Quarterdeck and Bridge

by Robert Seager II

NAVAL WAR COLLEGE/HISTORICAL DIVISION

ALFRED THAYER MAHAN (1840–1914) WAS THE ELDEST SON OF MARY Okill and Dennis Hart Mahan (1802–1871), professor of civil and military engineering and dean of faculty at the U.S. Military Academy, and a highly regarded author of military treatises. Alfred was born at West Point on 27 September 1840, spent his first twelve years there, and was filled to the brim as a young boy with the absolute necessity of praying until blue in the face and reading until exhausted. His favorite books as a child and young man were “boarders-away!” naval biographies and other maritime adventure stories. He would become, sequentially, a history buff, amateur historian, world-acclaimed professional historian, and, in 1902–1903, president of the prestigious American Historical Association. He was raised an Episcopalian of the biblical literalist sort, and by his own later admission succeeded personally in finding and knowing God.

As a naval officer of heroic proportions, however, Mahan was an utter failure. ¹ There was nothing swashbuckling about him. He thoroughly disliked the navy in which he served for forty years and was disliked by almost all who served with him, under him, or over him. His classmates at the U.S. Naval Academy “silenced” him during his first class year (1858–1859), his shipmates later avoided him in the wardroom, and his shoremates generally gave him wide berth. A tall, handsome, brilliant, and enormously vain young man, he was self-assured to the point of arrogance. Indeed, his contentious personality, his humorlessness, and his ill-concealed sense of social and intellectual superiority conspired to condemn him to a life of professional loneliness in the U.S. Navy. With the exception of Samuel (“Sam”) A’Court Ashe, a midshipman who briefly befriended him at Annapolis, he had no close personal friends in or out of the service. He was, as his daughter Ellen later observed, “The Cat That Walked by Himself.”2

Further, he was a naval officer who was deathly afraid of the sea; and he was either a poor shiphandler or was incredibly accident-prone at the conn.³ He never heard a naval gun fired in anger save during the closing moments of the action at Port Royal, South Carolina, in November 1861, and he spent many of his subsequent waking hours on shore trying to avoid or postpone reassignment to sea duty. His naval career, from tedious blockade duty during most of the Civil War until his assignment to the new Naval War College in 1885, was a dreary succession of antique vessels and underfunded shore installations.

Who, then, was this unusual, personally unpopular, ill-starred shiphandler who was prone to seasickness? He was the man who, between 1890 and 1914, did as much as or more than any other American to introduce his countrymen to new ways of looking at the U.S. Navy’s role in American foreign policy decision making, the nation’s proper role in world affairs, and the strategic implications and dimensions of national security. He published twenty-one books, eleven of them containing reprintings of many of his 137 articles or serving as the repositories of various preserialized magazine articles. He also penned 107 letters to newspaper editors, mostly to the New York Times and mostly contentious. His most important works by far are his seminal The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783, published in 1890, and its sequel, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812, published in 1892.⁴

Mahan has been condemned as naval propagandist, imperialist, warmonger, racist, and social Darwinist. He has been praised as patriot, foreign policy realist, brilliant historian, founding father of the Anglo-American “special relationship,” and strategic genius. What generally has been either overlooked or underestimated in evaluations of Mahan is that he was an intensely devout High Church Episcopalian, rooted in New Testament literalism, who combined into a single philosophical, theological, cosmological, and historical system conceptions that presented a Christian view of just war, pusillanimous peace, and Good Samaritan “imperialism.” His was a cosmos filled with dialectical conflict, a history in which God continuously intervened, and an earth inhabited by inherently combative men and nation states.

Much of Mahan’s adult life was spent as an Episcopal tither, lay-reader, sometime delegate to annual Episcopal Church general conventions, adviser to and lay president of the Seamen’s Church Institute (Episcopal) of New York, and member of the Episcopal Church Board of Missions. He was also friend, counselor, and contributor to Boone University of Wuchang, China, and to St. Augustine School for Negroes in Raleigh, North Carolina; and frequent contributor to The Churchman magazine, as well as a leading figure in the controversy within the Episcopal Church concerning reform of The Book of Common Prayer. Episcopal Christianity in particular and Protestant Christianity in general were always in his heart and mind and were always a prism through which he viewed the secular world. His “spiritual biography,” The Harvest Within: Thoughts on the Life of a Christian (1909), discloses the depth of this orientation, as does the revealing diary he kept while serving as executive officer in the Iroquois in East Asian waters in 1868–1869. The most important clue to understanding the mind of Alfred Thayer Mahan lies in his religion.5

There was nothing particularly original, however, in Mahan’s eclectic cosmology. Nor was his major discovery (in 1884) of the influence of sea power on history original with him, a point he willingly conceded when he came later to realize that men, from General Pericles of Athens, Greece, to Representative Washington C. Whitthorne of Columbia, Tennessee, had earlier grasped the idea.⁶

Mahan participated in no stirring battles, chastised no duplicitous tribal chief by leveling his flimsy village, and opened no foreign port to U.S. trade at cannon mouth. On only two occasions (Osaka, Japan, in 1868 and Panama City in 1885) did he participate in putting small bodies of armed seamen on shore to protect American lives and property. Because he was totally unheroic, any analysis of his reputation as one of the most important and influential officers in the history of the U.S. Navy must turn almost entirely on his ideas and teachings: how and whence those ideas derived, how they applied to the nation and to the world in which Mahan lived, and to what extent, if any, they are still useful to the navy and the nation nearly a century later.

A summary of his ideas, to which the influence of sea power on history was basic, includes the following:

1. Conflict, progress, and natural laws in the universe: From his uncle, the Reverend Milo Mahan (1819–1870), professor of early Christian church history in the General (Episcopal) Seminary in New York City, Mahan derived his belief that motion in the universe and progress in human history could be explained in terms of the dialectical clashes of various cosmic forces inherently in opposition to one another. Whereas Milo Mahan was a Pythagorean numerologist and mystic who explained these forces as numbers that stood for conflicting ideas or principles, his nephew, without known assistance from Hegel or Marx, argued that progress in history was the result of “the conflict of two opposites, as in the long struggle between freedom and slavery, union and disunion in our own land; but the union nevertheless exists. It is not to be found in freedom, not yet in slavery, but in their conflict it is.”

From his uncle Milo also came the conviction that a universe fashioned and set in motion by an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Creator was, by definition, suffused with a logic and perfection that could be expressed in the form and fact of natural laws. Mahan therefore believed that there were “laws” of history, war (strategy and tactics), and human behavior. He held, further, that “the first law of states, as of men, is self-preservation,” even if such preservation had to be achieved by national expansion.

2. Inherency of war and just wars in human history: Mahan viewed war as the earthly manifestation of dialectical conflict in the universe. Given the existence of sovereign states inhabited and governed by aggressive men (ample evidence for which he found in the Bible), and the fact that there was no recorded human history in which war was absent, he concluded that war was both constant and inevitable. Indeed, war was a corrective instrument placed in human hands by the Creator to enable God-fearing and God-loving men to defend that which is good, just, and righteous on earth and oppose forcibly that which is evil, unjust, and wrong. Modern nations in the service of God must be prepared at all times to fight just wars.

3. Pacifism, arms limitation, and rules of war: Mahan opposed all popular agitation for courts that would arbitrate international disputes, seek to control or outlaw particularly lethal weapons, or otherwise make rules and regulations designed to mitigate the horrors of war. Such activities foolishly denied the historical inevitability of war and compromised the necessity of fighting just wars. He felt, however, that modern wars might be rendered less protracted and less frequent if the profits reaped by nonparticipants were removed. Thus, as a U.S. delegate to the First Hague Conference in 1899 and a strident critic of American participation in the Second Hague Conference in 1907, he urged the abandonment of the seventeenth-century international rubric which held that in wartime “free ships make free goods, except contraband.”

4. Research and writing of history: Mahan was convinced that his personal awareness of the influence of sea power on history came directly from God. It was clearly one of the laws (or central themes) of history because the creation and proper use of organized sea power in wartime to ensure “command of the sea” had clearly influenced the course of human history, certainly more than had any other single factor. His belief in the inerrancy of God-given central themes in the universe, themes that historians could discover through the favor of God and by the use of subordinationist historical methodology, underpinned his attitude toward researching and writing history.

Specifically, he believed, “Facts won’t lie if you work them right; but if you work them wrong a little disproportion in the emphasis, a slight exaggeration of color, a little more or less limelight on this or that part of the grouping and the result is not truth, even though each individual fact be as unimpeachable as the multiplication table.” By working them right, historians could achieve mystical oneness with God by verifying His laws; nor would historians ever err in matters of historical interpretation.

