippi as it ran through the South.

The other significant part of the Anaconda plan was the blockade of southern ports. Here, Lincoln first had to navigate admiralty law while his fleet was built or acquired. Thanks to "King Cotton," European nations had a vested interest in maintaining trade with the South. They would not submit to a "paper blockade": the North would have to have a real force in place. Yet, the logistics of putting a blockade in place seemed to worry Lincoln less than the legal gymnastics required to legitimize a blockade against the South, which Lincoln had contended was not an entity in and of itself. Symond's explains this well.

One of the best stories told by Symonds is that of Lincoln's visit to the Hampton Roads region of Virginia while the Merrimack and Monitor circled each other warily amidst the Union blockade. Lincoln's personal intervention and suggestions prompted both the taking of a key shore positions as well as, ultimately, the scuttling of the infamous Confederate ironclad.

Symond's also covers the role that "contraband" (freed slaves) played in the Navy and how, traditionally, the maritime service was more accustomed to having blacks among its ranks.

Absorbing the contrabands into the blockade fleet caused scarcely a ripple either among the public at large or within the navy. Historically, free blacks had made up some 15 percent of the navy's enlisted force. During the 1850s, the figure dropped to only about 5 percent; now it would grow again back up to 15 percent. Naval officers, always eager for more hands, generally welcomed the contrabands on board as simply so many more strong backs, and the white sailors welcomed them, too, mainly because the newcomers were generally assigned "the dirtiest, most strenuous, and most physically demanding jobs," thereby relieving white sailors of those duties....White officers and men alike took a certain delight in using the enemy's slaves against them.

Interestingly, according to Symonds, Lincoln's early success on the rivers of the West and in implementing the blockade

...may have encourage Lincoln to take a slightly harder line with McClellan, who was still stalled on the Virginia peninsula battling the mud and his own fears. Union forces were successful elsewhere, so why not in Virginia?

Elsewhere in the book, Symond's describes the political management Lincoln had to engage in to sooth fragile egos and get the right men in the right places as he deemed necessary. His support of the ordnance expert John A. Dahlgren often put him at odds with the navy establishment, but he believed in Dahlgren and promoted him to admiral even though he lacked seagoing experience. At higher levels, he constantly had to manage the relationship (or lack thereof) and differing agendas of Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and Secretary of State William Seward.

Symonds covers other matters, such as the Trent affair and the hunt for the Confederate blockade runners (both involving the combustible Admiral Charles Wilkes, incidentally) as well as the messy aftermath of the "easing out" of Admiral Samuel Du Pont and the French invasion of Mexico.

Symonds has done a fine job of narrative history. While the focus is on the navy, he doesn't leave out the better known historical touchstones, which help to provide context for Civil War afficianados who may not be as familiar with naval timelines. The work is well-sourced and a valuable contribution to the existing Civil War literature. Symond's is to be commended.

Quick Spot the Russian Submarine!

Can you find the Russian Submarine in this picture?


Yup....it's under water! But it wasn't until the recent storm that hit Providence, RI this past week. Here's what the Juliett 484 looks like:


Here's the story:

“The Russian Sunken Sub Museum” is how engineer Damon Ise answered the phone this morning.

Yes, sometime in the evening, the listing submarine laid over on its side and sank, Ise said.

All that’s visible is the submarine’s periscope, sticking up out of the water at an angle, a radio antenna and one of the sub’s orange life buoys, Ise said.

“One of those [buoys] is bouncing and dancing on the surface, and then there’s just a trail of bubbles coming from the front,” he said. “It’s very sad.”

No fuel is leaking from the vessel, Ise said, and crews are working already on a salvage plan with a professional from New York.

Exactly what shape that salvage plan would take is, well, murky at this point, museum officials said today.

The vessel, berthed at Collier Point Park, had been battered by the storm that hit the region early this week. It had been restored as a floating museum after being bought in 2002.

By midday, TV crews and other members of the press joined several Coast Guard officers and staff of the submarine museum at the small, windswept park overlooking Providence Harbor.

Lines ran along the dock, down to the sub, holding it in place on the bottom. The antenna, and a small, pipelike-protusion stuck up from the relatively calm surface of the water.

Off in the distance, only one other vessel could be scene, a tanker.

