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Authors: David Milne

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Mahan's antagonists have raised some strong objections to his writings through the ages. A common theme is that Mahan's worldview does not resonate with American values—a charge later leveled at Henry Kissinger. One can follow Charles Beard in criticizing Mahan's worldview for being “based on the pure materialism of biological greed.”
8
Or one can follow Woodrow Wilson in rejecting Mahan's pessimistic view that war is interwoven into the fabric of the international system, that the United States should shun arbitration proposals and prepare for the worst. But it is impossible to deny Mahan's prescience on so much of what would unfold. The world in which we live resembles the one he said would come to pass in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Washington-led world economic system is dominated by free trade facilitated by open shipping lanes; the U.S. Navy has no peer competitor in its global reach; significant world crises are rarely resolved through the good offices of the United Nations; and the United States reserves the right to act unilaterally if its interests are threatened. In all of these matters, for good and for worse, Mahan anticipated the shape of the modern world. And so the story begins here.

*   *   *

On an early autumn day in 1871, an agitated elderly gentleman paced the decks of a Hudson River steamboat, mulling the indignities of government service. Adorned in quality fabrics, with piercing eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, Dennis Hart Mahan's distinguished appearance did not deceive. Through his long career as a professor of engineering at West Point, Mahan dined with the Marquis de Lafayette in Paris, taught military science to virtually every senior officer who fought in the Civil War, and wrote seminal texts that revolutionized battlefield tactics.
9
West Point made the man, and Mahan in turn had indelibly shaped its graduates: William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson all benefited from his instruction. Yet despite compiling a towering record of achievement, Mahan was not reconciled to retirement. Although President Grant had previously assured Mahan that he could remain in his post for as long as he desired, West Point's Board of Visitors had insisted on placing the sixty-nine-year-old professor on the retired list. As the steamboat approached Stony Point, Mahan decided with finality that the wrench of leaving his beloved West Point was too much to take—that life without purposeful labor was not worth living. He climbed the railings of the boat and cast himself onto the paddle wheel rotating below.

Obituaries attributed Dennis Mahan's suicide to a momentary “fit of insanity,” the exculpation deployed in that era when distinguished gentlemen committed suicide. But the actual cause of Mahan's death was the prospect of enforced indolence—compelling testimony to his unbalanced work ethic. The dangers of this trait were deftly avoided by his eldest son, Alfred Thayer, who bequeathed a legacy even more substantial than that of his father, but who managed his work-life balance with greater care. Alfred found his father impressive in certain aspects: upstanding, diligent, and possessed of a virtuous value system. Yet he could scarcely bring himself to acknowledge the shameful manner in which his father had abandoned his family.
10
His only recorded reflections speak privately to his “seasons of great apprehension” that he might have inherited his father's tendency toward melancholy and, potentially, self-destruction.
11

Beyond these words, Alfred spoke little of his father's suicide, either in his memoir or in his voluminous correspondence to friends and family. His reticence was indicative of the Victorian age in which he lived, but it also dovetailed with Mahan's yearning for privacy and an aversion to making a spectacle of himself. While Alfred followed his father in educating the military's brightest prospects, he never lost his dread of having to stand at a lectern and hold court for an hour or more. “I have … an abhorrence of public speaking,” Mahan confessed, “and a desire to slip unobserved into a backseat wherever I am, which amount to a mania.”
12
It was the timeliness and logic of Mahan's ideas—not an attention-seeking disposition—that brought him renown.

