A Navy, in the most obvious sense, is composed of ships—tangible objects which can be weighed, measured, and counted against one another. It is also composed of men, whose qualities are slightly more difficult to assay; and behind both, it is made up of traditions which bear somewhat the same relation to the men in the service that these men do to their ships. Under the influence of a great tradition commanders of quite mediocre ability have been known to accomplish things quite beyond the capacity of their minds in ordinary circumstances.
Perhaps the most striking historical example is one not of a naval but a military tradition: the march of the Roman Consul Claudius Nero to oppose Hasdrubal on the Metaurus in the Second Punic War. Nero’s army was facing Hannibal’s on the south Italian front when Hasdrubal came over the mountains into Italy. Nero had never before shown the slightest indication of military genius; he was merely a fairish military hack. But at this juncture, he successfully hid his movements behind a screen of light infantry, made a speedy march north, and with his brother consul crushed Hasdrubal under the weight of two armies and won the war. The important feature of the incident was that Hasdrubal at the time was rated more formidable than his brother, and the Roman military tradition required that the most dangerous enemy should be attacked first. Obedience to tradition made Claudius Nero a temporary Napoleon.
Again, not even the disintegration attendant on the Russian revolution could quite overcome the traditional Russian skill in mine laying. The Russian mining force was throughout the World War the most formidable obstacle the Germans had to face in the Baltic, the last to lose its cohesion and national spirit.
Nor are these traditions always valuable. Mahan comments repeatedly upon the shackling effect exercised upon the old French navy by its traditional search of “ulterior objects” as the first consideration in naval warfare, and makes some pretty acid comment upon the value of our own tradition that commerce destroying is a method of naval war productive of great results.
Yet both these traditions lie in the field of grand strategy, where it is comparatively easy to analyze their effects. If one is really to investigate the traditions of our Navy, really to discover what imponderable influences will be at work upon its officers in any given set of circumstances, it is necessary to examine the subject in more detail.
The moment this analysis is attempted in the case of the United States Navy one is impressed by the overwhelming importance of four names: Truxtun, Preble, Joshua Humphreys, and John Paul Jones, which among them express almost everything of value that sets the American navy apart from others of its kind. It is true that our naval tradition contains many elements in which these four names have no share. For example, in no other great navy do officers linger so long on the lower rungs of the ladder of promotion (and if this be thought a modern condition a little reading of naval history of the 1840’s is advised, when we had midshipmen of 30 and junior lieutenants in full beards approaching the retirement age). But this is hardly a useful tradition and may be a very harmful one; the good elements are those that trace back to the four men mentioned.
Of the four Joshua Humphreys was not a member of the naval service and the inclusion of his name therefore requires more justification than the rest. Yet he exerted a stronger influence upon the American navy, and perhaps upon the navies of the world, than any of the others. What led President Washington to request him to prepare a paper on the characteristics of the ships authorized for service against the Algerine pirates in 1794 is not at this date discoverable. It was probably something quite simple, such as the fact that Humphreys was a prominent shipbuilder of Philadelphia, then the national capital, and therefore readily available. Certainly, on reputation Hackett of Boston was the man who should have been consulted—a designer with a long and splendid record who, during the Revolution, had turned out the fastest warship in the world in the Continental frigate Hancock. But Humphreys was chosen and he produced a paper which may be considered the Magna Charta of American naval construction, by consequence of its strategy and tactics, which are necessarily concerned with the exploitation of the qualities put into ships by their builders.
Humphreys wrote:
As our navy will be inferior in numbers, we are to consider what size ships will be most formidable and be an overmatch for those of an enemy; such frigates as in blowing weather would be an overmatch for double-deck ships and in light winds to evade coming to action. Frigates will be the first object and none ought to be built less than 150 feet keel to carry thirty 24- pounders on the gun deck. Ships of this construction have everything in their favor; their great length gives them the advantage of sailing,' which is an object of the first magnitude. They are superior to any European frigate, and if others be in company, our frigates can lead ahead and never be obliged to go into action but on their own terms.
The remarkable thing about this statement of proposed policy was that it sharply broke with current naval ideas- The common length of existing frigates was 100 to 110 feet; the common gun deck battery was twenty 12-pounders (in fact Hackett so built his frigate, when he was commissioned to design one three years later), with a few 18-pounder frigates just coming into use, and the 24 purely a line- of-battleship’s gun which, it was generally believed, could not be mounted in a frigate without making her unstable.
