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Blume on Curry, 'The Officers of the CSS Shenandoah' H-Maritime Blume on Curry, 'The Officers of the CSS Shenandoah' Review published on Tuesday, May 1, 2007 Angus Curry. The Officers of the CSS Shenandoah. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. xiv + 428 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8130-2943-6. Reviewed by Kenneth J. Blume (Department of Arts and Sciences, Albany College of Pharmacy) Published on H-Maritime (May, 2007) Conflict and Tensions on a Confederate Cruiser In October 1864, a refitted Scottish steamer was rechristened CSS Shenandoah and embarked on a thirteen-month, 58,000-mile cruise from Liverpool to the North Pacific and back as a warship of the young but fading Confederate States of America. Her mission was straightforward: engage in economic warfare by destroying the Union's North Pacific whaling fleet, thereby putting a critical industrial lubricant in short supply and crippling the Union's industrial capacity. Much of the story of the warship and its cruise is well known and has been told many times. The Shenandoah destroyed some $1.4 million in ships and cargo and probably gained the distinction of firing the Confederacy's last shot. Ironically, nearly half of the vessel's cruise occurredafter the defeat of the Confederacy, a turn of events that complicated the mission and legal status of both the Shenandoah and her officers and crew. It is a fascinating story that has attracted a half-dozen studies in the past fifty years, including four in just the past two years: Lynn Schooler's The Last Shot (2005), D. Alan Harris and Anne B. Harris' edition of executive officer William C. Whittle's journal,The Voyage of the CSS Shenandoah (2005), Tom Chaffin's Sea of Gray (2006), and now Angus Curry's The Officers of the CSS Shenandoah. Curry's book began as his 2002 La Trobe University dissertation,Echoes of Civil War: The CSS Shenandoah and Her Officers. I have not had the opportunity to compare this published version with the dissertation, so I cannot comment on what might or might not have changed from one version to the next, but the book does have the "feel" of a former dissertation. It is meticulously researched, painstakingly documented, exhaustingly detailed, and at times self-consciously revisionist in its focus. Those qualities can be either strengths or weaknesses, depending on one's preferences. It is evident, for example, that Curry has turned every page and opened every collection of letters relevant to the Shenandoah, and then some. His list of sources includes British Parliamentary Papers, manuscript papers of Confederate participants, published primary accounts, and virtually every extant sentence published by the officers of the Shenandoah, including of course the ship's log and various sea diaries. Since one of his goals is to differentiate the published and unpublished versions of the story, he has retrieved every recollection, every private account, and every letter that can be found at this point a century and a half after the fact. In addition, of course, he has reviewed a thorough selection of the relevant secondary material about the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, the Shenandoah, and history theory (particularly discussions over the past several decades about the role of "memory" in reconstructing past events). Curry has produced a masterly synthesis out of this material that can be tracked in his endnotes: 1,957 of them for 320 pages of text, or around six notes Citation: H-Net Reviews. Blume on Curry, 'The Officers of the CSS Shenandoah'. H-Maritime. 01-23-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/7836/reviews/8420/blume-curry-officers-css-shenandoah Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Maritime per page. What is the result of all of Curry's hard work, and is the work a success? Certainly, what wedon't need is just another narrative of the cruise of the Shenandoah and the exploits of her crew, and Curry understands that. He establishes early in the book that he has different goals. For one thing, he proposes "to explore the causes behind the sharp tensions that emerged between the CSS Shenandoah's officers and their commander" (p. xiii). In addition, his goal is to explain why the ship's officers made "little mention of the personal conflicts that beset them during the voyage in their postwar accounts," why there was a distinct "disparity between the officers' private war diaries and journals, and their public accounts after the Civil War" (p. xiii). His overall purpose, therefore, is "not principally a narrative of the CSS Shenandoah's cruise, but more an examination of the experiences of the Southern naval officers who served on board the commerce raider" (p. 10). As such, then, the book has the potential of making a significant contribution to our understanding of the social history of American naval officers (in this instance, Confederate