STRATEGICALLY AN ISLAND, THE UNITED STATES HAS ALWAYS REQUIRED A NAVY to bar enemies from its shores. Economically a trading nation, it has also needed a navy to defend its trade. The size and type of navy have always been debated. So has the way in which a navy should carry out its responsibilities. Prior to the twentieth century, the U.S. Navy did not need to exercise command of the sea or naval mastery, or even to vie for such exalted strategies, but it had a key role to play in defense of the Republic and the protection and expansion of its commerce.
The Continental Navy was established during the Revolutionary War with the anticipation that it could help win independence and because Americans knew that sovereign nations have navies. Similar thoughts led most of the states to establish navies of their own and both state and national governments to license privateers. The nation’s founders did not discuss naval strategy. They simply assigned tasks to the fledgling service—capture supplies for George Washington’s army, transport diplomats to Europe, bring munitions from the West Indies, raid British commerce, help to defend American ports—and the officers of the navy responded as best they could with the limited resources available to them. Independence achieved, many Americans believed that a navy was no longer needed or at least that the nation could not afford one. For a decade, the Stars and Stripes were carried to sea only by merchant vessels.
When attacks on those trading vessels became more than Americans could bear and a new constitution gave the government the ability to support a navy, one was reestablished. At virtually the same time, Europe returned to war. Coalitions led by Britain and France fought a life-and-death struggle, in which neither side showed much respect for the rights of neutral commerce espoused by the United States. The young Republic was not a passive observer of that great war but followed a policy of belligerent neutrality, which twice led it into the European conflict, first into the Quasi-War against France, then into the War of 1812 against Britain. Because the war with France was conducted entirely at sea, the burden of defense fell on the U.S. Navy. The war against Britain was fought equally on land and sea, but it was the Navy’s frigate actions in 1812 that avenged the nation’s honor and earned its enemy’s respect, and its victories on Lakes Erie and Champlain in 1813 and 1814 that helped to secure the status quo antebellum Treaty of Ghent, which ended the war.
During the decades following peace with Britain, the United States obtained Florida, settled its northern and western borders, and marked the Caribbean as within its sphere of influence. The Monroe Doctrine proclaimed the principles of U.S. foreign policy to the rest of the world, and Britain gave tacit recognition to the equality of U.S. interests and authority in the Western Hemisphere by signing the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty in 1850.
It fell to the U.S. Navy to execute this policy and to protect American commercial interests around the world. From the 1770s to the 1840s, most of the Navy’s squadrons, cruising the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Caribbean, showed the flag, and suppressed piracy and the slave trade. When periodic visits by naval vessels failed to deter infringement of American rights, officers turned to retribution and punished those who mistreated shipwrecked mariners, seized the property of merchants, discriminated against American commerce, or dishonored the American flag.
During the 1850s, various interest groups demanded that the Navy do more and its officers eagerly accepted increased responsibilities. The Navy’s role was expanded from merely defending commerce to exploring new lands and trade routes, identifying opportunities for trade, collecting nautical and commercial information, negotiating diplomatic agreements, and opening areas previously closed to American merchants. Matthew F. Maury’s collection of data on wind and ocean currents; Charles Wilkes’s United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–42; Matthew Calbraith Perry’s “opening of Japan” and conclusion of the Treaty of Kanagawa in 1854; the North Pacific Surveying and Exploring Expedition of 1853–55; and Robert Shufeldt’s globe-encircling voyage of 1878–80, during which he opened U.S. trade relations with Korea, epitomize these new roles.
