Commanding Lincoln’s Navy: Union Naval Leadership during the Civil War by Stephen R. Taaffe (review)

Since the Civil War, naval historians have struggled to grasp the magnitude of the navy’s contribution to Union victory. Stephen Taaffe’s Commanding Lincoln’s Navy yields the first analysis of the navy’s command structure. The heart of this structure was Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles’s relationship with his nineteen squadron commanders. Although almost every eventual commander had a powerful patron, how well the officer performed dictated his success or failure. Taaffe concludes that the navy had slightly better luck in appointing commanders in its vital areas of operation than the army. In short, those commanders who fought aggressively and without complaint earned the patience of the navy.

To its advantage, the Union navy did not confront a rival Confederate navy, at least at the beginning. Instead, the early obstacles proved to be the navy’s antiquated system of promoting officers based on seniority and the exodus of southern officers. Welles receives deserved credit for maneuvering through the navy’s rigid hierarchy and securing loyal officers competent to command in combat. Taaffe ably explains this difficult process and details how Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox helped by establishing a gossip network known as his “confidential correspondence.”

Commanding Lincoln’s Navy is well written. Taaffe unwinds the Union command structure with comfort and clarity. He is persuasive in arguing that, unlike the army, the navy could not afford to carry deadwood among its commanders. The difficulty of the blockade and the physical demands of the ship usually remedied appointment errors. Initiative, innovation, and grit separated successful naval commanders like David Farragut and David Porter from promising lights like Samuel Du Pont and John Dahlgren. Unlike other works on the naval squadrons such as Robert Browning’s two-volume set on the Atlantic blockade, Commanding Lincoln’s Navy concentrates on combat operations such as the attack on New Orleans and the siege of Charleston.

Except for his analysis of the command structure, Taaffe breaks no new ground. For readers expecting Taaffe to make the naval war more relevant to the Civil War, the book disappoints on many levels. Primarily, it fails to connect the operation of the command structure to the bigger issues of the Civil War. For instance, Welles demanded that his commanders operate their squadrons relying on initiative rather than support from Washington. This permitted commanders a great deal of discretion in setting naval policy. So when squadrons ran short of sailors and contrabands started approaching their ships, commanders were able to enlist the contrabands as crew members. Taaffe does not examine how the radical policy of enlisting contraband sailors arose naturally from Welles’s expectation that commanders solve their own problems. Moreover, the book does not analyze how the navy integrated evaluations of blockade efficiency into the command structure. Ultimately, Taaffe places too much emphasis on the personalities of squadron commanders.

Factual errors weaken the evidence. Revisiting the famous incident where Gustavus Fox blew cigar smoke in Lincoln’s face at an important meeting, the smoke blower is erroneously identified as William Seward. Taaffe alleges that the Mississippi Squadron and the West Gulf Squadron greeted each other warmly when they met and later offers a conflicting interpretation of the same event. For a book that claims to be gossipy, there is not much real gossip. Craig Symonds’s fine work Lincoln and His Admirals (2008) contains much meatier tales of officer insanity and nearly fatal seasickness—and that Gideon Welles wore a conspicuous wig.

Commanding Lincoln’s Navy ultimately succumbs to an approach adopted by too many naval historians who wall off their work from the war and labor in the shadow of the army. To remedy this problem, historians would do well to remember certain truths. First, as Union armies floundered, the navy built the watery infrastructure for dismembering the Confederacy. Second, ironclads terrified Confederate civilians before Sherman’s men marched through...