officers) during the Civil War. In that sense, the book is a success. We gain a clear understanding of who these Confederate officers were, where they came from, what their "world view" was, and what their concerns were during the cruise. Curry can speak with authority on these subjects because he has indeed examined the officers and their letters and diaries more closely than previous writers. The officers had similar backgrounds in that most had been trained at the Naval Academy and had come from the Southern elite. They shared "social and professional expectations and aspirations" (p. 318) in that they had all yearned for duty on a commerce raider and all hoped for a share of prize money and personal glory. They were all committed to the Confederate States of America, and they were all devoted to a concept of honor and duty that sometimes conflicted with the realities of what they had to do. Curry tries to make a case that these officers were unique. "This was not just a naval experience, it was also a 'Southern' experience," he writes (p. 74). He also emphasizes that even within the range of "Southern" naval experiences, these officers were different. "The most defining similarity between the officers was their being sent on overseas service to Europe in 1863. The unique nature of this duty isolated the officers from the effects and progress of the Civil War. In consequence, the officers were subjected to a frustrating wait for active service on a Confederate cruiser" (p. 318). This latter point is well taken and is probably one of the more significant insights of the book. But in making this assertion Curry is ignoring what the other part of his story illustrates: they were typical Confederate officers in their backgrounds, devotion to Southern conceptions of "honor," and ethical flexibility when it came to the cause for which they were fighting. But aside from the "Southern" characteristics that shaped their cruise aboard the Shenandoah, other factors, admittedly, made their experiences unique. Their cruise was longer than a typical cruise-- which meant that they were away from land, and their families, for greater stretches of time than typical sailors. For large portions of the cruise, their commander did not permit them to know their destination: either the North Pacific whaling areas, or, at the other end of the cruise, Liverpool. Moreover, while commanders frequently come into conflict with their subordinates shipboard, the situation was magnified aboard the Shenandoah because of the quirky views and erratic behavior of Commander James Iredell Waddell. At the same time, although Curry tries to emphasize the uniqueness of these officers and their Citation: H-Net Reviews. Blume on Curry, 'The Officers of the CSS Shenandoah'. H-Maritime. 01-23-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/7836/reviews/8420/blume-curry-officers-css-shenandoah Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Maritime experiences, they were, in certain aspects, representative of the experiences of many American naval officers in the middle third of the nineteenth century, and particularly during the Civil War. Naval officers, especially those trained at the Naval Academy, tended to come from elite backgrounds and consequently shared a common world view.[1] Furthermore, many a young Union naval officer expressed "great expectations" for personal glory and prize money. In the North Pacific part of the cruise, according to Curry, "the Confederate officers were caught in an emotional pendulum, swinging between mind-numbing boredom and wild excitement, which only served to increase the tensions among the officers" (p. 200). But many Union naval officers on blockade duty experienced similar highs and lows, moments of breathtaking action interspersed with weeks of unremitting boredom. As one historian wrote, "The monotony of this continual and watchful existence was broken by the frequent chasing and occasional capture of blockade-runners."[2] Summer blockade duty off the Gulf Coast could be a dreary and risky business for a naval officer. Blockade duty off the Texas coast was, according to Alfred Thayer Mahan, "the end of nowhere" and "desperately tedious," and his biographer Robert Seager notes that, as a result, "morale in the vessel was terrible."[3] Nor could the tedium of the long Shenandoah cruise or the frequent disciplinary problems be described as unique. One need only read accounts of nineteenth-century American naval exploration in the Pacific to see similar issues. The main difference has to do with the inability of Shenandoah's commander to deal effectively with the continual breakdown of discipline. The book has, effectively, three parts: the first several chapters that set the stage; the middle seven chapters, which provide a narrative of the cruise itself; and the final two chapters, which explore the post-Shenandoah lives of the officers.
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