5. Laws of naval strategy and tactics: From Antoine-Henri Jomini (1779–1869) by way of Stephen B. Luce (1827–1917), Mahan derived the notion that a nation’s “command of the sea” hinged on its recognition and scientific application of the laws of tactical and strategical concentration. These were cosmic laws that operated without reference to technological changes in naval vessels and ordnance. For this reason, fleets or armies, regardless of existing technology, that situated themselves at geographical positions in or near the “strategic center” of a given war—thus affording themselves the greatest amount of offensive mobility or the greatest measure of defensive flexibility—usually won the battles that determined the outcome of the wars and thus influenced the course of history. And a fleet in battle that could maneuver (concentrate) itself in such a way as to bring, for a decisive moment, a greater part of its firepower and personnel against lesser parts of the firepower and people of its enemy would invariably win the action—the decisive “Big Battle,” that would establish “command of the sea” and bring victory. Indeed, as Mahan put it, again in dialectical terms, the very “Art of War consists in concentrating in order to fight and disseminating in order to subsist. . . . The problem is one of embracing opposites.”

6. Battleships as decisive naval weapons: Finally, Mahan argued that mere commerce raiding during war at sea (guerre de course) could never be tactically or strategically decisive. Wars at sea could be settled conclusively, and “command of the sea” thereby established, only by concentrated fleets of battleships. But such vessels, he had come to believe by 1906, did not necessarily have to be copies of HMS Dreadnought and mount batteries composed solely of 10-inch or 12-inch guns. Modern navies, he argued, should maintain the operational flexibility inherent in “balanced” ship sizes and in the employment of “mixed batteries” of greater- and lesser-caliber guns. Whatever the size of the ships or caliber of the guns, however, battle fleets must obey the strategical and tactical laws governing war at sea. The projection of naval power ashore by amphibious or other means seems not to have concerned Mahan.7

Mahan’s discovery of the influence of sea power on history occurred shortly after Commodore Luce had invited him to join the faculty of the proposed Naval War College, which was scheduled to commence operation in Newport, Rhode Island, on 4 September 1885. Luce told him only that he would be required to give lectures on the “certain general principles” adducing to success or failure in naval warfare.⁸ Commander Mahan was no stranger to the scholarly Luce. They had sailed together briefly during the Civil War, and Luce also knew him as the author of The Gulf and Inland Waters, a credible volume in the Charles Scribner’s Sons series on the Navy in the Civil War, which Mahan researched and wrote in five months in 1883 while serving as navigation officer at the New York (Brooklyn) Navy Yard. Why Scribner’s picked Mahan for this task is not known, but why Mahan accepted such a pressure-packed assignment is clear: with a wife and three small children to support, he desperately needed the six hundred dollars the publisher was offering for the job. Competent as the book was, there was in it no hint of the sea power hypothesis to come. He did make plain, however, his view that the Civil War was in every respect a just war.9

The time, place, and circumstance of Mahan’s great discovery of his sea power hypothesis are known precisely; it occurred in the library of the English Club in Lima, Peru, in November 1884, while he was reading Theodor Mommsen’s The History of Rome in preparation for his War College lectures, and while his command, the decrepit Wachusett, lay at nearby Callao. Years later, in 1907, he described the exciting moment of his discovery in his autobiography, From Sail to Steam:

He who seeks, finds, if he does not lose heart; and to me, continuously seeking, came from within the suggestion that control of the sea was an historic factor which had never been systematically appreciated and expanded. For me . . . the light dawned first on my inner consciousness; I owed it to no other man. . . . I cannot now reconstitute from memory the sequence of my mental processes; but while my problem was still wrestling with my brain there dawned upon me one of those concrete perceptions which turn inward darkness into light—and give substance to shadow. . . . It suddenly struck me, whether by some chance phrase of the author I do not know, how different things might have been could Hannibal have invaded Italy by sea, as the Romans often had Africa, instead of by the long land route.

Much earlier than this, however, in mid-1894, Mahan had privately assured his wife that he had been “guided to the work which is now so overwhelming praised,” and that “the gift and call to write both came from outside.”¹⁰

Whether the Creator had indeed nudged Mahan’s mind, or a Gestalt experience of sorts had taken place, cannot be determined. Nonetheless, Mahan’s blinding historical insight in November 1884 about sea power in history was destined to change the direction of his boring and lackluster naval career, revolutionize the study of naval history, and make his name a household word in U.S. naval and diplomatic circles and in the parlors of subscribers to such high-toned magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Monthly, and North American Review.

In mid-May 1885, Mahan informed Luce that preoccupation with the concerns of the Wachusett had rendered his sea power insight “a little vague” since November 1884, but that from “scanty notes” made at the time, his basic approach to his lectures would be, first, to “consider sources of maritime power or weakness—material, personnel, national aptitude, harbors with their positions relative to commercial routes and enemies coasts.” He would then “bring forward instances from ancient and modern history, of the effect of navies and the control of the sea upon great or small campaigns,” especially Hannibal’s defeat in Italy in the Second Punic War. He hoped this approach would lead to the discovery of possible parallels “between the weapons or branches of land forces and those of the sea, if any hints can be drawn as to their use.” As for the “subject of naval tactics,” a primary theoretical interest of Luce’s at this time, “I own I am awfully at sea; but in a study like the above I should hope for light.”11

Mahan would soon learn that Luce had already discovered the source of that light and would urge Mahan to follow its gleam. Indeed, Luce was far ahead of Mahan in the conviction that naval officers should study history, especially that of great naval battles, to discover what scientific principles were illustrated in victorious combat, or where disregard for the accepted rules of war had led to defeat. Mahan would also learn that Luce had nothing less in view than to make of the new Naval War College the birthplace of the discovery of the laws and principles comprising the “science of naval warfare.”

Indeed, Luce told the nine men in the first class to report to the college in September 1885 (Mahan was not yet present), and that their primary task there was “to raise maritime war to the level of a science.” Moreover, he continued, “having established our principles by the inductive process, we may then resort to the deductive method of applying those principles to such a changed condition of the art of war as may be imposed by later inventions or by introduction of novel devices.” Luce was also certain that although there was yet

no authoritative treatise on the art of naval warfare under steam . . . we must, perforce, resort to the well-known rules of the military art with a view to their application to the military movements of a fleet, and, from the well-recognized methods of disposing troops for battle, ascertain the principles which govern fleet formations. . . . It is by this means alone that we can raise naval warfare from the empirical stage to the dignity of a science.

To make this last point quite clear, he suggested that “the existence of fundamental principles, by which all the operations of war should be conducted, has been placed beyond doubt by the researches of Jomini.” Let us, Luce emphasized, as we search for “the science of naval warfare under steam . . . look for that master mind who will lay the foundations of that science, and do for it what Jomini has done for military science.”¹²

So it was that through Luce, his commanding officer at the Naval War College, Mahan derived his conception of naval strategy and tactics from Jomini, whose numerous works (twenty-seven volumes of military history covering the wars of Frederick the Great, the French Revolution, and Bonaparte) dealt entirely with the strategy and tactics of land armies. In effect, Luce ordered Mahan to study Jomini’s land-war tactics and apply their principles to hypothetical fleet combat maneuvers of ironclad vessels under steam. Mahan, of course, obeyed, even though Jomini had observed in his seminal The Art of War (1836) that “war in its ensemble is not a science, but an art. Strategy, particularly, may indeed be regulated by fixed laws resembling those of the positive sciences, but this is not true of war viewed as a whole.”13

Mahan did not reach Newport until October 1885, after the brief twenty-six-day first session of the college had ended. He was delayed by the fact that the Wachusett was unexpectedly ordered to Central American waters during March and April 1885 to protect American lives, property, and transit-treaty rights during revolutionary and international disorders in the area. This enterprise forced Mahan to put a landing party ashore on the Isthmus of Panama in mid-March to maintain the nation’s right of transit, an operation that involved seizing and holding the U.S.–owned railroad and cable station in Panama City. It also involved showing the flag in El Salvador and Guatemala in April during the chaos occasioned by Guatemala’s invasion of El Salvador.

The detour of the Wachusett to the west coast of Central America was not without its educational advantages, however. If nothing else, Mahan learned from this experience that the U.S. Navy badly needed a coaling station on that coast, and that U.S. sea power, properly applied, had a critical role to play in sustaining U.S. diplomacy there. Further, the experience riveted in his mind an appreciation for the strategic importance of the isthmus, the chaotic political conditions within the weak little nations situated there, and the importance of the transit rights held by the United States. Indeed, the problem of the isthmus would play a major, almost disproportionate, role in Mahan’s early studies of sea power and in the curriculum of the infant Naval War College after he became the institution’s president in mid-1886.¹⁴

When Mahan finally conferred with Luce in Newport in October, they decided that Mahan (now captain) would spend the next ten months in New York to work up lectures on naval tactics and naval history to be given at the second session of the college, scheduled for a ten-week period commencing 6 September 1886. Three months before that session began, however, Luce (now rear admiral) was detached from the institution and assigned to command the North Atlantic Station, and Mahan became president of the school. Meanwhile, Mahan had been at work on his lectures in the Astor Library and the New York Lyceum.

