Instructors seeking to provide their charges with useful and relevant material still can find much of proven utility among the events and personalities of the American Civil War (ACW). At times the parallels to the very modern age are disquieting. The ominous rise of new weapons technologies posed much the same anxious concerns to Federal Navy commanders watching C.S.S. Virginia (nee U.S.S. Merrimac) taking ironclad shape in Norfolk as do the latest announcements from Beijing media about the threats hypersonic missiles or orbitally-launched kinetic energy weapons pose to U.S. Naval supremacy. New forms of media raise issues of popular support for warfare, be it in the form of Matthew Brady and other photographers’ grisly daguerreotypes of battlefield carnage or body-cam footage live-streamed from the field of combat into world-reaching social media. High-speed communication and transports, telegraphs and railroads, were concerns for 19th Century planners whose responses beneath the beards and brass buttons provide useful case studies for corresponding contemporary concerns.

One too-often forgotten such issue is the vital one of the need for any given senior commander to cooperate smoothly with at times mercurial sovereign civilian leadership. Stephen Taaffe’s fascinating and vital treatment of this exact subject in Commanding Lincoln’s Navy provides ‘all results in’ analysis of that vital and potentially-explosive relationship of much use to military thinkers of the 21st Century.

Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s only Secretary of the Navy, had no naval experience, but as a fiercely loyal cabinet member and a former newspaper editor, he combined a priceless understanding of media realities with a grinding determination to win the war. Taaffe ably chronicles Welles’s maturation as a manager of his human resources and obstacles, looming high among which were the Navy’s ossified seniority system and its tremendously powerful bureaux. Taaffe makes excellent use of Welles’s own assessment of his challenges, lucidly preserved in Welles’s multi-volume Diary, which combines priceless insight into the ‘team of rivals’ and the individuals who Welles felt helped or hindered the war effort and Welles’s efforts to complete and sustain the blockade that eventually strangled the Confederacy.

Taaffe chronicles how Welles had often-undesired input from all motives and all sides on nearly every one of his decisions, whether it was the support or replacement of a particular commander or the employment of a given weapons system or tactic. Welles’s navy was far less tolerant of hesitation or even suspected disloyalty to the Federal cause among his officers than were those initially in charge of the Union’s armies. Lincoln, other cabinet officials and Gustavus Vasa Fox, his competent and assertive Assistant Secretary, all put pressures on Welles in addition to those posed by the ghastly condition of admirals, ships, and Welles’s frantic need to find good replacements for them all in frantic haste. Unsurprisingly, Welles never managed perfection under such strains, but by the end of Taaffe’s narrative one shares Lincoln’s high opinion of Welles’s execution of his office.

Taaffe’s prime emphasis is, aptly, on Welles’s management of his senior commanders, among whom were heroes such as Charles Stewart, proven in battle—fifty-one years previously. Taaffe notes how Welles empowered and supported the best of his proved professionals, but Andrew Foote and even David Glasgow Farragut eventually collapsed under the burdens Welles and the war heaped upon them. Other men such as Samuel F. DuPont and John Dahlgren managed new technologies and their relationship with Welles in ways that ended or greatly hampered their utility to the war effort. Welles considered his drastic reactions necessarily ruthless. Many powerful people did not agree, but Lincoln, with his eye for talent, usually backed Welles.

Such trust was not without vindication. Franklin Buchanan had displayed excellence as a ship commander and the first superintendent of the United States Naval Academy. Welles nonetheless angrily refused to allow Buchanan to rescind his resignation when Buchanan’s belief that his native slave state of Maryland would secede failed in the event. Even modern authorities have faulted Welles’s inflexibility. It is worth noting that Buchanan would later command the Confederacy’s two most powerful ironclads—badly. He would be gravely wounded while watching outside the casemate of Merrimac/Virginia as his gunners burned the stricken U.S.S. Congress—and her wounded—with heated shot. His headlong charge with C.S.S. Tennessee against the Union fleet in Mobile Bay prompted a loyal Southern officer—Farragut—to remark, ‘I didn’t think Old Buck was such a fool.’ Farragut’s monitors, also supported by Welles, remorselessly pounded Tennessee to pieces.

Taaffe’s eminently readable and vivid narrative details dozens of similar stories, not all of them to Welles’s credit, but to the reader’s definite enlightenment. The most central, vital, and useful lesson from this volume is that, in an era when the Obama administration went through no less than seven senior commanders in Afghanistan, the modern leader must take a lesson from Welles and his war on that person’s vital need to manage civilian oversight at least as ably as the demands of the battlefield.

Rob S. Rice
American Military University ( )