Lincoln and His Admirals (review)

This book is part of the deluge of publications timed to coincide with the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. The deluge has conformed to the famously pungent law discovered by Theodore Sturgeon, a science fiction writer: "Ninety percent of everything is crap." Lincoln and His Admirals belongs in the worthy 10 percent. It received the 2009 Lincoln Prize, which it shared equally with James M. McPherson's Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York, 2008). The linkage is appropriate: The two may be regarded as companion volumes.

Previous studies of Lincoln as commander in chief have focused overwhelmingly on his involvement with the Union army. Tried by War substantially follows this tradition, perhaps because McPherson knew that Symonds was at work on Lincoln and His Admirals (in their acknowledgments, each praises the assistance of the other). Symonds' title suggests a reprise of the formula used in T. Harry Williams' Lincoln and His Generals (New York, 1952), each chapter of which focused on the relationship between Lincoln and a specific senior commander. But the book is really an account of Lincoln's relationship with the Navy Department. Admirals figure prominently, but the central figure, and rightly so, is Secretary of the Navy Gideon J. Welles, an acerbic New England Democrat whom Lincoln affectionately addressed as "Neptune." Welles took a tiny, ramshackle Navy and transformed it into a big, ramshackle Navy—a bewildering blend of wooden warships, converted merchantmen, and newfangled ironclads that at its height numbered some 600 vessels manned by 51,000 seamen, several thousand of them African American. Welles deserves immense credit for this achievement.

But Lincoln, Symonds makes clear, deserves immense credit for his role in the Union's naval strategy, which consisted of blockading the Confederate coast, supporting the army in its riverine operations (especially on the Mississippi River), assisting in the eventual capture of every Confederate port, and destroying the few Confederate ironclads and commerce raiders whenever opportunity offered. Lincoln also intervened to ensure the creation of the U.S.S. Monitor, whose revolutionary design became the model for the most successful class of Union ironclads. He also dealt adroitly with the Trent Affair, a diplomatic crisis provoked by the rash action of a Navy captain (who nonetheless went on to become an admiral).

That part of the story is familiar, though rarely told so well. Lincoln and His Admirals abounds with flashes of insight and telling vignettes that imply or reveal much larger issues. It also does more than any previous work to examine the Navy's role in emancipation, a theme hitherto almost entirely overlooked. The Navy had African Americans in service long before the Union Army (they had served in the prewar Navy as well), and Symonds masterfully explores their lives aboard ship and the race relations involved. He notes that the coastal enclaves necessitated by the need for naval coaling stations became magnets for escaping slaves and that Port Royal, one of the first of them, laid the basis for the crucial Sea Island experiments in post-emancipation labor.

Lincoln and His Admirals is not interdisciplinary in any significant way, nor does it place its story in comparative or longitudinal perspective. But as a narrative it is first rate, and a useful guide for anyone interested in exploring an important chapter in American civil–military relations.