Privateers & Volunteers: The Men and Women of Our Reserve Naval Forces: 1766 to 1866 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS277 America, it is to thee Thou boasted land of liberty,— It is to thee I raise my song, Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong. The blues, spoken or sung by black agrarians during and after the Populist era, was the fundamental form of late nineteen century black poetry. Invisible Poets preserves the myth of a Negro literary tradition which largely and unsuccessfully imitated the work of white poets. Sherman does provide a valuable reference source for black literary critics of the period, despite its limitations. Manning M arable Tuskegee Institute Privateers ¿r Volunteers: The Men and Women of Our Reserve Naval Forces: 1766 to 1866. By Reuben Elmore Stivers. (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1975. Pp. 502. $17.00.) "A naval reserve is that part of a nation's manpower not enrolled in a regular military service which can be used effectively as a force directed seaward against a prescribed enemy under the authority of an established government" (p. xiv). Using this definition, Captain Reuben E. Stivers presents a convincing case that de facto naval reserve forces existed long before the U.S. Naval Reserve was established in 1915. This is the story of their first century of service. Colonial privateersmen were "America's first naval reservists, and they made up what was its first reserve naval force" (p. 17). By the time of the Civil War the distinction between a regular and a reservist had been refined to the point where the latter were specifically identified as members of the volunteer navy. The author has worked hard to separate the story of the reservists from that of the regular navy, but a large part of it is familiar to students of naval history. Yet there is also a fuller discussion of privateering, letters of marque and of prize money than is usually found in most naval histories. Between the wars the author has sketched the main developments in the history of the country and in the maritime and naval world. The effort is commendable, but some of the generalizations and assumptions will raise the eyebrows of specialists. For example: "After the War of 1812 most Americans were able to cast off dependence on Great Britain and Europe, and to enjoy a cessation of the worries and harassment from these sources that had been a burden and a curtailment for 50 years" (p. 137). Five of the twelve chapters are devoted to the Civil War. One of these draws on manuscript material to sketch aspects of everyday life and is the most original part of the book. In the Civil War we meet the first women reservists in the form of nine Sisters of the Holy Cross 278civil war history who served as nurses on the USS Red Rover, the Navy's first hospital ship. Stivers points out that of the 6,000 or so volunteer officers who served in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War, no more than twenty percent had prior service in the navy or merchant marine. Another twenty or thirty percent had worked on the rivers and lakes. So fifty percent or more were civilians with no previous waterborne experience. As a naval reservist himself, Stivers writes with feeling about past instances of regular navy prejudice against reservists , and of the official blindness to their contributions and value. The book is based on a number of manuscript sources, two unpublished dissertations, and a great deal of printed primary and secondary sources. Useful documents are printed in seven appendices . Source footnotes are printed at the end of the volume and information notes are printed at the bottom of certain pages. There are three sources in the notes that are not in the bibliography. In two instances book reviews of pertinent works are cited but not the books themselves. The text contains errors or omissions that should have been caught by the editor, such as the rationale for the 1766 date (p. 16); no reason for the end of the first apprentice system (p. 178); Lord Lyons was the British minister not the ambassador (p. 218); the nation's highest award is incorrectly identified (p. 305). Stivers repeats a story, previously...