It should be kept in mind that during this period of lecture preparation Mahan was attempting to accomplish two quite different research and writing tasks. First, he undertook a review of the tactical maneuvers employed by warring fleets of wooden sailing vessels in line-ahead formation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with a view toward applying them to steel vessels under steam. To the practice of firepower concentration employed in line-ahead formations during the Age of Sail (usually employed without success or decision), he added Jomini’s principles of unit or fractional concentration. His problem here was that in 1885–1887 there was no tactical combat doctrine for steel and steam vessels; also, with the exception of the Austro-Italian battle of Lissa in July 1866, which had been a tactically chaotic melee of ironclad vessels attempting to sink one another with close-in gunfire or by ramming, there was no body of combat experience to guide him.15

Second, he read broadly in the printed accounts of the naval dimensions of the great mercantilist wars for empire in which Britain, France, Holland, and Spain had participated in the period 1660 to 1783, with the clear intent to document and otherwise demonstrate the truth of the sea power hypothesis that he had stumbled on in Lima in November 1884. In this task he made no effort to consult primary sources or materials that might conflict with his conviction that the existence or nonexistence of sea power had been (and was) the most powerful factor in determining the course and direction of human history. “Original research was not within my scope, nor was it necessary to the scheme,” he later confessed.¹⁶

The first of these dual historiographical enterprises to see the light was a curious manuscript titled “Fleet Battle Tactics.” In its text and in the accompanying hypothetical battle diagrams, Mahan employed, as best he could, elements of Jomini’s four main “maxims,” or “principles” or “laws,” of tactical concentration. As expressed in Jomini’s Study of the Art of War, they are:

1. To throw by strategic movements the mass of an army, successively, upon the decisive points of a theater of war, and also upon the communications of the enemy as much as possible without compromising one’s own.

2. To maneuver to engage fractions of the hostile army, with the bulk of one’s own forces.

3. On the battlefield, to throw the mass of the forces upon the decisive point, or upon that portion of the hostile line which it is of the first importance to overthrow.

4. To arrange that these masses shall not only be thrown upon the decisive point, but that they shall engage at the proper times and with energy.¹⁷

These four “maxims,” “principles,” or “laws” of the “science” or “art” (Jo-mini’s nomenclature varied) of tactical concentration lost something in persuasiveness when Mahan applied them to naval battle tactics in his “Fleet Battle Tactics” essay. As he viewed it, the battleship line, as it commenced action in either line abreast or echelon, would wheel, turn, and perform various precise, complex, and opportunistic geometric evolutions designed to secure, maintain, regain, or increase its concentration of fire (“the essence of scientific warfare,” said Mahan) on selected smaller enemy units that would be sent gloriously to the bottom one by one. It was to be a “highly drilled” fleet operation executed by “reasonably perfect ships, reasonably drilled and commanded.” In sum, said Mahan, “Perfection is our aim.” But in reading “Fleet Battle Tactics” today, one gains the impression that the enemy fleet was expected to sit supinely in the water, watching in awe, as the U.S. battle line, directed by some brilliant naval choreographer, danced nimbly around it and destroyed it piecemeal and totally. Near the end, U.S. torpedo boats and rams, the equivalents of Jominian cavalry, would swiftly stand down on the sinking cripples and put them out of their misery.18

Luce did not think highly of his disciple’s manuscript on tactics. He told Mahan, after reading the piece, that the main weakness in it was that it did not adequately link recent technological changes in ship design and ordnance with Jomini’s principles of land tactics as applied to fleet maneuvers. Luce also informed him that he would be responsible for only two lectures on tactics during the 1886 session and that he had engaged someone else to do the rest. Mahan’s “Fleet Battle Tactics” quickly disappeared from the sight and mind of man, a fate that seems not to have disturbed its author. Moreover, in his future books and articles Mahan never permitted the fact of technological changes in naval vessels and weapons to becloud or set aside his notions of fixed tactical and strategical principles, or laws, of naval warfare that were, he came to believe, inherent in the mathematical orderliness of the universe.¹⁹

Mahan’s 1886 study of Jomini’s tactical doctrines also influenced his conception of naval strategy, some elements of which he discussed in his Naval War College lectures in 1887, and which found their way into his two Influence of Sea Power books in 1890 and 1892. Not until 1911, however, did he finally bring together his scattered views on strategy in his Naval Strategy, Compared and Contrasted with the Principles of Military Operations on Land. “Naval Strategy,” he assured the readers of that opaque volume, is based on “fundamental truths, which when correctly formulated are rightly called principles; these truths, where ascertained, are themselves unchangeable.” He admitted that new light might be shed on the applications of these principles. But the appearance of the submarine, the long-range torpedo, wireless telegraphy, and the airplane by 1911 had not modified or illuminated his “fundamental truths” about naval strategy. These strategical “truths,” all with Jominian overtones of tactical concentration, were, as Mahan viewed them, four in number:

1. To understand that the basic goal, and end purpose, of naval strategy is, by fleet action, to “break up the enemy’s power on the sea, cutting off his communications with the rest of his possessions, drying up the sources of his wealth and his commerce, and making possible a closure of his ports.” This produces “command of the sea.”

2. To effect a deployment of battle fleet and support vessels in such manner as to bring a superior force of one’s own to bear on an inferior though significant enemy force in one quarter, while elsewhere other enemy units are held in check long enough to permit the initial or primary strike force to produce victory; in short, the principle of “hit and hold.”

3. To seek to commence naval war from a central position (or strategic center) so that one’s own concentrated naval force can be dispatched offensively along interior lines outward against separated segments of the enemy’s force. This positioning increases the likelihood of bringing successful hit and hold maneuvers into play. One must never divide his own main battle fleet or dispatch it on eccentric operations.

4. To appreciate and act on the fact that the main purpose and mission of battle fleets is to bring the enemy’s main fleet (or a major segment thereof) to decisive battle, and to destroy it wholly with concentrated fire from guns of one’s own capital ships (armored steel battleships). Battle fleets thus must operate offensively, not defensively (not as “fleets-in-being”), in bringing the enemy into a decisive “Big Battle” victory in which they are rewarded with “command of the sea,” the fundamental strategic goal of naval warfare.20

The dubious relevance of his Naval Strategy volume and his “Fleet Battle Tactics” manuscript aside, it was Mahan’s second task—to compose lectures that would clearly demonstrate the influence of sea power on history—that he wanted most to accomplish. These lectures would become, virtually unchanged, his famous The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. In November 1885, he had commenced reading the printed monographic, biographical, and autobiographical literature on the great European imperial wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By May 1886 he had taken four hundred pages of notes and knew exactly what he wanted to prove and how to prove it. It was just a question of arranging his carefully selected facts to fit his thesis and getting it all down on paper.²¹

In analyzing Mahan’s seminal volume, one should remember that the first and most influential chapter in the book, “Elements of Sea Power,” was written last, that it was tacked onto the hefty manuscript at the very last moment at the request of the publisher to make the whole work “more popular.” Mahan agreed to this bastard surgery because he knew history was not “an attractive subject to the public,” and because he thought increased sales might encourage the publishers, Little, Brown of Boston, to gamble on a sequel that would carry the story up to 1812, as later they did.

In sum, “Elements of Sea Power” was primarily a summary of European national motives, opportunities, and aptitudes for the creation and employment of sea power, as Mahan conceived them to have related to the great mercantilist wars for empire fought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was a précis of sorts to the rest of the book. The historical illustrations used in “Elements of Sea Power” to explain national motives, opportunities, and aptitudes for sea power were taken primarily from British and French military and naval experience in 1660–1783. How these examples might be applied to the United States in 1890 was treated briefly, tangentially, and diffidently.

“Elements of Sea Power,” then, was not a prescription for or summons to U.S. imperialism, mercantilism, colonialism, or territorial expansion. Mahan sought only to awaken Americans to the need for a navy that could ensure national security in Gulf-Caribbean and eastern Pacific waters, if and when a canal was built across the Isthmus of Panama by a foreign power—a project that French interests indeed were attempting at that time. The essay was essentially a call to the American public to emerge from twenty-five years of isolation.22

The basic thing Mahan sought to demonstrate in the main body of the book was simply this: that among European nations with sea coasts, “in three things—production, with the necessity of exchanging products, shipping, whereby the exchange is carried on, and colonies, which facilitate and enlarge the operations of shipping and tend to protect it by multiplying points of safety—is to be found the key to much of history, as well as of the policy, of nations bordering upon the sea.” Mercantilistic imperialism thus boiled down to the relationship of “(1) Production; (2) Shipping; (3) Colonies and Markets—in a word, sea power.”²³

It was sea power, therefore, that had made eighteenth-century European imperialism and mercantilism really work. Specifically, Mahan described the process whereby strong (usually absolute) monarchs exported the products and people of their kingdoms, in the numerous vessels of their national merchant marines, protected by their large navies, to overseas colonies that were designed to function as closed, monopolized markets. This policy produced favorable trade balances, thus generating the bullion or raw materials that made the imperial exporting nations and their ruling dynasties even richer and more powerful, as well as better able economically to launch and sustain the mercantilist wars on land and sea (mostly the latter) that served to expand their empires even farther. Britain, thanks to the early emergence of the superb Royal Navy, was Mahan’s prime example of the crucial role that sea power (merchant and naval) had played in creating the national power, glory, and wealth that was the British Empire of 1890.

Mahan also set forth, in the “Elements of Sea Power” chapter, the six “principal conditions affecting the sea power of nations” and the potentiality of various coastal nations to develop such power, mainly citing illustrative comparisons from British, French, Dutch, and Spanish imperial history of the period 1660–1783. It was only in this comparative context, however, that the United States—with its tiny merchant marine and antiquated navy—was brought peripherally into the picture. The six conditions Mahan cited were geographical position, physical conformation, extent of territory, number of population, national character, and character of government.

