At the age of 50, Alfred Thayer Mahan was a captain in the U. S. Navy, unknown outside the service, and considered even by fellow officers as possessing rather ordinary talents.* A year later, his name was a byword throughout the navies of all civilized powers, and his theories were read and endorsed by world leaders.
Nothing forecast the metamorphosis. In 1878, Mahan had written an essay for the U. S. Naval Institute on the training of naval officers and men. Five years later, he contributed a slim volume to a series on the Civil War. It was kindly received by the profession, but his authorship was determined principally because he had participated in many of the events described.
In 1883, while commanding a steam sloop on the Pacific coast of South America, he received a letter from Admiral Stephen B. Luce asking him to lecture on naval history and tactics at the infant Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island. Two years elapsed before he could return to the United States and begin the new assignment, but they were two important years. He considered his qualifications to be slight, and he doubted whether studying great naval battles from the age of sail would be beneficial in the age of steam and modern weapons. But his father, a professor at West Point, was an authority on military tactics, and Mahan thought he might possess “some inherited aptitude for the particular study.” His ship’s library was worthless, but at the English Club in Lima, Peru, he encountered Mommsen’s History of Rome, which opened his eyes to the advantages lost by Hannibal because Rome controlled the sea. In his autobiography he wrote:
He who seeks, finds, if he does not lose heart; and to me, continuously seeking, came from within the suggestion that control of the sea was a historic factor which had never been systematically appreciated and expounded. Once formulated consciously, this thought became the nucleus of all my writing for twenty years then to come.
By the time he reached home in 1885, he had developed his approach, to investigate both the general and naval history of the preceding two centuries and to demonstrate the influence of the events of the one upon the other. With this in mind, he launched into the search for material to substantiate his theory. Atlas in hand, he read widely, relying on the best-known works for the general history of each period and upon authoritative professional histories for the nautical details.
New areas of study suggested themselves. He read unsystematically and considered original research beyond the scope of his program. “The subject lay so much upon the surface that my handling of it could scarcely suffer materially from later discoveries.” Minor inaccuracies would not affect his major thesis.
From a study of naval matters, he progressed naturally to land warfare. He had earlier encountered Napier’s Peninsular War, which was to him “ . . . the greatest military history in the English language . . . which magnificently combines philosophical breadth of treatment, minute technical discussion, and superb dramatic power.” He studied Hamley’s Operations of War and read Jomini, particularly the latter’s reduction of warfare to its basic principles and his unfamiliar contention that no distinction exists between the role of the statesman and that of the general.
In order better to understand naval battles in their most minute detail, Mahan familiarized himself with old sailing ships, techniques, and terms. He filled innumerable notebooks with historical facts written with care and precision. He decided that existing diagrams of ship maneuvers in important battles were inaccurate, so he and another officer cut out fleets of card board craft, appropriately colored them for identification, maneuvered them to their proper position, and pasted them in place. With his notebooks, charts, and homemade watercolor maps, he felt prepared to lecture.
The lectures, delivered in 1886 and 1887, were well received by the officers assembled. Encouraged by this, and with his wife’s constant urging, Mahan found a house willing to publish the lectures as a book entitled The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783. But whereas he had not hampered himself in oral delivery with the exactions of style, as an author it became a matter of concern. In writing as in many things, he followed the advice of Dr. Samuel Johnson, “diligently to set down thoughts as they arise, in the first words in which they occur, and later to formulate and embellish as required.”
Mahan has often been criticized for a certain heaviness of style, an offense to which he cheerfully admitted. It stemmed from his intense aversion to reading anything inaccurate or incomplete and, to avoid this, he surrounded the main thought of any sentence with all necessary qualifications. The multiple clauses made each sentence independent, but they led to criticisms for diffuseness. In his autobiography, he comments without apology, “I must get the whole in; and for due emphasis am probably redundant.”
In grammar and vocabulary he was a purist, though not above coining a word if it could be logically employed. Slang he shunned. The relative position of words was given great attention. He held with Robert Louis Stevenson that everything depends upon the order of the words, and that the sentence should be like a legal statute, as nearly as possible independent of punctuation. Mahan’s style was distinctly his own, but he admitted to unrestrained plagiarism of apt expressions.
Mahan’s greatest advantages were his freedom from pecuniary pressure and the opportunity for uninterrupted work. He did not hurry but applied himself diligently in a set routine. Each morning was devoted to writing, whatever the author’s inclination. Afternoons were spent reading or with his family. Long walks each morning and afternoon were normally passed in thought, but he welcomed the presence of his own and other children. Except at sea, he did not work in the evenings.
When pondering a problem indoors, he would rise from his desk and pace, head down and hands clasped behind his back. When satisfied that he could not obtain a better product, he would allow his wife to type the manuscript from his neatly written notebooks. This methodical approach to writing, easily traced to the orderly habits of a lifetime in the service, also helped overcome a self- confessed lack of industry.
As has been shown, Mahan’s principal interest in history was in the evidence it provided to support his theory. His normal procedure was to formulate a guiding principle after a general reading on the subject. “This leading idea was not intended to exclude other points of view or manners of presentation, but was to subordinate them somewhat peremptorily.”
The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1783-7812, which followed his book of lectures in 1892, is a good example of the application of this formulating process. The first chapter written was the book’s final chapter, a summing-up containing a distillation of the events involved and the lessons learned therefrom. He then wrote the introductory chapter, intended to outline the general and naval situation at the beginning of the period. Mahan’s contention was that British warfare against Napoleon’s maritime commerce led to French defeat; he wrote these chapters next, though in the book, and chronologically, they came last. Finally, the book’s early chapters on the great naval actions were completed.
In his two major biographies of Farragut and Nelson, Captain Mahan abandoned his earlier approach and made use of source material. The latter work was a labor of homage to the man who embodied British sea power, and Mahan sought to steep himself in the spirit of the man, to a large extent through his correspondence. In spite of his dependence on letters in this instance, Mahan abhorred wide use of correspondence in biography. “Profuse recourse to letters simply turns over to the reader the task which the biographer has undertaken to do for him. Perhaps the biographer cannot do it. Then he had belter not undertake the job.”
The clearest statement of Mahan’s concept of the role of a historian can be found in the inaugural address he made before the American Historical Association at Philadelphia, 26 December 1902, upon his selection as its president. He began by reminding the group that his study of history had been incidental, late in life, and, therefore, superficial and limited. But if he apologized for his grounding as a historian, he did not for his views on the role of a historian. He deplored over-attention to detail and suggested that the effort to accumulate and substantiate every fact, large and small, had deprived the world of many worthwhile historical works. The effect of giving every fact and omitting none was not, in his opinion, fidelity of presentation, the true historian achieving his purpose through the presentation of the subject and conveyance of the truth through the grouping of his facts and the emphasis placed on them. In a summation of his own method, Mahan held that, as a preliminary approach, the historian ought “to analyze his subject, to separate the separate parts, to recognize their interrelations and relative proportions of interest and importance. Thence would be formed a general plan, a rough model, in which at least there should appear distinctly to himself what is the central figure of the whole the predominance of which before teacher and reader must be preserved throughout.”
It is now nearly half a century since the death of Admiral Mahan. The effect of sea power upon the outcome of World War I brought him the accolade of prophet. His lectures before the Naval War College marked him as a tactician and strategist. Accepted throughout the world as the foremost naval philosopher, he has also been castigated as a glorifier of war. Whatever other claims may be presented on his behalf, it is safe to say that no historian of modern times has rivaled the impact and influence of Alfred Thayer Mahan.
* See Francis Duncan, “Mahan—Historian With A Purpose,” U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 1957, p. 498.