It is not easy to picture today the derision that Humphreys’ grandiose plan excited among shipping men, particularly among English shipping men, or the storm of salt-water criticism that raged round the head of President Washington when he adopted these wild ideas as the guiding principles of the new naval construction. The issue was still so much alive in 1797 that when launching accidents befell the first two frigates the mishaps were cited from the pulpit as evidence of Divine punishment directed at “Jacobin” ideas.
In spite of opposition from men who were qualified to know, President Washington could find no logical loophole in Humphreys’ argument. He commissioned the Philadelphian to draw plans for the six frigates that became the Constitution, United, States, Constellation, Congress, President, and Chesapeake, and in so doing forever committed the American navy to the principle of big guns on big ships. The influence of Humphreys’ paper and Washington’s decision underlies all American naval history like a subsoil and is still potent today. In it is to be discovered the source of the constant search for more powerful ordnance that caused our builders to mount the 11-inch Dahlgren and 100-pounder rifle in the fifties, when the rest of the world was experimenting tentatively with the 7-inch and the 68-pounder; that gave the later monitors their 15-inch guns, the battleships of the Oregon class their extra 8-inch turrets; that produced the designs for the Michigan while Lord Fisher was still wondering whether an all-big-gun battleship might not be a good idea.
Finally, it is interesting to observe that the technical terms be modernized Humphreys’ argument will stand today as a perfectly good statement of the case for the 10,000-ton cruiser mounting 8-inch guns, the heavy frigate of our own age. It is worth noting that our own nation was the only one that had much to say in favor of this type of ship at the naval conferences, and that in addition the United States has held out for the 35,000-ton Battleship. Undoubtedly there are excellent strategic and tactical reasons why both types meet American needs; the point worth considering is that such reasons are often rationalizations of traditions so profoundly embedded as to lie beneath conscious thought—to constitute part of the basic apparatus for the criticism of thought. If Joshua Humphreys had advocated a flotilla navy, it is not improbable that we should be building shoals of submarines and torpedo motor boats at the present time.
Yet it is not enough merely to admit Humphreys as the founder of the tradition that American ships, though they may be fewer than those of other nations, should be larger, stronger, and heavier gunned. The success of his 44’s in the face of all doubts established as a custom something even more valuable and less imitable—a friendliness to innovation, a willingness to experiment, quite without parallel in the history of military establishments. Of all the criticism leveled against such institutions that of hidebound conservatism is the most frequent and best justified; but it has seldom with justice been brought against the United States Navy. No similar service has so readily received every new device. The steam warships, the screw propeller, the very light, the turret, the reciprocating engine, the mine, the submarine, the airplane, and a host of minor devices, in fact, almost every feature of the warship of today, are inventions produced by American naval officers or developed in the American navy.
This seems to be covering a good deal of ground, and it may reasonably be objected that the flood of inventions is not the product of a naval tradition but of Yankee ingenuity. But the suggestion is not that Humphreys founded a line of inventors. The difference can be made clear when we consider that the French also are an inventive race (their patent office grants more letters on new devices than any other in Europe), and their navy has given birth to no such parade of new devices. The Humphreys’ tradition, which in this instance it might be more proper to call the Washington tradition, is specifically that of receptivity to new inventions. Since that time the responsible administrators of the navy, whether secretaries, the old board of commissioners, the newer bureau heads, or the still newer General Board, seem always to have had in the back of their heads that each new idea offered might be something as good as the 44-gun frigates.
It is true that this tendency has given us some monumental and ridiculous failures—the Hunter wheel ship (with paddle wheels set vertically in recesses in the sides); the Experiment of 1831 (without ribs, on the theory that the rush of water would make her sides assume a “natural” form and thus produce speed); the shallow-draft monitors (which would not float), and the ram Katahdin, come to mind. But the successes have outnumbered the mistakes; to mention only three: the monitor, the screw propeller, and the submarine were devices that had been refused by European services and were brought to success on this side.
The curious thing is that Humphreys’ frigate policy should have been based on a misconception. He wished to provide the new United States Navy with superior ships to make up for its ineradicable inferiority in personnel. This idea seems so strange today that it is necessary to remember the record of the Continental Navy, which had not exactly covered itself with glory during the Revolution. Thinkers of that age were agreed in assigning lack of naval experience and tradition as the cause of this failure, but they were also agreed that the disease was one that only a couple of centuries would cure. At this point the second of the builders of naval tradition comes into the picture.
