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BOOK REVIEWS 771 Long Excerpts from the Pens of Franklin And BOOK REVIEWS 771 long excerpts from the pens of Franklin and Whitefield—a bit of a slog. Hoffer’s depiction of Whitefield’s theology might require more background than most students will have, and they may well wonder what the long passage from the Drinkers Dictionary reveals about Franklin other than his love of words and wordplay. Hoffer could have spent more time explaining some concepts, as one wonders if even the most sophisticated undergraduate will know the meaning of such terms as “antinomian” (p. 57) or “soteriology” (p. 82). But overall, this book more than succeeds in achieving its goal of help- ing students understand and appreciate the cultural and intellectual environment of the Anglophone world. Sheila Skemp is the Clare Leslie Marquette Chair of American History at the University of Mississippi. Her most recent publication is The Making of a Patriot: Benjamin Franklin at the Cockpit (2012). 1812: The Navy’s War. By George C. Daughan. (New York: Basic Books, 2011. Pp. xxx, 492.$32.50.) This book is George C. Daughan’s sequel to his inaugural mono- graph, If By Sea: The Forging of the American Navy—from the Amer- ican Revolution to the War of 1812 (2008). Despite its subtitle and colorful dust jacket depicting dueling American and British warships, this work is not a history of the United States Navy in the War of 1812. Though the navy figures prominently in his study, the author devotes a considerable portion of his text to the military, political, and diplomatic dimensions of the war as well. Daughan tells his story in thirty-four economical chapters, the bulk of which examine American and British operations ashore and afloat during the war. Although his account focuses primarily on the U.S. war effort, he does not neglect the activities of the Royal Navy or the British army. The planning and execution of British raids on the American maritime frontier in 1813 and 1814, for example, receive extended treatment. In a style reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt’s The Naval War of 1812 (1882), Daughan trains his historical lens, by alternate turns, on operations at sea and those on the north- ern frontier—the two main arenas where the combatants clashed— devoting separate chapters to pivotal contests on blue water, such as the engagement between USS Constitution and HMS Guerriere Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00246 by guest on 28 September 2021 772 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY (19 August 1812),and those on inland seas, including the Battle of Lake Erie (10 September 1813). He also gives significant attention to Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia—an event, he argues, that shaped the strategic and diplomatic courses pursued by political leaders in both the U.S. and Great Britain. Daughan relies almost exclusively on secondary sources to inform his narrative, which is a pity, as there is a rich documentary record bearing on the War of 1812 in public and private repositories on both sides of the Atlantic. This reliance would not be so troubling had he drawn more fully on the wealth of 1812 scholarship in print, but his bibliography contains a number of unexpected omissions, most no- tably the modern letterpress editions of The Papers of James Madison (Presidential Series) and The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Retirement Series). Equally surprising is his failure to exploit many published documentary collections and contemporary memoirs—a large por- tion of which have been digitized and are easily accessed via the Internet—such as Arsene` Lacarriere` Latour’s Historical Memoir of the War in West Florida and Louisiana, 1814–1815. As a result of these oversights, much of what Daughan has to say about the larger significance of the war and how it was fought is derivative. It is unclear why and for whom George Daughan wrote 1812: The Navy’s War. Most authors address these important questions in their preface or introduction. However, he eschews such explanations in his introduction, opting instead to describe the war’s first clash at sea between USS President and HMS Belvidera. Nor is the subtitle of his book (nor the cover art that graces its dust jacket) a reliable guide to its contents. To be sure, the author describes in considerable detail the navy’s role in fighting the war, but the American sea service com- mands the spotlight in only a third of the chapters. Indeed the con- clusion contains just a single paragraph (p. 416) summarizing the navy’s significance. Why, then, should we consider the War of 1812 as the navy’s war? Daughan never answers this question satisfactorily. I raise this criticism because it points to a fundamental problem with this book’s organization and content; that is, absent a central theme to organize and guide its narrative, the work sometimes wal- lows in a sea of information, drifting from fact to fact and event to event without an author’s steadying hand to steer it to a meaningful destination. Had Daughan considered his theme more carefully, he might have written a more focused study of the war. As it is, he has produced a wide-ranging 1812 chronicle that too often renders the war’s key events in broad brushstrokes. For instance, he discusses Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00246 by guest on 28 September 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 773 the 1814 American offensive on Lake Huron in a spare page and a half of prose, while he condenses U.S. operations on Lake Erie for that year into two brief paragraphs. Given that securing control of the upper lakes was central to the Madison administration’s strategic ambitions at the time, Daughan’s failure to develop this topic more fully detracts from his narrative. While Daughan has produced a sweeping account of the War of 1812 that highlights its most enduring moments and personalities, he sometimes veers off course in his judgments. His depiction of James Madison as a chief executive who micromanaged the U.S. war effort on both land and sea is one that is not supported by the documentary record and neither is his argument that Madison timed the American declaration of war to coincide with Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Daughan also has a tendency to employ value-laden words that give a partisan cast to his book, describing, for instance, Americans who supplied the British as “traitors” (p. 267). Though lively, this style of writing, for some, may call Daughan’s objectivity into question. It should be noted that this volume contains a distressing number of errors, both factual and editorial. Ships, people, and places are misidentified, misspelled, or inaccurately described throughout the text, and even more concerning, sloppy documentation accompanies it. Quotations with dropped, added, or altered words and unattributed or wrongly attributed quotations are among some of the mistakes I noted. Collectively, these faults undermine the scholarly value of Daughan’s book for both the 1812 specialist and the general reader. 1812: The Navy’s War provides a fair overview of the operational challenges faced by America’s naval forces in fighting the second “War of Independence.” An eager audience awaits the author who can tell the 1812 navy’s story in its full dimensions, for that is a tale that will be truly worth reading. Charles E. Brodine Jr., a historian with the Naval History and Heri- tage Command, is Associate Editor of The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History. The Art of Robert Frost. By Tim Kendall. (New Haven: Yale Univer- sity Press, 2012. Pp. 392.$35.00.) It is not hard to understand why a distinguished university press would publish Tim Kendall’s The Art of Robert Frost: the book is Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_r_00246 by guest on 28 September 2021.
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