The Civil War at Sea. By Craig L. Symonds. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009. Pp. vii, 201, ISBN 978-0-275-99084-8.
Craig Symonds, Professor Emeritus of History at the United States Naval Academy, offers here a thematic and topical treatment of the naval dimension of America’s Civil War. The reader may approach chapters individually to glean insight into various facets of the war at sea, but he will put down the volume with an heightened awareness of the naval war’s chronology, key players, and the “salient issues” (ix). The work does not adhere to a strict line of argument, yet it constitutes much more than “merely a great tale” of Civil War naval narrative. Topics treated here include: the advent of a modern and industrial navy in the 1850s; the Union blockade and those Confederate vessels that attempted to break it; chapter three examines the Confederate war on commerce, or, how ships ill- suited to blockade running attempted naval forms of guerilla warfare—guerre de course—against federal vessels; the naval war in the West on the nation’s rivers; the siege of Charleston; and, by way of conclusion, a brief case study of the CSS Shenandoah’s 58,000-mile voyage around the globe. Over and above, Symonds contends that naval forces did not determine Union victory. He views the North’s triumph over the South as an outcome more directly related to two factors: first, the North’s industrial base; and, secondly, Lincoln’s ability to maintain political support. Symonds does, however, view the war at sea as influential in its effects on the length and trajectory of the war (170).
The poet, novelist, and literary critic Robert Penn Warren once remarked that a people’s way of fighting reflects directly its way of thinking, and that the epic clash between the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia reflected the waxing prestige of Pragmatism in American political thought and industry. Symonds explores the changes wrought on the American navy through industrialism and modernization before and during the Civil War in chapter one. Contrary to historians who argue that the United States navy stood ill prepared for war in 1861, Symonds points to the presence and availability of twenty-four propeller-driven steamers, all acquired or purchased from 1854-9. The United States Congress appropriated funds for three new classes of war ships: the Merrimack, the Hartford, and the Mohican classes. Guns became heaver (they also boasted rifling) and fired heavier ordinances. Delayed fuses allowed for detonating munitions. Screws—or propeller drives—enabled vessels to sail more quickly over greater distances. The Union navy expanded further to feature many Monitor-type vessels, and this growth reflected the emergence of a truly industrial system in the North (25). These vessels wrought greater destruction on the Confederate psyche than they managed to achieve at sea; their guns (big, but few in number) could not sustain prolonged rates of fire and nearly asphyxiated gun crews. Revolving turrets suffered from uneven gears and inconsistent machinery. As for the Confederacy, it lacked the industrial base to produce such vessels and the armor those vessels required. And the Confederacy never managed to achieve success as it did on 2 March 1862, the day the CSS Virginia—its signature ironclad—sank US warships Congress and Cumberland with great ease.
The Union blockade of the South did not incapacitate the Confederacy’s ability to make war. In fact, the successful blockade runner typically staged four runs—either in to port or out to sea. Symonds calculates that of those vessels which attempted runs on the blockade, three quarters achieved success. In the end, however, three quarters of all ships that made such runs fell into Union hands or sank beneath the waves. Symonds cites another estimate that blockade runners managed to import 400,000 rifles (sixty percent of the Confederacy’s shoulder arms), three million pounds of lead, and 2,250,000 pounds of powder (55). Because the Confederacy lacked rail networks necessary to transport supplies (indeed, the Confederacy even scrapped its own rails to produce iron plating for its warships), efforts to crack the Union blockade buttressed the southern war effort. Symonds praises the blockade for its prevention of southern exports. To deprive the South its historic profits from cotton in European markets seemed as great a victory as hindering war materiel from reaching the South.
Symonds examines the Confederate raiding strategy in chapter three. Jefferson Davis’ early call for privateers compelled ship owners to prey on Union merchant shipping. This proved increasingly difficult, as the war on commerce offered less financial incentive compared to blockade running. Moreover, it was intrinsically dangerous. Union commanders sailed with orders from Abraham Lincoln to detain privateersmen on charges of piracy, a crime for which, under normal circumstances, a man went to the gallows until Jefferson Davis threatened, in turn, to shoot Union prisoners of war. Commerce raiders did not prove decisive for the Confederacy, though numerous vessels managed to achieve lasting fame for their ability to destroy Union shipping. Raiders Sumter and Shenandoah struck fear into Union naval commanders and proved great obstacles to federal superiority on the seas. They managed to achieve success disproportionate to their numbers.
“The war in the West was inextricably tied to the ability of either side to control the traffic on the rivers,” and Symonds locates similar reasons for Union success on the rivers as on the high seas: the ability to produce ironclads quickly. By January 1862, two months before the Monitor and the Virginia, the Union deployed James Eads ironclads on the rivers as part of Winfield Scott’s broader Anaconda strategy to constrict and suffocate the Confederacy via the Mississippi River (118). Perhaps most importantly, increases in technology, armor, and firepower particular to Union ironclads on the rivers greatly diminished the ability of forts to defend the heartland of the Confederacy; the fall of forts Henry and Donelson, along with David Dixon Porter’s remarkable run past Confederate batteries at Vicksburg, bear testament to this fact. Symonds reasons, in accord with historian Gary Joiner, that the combination of these vessels with Union ground troops into a formidable fighting force made possible the Union victory in the West against Confederate forts.