Thomas Truxtun admitted the inferiority but did not believe it ineradicable. He had been most fortunately placed to analyze the failure of the Continental marine, for during the Revolution he was a privateer captain who was personally closely acquainted with most of the national officers and with many of their crews. He seems to have reached the conclusion that the trouble was simple indiscipline through simple ignorance—captains who did not know how to exact obedience, lieutenants who hobnobbed with the crew like junior warrant officers, and special ratings who did not understand what was required of them.
It is not often that we are afforded so clear a picture of what went on in the mind of a historical character as we are given by that remarkable series of letters from Truxtun to his officers reprinted in the old Naval Documents. Taken together they form an instruction book for sailors which is rather better than the official regulations since each is addressed to the individual and lays down the principles of his conduct, leaving the detail to his own initiative.
The model is obviously the British navy, in which Truxtun had served as a youth, but in approaching England’s as the pattern of a sea service, the American captain was forced into two variations of technique that were to assume the highest importance in forming our naval tradition- In the old New England and Pennsylvania trading ships of the days before the Revolution, almost every man had had his share in the venture. Decisions of policy were usually arrived at by a kind of soviet of the crew, who were also the captain’s business partners. The Revolutionary privateers had been similarly financed and organized, and as the captains and crews of the Continental Navy spent more than half their times in privateers, it is not surprising to find them carrying over this committee form of government when they sailed under the national flag. It was ruinous to the authority of the officers and to the effectiveness of operations; one recalls John Paul Jones’ difficulties with the officers’ union in the Ranger.
Truxtun had also seen how, in the British service, officers maintained their authority by being drawn from an aristocracy of birth. The method was not capable of reproduction under American conditions, but Truxtun’s letters bear the marks of an unwavering determination to create in its place an aristocracy of position. “Let me ask you,” he writes, “if it is not beneath the Character of a Commissioned Officer to converse with Seamen, and to suffer, and to see Pettee Officers box on Deck.” In other words, officers are to emphasize their character as such by holding aloof.
But not so much aloof as to lose contact with their crews. This aristocracy of position carried responsibilities as wide as its powers, foremost among which is care of the crew, both as leaders and as human beings.
It is not to be expected that the Lieutenants of Ship are to remain idle, and indifferent Spectators of what is going on but on the Contrary it is absolutely necessary that they overlook the Duty of every Department on Board.
An Officer in Carrying on his duty Shou’d be Civil and polite to everyone, for Civility does not interfere with discipline.
An Officer is never to lose sight of that humanity and Care that is due to those who may really be Sick, or otherwise stand in need of his assistance.
The latter doctrine, which may be expressed as the essential unity of men, of officers and crew, took hold more vigorously and remained more permanently a feature of the American naval tradition than perhaps anything else we owe to Thomas Truxtun. His heritors snatched it up avidly, as though it filled a want they themselves had felt. It supplied the needed key to personnel control in a service that was genuinely, and not merely technically (like the British), voluntary. There are few more affecting anecdotes in naval history than the story of Decatur’s sailors touching their caps and murmuring “God bless him! He has a soul to save,” as their captain paced the deck on his last inspection while the United States moved into battle.
Even today, after a thousand mutations and a thousand improvements in the conditions of naval service throughout the world, good treatment of the enlisted man and good relations between him and the officer remain the outstanding specific peculiarities of the American navy. The British do pretty well in this regard; yet during the World War nothing astonished the British more than to see officers and men of American ships pulling oars side by side in boat races. They could not understand how it was brought about without loss of discipline; and that it was so accomplished we owe ultimately to Truxtun’s letters to his officers.
These letters, far more than Truxtun’s two magnificent victories over French frigates, made him the father of the navy to the men of his generation. It was, of course, a piece of the rarest good fortune for the service that, of all its ships, the Constellation alone should bring to action two enemy cruisers of her own class. The results of those actions told more fully than a thousand pages of text the value of his system. The senior captains, whose mental habits had been formed during the Revolution, were about to be retired or to pass from the service under the reduced establishment of 1801. It was perfectly natural that the juniors should imitate the methods of the navy’s most successful captain; and quite aside from the fact that the service was small enough to permit a fairly ungarbled account of those methods to be transmitted by word of mouth, there were probably a good many copies of the Truxtun letters floating around to show how he had done it.