Nearby, a sign for Cardi's Furniture -- featuring the three Cardi brothers in sailor suits – urged visitors to follow safety tips, some of which were painfully obvious today:

"Be sure to use caution when in the sub" and "Appropriate footwear required; decks may be slippery."

At least they're keeping a sense of humor about it all!

"The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down...

...of the big lake they called 'Gitche Gumee.'" Today is the 31st anniversary of the sinking of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, which was immortalized by Gordon Lightfoot.

It is also the birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps!

Military Path to Citizenship

Writing in the Washington Post, Max Boot and Michael O'Hanlon propose a military path to citizenship and National Review's Stanley Kurtz thinks it's a good idea while John Derbyshire and Mark Krikorian do not. Kurtz offers some historical examples of non-citizens contributing to the national defense (and asks for more) and is supported by emailers (one, two, three) who explain that, indeed, this is already going on in the U.S. military (which Boot and O'Hanlon mention in their piece).

Derbyshire's specific complaint against the idea is this:

The difficulty Boot notes in increasing troop levels ought to be a clue that, while we're happy to sign on to kill Saddam or nuke Japan or burn Atlanta (sorry to you Georgians out there), not enough of our people are interested in playing nursemaid to a bunch of crazies to make that a sustainable policy. To ignore that, and call instead for the recruitment of foreign soldiers, stems from the same impulse as Brecht's crack about "dissolving the people and electing a new one" — if the American people aren't interested in signing up for police duty in Araby, lets find people who are.

My college roommate's family was a beneficiary of the military path to citizenship. A Filipino, his father enlisted in the Navy, did his time and wound up in San Diego as a U.S. citizen. I have no doubts that there are non-U.S. citizens who would jump at the chance to obtain expedited U.S. citizenship.

The Military History Foundation

Mark Grimsley has tired of the "hand wringing" and proactively started The Military History Foundation:

I have created The Military History Foundation in response to my perception that at present, a dearth of ideas and strategies exists concerning the advancement of military history as an academic field. The tone among many senior scholars in the field -- including those who hold, or have held, leadership positions -- is strikingly defeatist. Along with their rank-and-file counterparts, they complain about the marginalization of the field, blaming it on a blind prejudice against miltary history among academics in other fields.

This may be true. It is also irrelevant.

I happen to think the thesis of an unreasoning hostility toward the field is overblown. But even if it is not, this does not relieve us of the responsibility for developing and executing plans to strengthen the academic military history. Since others do not seem to be shouldering the burden, I've decided to embark on the work myself....

...I am going to do what I can to generate constructive plans and insist that the leadership of the Society for Military History either adopt them or develop constructive plans of its own.

That is the immediate task of The Military History Foundation. At the moment, it consists of a domain name purchased for $23.90 and a few web pages.

But it won't stay that way.

Instead of perpetuating a debate whereby many continue to talk past each other, Grimsley has provided a potential avenue for change. Kudos for the proactive approach!

Vanishing Military Historians? Not Really

Mark Grimsley takes issue with John Miller's piece about vanishing military historians, which I commented upon earlier this week. [Full disclosure: I asked Grimsley for is take on the piece--and apparently I wasn't the only one]. In short, Grimsley thinks Miller's partisanship has skewed his analysis and that miller purposedly ignored the successful military history programs at such "liberal bastions" as Duke and UNC. Grimsley also did his own research into the University of Wisconsin situation that Miller used as an open to his piece. As they say, "read it all", and this follow up (and there will be more from Grimsley, I'd imagine).

UPDATE: John Miller has responded:

How clever of him to have uncovered my sinister conspiracy not to mention Duke or UNC! As it happens, I did quote UNC's ROTC commander, who is also a professor of military science at the school. I suppose I could have written that Duke and UNC have great programs—a couple of my sources said as much. More often, however, I heard OSU, Texas A&M, and Kansas State mentioned, so those are the ones I cited in the piece (along with West Point, which is a special case). But these are highly subjective judgments and professors get jealous about such things, so I'll say right now, on the record, that Duke and UNC have quality programs in military history.

