Alfred Thayer Mahan - Wikipedia

Thank you, my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that September 27 is the anniversary of the birth of United States naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan whom John Keegan called "the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century."
He was born at West Point, New York, the son of Dennis Hart Mahan who was a noted American military theorist, civil engineer and professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point from 1824-1871.

Alfred Thayer Mahan
American History Honors Documentary Research Project
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMWOx2ZB3qU

Images:
1. Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan painting.
2. USNA Midshipman Alfred Thayer Mahan
3. Alfred Thayer Mahan 'Organized force alone enables the quiet and the weak to go about their business and to sleep securely in their beds, safe from the violent without or within'
4. Alfred Thayer Mahan sketch

Background from
"ALFRED THAYER MAHAN: THE RELUCTANT SEAMAN
By Donald Lankiewicz

He was perhaps the most celebrated naval historian of his era, an influential promoter of United States naval and commercial expansion during America’s rise to world power in the late nineteenth century. As the author of numerous articles and books, including the landmark The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, Alfred Thayer Mahan was widely regarded as a brilliant naval theorist. From his writings, readers would never have guessed, however, that the renowned champion of the United States Navy hated the sea, and while an active-duty naval officer, lived in constant fear of ocean storms and colliding ships.

Mahan’s fear of accidents at sea was not unfounded. During a forty-year naval career that began as a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1856, he was involved in numerous maritime mishaps. As a young first lieutenant in 1861, Mahan was named the executive officer of Captain Percival Drayton’s 11-gun USS Pocahontas, and immediately set a dubious standard for his budding career. Captain Drayton was familiar with his new junior officer and noted in his diary that Mahan was ‘young enough not to have too fixed ways and is quite clever.’ Drayton, however, had never seen Mahan handle a ship.

On November 7, 1861, a small Union fleet assaulted Fort Walker at Port Royal, South Carolina, a Confederate stronghold on the edge of Drayton’s hometown that was commanded, as chance would have it, by his brother Thomas. Delayed by a storm and mechanical problems, the Pocahontas arrived on the scene after the other ships had pounded the fort into submission. As his vessel moved through the water to join the rest of the flotilla in Port Royal Sound, Lieutenant Mahan became engrossed in observing his superior officer, who was deep in thought over the fate of his defeated brother inside the pulverized fort. Mahan enjoyed studying human emotions and expressions, but as the Pocahontas‘s deck officer that day, he should have been watching the direction in which his ship was drifting. Suddenly, the Pocahontas slammed into the anchored Union sloop Seminole. The vain executive officer deflected any blame for his slip-up by suggesting that the fault lay with his superior, Captain Drayton, who, he sarcastically noted, ‘had done a good deal of staff duty; had less than the usual deck habit of his period.’

Following this incident, Mahan served ten months on blockade duty before the Navy Department assigned him to teach seamanship at the Naval Academy, which had been transferred from Annapolis, Maryland, to Newport, Rhode Island, as a wartime precaution. Mahan’s effectiveness as a teacher of seamanship proved to be as questionable as his own ability to handle a ship; he later recalled the ‘humiliation’ and ‘bad luck’ of having to teach subjects such as knotting, which he considered unworthy of his time. Mahan, who rated himself intellectually superior to almost everyone, was not well liked by his students, and during his 13 months in Newport, he rapidly began to dislike his chosen profession.

Mahan reluctantly returned to sea duty and soon built upon the shaky record he had established while serving on the Pocahontas. His lack of confidence in handling ships was apparent from his reaction to a successful, routine maneuver in 1869. Returning from target practice in the Pacific Ocean aboard the USS Iroquois, Mahan managed to bring his ship back into Japan’s Yokohama Harbor without hitting another vessel. ‘Vanity excited,’ he wrote of the experience on the Iroquois, which was, however, an exception, not the rule.

