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Four Years in the Confederate Navy: The Career of Captain John Low on the C.S.S. Fingal, Florida, Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and Ajax (review)
- Civil War History
- The Kent State University Press
- Volume 11, Number 1, March 1965
- pp. 102-104
- 10.1353/cwh.1965.0026
- Review
- Additional Information
102CIVIL WAR HISTORY with 32,000 troops in spite of divided loyalties and the ruthless border warfare it was to experience. Contrary to some impressions held by students of the war that the troops West Virginia furnished were home guards. Stutler proves that they were rather "soldiers of the Republic who bore their weight in battles and campaigns from Gettysburg to Vicksburg and Jackson, Mississippi, and from McClellan's Peninsular campaign in tidewater Virginia to the far western plains of Nebraska and the two Dakotas." In a very real sense the men of West Virginia who served in the Federal armies earned statehood for their area with the patience, the endurance, and the blood they shed in many a skirmish as well as in many a full-scale battle. Since every county of West Virginia had many stories it could contribute to the history of the state, Stutler had a great range of material from which to select. Those he chose to tell in his refreshing and pleasing style follow the war's course in a chronological order. Since each is so uncommonly good I would defer trying to select one for special mention. The conclusion one draws after reading this superb work is that no Civil War library can call itself complete without Boyd Studer's West Virginia in the Civil War. Arnold Gates Garden City, New York Four Years in the Confederate Navy: The Career of Captain John Low on the C.S.S. Fingal, Florida, Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and Ajax. By William Stanley Hoole. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1964. Pp. xiv, 147. $5.00.) Historians slowly are closing the gaps in our knowledge of Civil War naval affairs; in recent years we have had Waddell's account of his cruise on the Shenandoah; Edna and Frank Bradlow's vignette of the Alabama's visit to South Africa; Van Doren Stern's fine pictorial history of the Confederate navy; and, of course, V. C. Jones's trilogy. Now William Stanley Hoole, librarian at the University of Alabama and editor of the Confederate Centennial Studies, gives us the logbook of Lieutenant John Low. In tracing this document, Hoole did some commendable detective work, and that story is nearly as interesting as the book itself. His tenacious resourcefulness paid large dividends, for Low's journal provides "a unique document of considerable historical significance. ... it forms a narrative of Confederate naval service on the high seas for seventeen months, from July 28, 1862, to December 31, 1863, an account second only to Admiral Semmes's own Cruise of the Alabama and Sumter." John Low came to America in 1856 and soon established himself as an up-and-coming naval supply merchant in Savannah, Georgia. When war came he volunteered and soon received orders from the Confederate naval secretary to join the chief of naval procurement in England. Low ran the blockade in the Fingal in late 1861; he acted as "civilian" book reviews103 adviser aboard the Florida when that vessel was delivered to the Confederates in the West Indies; his skillful seamanship helped bring the Ahbama through her terrifying encounter with a cyclone in October, 1862; he commanded the Tuscaloosa (virtually all we know about that cruise comes from this diary); and when the war ended Low was attempting to run the blockade for the navy department in die Ajax. Consequently he was in a good position to tell us important things about Confederate naval operations. From these adventures Hoole has woven a narrative of considerable interest and buttressed it with extensive quotations from the logbook. Though somewhat sparse on documentation, the book is attractively presented, with a good index and some well-chosen illustrations. And if it repeats much of what we already know, it also fills in some blank spots, and adds new perspective to a much neglected phase of Civil War history. This contribution to historiography is so important that one hesitates to criticize, and yet the book is marred by a number of shortcomings, some serious, some minor. At different points in the narrative the pro-South sympathies of the author obtrude to jar the reader. The casual implication of the British Foreign Secretary's Confederate propensities...