Thomas Macdonough: Master of Command in the Early U.S. Navy (review)

The mission of the Naval Institute Press's "Library of Naval Biography" is to provide "accurate, informative, and interpretive biographies of influential naval figures" (p. xii). If some of the earlier volumes in this series are skimpy on interpretation, no one can make that complaint about David Curtis Skaggs's fine biography of Thomas Macdonough—War of 1812 hero and victor at the 1814 battle of Lake Champlain. Skaggs draws on contemporary theories of military leadership and command to provide a framework for appreciating Macdonough's training, naval career, mastery of battle, and life accomplishments. Such an approach is particularly welcome because, for many leaders of the nineteenth-century navy, intimate personal sources are lacking from which a biographer can draw out a portrait of a vital, three-dimensional human being. With subjects for whom this limitation cannot be overcome, incisive analysis and critical interpretation of an officer's career and historical importance can still justify a book-length biography and make it rewarding reading. This is definitely the case with Thomas Macdonough: Master of Command.

Most naval officers whose claim to historical fame is War of 1812 service lived and continued to command at sea years after the return of peace. The older practice in writing about such lives was to cover the pre-1815 years in loving detail and then do a fast, superficial flyover of the remainder of the subject's life. Fortunately, this tradition appears to be a dying one. Skaggs offers two strong chapters (out of the eight for his subject's life) devoted to Macdonough's postwar commands of Guerrière and Constitution. The period between the War of 1812 and the American Civil War was a critical one for the young U.S. Navy. Throughout those years the navy actively and effectively supported U.S. national interests in every part of the globe. Equally important, navies which fight big, attention-getting wars, are typically shaped and trained in times of relative peace, when the public's and the historian's eyes are diverted elsewhere. Such is abundantly true of the U.S. Navy of the war with Mexico and the Civil War. That more historical attention is being devoted to the navy of the 1815-60 years is indeed welcome. What is required now is the discovery of an overarching interpretive theme (or themes) that will enable scholars and readers to understand the navy of these years as more than a group of officers with too little to do and (consequently) with excess energy to devote to interpersonal quarrels—an entrenched caricature which Skaggs does not completely avoid.

One note of caution: Readers not familiar with the early U.S. Navy's personnel policies may be misled by the long quotation from Patrick O'Brian (pp. 10-11) into thinking that midshipmen's appointments in the U.S. Navy were the patronage privilege of the navy's ship commanders. The system described by O'Brian, and cited by Skaggs, was the one followed in Britain's Royal Navy, but not in its United States counterpart. American midshipmen were appointed (and, if necessary, dismissed) by the Navy Department, although some captains sought to emulate the British approach through the practice of naming acting midshipmen whose appointments expired with the ship's commission or the captain's pleasure—an abuse actively discouraged, if sometimes grudgingly tolerated, by U.S. policy.

Anyone with an interest in the nineteenth-century U.S. Navy or naval warfare under sail will wish to read Thomas Macdonough: Master of Command in the Early U.S. Navy for its compelling and well-written narrative of an important life—but even more so because Master of Command brings into play sophisticated tools for understanding and appreciating men...