As for geographical position, that of the United States was certainly conducive to the development of sea power should the nation choose to undertake such development. Mahan noted, however, that from a strategic and military defense standpoint, the relationship between the southern continental United States and the Gulf of Mexico was analogous to England’s relationship to its channel, or that of the Mediterranean nations to Suez, especially if a Central American canal were to be constructed. If that occurred, Mahan warned, the Gulf-Caribbean, given a canal outlet, would become “one of the great highways of the world” along which “a great commerce would travel, bringing the interests of the other great nations, the European nations, close along our shores, as they have never been before.” This magnetic attraction of world shipping, merchant and naval, to the Gulf-Caribbean would surely involve the United States in “international complications” eventually calling for “warships of the first class, without which ships no country can pretend to control any part of the sea.” It would also demand bases in the Gulf-Caribbean sufficient to sustain U.S. naval operations in isthmian waters in the event of political crises in Central America. These bases should be positioned so as to control ingress and egress to and from the Mississippi River. It should be noted that, in this regard, Mahan was thinking almost entirely in terms of coastal strategic defense.24

He pointed out that the nation’s physical conformation included numerous deep harbors with easy access to the sea like those that had been a source of maritime power and wealth in Europe, and that the United States had such assets on three coasts; but the country had no merchant marine, nor was it likely to have one in the foreseeable future. Further, the nation had no colonies because its investment capital found ample opportunity for profit in its economically underdeveloped interior. This would remain the situation for some time to come unless America’s isolated “little corner” of the world was pierced by an isthmian canal—in which case the nation would be in for a “rude awakening.”²⁵ In sum, of the three requisites for empire—production, merchant shipping, and colonies (closed markets)—America lacked two; the nation did have industrial productive capacity.

On the other hand, America’s extent of territory and number of population were sufficient to achieve and sustain sea power capabilities. Also, the national character of Americans included a necessary amount of commercial aptitude and acquisitiveness; and Americans certainly had the ability to produce sufficient commodities for trade. But modern nations aspiring to sea power must also have a “capacity for planting healthy colonies.” By healthy colonies, Mahan did not mean the kind of colonies planted by Spain, Portugal, and France in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. These were simply mercantilistic “cows to be milked,” upon which the home government had legislated “a monopoly of its external trade.” He meant, instead, colonies like those the British had planted in North America, possessions that required minimum control from the mother country. They would be colonies settled by people with a “genius for independent action,” not colonies rigidly controlled and monopolized by the home government. Therefore, if there were ever in the American future conditions “calling for colonization, it cannot be doubted that Americans will carry to them all their inherited aptitude for self-government and independent growth.” He saw no such situation developing, however.

Finally, Mahan admitted that the character of government of most of Europe’s great sea powers in the past had been absolutist or despotic; but he felt certain that democratic governments could also aspire to sea power, even though, “Popular governments are not generally favorable to military expenditure.”26

What concerned Mahan most in all of this was that even with a great U.S. merchant marine, “it may be doubted whether a sufficient navy would follow,” and even if it did follow, whether it would be strong enough and capable enough to meet a potential enemy far at sea, even close to foreign shores, rather than in American waters. Or would it be so weak that it would have to adopt a passive defense strategy and meet the enemy in U.S. coastal waters? The question, then, of the adequacy of the U.S. Navy, Mahan concluded, “is probably now quickening in the Central American Isthmus. Let us hope that it will not come to the birth too late.”²⁷

In general, Mahan did not in 1890 consider the United States a likely candidate for imperialism, colonialism, or militarism. “I dread outlying colonies,” he had told Sam Ashe in 1884, “to maintain which large military establishments are necessary. I see in them the on-coming of a ‘strong’ central government . . . or perhaps a subversion of really free government.” He worried too that neither the Republican nor Democratic Parties would have the political courage to respond to a foreign challenge at the isthmus, or even have the good sense to assume a sensible defense posture in the Gulf-Caribbean, but Mahan himself did little to change matters. He participated not at all in the political agitation for the New Navy in the 1880s, or in arguments in and out of Congress that linked naval expansion to forced commercial expansion abroad. He favored free trade, he had told Ashe in 1884. Indeed, he never advocated artificial U.S. government stimulation of overseas trade with tariffs, subsidies, drawbacks, or gunboats. Nor did he ever link the advent and growth of the New Navy to the advancement of his personal career.28

It thus seems reasonably clear that the principal thrust of Mahan’s advice to his country on the nation’s diplomacy and its defensive strategy at the advent of the so-called imperialist period in American history was not particularly imperialistic. He was an “imperialist,” he said, because he was nonisolationist; and an “imperialist” United States, by his definition, was a nation that must abandon isolationism to the extent of aspiring to own, operate, fortify, or otherwise control any future Central American canal. The nation must also have a naval capability in warships, bases, and coaling stations in the Gulf-Caribbean with which to protect that canal and monitor international shipping to, near, and through its eastern approaches. Similarly, in the eastern Pacific the United States must annex Hawaii and establish there a naval presence capable of flanking and otherwise superintending international shipping to and from the future canal’s western terminus. The new U.S. Navy, then, need be only large enough to maintain a protective shield in the northern and eastern Pacific for the purpose of defending the thinly populated, underdeveloped West Coast against threat from or attack by an increasingly aggressive Japan. As for the size of the nation’s Pacific shield, Mahan was quite specific. In an Atlantic Monthly article in 1890, titled “The United States Looking Outward,” he wrote:

It should be an inviolable resolution of our national policy, that no foreign state should henceforth acquire a coaling position within three thousand miles of San Francisco—a distance which includes the Hawaiian and Galapagos islands and the coast of Central America. For fuel is the life of modern naval war; it is the food of the ship; without it the modern monsters of the deep die of inanition. Around it, therefore, cluster some of the most important considerations of naval strategy.²⁹

True, Mahan also spoke in the 1890s of the possibility of increased American trade in the Pacific in future years; but he regarded this mainly as a desirable economic by-product of canal acquisition and Hawaiian annexation. It was far less important to him than was the strategic necessity of creating and policing an isthmian-centered, Caribbean-Gulf-Hawaiian-West Coast-Galapagos Islands defense perimeter. Indeed, the strategic importance of an American-controlled canal at the isthmus was almost always in his mind from 1890 to 1914. No other strategic subject engaged his attention with such frequency and intensity during these years.³⁰

In November 1900, Mahan even suggested that, given the nation’s commitment to China in its recently announced “Open Door Policy,” Americans might well consider a “retrenchment of responsibility” and abandon insistence on the Monroe Doctrine in that sector of the Western Hemisphere south of the Amazon valley; or at least extend Open Door (free trade) principles there to all nations, principles of the sort that some Americans were then seeking to establish in China.31

This is not to say that the highly moralistic Mahan approved the tough methods employed by the Roosevelt administration against Colombia in November 1903 to acquire an acceptable canal right-of-way in Panama. After all, Christians do not steal—or should not. In any event, not until 1912 did he undertake a defense of the legality of U.S. behavior at the isthmus nine years earlier. In this belated exercise he argued that the Roosevelt administration had intervened to restore order in Panama so as to preserve the right-of-transit permitted in Article 35 of the 1846 treaty between the United States and New Granada (predecessor state to Colombia). He specifically separated the dubious morality of the U.S intervention from its legality.

Nor had Mahan been happy when Britain joined with Germany in a naval blockade of the Venezuelan coast—a blockade in which the Germans had actually bombarded a fort and a town on that coast—during December 1902, in an attempt to force Venezuela to pay its debts. He believed that the only good that could come of such arrogant European naval penetration of the Gulf-Caribbean so close to the isthmus was that Congress might be persuaded to authorize “two more battleships.” Furthermore, Mahan did not think, as he made clear in February 1903, that the Monroe Doctrine should be used by the United States against Latin Americans to justify compelling them to make good their obligations to their European creditors, because “to do so which has been by some argued a necessary corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, would encroach on the very independence which that political dogma defends.” The United States, he asserted, should be “preponderant” in Latin America, not “paramount.”

Given these temperate views, Theodore Roosevelt’s crude seizure of Panama in November 1903 was simply too much for Mahan. So too was the President’s enunciation of the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in December 1904, in which he justified unilateral preventive intervention by the United States in Latin America in order to forestall possible European intervention there. Not until 1908 did Mahan accept the principle underlying the corollary. In thus defending Roosevelt’s 1904 policy in the Dominican Republic in 1908, and his 1903 policy in Panama in 1912, Mahan was tardily accepting the fait accompli of both situations. He had not contributed to or participated in the initial decision-making process in either instance, nor was he even consulted.³²

In addition, it is well to note that Mahan’s advocacy of an eastern Pacific defense perimeter, particularly his insistence that Hawaii be annexed, contained a distinct racial dimension that was related to his perception, as early as January 1893, that the Hawaiian Islands were being overrun by immigrant Chinese. He saw this as evidence of the beginnings of a “barbaric invasion” of Western civilization that could be contained only by “a firm hold on the Sandwich Islands by a great civilized, maritime power.” An augmentation of U.S. naval power to protect underpopulated California from Oriental inundation (the “Yellow Peril”) was clearly indicated, he insisted.