This is a splendid synthesis of Civil War naval history. It demonstrates with matter and art the nature and scope of the Civil War’s naval dimension. Modern technology produced modern weapons and, in turn, produced a modern naval war. Such a war vastly favored the North, whose industrial base could furnish the proper materiel most rapidly. The South, by contrast, bore the strategic burden of defending an expansive coastline with inadequate ships, resources, and manpower. While the Confederacy made significant naval innovations such as the submarine and torpedo, these could not stem the tide of Union victory on the waters. Nor could its forts bear the brunt of the Union Navy on the rivers or at the ports. Historians may mark the American Civil War as a traditional war dictated by Napoleonic stratagems, but these interpretations seem harder to square with the modernism that so defined the naval dimension. In innovation, weaponry, tactics, and scale this naval dimension of the American Civil War foretold the modern industrial nation that emerged after 1865.
MITCHELL G. KLINGENBERG
Texas Christian University
The Civil War At Sea. By Craig L. Symonds. Reflections on the Civil War Era. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009. Pp. vii-170.)
In The Civil War At Sea, Craig L Symonds provides an operational history of navies in the Civil War. Following a typical organization, Symonds examines the role of modern technology, considers the impact of the Union blockade, discusses the significance of Confederate commerce raiders and Union counters, spends a couple chapters on successes and failures of combined operations, and concludes with a mélange of notable operations near the end of the war. Several themes govern Symonds’s interpretation of the naval war. The blockade harmed the Southern economy and Southern morale, while the South’s commerce raiders did not have a decisive impact on the Northern war effort, and Southern fortifications proved ineffective against modern naval technology and the industrial superiority of the North.
Before and during the Civil War, naval warfare changed tremendously. Many of the key technological developments – steam engines, screw propellers, larger rifled guns, explosive shells – occurred prior to the war, but the war spurred more widespread adoption of such advancements. Symonds moderates the traditional picture of a woefully unprepared U.S. Navy by suggesting that the Navy was better prepared to fight at the start of the Civil War than in any previous conflict. The war gave reason for Americans to adopt the European idea of sheathing ships in armor, and also saw the implementation of the rotating turret for guns. The South began the war with hardly any naval resources, and efforts to rely on coastal forts or small gunboats proved unworkable in the face of the latest naval technology. The Confederacy’s industrial limitations greatly hampered its aspirations for naval power.
The next two chapters focus on key offensive efforts by the North and South. The Union blockade of the South has received many conflicting interpretations throughout Civil War historiography. Though it was imperfect, Symonds concludes that it did shorten the war by weakening the Confederate economy and civilian morale. While Northern industry churned out ships at a prodigious rate to staff the blockade squadrons, the Confederacy settled on coastal fortifications to defend its ports. Revenue from Southern cotton exports declined catastrophically, a significant blow to the South’s economy. The South’s greatest offensive naval effort of the war came through commerce raiding. Civilians found blockade-running more profitable than privateering, so the Confederate Navy led most of the commerce raiding. The narratives of ships like the C.S.S. Alabama could be dramatic, and a handful of such raiders did significant damage to Northern shipping, but ultimately this had relatively little effect on the Northern economy or war effort.
Symonds’s next two chapters could be linked to the topic of Union Army-Navy cooperation. First he examines the war on the western rivers (predominantly the Mississippi). Control of the rivers greatly aided the movement of troops and supplies and the prosecution of the land war in the west. Conflict again centered on Union naval supremacy versus Confederate shore fortifications, though here Union gunboats operated in conjunction with land forces. The Union’s industrial superiority – the ability the produce flotillas of ironclad gunboats – and exceptional cooperation between the Army and Navy proved the keys to Northern domination of the rivers and advanced the overall conquest of the western theater. Symonds includes a brief, valuable analysis of how rivers aided movement in the west, contrasting them with eastern theater rivers, which impeded movement. If the western rivers witnessed the positive side of inter-service cooperation, the struggle for Charleston, South Carolina, serves to highlight the difficulties that combined operations faced. Poor leadership from the Army, Navy, and administration in Washington repeatedly combined to derail Union efforts to capture the city.
A final chapter ties together many earlier themes while bringing the book to a chronological conclusion as well. The Union’s securing of Mobile Bay and capture of Fort Fisher (effectively closing off Wilmington, North Carolina) tightened the noose of blockade. These battles revisited the significance of Union ironclads and heavy guns. The struggle to capture Fort Fisher again showcased the challenges of combined operations. Symonds closes with the narrative of the commerce raider C.S.S. Shenandoah. Naval operations did not decide the course of the war, Symonds concludes, but they did advance Union victory and hasten the war’s end. This volume has a couple limitations, albeit forgivable ones: the topical format of this book sometimes leads to a disjointed narrative and of necessity such broad survey means many topics received very limited depth of coverage. Symonds’s work will be helpful to specialists seeking to solidify their knowledge and would be an excellent resource for students beginning to study the naval dimension of the Civil War.
Jonathan T. Engel