Grimsley continues to post about it, including putting up a comment from a reader, which echoes my own feelings on this matter:

Having read Miller’s piece, the responses herein, and being a recently retired faculty member, I must say that the whole thing here seems to be a matter of umbrage taken unnecessarily. I cannot discern in Miller’s piece any disrespect for the field of military history, and to presume that he’s trying to implement some secret plan to kill it off simply to be able to make a point about the liberal biases of academia leads straight to paranoia.

It seems that Miller’s piece was incomplete, and no doubt he regrets any significant omissions — but looking upon you as persons who understand that any conveyance of facts about an event or circumstances by necessity must be limited, I would expect more understanding of this to be displayed.

The commenter also sketched a rough guideline how to approach the subject more analytically, which Grimsley has fleshed out.

Unfortunately, I think Grimsley seemed predisposed to assume the worst about Miller's motivation for writing the article and approached the matter too tendentiously in his initial response. In an email to Miller, Grimsley stated that:

My recent posts on both Cliopatria, the big history blog, and my own individual blog devoted to academic military history, respond to your September 26 article, “Sounding Taps.” The tone I have taken is contentious but I hope not abusive. Basically your article struck me as deliberately constructed so as to catastrophize the position military history has within the academy.

Grimsley's piece is not "abusive", but it's contentiousness is surrounded by a large amount of flippancy. It seems to me that the best way to engage in a debate over an issue is to--at least initially--take the argument at face value, offer correctives or refutations and proceed. By assuming the worst of Miller's motivation, I think Grimsley has needlessly applied a bellows to a fire that--according to him--need not have been kindled in the first place. Both have good points, and a healthy, respectful dialogue would probably be more useful and productive. (I'm off the stump now).

Vanishing Military Historians

John J. Miller (via PDTR) investigates why military historians are become scarce on college campi. He quotes Mary Habeck, a military historian at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., who blames the "tenured radicals" of the 1960's, who prefer studying "the kind of social history [they] want to support." Thus, according to Miller, these academics concentrated on social history instead of "diplomatic, intellectual, and maritime history — but perhaps none have suffered so many casualties as the 'drums and trumpets' crowd."

Miller has surveyed American colleges and universities and explains:

At first glance, military history appears to have maintained beachheads on a lot of campuses. Out of 153 universities that award doctorates in history, 99 of them — almost 65 percent — have at least one professor who claims a research interest in war, according to S. Mike Pavelec, a military historian at Hawaii Pacific University. But this figure masks another problem: Social history has started to infiltrate military history, Trojan Horse–style. Rather than examining battles, leaders, and weapons, it looks at the impact of war upon culture. And so classes that are supposedly about the Second World War blow by the Blitzkrieg, the Bismarck, and the Bulge in order to celebrate the proto-feminism of Rosie the Riveter, condemn the national disgrace of Japanese-American internment, and ask that favorite faculty-lounge head-scratcher: Should the United States have dropped the bomb? “It’s becoming harder and harder to find experts in operational military history,” says Dennis Showalter of Colorado College. “All this social history is like Hamlet without the prince of Denmark.”

Miller also gives examples of endowed military history chairs that are going unfilled (University of Wisconsin); accomplished military historians who are retiring and not being replaced (Gerald Linderman and John Shy at Michigan); or replaced by non-military historians (James MacPherson's prospective replacement at Princeton is an expert in gender studies); and institutions that are refusing endowments for a military history chair at all (Dartmouth).

It's not just the universities that have turned away from military history. At least one of the mainstream historical scholarly publications has been ignoring straight military history, too.

Another reason for the shortage of scholars is that military historians have been shut out of The American Historical Review, the most prestigious academic journal for history professors. Last year, John A. Lynn [who states he is a Liberal Democrat--ed.] of the University of Illinois surveyed the last 150 issues of the AHR, which comes out five times annually. During this 30-year period, he couldn’t find a single article that discussed the conduct of World War II. Other ignored wars included the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. There was a single article on the English Civil War, dealing with atrocities committed therein. Lynn located precisely two articles on the U.S. Civil War. One of these also dealt with atrocities. “I guess military atrocities are attractive to the editors,” he says. The only article on World War I focused on female soldiers in the Russian army. “I suspect the editors liked it because it was about women, not because it was about war.” The lead article in the most recent issue of the AHR is about wigs in 18th-century France.

