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Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 359.00973 TOL | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
How "a handful of bastards and outlaws fighting under a piece of striped bunting" humbled the omnipotent British Navy.
Before the ink was dry on the U.S. Constitution, the establishment of a permanent military had become the most divisive issue facing the new government. Would a standing army be the thin end of dictatorship? Would a navy protect American commerce against the Mediterranean pirates, or drain the treasury and provoke hostilities with the great powers? The foundersparticularly Jefferson, Madison, and Adamsdebated these questions fiercely and switched sides more than once. How much of a navy would suffice? Britain alone had hundreds of powerful warships.
From the decision to build six heavy frigates, through the cliffhanger campaign against Tripoli, to the war that shook the world in 1812, Ian W. Toll tells this grand tale with the political insight of Founding Brothers and a narrative flair worthy of Patrick O'Brian. According to Henry Adams, the 1812 encounter between USS Constitution and HMS Guerriere "raised the United States in one half hour to the rank of a first class power in the world." 16 pages of illustrations; 8 pages of color.
Author Notes
Ian W. Toll is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Conquering Tide, Pacific Crucible, and Six Frigates, winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award and the William E. Colby Award. He lives in New York.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Toll, a former financial analyst and political speechwriter, makes an auspicious debut with this rousing, exhaustively researched history of the founding of the U.S. Navy. The author chronicles the late 18th- and early 19th-century process of building a fleet that could project American power beyond her shores. The ragtag Continental Navy created during the Revolution was promptly dismantled after the war, and it wasn't until 1794 in the face of threats to U.S. shipping from England, France and the Barbary states of North Africa that Congress authorized the construction of six frigates and laid the foundation for a permanent navy. A cabinet-level Department of the Navy followed in 1798. The fledgling navy quickly proved its worth in the Quasi War against France in the Caribbean, the Tripolitan War with Tripoli and the War of 1812 against the English. In holding its own against the British, the U.S. fleet broke the British navy's "sacred spell of invincibility," sparked a "new enthusiasm for naval power" in the U.S. and marked the maturation of the American navy. Toll provides perspective by seamlessly incorporating the era's political and diplomatic history into his superlative single-volume narrative a must-read for fans of naval history and the early American Republic. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Not confined to sea battles, Toll's history of the U.S. Navy's formative decades, from the mid-1790s to the War of 1812, rounds out affairs by anchoring the nascent navy to its financial supports. Navies are not inexpensive, and the costs of building and maintaining ships appear lightly but persistently in Toll's narrative. It centers on the first vessels purpose-built for the navy, the half-dozen frigates of which the USS Constitution moored in Boston today is the last survivor. Besides money, their construction involved politics; the Federalists favored the naval program (creating the Department of the Navy in 1798), while Jefferson's parsimonious Republicans were more diffident. Toll is as insightful about the essential domestic and diplomatic background as he is with his dramatizations of the naval engagements of the new navy, which produced a crop of national heroes such as Stephen Decatur. The maritime strategy and the highly developed sense of officers' honor, which influenced where particular battles occurred, emerge clearly in this fluent account. Vibrant and comprehensive, Toll makes an impressive debut. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2006 Booklist
Choice Review
This well-written narrative recounts the early history of the US Navy and places it in the political, diplomatic, economic, and emotional setting of the young republic. Focusing on the establishment of the Navy in 1794, the construction of the Navy's first six frigates (including the Constitution and Constellation, which are still afloat), the Barbary and French Quasi-Wars, the Chesapeake-Leopard Incident, and the War of 1812, Toll shows how the new service developed and gained the respect of Great Britain and other powers. Of particular interest are the portraits Toll limns of naval and political leaders of the time. Based heavily on recent scholarship, this work replaces William M. Fowler's Jack Tars and Commodores: The American Navy, 1783-1815 (CH, Dec'84) and Leonard F. Guttridge and Jay D. Smith's The Commodores (CH, Nov'69) as the standard popular history of the establishment and operations of the first quarter century of the US Navy, which a century and a half later eclipsed all others. With a style reminiscent of David McCullough's, this work, remarkable for a first-time author, should find a large audience. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. J. C. Bradford Texas A&M University
Kirkus Review
Who knew that we owe the U.S. Navy to long-ago Muslim machinations? That gross oversimplification points to a historical accident that debut author and historian Toll capably works. At the time of the Revolution, America's navy amounted to a ragtag collection of privateers and merchantmen; even John Paul Jones's celebrated raid along the English coast was a freelance operation. After the Revolution, writes Toll, "what little remained of the Continental Navy was taken entirely out of service," the ships auctioned off and the men dismissed. Whether the new country needed a navy at all was a matter of hot debate among rival political parties, even as America's merchant fleet became an important presence in the Mediterranean and Caribbean markets. Enter the "Barbary pirates," privateers of four Arabic states that seized American ships and sailors in a sort of elaborate protection racket--one that England, the world's foremost naval power, could have easily crushed but instead used as a "check against the growth of economic competition from smaller maritime rivals," particularly the upstart U.S. In response, though taking time out to come to the brink of war with France, Congress authorized the construction of a federal navy whose six-frigate core numbered "the most powerful ships of their class in any navy in the world." The U.S. Navy then sailed off to Tripoli to begin the ten-year campaign that would finally break Barbary power. Toll's narrative closes with an admirably thorough account of the naval dimension of the War of 1812, when James Madison determined that an organized fleet acting in concert was less effective than a single frigate that could "get loose in the Atlantic and prey upon British shipping," which American ships did to great effect, doing much to win the war. A welcome contribution to the small library of early American naval history, deserving a place alongside one of the last such books--by a pre-presidential Theodore Roosevelt. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This history will be a delight to fans of naval literature, fact or fiction. Toll, a former Wall Street analyst, vividly recounts the first two decades of the U.S. Navy, beginning with Congress's decision to build six heavy frigates in 1794 and continuing to the end of the War of 1812 (the navy itself takes its founding from the start of the Continental Navy in 1775). The decision to create a maritime force was made in reaction to the seizure of U.S. merchant ships and sailors by the Barbary pirates, and it sparked much heated debate among the Founding Fathers over the issue of a permanent military establishment. But, clearly, the country could not continue with only a standing army. The six frigates, one of which the USS Constitution is still afloat, were all of innovative design, more heavily armed yet faster than anything else on the seas. Their service through battles with Barbary pirates, the quasiwar with France, and the War of 1812 are vividly narrated here with firm historical detail and a strong cast of characters ably handled by Toll, ranging from the country's Presidents to the colorful officers and sailors on these frigates. Strongly recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/06.] David Lee Poremba, Davenport, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