The Civil War interrupted but did not change American policy or significantly alter how the Navy operated. When the South seceded from the Union, all U.S. Navy squadrons, except the one operating off Africa, were called home. Additional ships were leased, purchased, and constructed, and the U.S. Navy grew exponentially. During almost four years of operations, its forces made significant contributions to Union victory by blockading the Southern coast and joining with U.S. Army troops to subdivide the Confederacy along the Mississippi River and to capture all of its major ports. After Appomattox came a return to traditional U.S. policies, the maintenance of stability, and the reestablishment of the Navy’s squadrons.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Age of Sail was drawing to a close. For three centuries, ships and weapons had remained basically unchanged and developments had been evolutionary in nature. Then, in only a few decades, propulsion changed from sail to steam, hulls from wood to iron and steel, armaments from muzzle-loading smoothbore cannon to breech-loading rifled guns, and projectiles from solid shot to exploding shells. Such revolutionary developments appeared to demand changes in both strategy and tactics, but the nature of the changes required was unclear. Fifty years of uncertainty followed.
Before the impact of technology could be clarified, the Navy was called on to assume new and quite different roles. During the previous century, the Navy’s expanding commercial role had been neither planned nor envisioned by naval officers or government leaders, though a foreign visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville, divined the future. The observant French traveler predicted the twentieth century when he observed, “When I contemplate the ardor with which the Anglo-Americans prosecute commerce, the advantages which aid them, and the success of their undertakings, I cannot help believing that they will one day become the foremost maritime power of the globe. They are born to rule the seas, as the Romans were to conquer the world.”1 By the 1880s and 1890s, Americans were beginning to look outward, beyond the Western Hemisphere, and both political leaders and naval officers began to measure the U.S. Navy by comparing it with the navies of Europe’s great powers, rather than by its ability to defend and serve American commerce. America’s maritime empire had developed without the benefit of a clearly defined peacetime naval policy.
During the 1880s and 1890s, American naval and political leaders began debating what types of vessels should be built and where and how they should be deployed. The ABCD ships (the protected cruisers Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago and the dispatch vessel Dolphin) of the 1880s represented new technological developments but not a new role. They remained—like the sloops and frigates of the sailing Navy—primarily commerce defense and raiding vessels to be scattered among the Navy’s several squadrons during peacetime. A decade later, the United States built its first true capital ships. Alfred Thayer Mahan lobbied for keeping them together in a battle fleet whose primary role was to engage the enemy’s fleet, not its commerce. By the turn of the century, the Navy developed a systematic body of thought that would guide it for at least the next fifty years. It was a heady time for American naval officers as their service competed with the navies of Britain, Germany, and Japan for supremacy. At the same time, they sought to protect America’s new possessions in the Pacific; police its informal empire in the Caribbean; and expand the economic and political interests epitomized by the Open Door Notes, in which the United States committed itself to maintaining the equality of trading and investment opportunity for all foreign nations in China plus defending the territorial and administrative integrity of China.
Victory in the Spanish-American War brought the Navy great popularity at home, and the writings of Mahan achieved great influence abroad. Leaders in all maritime nations read and, with only a few exceptions, accepted the ideas of Mahan, the “Prophet of Sea Power.” His writings provided the intellectual underpinning of American maritime strategy. Though he was neither the first nor the only person to identify “timeless principles” from the study of naval history, he stated them well and often in his trilogy on Anglo-American naval history and in scores of magazine and newspaper articles. Indeed, Mahan’s ideas or the inferences drawn from them by world leaders led to actions that resulted in some historians blaming them for the naval race that helped to precipitate World War I. The United States entered that race with gusto. By 1910, it had twenty-seven battleships in service and six more building, which made it the world’s second or third strongest naval power. Less than a decade later, President Woodrow Wilson served notice of American intent to build “a navy second to none” and, with World War I in progress, Congress appropriated funds toward that end.
American participation in the war was relatively brief and its direct contribution to Allied victory modest, but the nation emerged from the conflict with its economy strengthened, ready to challenge all nations for naval supremacy. But, support for a large navy evaporated as the American people demanded a return to “normalcy.” That meant a reduction in taxation and, consequently, the curtailment of naval building. A return to normalcy also implied a retreat from international involvement, which, together with the desire for retrenchment in naval expenditures, led to the Washington Conference of 1921–22 and naval arms limitations. For the next decade, the Navy appeared to languish, just as it had following most previous wars. The U.S. Navy did not even build to the level allowed by the Five Power Pact of the Washington Conference, but its failure to do so did not mean that no progress was made; there were advances, particularly in the field of aviation.