Miller does qualify that the military academies are still strong in military history and also menitions that some public universities, including Kansas State, Ohio State, and Texas A&M, have strong, well-respected military history programs. However, he also explains that military historians are forced to find refuge at second-tier schools and in the military itself.

Miller may seem a bit snarky towards the social historians, but the point of his article isn't so much to attack what is being studied as it is to call attention to what isn't. Military history--traditional military history--is important because of the lessons it teaches:

“Knowledge of military history is an essential prerequisite for an informed national debate about security and statecraft,” says Michael Desch, a political scientist at the Bush School of Government and Public Service in Texas. Many voters, for instance, don’t know how to contextualize the nearly 23,000 U.S. military casualties in Iraq since 2003. That’s a pretty big number. But it’s also roughly the level of casualties suffered at Antietam in just one day, and a small fraction of the more than 200,000 casualties endured in Vietnam.

Critics of the war also have plenty to gain from a public that has a better understanding of older conflicts. “People might have realized that we have a poor track record of using the military to do nation-building in Third World countries,” says Desch. “The model isn’t Germany or Japan, but Nicaragua and the Philippines.” Finally, the population of Americans who have served in the military is shrinking, and with it their knowledge of what armies and navies do.

Anybody who has studied the history of war knows that it’s possible to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat — it happened at Shiloh, when a Confederate attack nearly routed the Union army, only to have General Grant drive them off the field of battle the next day. Perhaps military historians can stage a similar comeback. In their efforts to do so, they will be wise to remember something that Grant didn’t know back in 1862: An awful lot of brutal fighting lies ahead.

I think Miller's concerns about the dearth of military history courses offered to, say, your average undergraduate, is--while not unfounded--a bit overwrought. I can only point to my own personal experience.

I took courses titled "World War II" and "The Civil War" in which I think it could be reasonably expected that "military history" would be covered. In my World War II class, the professor (whom I'd describe as a diplomatic/social historian) came right out and said he wasn't going to focus on tactics (which was fine by me). Nonetheless, he did cover basic strategy and also touched on the "war is politics by other means..." methodological track. That being said, as he promised, he focused much less on battles than the social impact on the homefront, for instance. Miller is also on target in that we did investigate one of the very topics that he mentions as being a favorite: Hiroshima. The course was very well done and enjoyable and I learned a lot. But it was definitely presented from the perspective of social and diplomatic history, not military.

The Civil War course, on the other hand, was taught by a professor who was much more of a diplomatic/military historian. As such, he delved much deeper into tactics and battles, though he didn't neglect politics or diplomacy. He did, however, give relatively short shrift to social history. This course was also worthwhile, but, again, the dominant perspective was that of the discipline in which the professor specialized.

Thus, I believe that, when done properly, a general survey-type course--the kind most undergrads take--can effectively delve into tactics and battles as well as other areas (social, diplomatic, political). That's where I think Miller is a little off the mark. The traditional topics covered by military history are being taught as part of a larger, more comprehensive course that also covers history as studied via a wide variety of historical methodologies. That being said, he does make an important point.

Colleges and universities need to have military historians on campus who teach conventional military history courses as well as general surveys. First, and most in-line with Miller's critique, the continued popularity of books devoted to the military history of the Civil War and WWII show that there is a body of students out there who would be interested in straight forward military history courses. Thus, specific, upper level courses in military history would probably be well received and be attractive to many students.

Yet, to my mind, it is the role that military historians can play in the historical education of the broader student population that is more important. I saw many people interested in military history in my Civil War class. They were there for the guns and ended up learning about a whole lot more (yes, like about the "butter"). Similarly, there were people in my WWII class who were interested in the home front and Hiroshima, but also took away some knowledge about battles and a few tactics and how specific military capabilities and outcomes play a part in history.

What I'm getting at is that a military historian--just like a social or economic or diplomatic historian--brings a certain point of view to courses that deal with broader topics. It would be a shame if these perspectives are lost because they aren't popular enough amongst the academics or "sexy" enough for academic journals. The current impression is that any young historian simply can't make much headway with a specialization in military history. If there is no demand for this methodolgy, the supply will soon dry up and our understanding of war will be the worse for it.