Benjamin Franklin Isherwood: Naval Engineer (review)

374CIVIL WAR HISTORY of questionable value to find that Mrs. Yates's wedding gown "is still in perfect condition and is proudly possessed" by a member of the family. It is also of questionable value to find listed the names of the Illinois delegation and the other important residents of Mrs. Harrison's Washington, D.C, boarding house, followed by the counties included in Yates's congressional district, and for good measure a list of some senators and representatives topped by the names of the President and Cabinet. Again, examples could be multiplied. Often the language used to describe Yates becomes so extremely complimentary that it loses force. For example: "Yates, likewise, was the servant of God, trained for the very purpose of guiding Illinois . . . through the arduous and matchless hours of the nation's crisis. He was endowed with a brilliant mind, a splendid physique, indomitable courage, superb oratory, intense devotion to his state and country, tender sympathy, selflessness , and faith in God." Often the event is overdramatized as, for example, with the appointment of Grant. Whereas the author states: "The discovery of Grant was a romance, a melodrama, almost as breathless as any of Dumas' novels . . .", the governor himself simply stated in a letter: "I assure you there was nothing novel or romantic in the affair." The most interesting portions of the book are the letters of Yates himself, particularly the letters from Washington of the fifties and those written to Mrs. Yates during his term in the United States Senate. However, these letters are also highly selective and nearly always picture Yates in the most favorable way possible. It is a disservice to this rough and tumble old campaigner, to view him as a blithe, sweet and noble spirit. In short, could Yates by some supernatural medium have read this account of his life, he might well have wished it all to be true but in a triumph of honesty would . have to admit that this was not the way it was. Jack Nortrut Tri-State College Benjamin Franklin Isherwood: Naval Engineer. By Edward William SIoane, III. (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1966. Pp. xiii, 299. $7.50.) In this scholarly, well-written biography Dr. SIoane gives us the first significant account of Civil War naval engineering since the appearance, exacdy seventy years ago, of Captain Frank M. Bennett's The Steam Navy of the United States. Although this was the first of wars at sea to be fought primarily with steam power, its technological aspects, curiously, have received relatively scant treatment. This neglect is the more surprising in the case of naval logistics, particularly the design, manufacture, and operation of hulls and machinery—with which Engineer-in-Chief Isherwood was conspicuously identified—because its influence on the development of the American industrial economy was hardly less than its stricdy mihtary effect. But the technological aspect was not lost on contemporaneous BOOK REVIEWS375 observers abroad. Lieutenant Colonel Chesney, professor of strategy at the British Army's Staff College, drew from the Federal navy's operations the fundamental lesson that industrial productivity, such as the North's, must now be recognized as the true index of mihtary power, and he commented with admiration on "what wealth of means private resources could create when the spirit of the Northern states should be fairly aroused to grapple with the crisis of their fate." Nearly all the participants in this industrial effort remain as yet unknown to historiography. Dr. Sloane's contribution hence is doubly welcome ; he concentrates on Isherwood's career as head of the navy's engineering branch from 1861 to 1869. His subject was a top ranking commander of the production battalions which eventually overwhelmed the Confederacy. Less than tlürty-nine when Secretary Welles obtained his appointment as Engineer-in-Chief, three weeks before the firing in Fort Sumter, Benjamin F. Isherwood brought to his office a substantial reputation . He had been most prolific of the navy's engineers in contributing to professional journals. His two volumes, Engineering Precedents for Steam Machinery (1859), a pioneer but boldly empirical formulation of thermodynamics research, involved its author in controversy, but established him as the country's best known authority...