The rise of aggressive regimes in Italy, Germany, and Japan and pressures to create jobs in the depression-stricken United States led to the construction of new ships during the 1930s. Funds had been appropriated for most of the major combatants used by the U.S. Navy to wage World War II even before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. During the first six months of that global conflict, the Navy reeled before the onslaught of German U-boats in the Atlantic and Japanese advances in the Pacific. Then it reorganized, identified effective commanders, developed sound tactics, and devised a winning strategy. Taking the offensive in late 1942 and early 1943, it began to rid the Atlantic of the Nazi submarine menace and to drive Japan backward until the United States and its Allies triumphed over the Axis Powers in mid-1945.
The United States emerged from World War II with unchallenged supremacy at sea. The war destroyed the multipower system of the past, as Germany, Italy, and Japan were vanquished and the economies of Britain and France were ruined. There emerged a bipolar world, in which for half a century the United States used its navy to counter the land-based power of the Soviet Union and to support friendly governments around the world. Ever more rapid technological change brought nuclear weapons, atomic-powered submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles, which, combined with other factors, escalated the cost of defense immensely. Those costs contributed to the implosion of the Soviet Union in the 1980s that laid the basis for a new world order, one whose contours will take time to clarify. Nor is the role of the U.S. Navy in that new order clear. What is certain is that the Navy will continue to be more than machines. Innovations in technology, or even new roles and missions, do not change everything. “Without officers what can be expected from a navy?” Thomas Truxtun asked Secretary of War James McHenry in 1797. “The ships cannot maneuver themselves.”2 Almost two centuries later, Admiral James Calvert expressed a similar thought, “Important as ships are, naval history is made by men.”3
These words speak to the purpose of this book, whose biographical essays trace the history of the U.S. Navy from its roots in the War for Independence to the postnuclear present. They tell the Navy’s story through the lives of the officers who forged its traditions and stand today as the models against whom the leaders of tomorrow will be measured. Selection of subjects for this volume was not easy. The officers chosen were neither “representative,” in the sense of being average or common, nor were they only the “great men” that a Thomas Carlyle or Sidney Hook might choose. Influence and importance are not necessarily linked to fame or battle command, and a number of the selections, Esek Hopkins and Robert F. Stockton, for example, are not obvious. The exclusion of other officers, such as Thomas Truxtun, Raymond Spruance, and George W. Anderson, Jr., is not a judgment of their importance. The selection criteria focused on choosing individuals who set precedents, reached particular heights of achievement, or had careers reflecting the main currents of naval development and the roles played by the U.S. Navy during its two centuries of operations. In selecting the subjects, an effort was made to avoid Whiggish anachronism. That is to say, the events of the Navy’s early history did not lead inexorably to the present. The U.S. Navy was not predestined to become the world’s supreme sea power. The adoption of nuclear power and the wedding of its use in submarines to ballistic missiles was not preordained. Lessons of seamanship, strategy, and tactics drawn from events of more than a century ago are unlikely to be directly applicable to conditions today, but there are connections, however allegorical, between the eras.
Few would deny the crucial importance of leadership in naval affairs or that many of the qualities of effective leadership—moral courage, technical competence, trustworthiness, loyalty upward and downward, self-confidence—are timeless. The question of whether leadership is innate or learned is insoluble, and no attempt is made here to answer it.4 The men of the Continental Navy received their training in the merchant marine and only entered the Navy in time of national peril. The next generation of leaders, men such as Stephen Decatur, David Glasgow Farragut, and David Dixon Porter, also learned their profession at sea while serving as midshipmen during the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812. The establishment of the Naval Academy in 1845 was a turning point in officer education. For the first time, young officer candidates received the rudiments of their education and training on shore before serving at sea. Four decades later, the Naval War College was founded by Stephen B. Luce, and henceforth most senior officers received a postgraduate professional military education to prepare them for high command. Seniority and command at sea were virtually the only avenues to promotion in the Old Navy, but within the last century, Luce, Mahan, William A. Moffett, and Hyman G. Rickover rose through special talents in education, training, and engineering. Thus, this collection contains essays on a variety of officers.