Four years later Mahan viewed increasing Japanese emigration to Hawaii and California in much the same light, and he saw the appearance of modern Japanese naval vessels in Hawaiian waters in 1897 as evidence that the “Yellow Peril” (Japanese manifestation) was about to engulf Hawaii. For the remainder of his life Mahan nursed the conviction, off and on, that there would someday occur a gigantic global military showdown between Orient and Occident, barbarism and civilization, yellow and white, heathen and Christian. That there would be an earlier war of lesser magnitude between the United States and Japan in the Pacific he had no doubt. Some day, in some way, and for some reason, Japan would attack the United States.33

Mahan’s dogged insistence on Hawaiian annexation in the early 1890s earned him (so he claimed) exile to sea in 1893, by the antiannexationist Cleveland administration, as commanding officer of the USS Chicago. This banishment, however, led to his triumphal welcome in England, where his Influence books had been exceptionally well received in naval, political, and literary circles. His enthusiastic inclusion in such company was a social and professional success that increased his already enormous sense of Anglophilia, and cemented forever in his mind a firm belief in the absolute superiority of virtually everything British—parliamentary system, common law, navy, empire, Anglican Church, manners, and smug confidence in British racial superiority. His subsequent writing clearly reflects these unshakable biases.

His two-year cruise in the Chicago also convinced Mahan that the technology of the steel “naval monsters” of the New Navy had passed him by. The modern vessels truly frightened him. When he returned home in 1896, he retired; forty unhappy years in the U.S. Navy were enough. He had decided, meanwhile, that he could earn enough in a “second career” as a writer (at five to seven cents a word) to increase a retirement salary of $3, 375 to a level necessary to support a wife and two unmarried daughters at home, put a son through boarding school and college, and sustain a gracious lifestyle of the sort that he had observed and admired in England.

Beginning in 1897 his literary output thus became increasingly voluminous; it also became increasingly commercial, popular, superficial, and repetitious, as he focused far less on history and much more on current events. Daily European and Asian diplomatic crises, conveniently spaced wars (Spanish-American, Boer, Russo-Japanese, Balkan), naval arms races, dangerous peace movements, and various Christian concerns soon became Mahan’s principal subjects. “I have committed myself to pot-boilers,” he confessed in June 1896. These potboilers—mostly magazine articles—subsequently collected and reissued in book form, however, helped to pay for a fine row house in New York City, an elaborate summer place in Quoque, Long Island, and a household staff of four or five servants in both residences. The “Philosopher of Sea Power” lived well from 1897 until his death in 1914.34

At the time of Mahan’s retirement from the U.S. Navy in March 1897, many Americans had become aware that a bloody revolutionary war of independence against Spain was under way in Cuba. “Cuba Libre!” was the cry. In April 1898, the United States, for purposes of pacification and for reasons essentially humanitarian, intervened militarily in the conflict. This action brought on the 116-day war with Spain that secured the independence of Cuba and, incidentally (almost accidentally), resulted in U.S. annexation of Spain’s colony in the Philippines.

Mahan had virtually nothing to do with the onset of the war. Neither his personal letters nor his publications from late 1897 to early 1898 indicate any interest in Cuba save as a strategic pawn in a hypothetical American-German naval war in the Gulf-Caribbean. He certainly visualized no actual war there.³⁵ Nor is there credible evidence that Mahan participated importantly in the U.S. Navy’s routine contingency planning of naval war with Spain and other nations during the years 1894 to 1898. Three or four Mahan letters (now lost) written in March 1898 to then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, do indicate, however, that he was consulted informally by Roosevelt on blockade strategy and tactics in Cuba in the event of war with Spain, and that he apparently recommended to Roosevelt a tight blockade of Havana, Mantanzas, and the western half of Cuba pending concentration of the U.S. battle fleet for a decisive action (“Big Battle”) against the Spanish home fleet, if and when it arrived in the waters of the Western Hemisphere.³⁶

There is no evidence that Mahan ever recommended a naval attack on the Philippines as part of a war with Spain. At no time during the prewar period did he agitate for war with Spain, contemplate or advocate territorial acquisitions as the result of such a war, or even speak out for a free Cuba. He was far too busy writing profitable articles for Harper’s Monthly that addressed the possibility of future naval war with Germany or Japan and argued the need for creating eastern Pacific and Gulf-Caribbean defense zones in order to maintain U.S. naval preeminence near a possible future canal in Central America. Thus, when the USS Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana harbor on 15 February 1898 and claimed the lives of 260 officers and men, Mahan was not among those splenetic Americans who irrationally blamed it on Spain and called loudly for war. Instead, he advocated a suspension of judgment in the matter and pointed out that the explosion might well have been caused by an accident within the vessel, which, in retrospect, now seems likely. Finally, on 26 March 1898, five weeks after the sinking of the Maine and sixteen days before McKinley read his war message to Congress, Mahan and his family departed the United States for a tour of Europe.37

Ordered back to Washington, D.C., on 25 April to serve on the Naval War Board, which was to advise Secretary of the Navy John D. Long on the conduct of the war in ways not made entirely clear, Mahan spent most of the brief war making various strategical and tactical suggestions dealing principally with operational problems associated with U.S. fleet concentration in Cuban, Caribbean, and Spanish home waters. By the time Mahan reached Washington on 10 May, however, the fleet was anything but concentrated, and Dewey had already sent Spain’s decrepit Asiatic squadron to the bottom of Manila Bay. On 3 July, most of the remainder of Spain’s little navy was demolished near Santiago, Cuba, thus severing the Spanish army in Cuba and the colony itself from the Madrid government. Responding to threats of bombardment of the Spanish coast by the U.S. Navy, Spain wisely asked for a cease-fire, and the fighting ended on 12 August. Meanwhile, U.S. infantry units, numbering about eleven thousand men, had occupied Manila in the Philippines. Guam, Wake Island, and Puerto Rico also had been seized—all without opposition—and Hawaii had been annexed at last (July 1898) by treaty with a compliant insular government that had been earlier (June 1897) negotiated by the equally willing McKinley administration.

Mahan’s main contribution to these stirring events was his continued insistence on the annexation of Hawaii. A less obvious contribution was a lucrative (“at my price”) contract, signed two weeks after joining the Naval War Board, with McClure’s Magazine that called for a series of five articles on the war. These pieces ran monthly in McClure’s from December 1898 through April 1899 and were reprinted in book format as Lessons of the War with Spain in September 1899 after Mahan’s return from participation as an American delegate at the First Hague Conference. The articles remain a valuable primary source on the history of the naval operations of the conflict.³⁸

The final report of the Naval War Board, written by Mahan during the third week in August 1898, saluted the nation’s acquisition of Hawaii and called the islands “militarily essential, both to our transit to Asia, and to the defense of our Pacific coast.” The report also called for a canal at the isthmus and for eight naval coaling stations—two in the Caribbean, one each in Hawaii, Samoa, Manila, and Guam, and two in the Chushan Islands near the mouth of the Yangtze River in China. “Beyond these eight positions,” Mahan wrote, “the Board is not prepared to recommend acquisitions.” The proposed bases in the central, western, and southwestern Pacific, however, would contribute to the future protection of American commercial interests in and near a China suffering from “the intrusion of European control upon her territory, and the consequent effect upon her trade relations.” Noticeably, the report did not call for annexation of the Philippines.39

Mahan accepted the idea of Philippine annexation with the greatest reluctance. He observed in the final report of the Naval War Board that, from purely a military standpoint, all that was needed by the United States in the archipelago was a naval station and coaling facility at the “city and bay of Manila, or Subic Bay, if all Luzon Island be not ceded.” A month earlier, on 21 July 1898, he had explained that he had “not yet become wholly adjusted to the new point of view opened to us by [George] Dewey’s victory at Manila,” even though it had “opened a vista of possibilities which were not by me in the least foreseen,” and in spite of the fact that he had long anticipated a massive conflict in the Pacific between East and West. Mahan finally decided that a beneficent God had delivered the Philippines into American hands to be civilized and uplifted. By early August 1898, he was reluctantly following the Republican Party line on annexation, which had moved gradually from merely acquiring a naval base in Manila, to taking only Luzon, to annexing all of the islands. His arguments, shared by many U.S. senators and other Americans at the time, pointed out that the Filipinos simply could not be returned to the brutal colonial rule of Spain; that they could not be subjected to the domestic political chaos inherent in Emilio Aguinaldo’s ill-organized independence movement; and that to withdraw from the islands would “abandon” to other nations “the task of maintaining order in the land in which we have been led to interpose.”⁴⁰