However, if one merely accepts Truxtun as a paragon there is nothing to be learned from his success. The danger to the navy in his career lay in the fact that his defects as well as his qualities might be established as part of the growing body of naval tradition. He was a victim of what Secretary Stoddert called “the avarice of rank”; generous and considerate with his juniors, he wrangled fiercely with his equals; and in setting the officer personnel above the enlisted, he placed his own position on so exalted a plane that he was almost unapproachable. “No Officer must attempt to offer me an opinion on the duty to be performed” is a line that recurs in his letters of instruction; a good regulation for only so long as there stands at the head of the squadron a commander of great ability who is surrounded by juniors either without intelligence or without experience.
As a matter of fact the navy was full of able juniors and the drastic reduction of the establishment in 1801, when few good, but many ordinary officers were dismissed, had still further raised the average quality. The condition against which Truxtun had raised his barrier no longer existed; and after his resignation the service was fortunate in once again finding an officer capable of going beyond the old traditions to found a new one. Edward Preble had been a lieutenant during the French war, but an old lieutenant; in command of the Essex he had been dispatched on the long convoy trip to the China seas just as Truxtun’s doctrine began to permeate the young navy, and he had therefore, to a considerable extent, escaped its influence. The juniors who accompanied him when he went out as commodore against Tripoli were full of it; and from a point outside the Truxtun doctrine he was thus able to consider and to accept or to reject such portions of it as seemed desirable.
Truxtun’s insistence on discipline and upon the separate social life of the officers seemed to Preble altogether admirable, for he had been through the Revolution as a lieutenant in a state ship, where indiscipline was even more rampant, if possible, than in the Continental Navy. Truxtun’s insistence upon care of the crew was no less desirable, for he came from Maine, where the principle of voluntary service was strong and fair treatment a corollary. On the other hand, he could utterly reject Truxtun’s aloofness from the junior officers and his worries about relative rank.
Truxtun, essentially a jovial, Old-King- Cole person, had found it necessary to use unapproachability as a means of preserving his own authority before men he knew socially on shore, and inducing his lieutenants to preserve theirs before the crew. In Preble’s case the shoe was on the other foot; not only did he lack even a speaking acquaintance with any officer in his squadron but he was utterly separated from them by at least three other factors. He was twelve years older than the oldest of his subordinates, Bainbridge, and nearly twenty years older than the average; again with the exception of Bainbridge, who was in prison in Tripoli after the first weeks of the campaign, he was the only captain in the fleet; and his reputation for violent outbursts of temper, of which he was fully aware, kept not only his juniors, but men generally, at a distance.
The need in his case, then, was not to drive men away but to draw them closer; not to reject the advice of juniors incompetent through ignorance, but to seek that of energetic young men in a situation which was, in a military sense, desperate. We catch glimpses of his method in a few fragments of letters and journals:
The Enterprise arrived today and the Commodore immediately invited Lieutenant Decatur aboard to dine.
As my ship was the only other one on the station I dined almost every day with Commodore Preble.
Whether the operations plans that resulted in the destruction of the Philadelphia, the attacks on the Tripolitan gunboats, and the bombardments of the castle sprang from Preble’s own brain or those of his juniors later became a matter of controversy. It really hardly mattered; the important thing was not who should think of a given plan or even whether the plan was a good one, but what kind of tradition would be laid down for the navy in those adolescent years. The tradition that Preble’s campaign left with it was one of a service singularly united in spirit, in which questions of relative rank were less urgent than those of relative accomplishment.
No commander was ever more generous than Preble in giving his subordinates all the credit for what was done and urging promotions and honors for them. He could well afford to do this because his own rank was so unassailably above any in his fleet that his juniors would never be rivals; but the event had the happy result of establishing as one of the firmest traditions of the American navy that doctrine of unity of effort, of full credit to subordinates, for which Edward Preble strove.
Since it is only human nature to wish the credit for oneself there are cases in opposition, such as the Sampson-Schley controversy after Santiago and the Perry- Elliott controversy after Lake Erie. The point lies in the feeling generated by such affairs, the mental attitude with which they are regarded. Both these American controversies were felt as disgraceful by everyone in the service; the not dissimilar Jellicoe-Beatty argument after Jutland was treated as a perfectly normal thing.