In 1874, Mahan ran the USS Wasp into a barge at the ship’s anchorage in Montevideo, Uruguay. He also was responsible for ‘doing slight damage’ to an Argentinean warship during a storm off Buenos Aires on November 3, 1874. More embarrassing than these accidents, however, was the time that Mahan clumsily wedged the Wasp into a dry dock caisson at Montevideo, where it remained stuck for ten days. This absurd episode prompted Mahan-biographer Robert Seager II to comment that ‘Alfred Thayer Mahan may be the only commanding officer in the history of the U.S. Navy rendered hors de combat by a dry dock.’

Only his family and his few friends ever knew about the emotional and physical turmoil that enveloped Mahan each time he took command of a ship. On one occasion he confessed to his wife Ellen that he sometimes feared ‘breaking down under the uncongenial load’ of the captain’s labor. ‘You have no idea,’ he said, ‘how hard it is to keep these ships straight.’ Mahan well knew, and often admitted later in life, that he had chosen the wrong career. Nonetheless, he persevered.

Soon after Mahan took command of the USS Wachusett in 1883, he added to his unfortunate record, according to a young officer aboard named Hugh Rodman, by colliding ‘with a bark under sail, which without question had the right of way. It was our duty to keep clear.’ The astonishing accident, Rodman later remembered, occurred on a smooth sea in broad daylight. ‘The greatest naval strategist the world has ever known,’ he wrote, ‘was not a good seaman.’ The other vessel ‘was sighted broad off our starboard bow, distant several miles. Yet we collided with her and were badly damaged . . . .’ Rodman also recalled that when another of the Wachusett‘s officers was questioned about the unnecessary collision, he sarcastically replied, ‘Why, the Pacific Ocean wasn’t big enough for us to keep out of the other fellow’s way.’

Commander Mahan remained with the Wachusett until the old warship was mercifully decommissioned in September 1885, after which he began a stint lecturing on naval tactics and history at the newly-established Naval War College in Newport. By the time Mahan took charge of his last command, the USS Chicago, in 1893, he had been regularly shifted back and forth between sea duty and classroom assignments. Although he much preferred life on land, this situation helped neither his self-confidence nor his skills in navigating a ship.

With each mishap at sea, Mahan felt greater stress. He often asked his wife to pray for him that he ‘may be upheld through the remnant of the cruise.’ Aboard the Chicago, Captain Mahan seldom left the bridge when in the vicinity of other vessels, and his self-induced anxiety caused him constant stomach irritation. His powerful fear of the sea and possible collisions with other ships left him close to a nervous breakdown and caused him to begin to consider seriously an early retirement.

On May 27, 1893, Mahan’s fears were once again realized. In a minor accident, the Chicago, with Mahan on the bridge, had a brush with the USS Bancroft, a Naval Academy training ship, at the New York Naval Shipyard in Brooklyn. Neither vessel was seriously damaged, but this latest mishap unnerved Mahan and kept intact his record of having ‘grounded, collided, or otherwise embarrassed every ship (save the Iroquois) he ever commanded.’

Shortly after the Chicago-Bancroft collision, Mahan injured his knee and lower leg, causing him to be placed on the restricted-duty list. It was a welcome respite for the commander, who had grown weary of the ‘active pursuit of the sea and its new naval monsters.’ His recuperation also kept him out of trouble. He reported with some relief to his daughter, Ellen, on July 9, 1893: ‘The doctor says I must go on the sick list for a fortnight and keep my leg perfectly quiet, so if the Chicago does anything amiss in that time I shall not be the culprit.’

While the injured captain was on leave, the Chicago was involved in another collision. The captain of the British tanker Azov crashed his ship into the Chicago as it was anchored in the Scheldt Estuary in the Netherlands. Mahan’s crew–obviously well drilled in emergency procedures–prevented major damage to their unlucky ship by quickly plugging the gashes left by the tanker.