This does not mean that Mahan suddenly had become an enthusiastic colonialist in 1898. He had not. The word colony so disturbed him that he referred to the Philippines and Puerto Rico as “dependencies.” He hoped that Americans could administer them with the skill, benevolence, and beneficence generally shown by the British in their colonies, but he admitted that the “task is novel to us; we may make blunders.”⁴¹ He participated not at all in the public debate on annexation in 1899–1900. He scarcely mentioned the bloody guerrilla war fought by Americans and Filipinos in the jungles of Luzon, Mindanao, and Samar in 1899–1901. Instead, he turned his busy pen to a defense of the British cause in the Boer War in South Africa. He was convinced that the Philippines lay far outside the eastern Pacific defense perimeter that he considered the U.S. Navy capable of defending; further, he came to believe by 1911 that the loss of the archipelago by act of war would be no more significant to the United States from a material standpoint than the “loss of a little finger, perhaps a single joint of it. The Philippines to us are less a property than a charge.” Moreover, in his 1911 critique of the Naval War College’s contingency plan for war with Japan, Mahan roundly attacked the college’s recommendation that the U.S. Navy should carry the war to Japanese home waters by way of the Philippines. The distant Philippines were simply indefensible, he argued.42

To be sure, Mahan did speak on occasion in 1899–1900 of the Philippines in American hands as a threshold to the markets of Asia as well as a gateway to the Christianization of China; but the fact is that he had little interest in American commercial successes in China. Certainly he had no personal stake in the nation’s China trade. He was interested, however, in the thrust of Secretary of State John Hay’s first “Open Door Note” on 20 March 1899, which proclaimed U.S. opposition to the increasingly successful efforts of Germany, Russia, France, Britain, and Japan to carve a militarily helpless and administratively hapless China into monopolistic economic spheres of influence. Hay naively asked the powers involved in these assaults on Chinese sovereignty to desist, and to extend to one another and to all nations equality of commercial opportunity in their respective spheres. Of course, they did not.

Mahan was convinced that American industry, thanks to abundant raw materials, superior management techniques, and the manufacture of quality products in great number, could compete effectively in the China market (or any foreign market) against the products of any other industrial nation if free trade (both import and export) were permitted and subsidies were not extended to the various foreign traders by their governments. He had no idea what the economic potential of the China market might be, however, and he wisely refrained from any statistical guesswork on the point. But as Paul A. Varg demonstrates, there was no market of any consequence for American goods in China in 1900–1912 and even less of a market in the United States for Chinese commodities, facts perceived by resident U.S. capitalists, commercial agents, consuls, and other “old China hands,” then and later. The volume and value of U.S. exports to China, measured against total U.S. exports abroad in 1900–1912, were infinitesimal. The China market was a myth.⁴³

In 1902, Mahan was elected president of the American Historical Association. From this prestigious podium he instructed his fellow historians in the art of writing and presenting history in a manner so simple that it would instruct “the man in the street” about the world in which he lived and would simultaneously serve the God who was omnipresent in history. History, after all, he said, was “the plan of Providence . . . in its fulfillment.” It was incumbent upon historians, he told them, to search for, discover, and verify by subordinationist methodology those “central ideas” that by act of verification become central themes, or foundation stones, in the fashioning of the “great mosaic” that was God’s continuing revelation of Himself to man. One such theme was Mahan’s own concept of the influence of sea power on history; he was certain that he had verified this concept in his books.44

It is not surprising that an American naval officer of Mahan’s national and international renown as the discoverer of the influence of sea power on history and a devout believer in its concomitant, the inevitability of war, would attract disciples, enemies, and skeptics during his lifetime and beyond. After all, he was also known as an advocate of U.S. naval preparedness and American expansion (limited principally to the acquisition of coaling stations for the purpose of enhancing national security), and as a spokesman for the conceptual fusion of free trade, free speech, free thought, and free missionary Christianity as a means of uplifting backward peoples in Asia who enjoyed none of these blessings. These controversial views, one and all, intensified the formation and expression of pro-Mahan and anti-Mahan schools of thought, both of which have attracted historians ever since.

Initially, Mahan was attacked by anti-imperialists, pacifists, and constitutional strict constructionists as Philippine annexation became the major presidential campaign issue in 1899–1900. Called a professional killer and worse, he was held solely responsible for the unnecessary annexation of Hawaii in 1898. His belief, then and later, that neither the First nor the Second Hague Conference could, should, or would bring perpetual peace to mankind was especially annoying to those pacifists who held that enough peace committees, pamphlets, and speeches, together with the sheer willpower of right-thinking people, could somehow usher in a peaceful millennium someday soon. Not so, countered Mahan: “There are no short cuts by which men may be made peaceful. If the world could have been saved by an organization it would have been saved a thousand years ago by the Christian church.” Put another way, if the omnipotent God really wanted peace on earth, He had merely to decree it.⁴⁵

On the other hand, disciples of Mahan were decidedly upset soon after World War I, when the United States took the lead in bringing about a naval arms limitation agreement at the Washington Conference in 1921–1922. William O. Stevens, one such true believer, was much distressed with American acceptance of the 5:5:3:1.75:1.75 capital ship tonnage limitation ratio, a decision that threw “overboard [Mahan’s] whole philosophy of sea power.” The Five Power Treaty, lacking enforcement provisions, was but a “scrap of paper” that left the nation naked in the western Pacific in the face of an aggressive Japan. The “world has scrapped more than battleships,” Stevens warned; “[I]t has discarded Mahan’s entire philosophy for an experiment in faith.” Such clairvoyance, however, was but a weak zephyr blowing against the pacifist and isolationist gales of the 1920s and 1930s, the general directions of which were distinctly anti-Mahan.46

Nonetheless, Mahan’s emphasis on the importance of sea power on history was substantially vindicated in World War II and after, even though the strategy and tactics used by the U.S. Navy to achieve “command of the sea” had little to do with Mahan’s principles of naval warfare. There was no Mahanian concentration of battle fleets on either the Japanese or the American side. Both navies operated with fractional tactical task forces, often distributed over large areas of ocean. No decisive, war-ending big battle was fought at sea. It was a war of attrition in which American industry was more than able to replace and augment U.S. losses on, under, and over the sea while Japan’s industrial plant lacked that capability. It was also a war in which naval air power played a decisive role, as did the U.S. submarine force, in bringing Japan to its knees industrially and economically. Aircraft carriers, submarines, mobile floating decks, amphibious landing craft, radar, variable time fuses, kamikaze tactics—one and all would have mystified Mahan.⁴⁷

Indeed, Mahan’s inexplicable disregard of the relationship between naval technology, tactics, and strategy has bewildered his supporters and critics alike—especially his underestimation of the submarine as a decisive guerre de course weapon and his overestimation of the battleship as the decisive fleet surface weapon. It was a costly misjudgment, as German U-boats demonstrated in both World Wars. Even when the obsolete U-9 sank three old British armored cruisers on 22 September 1914, killing 1, 460 sailors, Mahan dismissed the event as a freak accident. It did “not greatly impress me from a military standpoint,” he wrote; “I have always held that torpedo protection is a matter of scouting—watchfulness, and lapses there will occur. The result will show if I am greatly wrong.” He was totally wrong.⁴⁸

During his final years in the public eye and in print, from the convening of the Second Hague Conference in June 1907 until his death in December 1914, Mahan spent much of his literary energy hurling verbal thunderbolts at the peace and arbitration movements, while simultaneously insisting that the U.S. Navy limit the tonnage of its battleships and the caliber of some of the guns mounted on them. Much of his literary activity during these years was also devoted to a gratuitous, almost tiresome campaign to warn the British that war with Germany was looming and to explain to them how the Royal Navy might best conduct the naval dimensions of that conflict.⁴⁹

The four most significant of the controversial issues that he raised between 1907 and 1914, especially in terms of his personal relations with Theodore Roosevelt and his professional reputation within the U.S. Navy, were: (1) his contention that exempting neutral noncontraband private property from destruction at sea during wartime would simply lengthen the duration of conflicts, because of the excessive wartime profits inherent in the hoary U.S. maritime doctrine of “free ships make free goods”; (2) his belief that the tonnage of battleships should not exceed twelve thousand, as heavier vessels would be “larger than needed, and likely result in too few ships,” the greater size of which would not provide a “commensurate gain in offensive power”; (3) his related recommendation that the U.S. Navy’s annual tonnage construction allotment from Congress be spread over a “balanced” fleet of battleships, cruisers, and destroyer-torpedo vessels; and (4) his insistence that the all-big-gun (10-inch and 12-inch) batteries being built into the new U.S. battleships should be replaced with more operationally flexible mixed-caliber batteries mounting various combinations of 12-, 10-, 8-, and 6-inch guns. He went to the mat with Roosevelt on all these points, lost all four falls, and was gently nudged out of the President’s inner circle for his trouble. By the time war in Europe loomed in 1913–14, Mahan was widely regarded as an eccentric, quarrelsome “back number” in the U.S. Navy. His main error was that although he was a “battleship navalist,” he was not a Dreadnought purist.50

One must still ask, given the view that Mahan had become irrelevant by the time of his death, is he really worth reading and pondering today? Although there have been many other influences on history besides the existence or nonexistence of sea power, the relationship between the mastery of the sea and the rise, continuation, or fall of various seaboard nation-states since the beginning of recorded history is fairly obvious. And as long as there is no persuasive historical evidence whatever to contradict Mahan’s insistence that war is inherent in the universe, in human history, and in the human condition, it is only prudent that the United States remains thoroughly and constantly prepared for war at sea, whatever the future technological dimensions of naval war might be. This may sound partly like advice from the grave at Quogue, as indeed it is.

