William S. Dudley

The naval war of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain has received its fair share of attention from historians. Over the years, writers from William M. James to Theodore Roosevelt have written about it, with their ranks only increasing with the recent bicentennial of the conflict. In most of these books, the focus is on the drama of the battles, with accounts of sailors on both sides blasting away at each other from wooden ships, relying upon courage, accuracy, and the wind for victory.

William Dudley’s book stands apart from these works because of its focus. Instead of providing a narrative of the various battles fought by the United States Navy in the Atlantic and on the Great Lakes, Dudley’s goal is “to explain what it took to build, maintain, man, fit out, provision, and send out fighting ships to sea for extended periods of time.” In doing so, he focuses his attention on a far more important, if less exciting, aspect of the American war effort, which was providing the logistics and personnel needed to wage war against the British empire. And as one of the editors of The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History series, Dudley is well-qualified to undertake such a task, demonstrating a command of the sources that allows him to draw out the important details to inform our understanding of the naval war effort.

As a consequence of this shift in focus, the people at the center of Dudley’s narrative aren’t the officers and men who fought in the battles, but the politicians and administrators who shaped policy and worked to turn it into reality. Two men in particular stand out: Paul Hamilton and William Jones, both of whom served as Secretary of the Navy during the war. The two men had much in common: both were veterans of the American Revolution who had successful political careers after the war. As President James Madison’s first Secretary of the Navy, it was Hamilton who fought to prepare the navy for war against the British, only for many of his proposals to be frustrated by Albert Gallatin, the parsimonious Treasury Secretary. With the onset of the war the overwhelmed Hamilton retired; in his place Madison nominated Jones, who proved more successful but who faced several new challenges because of the administration’s haphazard prosecution of the conflict.

These secretaries bore much of the burden of organization because of the small size of the department. Just a handful of clerks and naval officers were expected to manage a rapidly expanding naval force that was engaged across a large stretch of the North American continent. This makes the achievements Dudley describes all the more remarkable, as these men built or cobbled together what they could to face the British. While Dudley’s focus is on administration and logistics, he does not neglect the campaigns and the battles but instead includes them so as to provide context for the decisions made. This helps to underscore the challenges the navy faced against a numerically superior foe, while also demonstrating the factors involved in the victories scored against those odds.

By the end of the book, Dudley has provided his readers with a thorough account of the United States Navy’s operations during the war. It’s a book that is almost encyclopedic in its coverage, as Dudley segments his chapters with subheadings identifying the topics addressed in the subsequent chapters. This adds to the utility of the book, but it also makes for a text that is functional rather than fluid, lacking the readability and dramatic snap that some readers may want from such a work. Fortunately for them there are plenty of alternatives out there and more will be written in the year to come, for which Dudley’s book will undoubtedly serve as a reliable source for the less-glamorous but often more important aspects of waging a war on the waters in the age of sail.… (meer)