By early December 1894, Mahan had had enough. For several years he had been writing with much success, when time permitted. He knew that his greatest accomplishments would come not as a naval officer, but as a writer and historian. Few of the men who had actively served with him could argue with the logic of this conclusion. By the time of his death in 1914, Mahan’s reputation had long transcended the limited circles of the U.S. Navy. His true talents as a naval strategist and historian were borne out in the 137 scholarly articles and 20 books he had written, and his The Influence of Sea Power had altered modern naval planning.

It is ironic that one so knowledgeable about naval warfare could at the same time serve for forty accident-prone years on the vast seas that he feared and detested. But his long-forgotten legacy of reckless and almost comical seamanship has rightly been dwarfed by the tremendous positive effect he had on the U.S. Navy.

This article was written by Donald Lankiewicz and originally published in the February 1997 issue of American History Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to American History magazine today!"

Strategy background from history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/mahan
"Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History: Securing International Markets in the 1890s
In 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a lecturer in naval history and the president of the United States Naval War College, published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, a revolutionary analysis of the importance of naval power as a factor in the rise of the British Empire. Two years later, he completed a supplementary volume, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812.
Mahan argued that British control of the seas, combined with a corresponding decline in the naval strength of its major European rivals, paved the way for Great Britain’s emergence as the world’s dominant military, political, and economic power. Mahan and some leading American politicians believed that these lessons could be applied to U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the quest to expand U.S. markets overseas.

The 1890s were marked by social and economic unrest throughout the United States, which culminated in the onset of an economic depression between 1893 and 1894. The publication of Mahan’s books preceded much of the disorder associated with the 1890s, but his work resonated with many leading intellectuals and politicians concerned by the political and economic challenges of the period and the declining lack of economic opportunity on the American continent.

Mahan’s books complemented the work of one of his contemporaries, Professor Frederick Jackson Turner, who is best known for his seminal essay of 1893, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” An American history professor at the University of Wisconsin, Turner postulated that westward migration across the North American continent and the country’s population growth had finally led to the “closing” of the American frontier, with profound social and economic consequences. While Turner did not explicitly argue for a shift towards commercial expansion overseas, he did note that calls for a “vigorous foreign policy” were signs that Americans were increasingly looking outside the continental United States in order to satiate their desire for new economic opportunities and markets.

Mahan was one of the foremost proponents of the “vigorous foreign policy” referred to by Turner. Mahan believed that the U.S. economy would soon be unable to absorb the massive amounts of industrial and commercial goods being produced domestically, and he argued that the United States should seek new markets abroad. What concerned Mahan most was ensuring that the U.S. Government could guarantee access to these new international markets. Securing such access would require three things: a merchant navy, which could carry American products to new markets across the “great highway” of the high seas; an American battleship navy to deter or destroy rival fleets; and a network of naval bases capable of providing fuel and supplies for the enlarged navy, and maintaining open lines of communications between the United States and its new markets.

Mahan’s emphasis upon the acquisition of naval bases was not completely new. Following the Civil War, Secretary of State William Seward had attempted to expand the U.S. commercial presence in Asia by purchasing Alaska in 1867, and increasing American influence over Hawaii by concluding a reciprocity treaty that would bind the islands’ economy to that of the United States. Seward also attempted to purchase suitable Caribbean naval bases. Finally, he attempted to ratify a treaty with the Colombian Government that would allow the United States to build an isthmian canal through the province of Panama. In the wake of the Civil War, however, Congress became preoccupied with Reconstruction in the South, and the Senate rejected all of Seward’s efforts to create a network of American naval bases.

In the 1890s, Mahan’s ideas resonated with leading politicians, including Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, and Secretary of the Navy Herbert Tracy. After the outbreak of hostilities with Spain in May 1898, President William McKinley finally secured the annexation of Hawaii by means of joint resolution of Congress. Following the successful conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States gained control of territories that could serve as the coaling stations and naval bases that Mahan had discussed, such as Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Five years later, the United States obtained a perpetual lease for a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

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Great bio and history share sir.

Great Naval history share.