Stephen Decatur: A Life Most Bold and Daring (review)

Stephen Decatur was one of the great heroes of the early American republic. He first won acclaim in the War with Tripoli in 1803, when he headed an operation to burn the USS Philadelphia after it had run aground in the harbor of Tripoli and then been captured and refloated by the enemy. For succeeding in this daring and dangerous mission, the twenty-five-year-old Decatur became the youngest captain in U.S. naval history. Decatur also showed exceptional courage in hand-to-hand combat in a gunboat battle later in the war. He added to his laurels in the War of 1812 by capturing the British frigate Macedonian, which for more than sixty years thereafter cruised the seas as a trophy ship of the U.S. Navy. Although Decatur's reputation was slightly tarnished when he lost the USS President to a British squadron later in the war, his success in the Algerine War in 1815 added new luster to his name. In 1820, at the age of forty-one, he was tragically killed in a duel by Commodore James Barron, the ill-starred officer who had been tainted in the notorious Chesapeake affair in 1807.

Decatur did not leave a large body of papers, and the indispensable biography will always be Alexander Slidell Mackenzie's The Life of Stephen Decatur, a Commodore in the Navy of the United States (1846), which is packed with anecdotal information from contemporaries that cannot be found elsewhere. Although there have been a number of other biographies of Decatur, the latest entry, by Spencer Tucker, is probably the best even though the author was limited to 90,000 words. An accomplished naval historian, Tucker has written first-class books on Jefferson's gunboat fleet and on the complex subject of naval guns in the Age of Sail.

Tucker takes us through Decatur's life, focusing on the key episodes in his career. His treatment of Decatur's role in the Tripolitan and Algerine wars is particularly good, but readers will appreciate Tucker's informed opinion on every aspect of the commodore's career. Tucker also does a good job of trying to unravel the events surrounding the duel that ended Decatur's life. In a brief concluding chapter, he provides a good assessment of Decatur. Tucker concludes that the Algerine War showed Decatur at his finest. In this war, "he showed a great strategic sense, a flair for timing, skill in diplomacy, and firmness of purpose" (p. 187).

One wishes that Tucker had been given a little more space so that he could provide more detail on the development of the early American navy. What he does say is reliable and usually clear, and readers without any background in naval history will profit from the glossary of naval terms that is appended. Tucker makes a few small errors, and he might have aided his readers by including a chronology. Otherwise, this is a fine piece of work, likely to stand for some time as the best short biography of one of the central figures in the early American naval pantheon.