‘Admirals’ tells of Lincoln’s war at sea

By Timothy J. Orr

Today, about 57 years after T. Harry Williams published his landmark study of Civil War command and strategy, “Lincoln and His Generals” (1952), the U.S. Navy gets similar recognition for what it accomplished during the Civil War.

“Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War” by Craig L. Symonds; Oxford University Press; 2008.

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Craig L. Symonds puts northern admiralship center stage with his latest book, “Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War.”

Symonds, a professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy, argues that the Union’s commander in chief demonstrated capable maritime leadership. Despite Abraham Lincoln’s inexperience with all matters nautical, throughout the war he made commendable efforts to educate himself in topics pertaining to naval technology, tactics, operations and strategy.

Interestingly, despite Lincoln’s proactive efforts to understand naval affairs, Symonds maintains that when it came to strategy, Lincoln usually adopted a “wait-and-see” attitude to respond to maritime crises. Yet Symonds also points out that when Lincoln did act, he showcased his ability not to be “hamstrung by established doctrine.”

To explain this point, readers might consider two matters from 1861. Frequently, naval issues overlapped with diplomatic ones, and patience — not fanatical desires to establish an immediate superiority — saved the Union on several occasions.

The year 1861 witnessed the controversial “Trent Affair,” a diplomatic showdown sparked by an overzealous captain who had searched a British mail packet, the Trent, seizing two Confederate ambassadors. During the international uproar that followed, Lincoln had to choose between supporting the Navy’s right to seize belligerent prizes or risk provoking a war with the British Empire.

Lincoln weathered the storm of controversy, eventually releasing the southern envoys to British authorities and avoiding a foreign confrontation. Symonds points out that had Lincoln acquiesced to the bellicose posturing indulged by the Navy and the rest of the nation, the situation might have spelled doom for the Union.

The Trent Affair illustrated the first aspect of Lincoln’s navalism, his reactionary approach. But another 1861 event showcased his flexibility. Early in the war, Lincoln enacted a blockade of southern ports. This shrewd maneuver not only proposed to halt Confederate shipping, but also hoped to diffuse Confederate privateering, an activity recently authorized by Jefferson Davis.

Of course, a host of legal issues surfaced: Could Lincoln lawfully blockade a rebellious portion of the nation and, if so, could a blockade exist without a declaration of war? A series of privateer cases determined the matter, declaring that war necessarily existed between the two sections and that a blockade was permissible.

However, these legal proceedings forced Lincoln to abandon his plans to execute captured privateers under anti-piracy laws. But, by abandoning this minor strategic initiative, Lincoln found legal means to replace it with a major one, the blockade. Here, Lincoln’s flexibility added strength to the Navy’s strategic purpose, and incidentally his leniency toward privateers later, thwarted Confederate soldiers from summarily executing captured black soldiers who fought for the Union.

Symonds’s book is a necessary addition to the Civil War scholar’s bookshelf. Casual readers will enjoy it for its wonderful prose and anecdotal style. Readers will learn the complex professional relationships Lincoln had with his Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles and his leading admirals: Samuel DuPont, David D. Porter, Samuel P. Lee, Andrew Foote, David Farragut and John Dahlgren.

Some academics might find minor grievances with the book’s broad contentions, especially because Symonds includes little quantitative data to support his opinions. Likewise, naval historians might find the discussion of strategy unsophisticated and generally lacking in comparative analysis to its Confederate counterpart.

Indeed, Symonds’s discussion of politics, diplomacy, civil-military relations and intrigue consumes the purely military aspect of naval strategy to the point that nonexpert readers may find it impossible to understand how, exactly, Union admirals viewed the Navy as an essential cog of Union victory.

Nevertheless, “Lincoln and His Admirals” fills a void that scholars heretofore left unfilled — a collective assessment of Union admiralship. This book will surely stand out as an indispensable piece of Civil War literature for years to come.

Timothy J. Orr is a graduate student in Civil War history at Penn State.