NOTES

1. This interpretative essay is based substantially, although by no means entirely, on the following works and studies of Mahan by the present author, viz.: Robert Seager II and Doris D. Maguire, eds., Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan, 3 vols. (Annapolis, Md., 1975) (hereafter cited as LPATM), and Robert Seager II, Alfred Thayer Mahan (Annapolis, Md., 1977), a biography based on LPATM (hereafter cited as Seager, Mahan). In greater or lesser degree, this essay also relies on material found in the author’s several articles on Mahan, viz.: “Ten Years before Mahan: The Unofficial Case for the New Navy, 1880–1890,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40 (1953): 491–512; “A Biography of a Biographer: Alfred Thayer Mahan,” in Changing Interpretations and New Sources in Naval History, edited by Robert W. Love, Jr. (New York, 1950), 278–92; “Alfred Thayer Mahan,” in Dictionary of American Military Biography, edited by Roger J. Spiller, Joseph G. Dawson, and T. Harry Williams, 3 vols. (Westport, Conn., 1984), 2:711–14; and “Alfred Thayer Mahan,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Historians, 1866–1912, edited by Clyde N. Wilson (Detroit, 1986), 162–73. It is also indebted conceptually to recent research by Philip A. Crowl, James A. Field, and Paul A. Varg. For a more traditional interpretation of Mahan, see Margaret Tuttle Sprout, “Mahan: Evangelist of Sea Power,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, edited by Edward Mead Earle (Princeton, N.J., 1943), 415–45

2. Rudyard Kipling, The Cat That Walked by Himself (New York, 1970), passim. For Ellen Kuhn Mahan’s recollections of her father, see LPATM, 3:719–30.

3. For a conflicting view on Mahan’s seamanship, see Captain Robert Brent, USN, “Mahan—Mariner or Misfit?” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 92 (April 1966): 92–103. Compare his account of the Wachusett collision, which he denies having happened, with Seager, Mahan, 140, 261; and LPATM, 2:160. It happened.

4. The useful bibliography of Mahan’s publications found in William E. Livezey, Mahan on Sea Power (Norman, Okla., 1947), 301–19, has been substantially expanded by John B. Hattendorf and Lynn C. Hattendorf, comps., A Bibliography of the Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan (Newport, R.I., 1986), which is now the standard bibliographical source on Mahan.

5. Seager, Mahan, 575–77. See especially Alfred Thayer Mahan, “The Peace Conference and the Moral Aspect of War” and “War from the Christian Standpoint,” in his Some Neglected Aspects of War (Boston, 1907); “The Apparent Decadence of the Church’s Influence” and “Twentieth Century Christianity” in his The Interest of America in Sea Power (Boston, 1897), 229–30, 235–36, 243–46; and his 1913 and 1914 articles on “Freedom in the Use of the Prayer Book,” The Churchman 108 (November 1913): 623–24, and “Prayer Book Revision,” ibid., 110 (October 1914):465–66, 497–98. Also, see his “Christian Progress,” New York Times, 16 August 1914, as well as his various statements, addresses, and lay sermons on Christian and Episcopal Church themes and concerns in LPATM, 3:423, 590–91, 597, 598–602, 605, 644–56, 657, 682, 683–84, 693–97, 714–16. His intense religious experience while on board the Iroquois is printed in full in LPATM, 1:145–332.

6. For the derivation of Mahan’s notion of the influence of sea power on history, see Lawrence C. Allin, “The Naval Institute, Mahan, and the Naval Profession,” Naval War College Review 31 (Summer 1978): 29–48; A. T. Mahan, From Sail to Steam: Recollections of Naval Life (New York, 1907), 276; and J. M Scammell, “Thucydides and Sea Power,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 47 (May 1921): 701–14. See further, Kenneth J. Hagan’s perceptive “Alfred Thayer Mahan,” in Makers of American Diplomacy, edited by Frank J. Merli and Theodore A. Wilson, 2 vols. (New York, 1974), also, Seager, Mahan, 199–204, and his “Ten Years before Mahan,” passim. Among others who flirted or consorted with the sea power hypothesis were ancient Greeks and Romans: Thucydides, Xenophon, and Tacitus; Englishmen: Francis Bacon, Walter Raleigh, and John Seeley; U.S. Navy Officers: Robert W. Shufeldt, Stephen B. Luce, and William Glenn David; and U.S. House members: John F. Miller and William G. McAdoo.

7. For Milo Mahan’s theological influence on his nephew, see Seager, Mahan, 445–55, 555. Mahan’s hostility to disarmament, arbitration, and international courts to end war or mitigate its horrors is expressed in, and the doctrine of ‘free ships make free goods’ is condemned in, his “The Peace Conference and the Moral Aspect of War,” 433–37; “The Hague Conference: The Question of Immunity of Belligerent Merchant Shipping” and “Commerce and War,” New York Times, 17 and 23 November 1898; “The Hague Conference and the Practical Aspect of War,” National Review 49 (July 1907): 688–704; also in related articles, written in 1907 and 1911, which are reprinted in his Some Neglected Aspects of War, and in his Armaments and Arbitration, or the Place of Force in the International Relations of States (New York, 1912). Mahan’s philosophy of history and historiography is discussed in detail in Seager, Mahan, 430–58, and briefly below in this essay. The influence of Jomini and Luce on Mahan in the realm of the “laws” of strategy and tactics is skillfully treated in Philip A. Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,” in Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, edited by Peter Paret (Princeton, N.J., 1986), 444–77. Mahan’s arguments favoring “balanced” fleets and “mixed batteries” are presented in his “Retrospect upon the War between Japan and Russia,” National Review 47 (May 1906): 383–405; “Reflections, Historic and Others, Suggested by the Battle of the Sea of Japan,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 32 (June 1906): 447–71; and “The Battleship of All Big Guns,” Worlds Work 21 (January 1911): 13888–902. Also, see Seager, Mahan, 519–34, and note 49 below.

8. The quotation is Mahan’s. Luce’s letter of invitation, dated 22 July 1884, has not survived, nor is it clear just what he intended having Mahan cover in the lectures. See LPATM, 1:577–78; and Seager, Mahan, 141–42.

9. Seager, Mahan, 134–36.

10. LPATM, 1:577–78, 581–82; 2:276, 285; and Seager, Mahan, 144–47.

11. LPATM, 1:606–7.

12. Luce quotations in John D. Hayes and John B. Hattendorf, eds., The Writings of Stephen B. Luce (Newport, R.I., 1975), 45–68, 71–97, 190–91. Also, see John B. Hattendorf, B. Mitchell Simpson III, and John R. Wadleigh, Sailors and Scholars: The Centennial History of the U.S. Naval War College (Newport, R.I., 1984), 11–24. Luce had also discovered that “Religion and war are the two great central facts of history. . . . Religion gave birth to education. War led the way to civilization.” Mahan would soon come to accept this idea as well, if indeed he had not already embraced it.

13. Antoine-Henri Jomini, The Art of War, 1836, translated [1861] from the French by Captain G. H. Mendell, USA, and Captain W. P. Craighill, USA (Philadelphia, 1892), 321. This is a later edition of their 1862 English-language volume. It seems likely that of Jomini’s many volumes, Mahan read only this one. See Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan,” 444–47.

14. Seager, Mahan, 149–58.

15. E. B. Potter and J. Roger Fredland, eds., The United States and World Sea Power (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1955), 383–87.

16. Mahan, From Sail to Steam, 168, 277–78.

17. Jomini, Arf of War, 70–71; Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan,” 455–56; and Seager, Mahan, 168–70, 552, 555. The language here is Jomini’s, as translated by Mendell and Craighill. See note 13 above.

18. A. T. Mahan, “Fleet Battle Tactics” [1886]. This lengthy, typewritten, unpublished study, containing critical marginal comments by Luce, is in the Mahan Collection, Naval War College Library. Also, see Seager, Mahan, 166–68, 171–73.

19. Mahan, From Sail to Steam, 284–85; and Seager, Mahan, 173.

20. A. T. Mahan, Naval Strategy, Compared and Contrasted with the Principles of Military Operations on Land (Boston, 1911), 1–3, 6–10, 15–18, 31, 49, 53–55, 189, 199, 254, 279, 386, 391–93, 415, 422–23, 428–29. Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan,” 457–61, contains an excellent synthesis and critique of Mahan’s strategic concepts. Less persuasive is W. D. Puleston’s attempt to identify those concepts with the strategic and tactical insights of Karl von Clausewitz in his otherwise useful Mahan: The Life and Work of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, U.S.N. (New Haven, Conn., 1939), 295–98. Jomini’s views on land warfare strategy are set forth in his Art of War, 67–69. Most of his observations lend themselves imperfectly to naval warfare. For the difficult gestation of Mahan’s volume, Naval Strategy, see Seager, Mahan, 548–53.

