Commanding Petty Despots. The American Navy in the New Republic. By Thomas Sheppard. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland, 2022.
Reviewed by Tim Coyle PhD
David Porter, having spent decades in the US Navy, was appointed to a diplomatic post in Constantinople in 1835. He noted the parallels between the Turkish sultan’s total authority over his subjects and the powers of a naval captain and wrote: ‘a man-of-war is a petty kingdom, governed by a petty despot’.
Commanding Petty Despots; the American Navy in the New Republic, is a study of the relationships between the officers of the infant US Navy and their civilian authorities. It was, at times, a fraught relationship with the vainglorious and swashbuckling naval captains battling both Secretaries of the Navy and their own colleagues over command and independence, recognition for campaign victories, promotions and seniorities.
Naval administration in the Revolutionary War was chaotic and neglectful under governance by committee. The ratification of the Constitution saw the naval force placed under the Secretary of War. This proved unworkable and Congress legislated for a Navy Department in 1798, headed by a Secretary of the Navy.
This book charts the tenures of the first five Secretaries: Benjamin Stoddert (1798-1800), Robert Smith (1800-09), Paul Hamilton (1809-12), William Jones (1813-14) and Benjamin Crowinshield (1815-18). Ranged against them were the luminaries of the early US Navy: William Bainbridge, John Paul Jones, Stephen Decatur, Thomas Truxtun and other fighting captains. The book covers the period of the ‘Quasi War’ with France, the Tripolitan War with the Barbary powers and the War of 1812.
The hierarchy establishing the reporting responsibilities between the Secretaries and the naval captains, was often tenuous. Secretaries were generalist public officials who left operational ship management to the captains. They, in turn, obsessed with seeking fame in combat, were intensely sensitive to perceived slights over seniority and were always ready to defend their reputations to the extreme – on the ‘field of honour’. They demanded prestigious appointments and claimed the right to decline any they imagined did not equate with their seniority and potential. These characteristics were shared with their sometime British opponents. It was the challenge of controlling these superior beings that the Secretaries, with support from the Presidents of the day, had to address.
Author Thomas Sheppard, assistant professor at the Marine Corps University Command and Staff College, leads the reader through this fascinating period of the US Navy’s early development. Sheppard focuses on the managerial aspects of the infant navy and the personal traits and relationships of the characters and presents the narrative as a vivid and absorbing glimpse into this romantic and far-removed era. The final chapter covers the 1815-24 period in which the Board of Navy Commissioners was stablished. Comprising naval captains, the Board endured a rough initial passage until, by the mid-1820s, the Navy administration settled into a more stable era of professionalism, respecting mutual qualities and capabilities for the common end.
In summary, Commanding Petty Despots is a very readable study of early naval management in an infant navy born of revolution which faced formidable challenges at sea against multiple threats while having to tame its self-aggrandising captains. In later years military grandees such as David Beatty, Lord Charles Beresford, Jacky Fisher, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay sorely tried their civilian masters. Could their like arise again?
