Alfred Thayer Mahan entered the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, September 30, 1856. Born at West Point, September 27, 1840, he was at the time of his entrance but three days above sixteen. Like many another candidate for the navy, he solicited his own appointment, obtaining it finally through the influence of Jefferson Davis, who had studied under his father at West Point, and was at this time Secretary of War. Having attended Columbia College for two years preceding, the boy was permitted—by a concession of which this is believed to be the only instance in the annals of the Academy—to omit the first year’s work and enter with the “Youngster” class, or “class of ’55 date,” according to the nomenclature then used. Up to the year 1851 the midshipmen’s course had consisted of five years at sea followed by one at the Academy. Mahan entered in the autumn after the graduation of the last class under the old scheme; and it was to the more mature, “sea-going” character of former classes that he attributes the total absence of hazing in his day. The practice was “not so much reprobated as ignored.” It came in later, when the Academy was moved to Newport during the Civil War, and “new ideals were evolved by a mass of schoolboys, severed from those elder associates with the influence of whom no professors nor officers can vie.”[[2]]
In the dusty files of Academy registers for that period one may read the names of boys famous in later years. George Dewey was a class ahead of Mahan; Schley and Sampson were respectively one class and two classes behind. On graduation, Dewey stood fifth in a class of fifteen; Mahan second in a class of twenty, with a record apparently very close to the leader’s; and Sampson stood first. In his last year the future historian was first in seamanship, physics, political science, and moral science, third in naval tactics and gunnery, fourth in “steam engine,” and fifth in astronomy and navigation. The year before he had excelled in physics, rhetoric, and Spanish. The details are noteworthy chiefly as they show the subjects of the old-time curriculum, in which so-called practical branches were less predominant than they are to-day. Of Mahan’s class, which numbered forty-nine at the time of entrance, twenty-nine had dropped back or resigned before the end of the course.
After a cruise in South American waters in the old frigate Congress, Mahan at once received his commission as lieutenant, August 31, 1861, and soon afterward an appointment as second in command of the steam corvette Pocahontas, then in the Potomac flotilla. It illustrates the rapid promotion of those war-time days that each member of his class received similar advancement in the first year of the war. In the Pocahontas he came under fire in the attack on Port Royal, and afterward spent many weary months in blockade duty, first in the Pocahontas off the south Atlantic coast, and later in the Seminole off Sabine Pass, Texas. This latter station, Mahan remarks, “was a jumping-off place, the end of nowhere.” “Day after day we lay inactive—roll, roll.” The monotony was broken by a pleasant eight months at the Naval Academy in Newport and a “practice cruise” to England in the Macedonian; and in the last year of the war he saw more varied service on the staff of Rear Admiral Dahlgren, again on the Atlantic coast blockade.
Commissioned lieutenant commander in 1865, Mahan passed the ensuing twenty years in the customary routine of alternate sea and shore duty. In 1867–1869, a long cruise in the steam frigate Iroquois to Japan, via Guadeloupe, Rio, Cape Town, Madagascar, Aden, and Bombay, gave opportunity, unusual even in the navy, to see the world, and brought him to Kobe in time to witness the opening of new treaty ports and the last days of medieval Japan.
In 1885, when he had reached the rank of captain and was forty-five years of age, he had yet had little opportunity to display the distinctive talents which were to win him permanent fame. Partly, perhaps, in consequence of a book by his pen entitled “The Gulf and Inland Waters” and published two years before, but more likely as a result of the shrewd estimate which naval officers form regarding their fellows in the service, he was requested at this time to give a series of lectures on naval history and tactics at the Naval War College, then just established at Newport, Rhode Island. His acceptance of this duty marks a turning point in his career.
The call reached him in the Wachusett off the west coast of South America. It was nearly two years later, in August, 1886, when he took up his residence at the college, succeeding Rear Admiral Luce as president. A change of political administration in the meantime had brought about a less favorable policy toward this new departure in naval education, with the result that, to quote Mahan again, the college “was reefed close down, looking out for squalls at any moment from any quarter,” for the next four or five years. It bears evidence to his tact and tenacity, and it was not the least of his accomplishments for the navy, that he piloted the institution safely through this crucial period, with scant appropriations or none at all, in the face of a hostile Secretary of the Navy and a lukewarm service.
After seven years devoted chiefly to the War College, Mahan went to sea for the last time as commander of the cruiser Chicago in the European squadron. At this time “The Influence of Sea Power upon History” had already been published, and the volume on the French Revolution and Empire was nearly ready for the press. Upon requesting postponement of sea duty until its completion, he was informed by his superior in the Bureau of Navigation that it was “not the business of a naval officer to write books.” The remark was narrow, for the naval or any other profession would soon stagnate without the stimulus of free discussion and study, which finds its best outlet through the press; and it showed slight recognition of the immense value to the navy and the nation of Mahan’s writings. Still it was well for the author that he made this last cruise—his only experience with a ship of the new fleet. If the importance of his first book was not realized at home—and it is stated that he had great difficulty in finding a publisher—it was fully recognized abroad. His arrival in England was taken as an opportunity to pay a national tribute of appreciation, of which the degrees conferred by both Oxford and Cambridge were but one expression. There is a slightly humorous aspect to the competition of American universities to award similar honors upon his return.
Retiring in 1896 after forty years of service, he was recalled to act as a member of the Naval War Board from May 9, 1898, until the close of the War with Spain. His fellow members were Rear Admiral Montgomery Sicard and Captain A. S. Crowninshield. This board practically controlled the naval strategy of the war. Of its deliberations and the relative influence of its members we have no record; but the naval dispositions were effective, and, aside from the location of the “Flying Squadron” at Hampton Roads as a concession to the fears of coast cities, they are fully approved by Mahan in his writings.
His choice a year later as one of the American delegates to the first Peace Conference at The Hague was eminently fitting in view of his thorough knowledge of international relations and the rules governing naval warfare. In determining the attitude of the American delegation, he took a strong stand against any agreement that would contract our freedom of action with regard to the Monroe Doctrine, and against immunity of private property at sea. The arguments against this latter policy he afterward stated effectively in print[[3]] and in a memorandum to the Navy Department. With the fulfillment of this duty, his public services, aside from his work as a writer, came to a close.
In the navy, as in other walks of life, an incompatibility is often assumed—and often unjustly—between mastery of theory and skill in practice, between the thoughtful student and the capable man of action; and there is no denying that among his contemporaries this assumption was current with regard to Mahan. While a conclusion is difficult in such a matter, the case may well rest on the following statement by a friend and fellow officer: “Duty, in whatever form it came, was sacred. Invariably he gave to its performance the best that was in him. That he distinguished himself pre-eminently on shipboard cannot be claimed. Luck or circumstances denied him the opportunity of doing things heroic, and his modesty those purely spectacular. As a subordinate or as captain of a single ship, what he did was well done. No further proof of his qualities in this respect is needed than the fact that, at the outbreak of the Civil War, when finishing his midshipman’s cruise, he was asked by a shipmate, an officer who expected a command, to go with him as ‘first lieutenant.’ To his colleagues of the old navy this invitation was the highest form of professional approval. The fates decreed that the wider field should not be his wherein, as commander-in-chief of a fleet in war time, he could have exhibited the mastery he surely possessed of that art with which his name will forever be indissolubly linked.”[[4]]