21. LPATM, 1:622–24.

22. Seager, Mahan, 205–6; and Mahan, From Sail to Steam, 324–25.

23. A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, 14th ed. (Boston, 1898), 28, 53, 71.

24. Ibid., 33–34, 42, 88.

25. Ibid., 39, 42.

26. Ibid., 42–44, 49, 50, 53, 56, 57–58.

27. Ibid, 58, 67, 87–88. Indeed, as early as March 1880, Mahan had told Ashe that the coming of a canal in Panama would require American control of the isthmus. “To control at the Isthmus we must have a very large Navy—and must begin to build as soon as the first spadeful of earth is turned at Panama.” That failing, “[W]e may as well shut up about the Monroe Doctrine at once,” LPATM, 1:481–82.

28. LPATM, 1:572–74; Seager, Mahan, 122, 132–34, 140–41; and Seager, “Ten Years before Mahan,” passim.

29. Reprinted in Mahan, Interest of America in Sea Power, 26. The population density per square mile of the three West Coast states in 1890 was: California, 7.63; Oregon, 3.28; Washington, 5.25. For the entire coast it was 5.83. For Mahan’s definition of himself as an “imperialist” (i.e., nonisolationist), see his From Sail to Steam, 324.

30. See his articles in the Atlantic Monthly (1890, 1893), The Forum (1893), and Harper’s Monthly (1895, 1897), as reprinted in Mahan, Interest of America in Sea Power, 3–104, 137–214, 271–314. The concept was later reiterated by Mahan in “The Panama Canal and Sea Power in the Pacific,” Century 82 (June 1911): 240–48, and in “The Panama Canal and the Distribution of the Fleet,” North American Review 200 (September 1914): 549–68. Also, see James A. Field’s excellent “Alfred Thayer Mahan Speaks for Himself,” Naval War College Review 29 (Fall 1976): 47–60, for a persuasive development and evaluation of Mahan’s eastern Pacific defense perimeter concept.

31. “The Effect of Asiatic Conditions upon World Policies,” North American Review (November 1900), in A. T. Mahan, The Problem of Asia and Its Effects upon International Policies (Boston, 1900), 201–2.

32. A. T. Mahan “Was Panama ‘A Chapter of National Dishonor?’” North American Review 196 (October 1912): 549–68; A. T. Mahan, “Panama Unguarded Might be Seized,” New York Times, 27 October 1912; and Seager, Mahan, 498–99. On the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary thereto, see A. T. Mahan, “The Monroe Doctrine,” National Review 40 (1903): 871–89. This article was revised in 1908 in order to change his hostile view of the Roosevelt Corollary and was reprinted in Mahan’s Naval Administration and Warfare, Some General Principles with Other Essays (Boston, 1908). Also, see Seager, Mahan, 142, 492–94. For the numerous substantial differences of opinion between Mahan and Roosevelt on these and other so-called imperial matters, see Richard W. Turk, The Ambiguous Relationship: Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan (Westport, Conn, 1988), passim, but especially 49, 52–54.

33. LPATM, 2:92–93, 507; Mahan, Interest of America in Sea Power, 31; and Seager, Mahan, 248–50, 358, 465, 476–79.

34. LPATM, 2:461. For a view of Mahan from the perspective of his literary production, see Seager, “Alfred Thayer Mahan,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, 47:162–73. Also, see Seager, Mahan, 327–32. Save for his excellent two-volume life of Nelson, which he began while serving in the Chicago and finished soon after his retirement in March 1897, Mahan wrote but two more books. His two-volume Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812 (Boston, 1912), previously serialized in Scribner’s Magazine, remains a solid study of naval operations in that conflict. It is Mahan’s only book dealing substantially with U.S. history. It is also a fascinating interpretative exercise in how an American Anglophile decides that both Britain and the United States had simultaneously fought wholly just wars in 1812–1814. See Kenneth L. Moll, “Mahan: American Historian,” Military Affairs 27 (Fall 1963): 132, 137; and Seager, Mahan, 506–8, 564–68. Mahan’s other monograph, Naval Strategy (1911), is discussed elsewhere in this essay (see note 20).

35. Mahan, Interest of America in Sea Power, 182–84, 291–92, 295, 299, 307–10; LPATM, 2:505–6, 532; and Seager, Mahan, 357–59.

36. Livezey, Mahan on Sea Power, 133–37; LPATM, 2:37, 734; and Seager, Mahan, 358–59, 362. The best brief account of various U.S. Navy contingency war plans against Spain is in David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York, 1981), 72–78. Also, see Turk, Ambiguous Relationship, 28–29, 34–35.

37. LPATM, 2:532, 3:592–94; Seager, Mahan, 357–58, 360–61; and H. G. Rickover, How the Battleship “Maine” Was Destroyed (Washington, D.C., 1976), 107–30.

38. For Mahan’s service on the Naval War Board, see Trask, War with Spain, 67–68, 89–90, 119, 203, 280–83, 306, 339, 361, 377; A. T. Mahan, Lessons of the War with Spain and Other Articles (Boston, 1899), 3–204; and A. T. Mahan, “The Work of the Naval War Board of 1898: A Report to the General Board of the Navy,” 29 October 1906, in LPATM, 3:627–43. Also, see Seager, Mahan, 366–91.

39. LPATM, 2:538–39, 581–91; Livezey, Mahan on Sea Power, 170–74; and Seager, Mahan, 391, 395–96.

40. Seager, Mahan, 391–95; and Mahan, “Effect of Asiatic Conditions,” in Mahan, Problem of Asia, 147–202, especially 175.

41. A. T. Mahan, “America’s Duties to Her New Dependencies,” reprinted under the title “The Relations of the United States to Their New Dependencies,” in Mahan, Lessons of War with Spain, 241–53; A. T. Mahan, “Capt. Mahan on Expansion,” New York Times, 1 December 1898. Also, see excerpts from a speech he gave on 30 November 1898, printed in LPATM, 3:596, under the title “A Distinction between Colonies and Dependencies.” The distinction was that “A colony must be a country qualified by its natural conditions, climatic or otherwise, to become incorporated with the mother country.” Therefore, he added: “We can’t have colonies. The original Roman colony was an outpost of the mother country—an extended Rome in the fullest sense of the word.”

42. Seager, Mahan, 394. He also later complained that the nation had been “pitchforked” into the Philippines and spoke of the “extreme repugnance” with which the United States had annexed the islands. The clash between the college’s contingency war plan against Japan of 1911, and Mahan’s critique, or counterplan, can be traced in LPATM, 3:380–88, 389–94, 395, 400–2; see also Naval War College, “Notes on Comments of Rear Admiral Mahan,” ca. 25 February–1 March 1911, in the Naval War Collage Library, Newport, R.I., and Seager, Mahan, 483–86.

43. Mahan, Problem of Asia, 155, 166, 176–77, 189–90; and Paul A. Varg, The Making of a Myth: The United States and China, 1897–1912 (East Lansing, Mich., 1968), 36–53; especially 50–52. In 1900, the value of U.S. exports to China ($7,000,000) was .005 percent of the value ($1,394,000,000) of all U.S. exports that year; it rose to a high ($53,000,000) of 3.5 percent in 1905 ($1,519,000,000) and slipped back to 1.1 percent ($24,000,000) in a total of $2,204,000,000 in 1912. See The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (Stamford, Conn., 1965), 550.

44. A. T. Mahan, “Subordination in Historical Treatment,” renamed “Writing of History,” Atlantic Monthly 91 (March 1903): 289–98. For an earlier (October 1897) statement of his subordinational methodology, see Mahan, Interest of America in Sea Power, 284–85. Also, see Seager, Mahan, 448–51. For Mahan’s predictably successful demonstration of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus by similar methodological devices, see his The Harvest Within (Boston, 1909), 22–24, 3–41, 44–45, 49–52.

45. Wallace Rice, “Some Current Fallacies of Captain Mahan,” Dial 28 (16 March 1900): 198–200; and Lucia Ames Mead, “Some Fallacies of Captain Mahan,” Arena 40 (September 1908): 163–70.

46. William Oliver Stevens, “Scrapping Mahan.” The Five Powers and their assigned ratios were Britain (5), United States (5), Japan (3), France (1.75), and Italy (1.75).

47. Bernard Brodie, “New Tactics in Naval Warfare,’” Foreign Affairs 26 (January 1946): 210–23.

48. Quoted passage in LPATM, 3:549; R. A. Bowling, “The Negative Influence of Mahan on Anti-submarine Warfare,” Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies (December 1977), 52–59; A. T. Mahan, “The Submarine and Its Enemies,” Collier’s Weekly 39 (6 April 1907):17–21; Seager, Mohan, 535–38, 554; and Dan van der Vat, The Atlantic Campaign: World War II’s Great Struggle at Sea (New York, 1988), 15–16.

49. See, particularly, his “The Hague Conference and the Practical Aspect of War,” “Germany’s Naval Ambition,” “The Battleship of all Big Guns,” and the first six articles, initially published in North American Review in 1911–1912, that are reprinted in Mahan, Armaments and Arbitration, 1–154.

50. Seager, Mahan, 506–10, 521–33. Also, see Turk, Ambiguous Relationship, 57–61, 71, 76, 82–96, 101–8.

FURTHER READING

NOTES