Born in West Point on September 27, 1840, Alfred was the first of six children raised in a solvent, stable family that set great store in the value of education. His father was raised in Virginia to Irish parents, although his Anglophilia—he shed his Irish affectations with breezy abandon—was untypical of second-generation emigrants from the old country. Alfred's mother, Mary Okill, was a devout Christian who prayed daily that her eldest son would pursue a career as a clergyman. Mary was a northerner, and this was the only flaw that her husband could discern in his wife, informing Alfred that “your mother is Northern and very few can approach her but still, in the general, none compare for me with the Southern woman.”
13
That Mahan was a child of the South is reflected in his father's reaction to discovering him reading a copy of Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin
: “My father took it out of my hands,” Alfred recalled, “and I came to regard it much as I would a bottle labeled Poison.”
14
Living in remote West Point—accessible only by steamboats in its prerailroad years and isolated by a frozen Hudson through the winter—ensured that Alfred's early years were closeted but conducive to scholarly endeavor. Surrounded by his father's books on military history, and compelled daily to display his mastery of Scripture by his loving but demanding mother, Alfred's intellectual development was impressive, even if his parents' stern pedagogical instruction left his social skills, hampered by a narrow circle of playmates, lagging behind the swiftness of his reading and the fluency of his writing.

Dennis Mahan's desire to immerse his children in the societal norms of the genteel, slaveholding South informed his decision to send Alfred to Saint James School in Maryland, an Episcopalian boarding school attended overwhelmingly by the well-heeled offspring of conservative southerners desirous of an education that ignored
Uncle Tom's Cabin
and treated chattel slavery as part of the natural order of things. Yet Alfred's father was also pragmatic, so when Saint James failed to provide Alfred with what he took to be adequate instruction in mathematics, he had few qualms about sending him northward to the racier, cosmopolitan setting of Columbia College in New York City. Alfred entered the college as a freshman in 1854 and remained in New York for two years—the time it took for him to identify his calling. Keen to expand his horizons beyond the northeastern seaboard, Mahan decided that a career in the Navy offered an unparalleled combination of discipline, travel opportunities, and the moral and spiritual well-being that comes with pursuing a selfless life in the service of one's nation.

Dennis Mahan's reaction to his son's plans for a career at sea was distinctly cool. Looking back in later years, Alfred could not help but applaud his father's prescience: “My entrance into the navy was greatly against my father's wish. I do not remember all his arguments, but he told me he thought me much less fit for a military than for a civilian profession, having watched me carefully. I think myself now that he was right; for, though I have no cause to complain of unsuccess, I believe I should have done better elsewhere.”
15

So why did his father judge Alfred so unsuitable for naval life? The answer lies largely in the fact that the earnest and bookish young Mahan lacked the spirit of camaraderie that lured so many young men to the Navy. Reveling in the company of his fellow men was simply not Mahan's thing. He was upstanding to the point of sanctimony, and his introspective nature and unbending interpretation of the rules made him a lonely student through his college years. “It takes at least twenty gentlemen to remove the bad impression made by one rowdy,” he complained to his father after observing uncouth behavior on a New York ferryboat.
16
His sense of right and wrong was wound to an unsustainably high level, and this trait tended to antagonize all but the most prissy.

Placing his reservations to one side, Dennis Mahan went to great lengths to secure his son's acceptance to the Naval Academy. He arranged an audience with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who had trailed Dennis by just three classes at West Point. Davis advised the aspiring sailor to meet with Congressman Ambrose S. Murray from New York, who in turn agreed to support Alfred's admission to Annapolis. As Mahan acknowledged, “It has pleased me to believe, as I do, that I owed my entrance to the United States Navy to the interposition of the first and only President of the Southern Confederacy, whose influence with Mr. [President] Pierce is a matter of history.”
17
Mahan had Jefferson Davis to partly thank for his success, but his route to Annapolis would have been much less certain with a different surname. His father offered unequivocal support, in the form of his personal prestige, when the stakes were highest for his cerebral, straitlaced son.

