Commanding Lincoln's Navy: Union Naval Leadership During the Civil War

by Stephen R. Taaffe

The Union Navy played a vital role in winning the Civil War by blockading Confederate ports, cooperating with the Union Army in amphibious assaults, and operating on the Mississippi River and its tributaries. To wage this multifaceted war, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles divided the Union Navy into six squadrons. The book examines who Welles assigned to squadron command and why he appointed these officers. Taaffe argues that President Abraham Lincoln gave Welles considerable latitude in picking squadron commanders. Lincoln not only trusted Welles's judgment, but he also understood that the Navy was not as important to the Union war effort militarily and politically as the Army, so there was less of a need for him to oversee closely its operations. Welles used this authority to make appointments to squadron command based on several criteria. Welles factored into his mental calculations seniority, availability, and political connections, but he was most interested in an officer's record, character, and abilities. Although some of Welles's earliest selections left something to be desired, his insight improved markedly as the war continued and he gained a greater understanding of the Navy and its officer corps. Indeed, by the end of the conflict, Welles had become quite ruthless in his search for effective squadron commanders capable of filling the Navy's increasingly difficult missions. In doing so, he contributed greatly to Union victory in the Civil War. The book covers some of the Civil War's most important campaigns and battles, such as the Union assaults on New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile Bay, and Fort Fisher, and the fighting on the Mississippi River.

Genres: History

364 pages, Hardcover

First published May 4, 2009

Reviews

[Steven Hull · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Union Navy and its exploits in the Civil War were overshadowed by the dominant roles the armies of the North and South played in determining the outcome of the war. Compared to the Union Army, the navy was small, its battles few, and its most important contributions to the North’s victory were its support to the army in a series of combined operations stretching from Texas to Virginia. However, as we learn from Commanding Lincoln’s Navy, the Union Navy was crucial in ensuring the imposition of an effective blockade and enabling Union ground forces to split off and isolate parts of the Confederacy, while supporting Union Army attacks on rebel coastal strong points.
Taaffe focuses on the civilian and upper echelon military leadership of the Union Navy. We learn how different the navy was organized when compared with the army and with today’s navy. The officer corps was a small, lightly educated, seniority based service populated at the top by old men. Ostensibly the navy was run by former newspaperman Gideon Welles, the Secretary, and his able assistant Gustav Fox. Welles’s challenge was to select able squadron commanders. This was a highly political endeavor with many of the officers being capable self promoters not above skirting the chain of command to get what they wanted. Many hallowed names of that era were connivers, less than capable commanders, and willing to do anything to get a prime command or permanent promotion to flag rank.
As the war progressed, Welles was schooled about whom the best leaders were and he put them in key positions which led to victories at places like Vicksburg and Mobile Bay. Welles became adept at adequately resourcing the navy and cooperating with the army in combined operations. The blockade of southern ports, although never perfect, got very tight by war’s end, confederate raiders were swept from the seas or marginalized and the Confederate Navy neutralized.
Taaffe’s book is about administrative leadership and bureaucratic infighting, not about sea battles and assaults on forts. We learn about the human sides of famous Union Navy leaders and how and why they earned their fame. However, we also learn about many who shamelessly promoted themselves above the navy and country in search of glory and promotions. It is also clear most were courageous when the firing started, with cowardice rarely showing itself.

[Rick Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephen R. Taaffe has written a book that is not only historical in nature, but also one that students and teachers of leadership will find useful. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles faced a monumental task of purging the old Navy of a seniority based system, political manueuverings by naval officers, and questionable loyalties of Southern born officers at the beginning of the Civil War. Taaffes book discusses Welles successes, failures, and lessons learned during the war. The book discusses naval actions in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, inland rivers, and other locations. He details the personalities and character of several officers revealing their strengths and weaknesses. Commanding Lincoln's Navy is not a blow-by-blow account of each naval engagement, but rather Taaffe concentrates on officers such as David Farragut, David Porter, John Dahlgren, and others.

[Rob Rice · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[WKOCH · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very different than the standard approach to this topic, in a good way. This is the only book I've encountered that focuses on Gideon Welles' selection of officers (mainly squadron commanders), and the reasons for the selection and success/failure of the squadron commanders. However, the topical approach of the book means that it frequently tells the story out of chronological order, which would make it difficult to keep straight at times for someone unfamiliar with the history of the Union naval operations beforehand.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great look at the squadron commanders of the Union Navy during the Civil War, and their relationship with the Navy Department (and, by extension, President Lincoln). I've never seen the subject treated in quite this way, as a cross-section of officers (as opposed to service bios of individual officers), and it all seemed very fresh and interesting. My only complaint: the book isn't long enough!