But the latter took place in a service that had not felt the weight of the Preble tradition. Another statement to the same general end floats up from the pages of Cooper: “During his [Preble’s] command to the Mediterranean there was not one duel in the squadron.” It would take another two decades and the life of Stephen Pecatur altogether to abolish service duel- tog, but surely this speaks volumes for the solidarity Preble introduced—that he could thus rein in the hot-blooded youngsters under his command. Nor can one attribute this “duellessness” to the fact that the squadron was facing an enemy. In a military situation quite similar Porter lost one of his midshipmen by duel in the Galapagos during the War of 1812, and two of Chauncey’s officers on Lake Ontario fought the British and each other by turns.
Yet Preble did not have the last word; indeed could not, since traditions, like individuals, attain permanence only through death. It is really very odd, however, that the latest great accretion to the American naval tradition should stem from the first officer who raised its flag. Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that John Paul Jones was so remarkable as a fighting captain that it was forgotten that he was anything else. The spirit of indomitability associated with his name is and must be traditional in every fighting service of whatever nation. Gazing at it, one may easily overlook everything but the battle with the Serapis; and it must be admitted that there was a good deal in Jones’ career to which oblivion would be charity. But whatever the reason, it was a full half century after he had written his famous notes on the organization of an American naval service to the Marine Committee of the Continental Congress before any effort was made to give his ideas effect.
The story of the incidents leading up to the foundation of the Naval Academy— the mutiny in the Somers, the abolition of the old Board of Navy Commissioners— is familiar enough. What is not usually quite so clear is the reason why such causes should produce such an effect. It is true that we have nothing like the Truxtun letters to point with absolute clearness to a process of reasoning, but an examination of the circumstances can hardly leave one in much doubt as to what Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft had in mind when he produced the institution like a rabbit out of a hat under the nose of a hostile Congress.
Bancroft was a philosopher and a historian, deeply read; he had just completed a painstaking history of the United States, in the preparation of which he had possibly consulted the Truxtun letters and had certainly examined the papers dealing with John Paul Jones, who was then a vexatious and incomprehensible figure to writers of history. Whether or not he knew that Truxtun’s ideal had been a navy officered by an aristocracy of service, Bancroft realized that such an ideal was a necessity for American conditions. But the navy of 1845 was clearly out of joint with such a plan. At the top were the veterans of 1812, good men, but aging; in the middle the midshipmen of that heroic period, also aging and many of them embittered by long sojourn in the lower ranks; and at the bottom the old “young officers” who were little better than commissioned deck hands.
These “young officers” were the problem. What made them less men than their predecessors? Surely it is not assuming too much to say that Bancroft referred the question to the papers of our earliest great sea captain and found there that
It is by no means enough that an officer of the navy should be a capable mariner. He must be that, of course, but also a great deal more. He should be as well a gentlemen of liberal education, refined manners, punctilious courtesy, and the nicest sense of personal honor.
Gentlemen! That was decidedly what the young officers of 1845 were not. Slow promotions had held them in the midshipmen’s grade, that is, in contact with seamen rather than officers, throughout the formative years, with the result that they were arriving at command rank with an elaborate knowledge of their profession in every department but the one most necessary—that of how to command. Their mental interests were those of the lower deck; and in that fact lay the reason for the strange and unpleasant happenings that had plagued the service.
It was to cure this condition that Bancroft founded his naval academy. Assuredly both he and Commander Buchanan assembled as good an academic staff as was then available; assuredly the men they chose did well in the formal branches of education. But it is a tribute rather than an insult to their memory to say that the midshipmen could have learned as much, technically, on board the ships from which they had been detailed to the new institution. We have the word of one graduate, not an insignificant-figure, that the only piece of information he acquired there was how to chop logic over the doctrines of moral philosophy.
Information was not, however, the object. The one thing the midshipmen could not learn aboard ship, the one thing they could gain only at the lips of older officers and by association with each other was that sense of being gentlemen, that feeling of belonging to a special aristocracy of position which Truxtun, Preble, and John Paul Jones alike insisted upon. The Academy was in fact, if not in name, dedicated to the memory of the last; and it is peculiarly fitting that its chapel should house his tomb.