The victors in great battles—John Paul Jones at Flamborough Head, Oliver Hazard Perry at Lake Erie, Porter at Vicksburg, Farragut at Mobile Bay, George Dewey at Manila Bay, and William F. Halsey at Leyte Gulf—are included, as are such dashing characters as Decatur battling the Barbary Corsairs, Raphael Semmes raiding Union commerce, and “31-Knot” Arleigh Burke devising destroyer tactics in the Solomons. But, the Navy is more than broadsides and battles. Essays on reformers (Matthew Perry, William Sowden Sims, and Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr.), thinkers (Luce and Mahan), those who exercised high command (Hopkins, Chester W. Nimitz, and Ernest J. King), and technical innovators (Stockton, Moffett, and Rickover) round out the volume.
The essays are not merely short biographies but also interpretive studies that assess the roles of their subjects as establishers, practitioners, and exemplars of the American naval tradition. For this reason authors have been selected whose knowledge of America’s naval heritage extends beyond the individuals about whom they write. Some have written on their subjects before, but all offer more than distillations of views presented elsewhere. I made no attempt to impose a uniformity of interpretation on the essays. The authors’ views are their own, and each contributor provides suggestions for additional reading to guide those whose interest they arouse.
Certain patterns do emerge. All the officers had great self-confidence. In combat or times of danger, most had courage and were aggressive, as illustrated by John Paul Jones uttering “I have not yet begun to fight,” Matthew Perry sailing boldly into Tokyo Harbor to “open Japan,” and Arleigh Burke leading his destroyers against superior Japanese forces. Such personality characteristics are to be admired in times of danger, but, at other times, they can lead to less desirable traits, such as the hypersensitivity exhibited by Stephen Decatur, which ended in a tragic duel, and the impetuosity of the sort demonstrated by Raphael Semmes when he rashly pitted his Alabama against the more powerful Kearsage. Many of the officers, and not just the reformers, faced strong opposition within the Navy but refused to retreat from foes. Jones fought the parochialism and nepotism represented by Hopkins; Moffett opposed the entrenched admirals of the “Gun Club.”
Navies, like other institutions, reflect the societies they serve. Few individuals better illustrated the spirit of the young republic than Decatur, the romanticism of the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause” than Semmes, or the hatred of the Japanese brought by Pearl Harbor than Halsey. The officers who guided the Navy, shaped its character, and set its course for two centuries were products of their times. Much has been demanded of them by the American people. Some met the challenges, and others did not, but all were makers of the American naval tradition. This book presents their stories and, in doing so, tells the story of one of the finest military services that the world has ever known.
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., edited by Phillips Bradley (New York, 1945 [1835]), 1:447.
2. Truxtun to McHenry, 3 March 1797, James McHenry Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
3. James Calvert, The Naval Profession (New York, 1965), 6.
4. Early in this century, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Types of Naval Officers (London, 1904), and Charles B. Davenport, Naval Officers: Their Heredity and Development (Washington, D.C., 1919) investigated the problem. Influenced by the social science thinking of the day, Davenport classified officers by “temperament,” “juvenile promise,” and “hereditary traits.” More recent studies include Oliver Warner, Command at Sea: Great Fighting Admirals from Hawke to Nimitz (New York, 1976), and John Horsfield, The Art of Leadership in War: The Royal Navy from the Age of Nelson to the End of World War II (Westport, Conn., 1980).