LIFE IN MR. LINCOLN'S NAVY
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LIFE IN MR. LINCOLN'S NAVY
Full Description:
Every aspect of the common sailor's life in the Union navy—from recruiting, clothing, training, shipboard routine, entertainment, and wages to diet, health, and combat experience—is addressed in this study, the first to examine the subject in rich detail. The wealth of new facts it provides allows the reader to take a fresh look at nineteenth-century social history, including issues like racial integration in the military. As he examines daily life in the Union navy, Dennis Ringle also calls attention to the enlisted sailor's enormous contributions to the development of the U.S. Navy as it moved from wood and sail to steam and iron.
A marine engineer with more than twenty years of naval experience, Ringle describes the lives of the steam engineers whose work later proved critical to the success of the ironclad monitors and the development of the powerful predreadnought warships. His focus is on the sailors assigned to the western river vessels, the ships enforcing the blockade, and those dispatched to destroy Confederate commerce raiders. To reconstruct daily life, he draws on a large number of published and unpublished diaries, journals, and letters. To put the information in context, he compares the sailor's life to that of a soldier's, including health conditions to explain why, for example, fewer sailors died from disease than soldiers.
Ringle's efforts to gain respect for the courageous Union sailors who helped save the nation are certain to bring them recognition, just as Bell Wiley's landmark studies Billy Yank and Johnny Reb did for the Civil War soldiers.
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Customer Reviews
Pleasantly Surprised
Friday, July 8, 2011
"Life in Mr. Lincoln's Navy" is a brief, matter-of-fact review of Navy life between The Mexican-American War and the end of the Civil War. It is one of the few books that examins the naval facet of the war which played an integral component in the war's outcome. The book examines the Navy Seaman and the challenges and changes which occured in the decades prior to and during the Civil War, peppered with anticdotes and stories from the era much in the same way Ken Burns did for his Civil War series years ago. It provides a unique perspective on issues that not only affected the Navy then but have affect it to this day: Recruiting, adaptation to changing technology, integration, discipline and training to name a few. "Mr. Lincoln's Navy" gives an excellent snapshot of an era and gives the Seaman it's rightful claim in having performed just as vital a role in the war's outcome as the infantryman of his day.
