Civil War Navies: A Review Essay

Two master historians of the American Civil War era, James M. McPherson, professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Craig L. Symonds, professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy, have separately and simultaneously published histories about Civil War navies. At first glance, they are very similar works in style and quality, but a close look reveals some surprising differences.

Both authors have produced well-written and engaging narrative histories in a traditional style. The two authors clearly know each other and respect each other's scholarship, each having provided a complimentary jacket blurb to the other's book. McPherson makes a particular point of acknowledging that he "learned a great deal from conversations with, lectures by, and the writings of, Craig Symonds, one of America's preeminent Civil War and naval historians" (227). Both authors are clearly aware that they are contributing to a subject that has been intermittently neglected, but has benefited in recent years from a great deal of scholarly attention to numerous specific naval aspects of the war.

After the spate of memoirs, documents, and general works by participants and observers that appeared in the late 19th century, there was a long hiatus in the publication of broad and general works until the subject was revived with the flurry of books that appeared for the centenary of the Civil War. In the early 1960s Virgil Carrington Jones produced his multivolume The Civil War at Sea, Rear Admiral Bern Anderson published his one volume overview, By Sea and by River, and William James Morgan at the U.S. Navy's Naval Historical Division oversaw the publication of the six-part Civil War Naval Chronology (republished as a single volume in 1971). Following these volumes, there was a quarter-century hiatus in general works until William M. Fowler, Jr., produced Under Two Flags: The Navy in the Civil War (1990). Fowler's work was soon followed at shorter intervals by Ivan Musicant's Divided Waters: The Naval History of the Civil War (1995) and Spencer Tucker's Blue and Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (2006). In addition to these general overviews, there has been a continual outpouring of books, articles, and academic theses exploring specific aspects of the naval war. Among these are numerous biographies, edited private letters, and other materials. The growth of this specialized literature justifies the recurring need to reexamine and to reassess the general understanding of the subject.

McPherson and Symonds have both answered the call to provide such updated broad summaries of the general narrative of the naval history of the Civil War in the light of these new scholarly insights, while at the same time building upon the contributions that endure from the scholarship of previous generations. While they both write about the same events, each author sees the context of his topic somewhat differently, emphasizes different aspects, and stresses different source materials in making his points.

Craig Symonds sees his volume as an operational naval history that narrates the battles and actions from both sides of the war, while placing the competing navies into a broad perspective. For source materials on operations, Symonds relies most heavily on the thirty volumes of operational reports that were compiled in The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (1894-1927). While an old source, it is nevertheless an authoritative well of detailed information that can be reinterpreted in the light of more recent scholarship.

Rather than employ the traditional chronological approach, Symonds comes at his subject thematically. He has artfully constructed the themes so that they carry the reader sequentially through the course of the war, but they can also be read separately. By doing this, he brings out the key points that he believes are often overlooked or lost in a straight chronological narrative of events. Symonds begins his volume with a chapter entitled "The Ships and the Guns: Civil War Navies and the Technological...