*   *   *

Mahan was struck down by “melancholia” upon arriving in Annapolis—a pretty but provincial town of approximately eight thousand residents—in September 1856. The immediate onset of this affliction did not augur well for his career as a sailor, but he soon shook off his blues and in a warm letter to Elizabeth Lewis, the stepdaughter of his uncle, the Reverend Milo Mahan, professed himself wholly satisfied with both his classmates and his early experiences of sailing: “You can form no idea what a nice class we have … Our mutual attachment renders us I fear rather disloyal to the fair sex … Life at sea, so far as I have experienced it, is the most happy careless and entrancing life that there is. In a stiff breeze when the ship is heeling well over there is a wild sort of delight that I never experienced before.”
18

These words are joyful and without guile. Yet this would be the first and last time that Mahan would wax lyrical about his fellow classmates and being at sea. Mahan concluded that Annapolis was “a miserable little town” and that he was destined for greater things than carousing with his philistine cohort of midshipmen. Mahan also soon discovered that he wasn't really much of a sailor. In fact, he actively disliked the sea—the tedium of sailing broken only by sudden storms that he failed to endure stoically.

Instead, Mahan cruised through the academy's unchallenging syllabus and devoted his spare time to reading the French medieval historian Jean Froissart, the diarist and diplomat Henry Lytton Bulwer, and the Scottish Romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott. His close friend, Samuel Ashe, was duly impressed by his friend's range of learning, describing him as “the most intellectual man I have ever known. He had not only a remarkable memory but also a capacity to comprehend and a clarity of perception.”
19
At Annapolis, Mahan managed to graduate second in his class without exerting himself beyond some last-minute cramming.

Alfred graduated in 1859 on the eve of the Civil War, and the loyalties of his graduating class were split by the conflict that ensued. His views on the looming crisis were understandably mixed, combining as he did staunch Unionism with an implacably southern upbringing and no real hostility to slavery. His view of America's black population was entirely typical of someone of his age and background, and he habitually deployed terms such as “nigger” and “darkie” to refer to free and enslaved African Americans. While never relenting in his opinion that America's black population was inherently inferior to those of European stock, Mahan did amend his views on the “peculiar institution” upon encountering field slaves for the first time in South Carolina. As he remarked in his memoir, “It was my first meeting with slavery, except in the house servants of Maryland … and as I looked into the cowed, imbruted faces of the field hands, my early training fell away like a cloak. The process was not logical; I was generalizing from a few instances, but I was convinced.” Even his father, a proud Virginian who supported slavery and oozed contempt for the abolitionist cause, backed Abraham Lincoln instinctively in his struggle to restore the Union: “My son, I did not think I could ever again be happy should our country fall into her present state; but now I am so absorbed in seeing those fellows beaten that I lose sight of the rest.”
20

Mahan's Civil War was uneventful. The Confederacy's naval assets were relatively inconsequential, so the Union enjoyed a mastery that was rarely challenged, allowing Lincoln to impose a strangulating blockade of the South's main ports. Serving on the Union blockade, Mahan heard a shot fired in anger just once—at Port Royal, South Carolina, on November 7, 1861—and his references to the conflict invariably speak to the essential tedium of serving through the defining conflict of American history. The Civil War did not make Mahan in the way that later diplomatic thinkers were shaped by their experience of the First and Second World Wars. Mahan made one serious attempt to join the action, requesting a transfer to the
Monongahela
, which was then engaged in the “sociable” (and more perilous) blockade of Mobile, Alabama. His transfer was declined and his classmate Roderick Prentiss was ordered to the ship instead. It was a fortunate rejection for Mahan, for Prentiss was killed aboard the
Monongahela
during the Battle of Mobile Bay of August 1864. The main highlight of Mahan's war was an encounter with a victorious General William Sherman, whom he had approached in Savannah with a message from his father. When Mahan introduced himself, Sherman “broke into a smile—all over as they say—shook my hand forcibly, and exclaimed ‘What, the son of old Dennis?' reverting instinctively to the familiar epithet of school days.” Sherman confessed to feeling a great glow of pride whenever Professor Mahan “dismissed him from the blackboard with the commendation, ‘Very well done Mr. Sherman.'”
21
Victorious in Georgia with the Union's most celebrated general, Mahan found that his father still cast quite a shadow.

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