The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, Volume III (review)

This is the third in a four-volume series of annotated compilations of documents relating to the activities of the United States Navy during the War of 1812. The first two volumes, published in 1985 and 1992, covered the prewar years and the events of 1812 and 1813. This volume includes 560 documents from the years 1814 and 1815 for a total of over 1,400 transcriptions of original source documents, mostly letters, published to date.

Like previous volumes, this one is divided into geographic areas and subdivided by topic. Descriptive text appears at the start of each area and topic to place the documents in their historical context relative to the war as a whole. This volume differs, however, in that it only covers naval activities in the Chesapeake Bay and Northern Lakes theaters as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The fourth volume will include documents from the Atlantic, Gulf Coast, and Indian Ocean theaters.

Another, and welcome, difference is a significant increase in the number of British documents included in the collection. In Volume II these amounted to 20 percent of the total. This has increased in Volume III to almost 30 percent. Although this has reduced the percentage of United States naval documents included in this volume as compared to Volume II, dividing the 1814-15 documents into two volumes will more than compensate for this reduction. While some of these British documents were previously published in Canadian document collections edited by Ernest A. Cruikshank and William Wood, their inclusion in this series gives the scholar a much broader and clearer picture of what was happening and why.

As with previous volumes in the series, the documents were selected from a wide variety of sources in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Anyone who has transcribed letters written during this period knows the difficulties caused by poor penmanship, faded text, and slightly out-of-focus microfilm. Dr. Crawford and his team at the Naval Historical Center have done a fine job in resolving all of these difficulties. The results are not only much easier to read, they are probably more accurate, as, whenever possible, the original source documents themselves were used to create the transcriptions. Scholars who have previously transcribed one of these documents from microfilm would do well to check their transcription against the version in this volume.

While experts in a given area, such as the Northern Lakes theater, might regret the omission of a document or two from this volume, it is equally likely that they will discover something new. Documents published in this series have been cited in scholarly works with ever-increasing frequency, further testimony to the quality of both the selection of the documents and their accuracy. The editor's goal of including documents that "display the underpinnings of the U.S. Navy during the war" has clearly been met. All three volumes in this series belong in the library of every serious student of the War of 1812.