John Roach, Maritime Entrepreneur: The Years as Naval Contractor, 1862-86 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS65 casionally chargé d'affaires at St. Petersburg and Vienna, dien as chargé and finally minister to Peru. Making use of nearly every conceivable American source, Oeste has carefully traced Clay's slow rise and many disappointments—at the age of thirtyfive and after fifteen years of service, he returned to his original post at his original rank and salary! A letter of his in 1845 to James Buchanan, his friend and superior, (p. 254) is a telling indictment of die haphazard, politics-ridden Foreign Service of die mid-nineteenth century. During the last thirteen years of his career Clay presided over American-Peruvian relations widi a sure hand, but his experience deserved more important concerns than debts and claims, cases, guano diplomacy, and efforts to open die Amazon from die west. In 1861 Seward dismissed him into unpensioned retirement widi no recorded appreciation of his services. While Oeste might have enhanced his account of diplomacy in Lima by using Peruvian sources, he has done a diorough job, and no writer will need to reexamine Clay's career for a long time. However, die book has a few flaws which will deter some readers. It is about twice as long as necessary, for Oeste writes in an old-fashioned, rambling style, and his manuscript badly needed pruning. Many matters, such as die text of a schoolboy letter, complete with misspellings, (pp. 31-32) and a full description of Clay's presentation to die Tsar as chargé, (p. 86) could have been condensed to a sentence or two apiece. Much of die Russian and Austrian diplomacy has little or nothing to do with Clay and could have been eliminated or briefly summarized. Chapter IX ("The Tobacco Mission to Austria") seems to be composed of largely new material and might have been excerpted as an article, along widi later bits on the same subject. Closely related to this wordiness is a certain diffuseness or incoherence often found in biographies of unimportant men or those who wandered from one job to anodier. The best way to present a minor diplomat to the readers most interested in him—diplomatic historians—is to show how his career was typical or atypical of diplomacy in his day and to concentrate on his most important work. Here and there Oeste has presented a significant vignette, such as his account of John Randolph of Roanoke (Clay's first patron) as a largely absentee minister to Russia—surely one of Jackson's least fortunate appointments! Also die eleven chapters which deal with Clay's Peruvian mission are well integrated and useful. But elsewhere die book contains too much incidental information, too many details and abrupt transitions to be wholly successful, eidier in recreating a man or in helping to evaluate die Foreign Service and American diplomacy of die middle period. , Davro M. Pletcher Indiana University John Roach, Maritime Entrepreneur: The Years as Naval Contractor, 1862-86. By Leonard Alexander Swann, Jr. (Annapolis: United States Naval Institute, 1965. Pp. xv, 301. $7.50.) As die full title suggests, diis volume is not a biography in die usual 66CIVIL WAR HISTORY sense. One leams little of Roach's personal life—if, indeed, he had one apart from his business. Neidier is it quite a continuous or complete business history. The loss of Roach's personal and company papers by fire precludes diat approach. Rather it is a study of die leading builder of marine engines and ships in die post-Civil War period widi emphasis on his relations widi die Navy Department. The account of his inevitable entanglement in Navy and national politics gives a "back door view" of our naval history not to be found in the usual textbook. Roach, who came to die United States as a penniless Irish youdi in 1832, made himself proprietor of a small New York iron foundry before the Civil War. During die war he manufactured marine engines for both die Navy and die merchant marine, and amassed profits to finance subsequent expansion. In the decade following die war he took die main steps toward creating a vertically integrated industrial structure which would enable him to "build complete ships, from die ore up...