by David Milne
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.
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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 earl
y 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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Through his mother’s instruction, and the high regard that he felt for his uncle Milo, an Episcopalian minister who published to acclaim on various theological issues, Mahan was a devout Christian. Indeed, understanding the depth and sincerity of Mahan’s faith is essential to understanding his subsequent foreign-policy views. He tithed his income to the church throughout his lifetime—including the substantial royalties he would accumulate from 1890—and was near faultless in his church attendance. When he visited England, he was discomfited by the secular direction in which this otherwise exemplary country appeared to be headed. This was reflected in the haphazard fashion that its aristocracy and upper middle class regarded devotion to their maker—skipping Sunday service when frivolities like hunting got in the way. Tied to his religiosity were prudish tendencies that did not sit well with a naval career. When he rose to positions of command, for example, Mahan believed that talk of sex was improper and so he refused to discuss “sanitary precautions against syphilis” with fellow officers, declaring that the “morals of factory girls” and those of “Charlestown Navy Yard girls” were also “unclean subjects and to be avoided.”22
Yet while Mahan’s Christianity was traditional in its approach to Scripture, it was also fairly progressive by the standards of the day. Mahan was a staunch Republican and throughout his life was a vocal opponent of radical progressivism, socialism, and indeed anything that smacked of excessive government interference in one’s private sphere. But he recognized that he owed a duty to God to invest some time in ameliorating the conditions of others less blessed. In later years he decried the growing epidemic of homelessness in America’s major cities: “There is no condition of life that should appeal more strongly to the sympathy of the fortunate than that of the homeless.”23 He was sympathetic to many progressive causes. Sharing Theodore Roosevelt’s distaste for the excesses of the Gilded Age, he opposed trusts, monopolies, and the “malefactors of great wealth,” as TR famously described them. This is not to say that Mahan was at the vanguard of the Progressive movement. He opposed the imposition of the eight-hour day, was relaxed about child labor, and was shaken at the prospect of women being granted the vote—“the proposition to give women the vote breaks down the constant practice of the past ages by which to men is assigned the outdoor rough action of life and to women that indoor sphere which we call the family.”24 An orthodox conservative in many respects, Mahan nonetheless possessed the capacity to surprise.
At the close of the Civil War, Mahan embarked on a series of voyages that took him across the world, affording him a wonderful opportunity to observe America’s global competitors firsthand. In the winter of 1867–1868, Mahan traveled to Japan on board the Iroquois, a “beautiful sea boat,” as the young sailor described it to his mother, although his dread of storms also led him to observe that “despite what romancers have written, a gale of wind is uncomfortable and anxious to everyone responsible … who can say when an accident may happen or what chastening God may intend for us.”25 Having been spared God’s wrath across the Pacific, Mahan arrived in Japan at a propitious time, as Western-inclined modernizers were in the midst of casting aside the feudal Tokugawa shogunate in the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The declared aim of Japan’s new oligarchs was now to “enrich the country, strengthen the military,” a program that Mahan supported for all right-thinking nations. While his first impressions were xenophobic, “I find the people uninteresting and don’t care for their peculiarities, nor for their customs,” he soon decided that “I think I shall like Japan; all agree in representing the people as amiable and goodnatured to the utmost. The two sworded fellows are the only ones who give trouble and they only rarely and when drunk.”26 Mahan was impressed by Japan’s efforts to emulate Western models of development, and he remained well disposed toward Japanese tenacity and ingenuity, even while in later years insisting that restrictions be placed on the ability of Japanese emigrants to settle permanently in the United States. Even then, his justification was reasonably complimentary:
Personally, I entirely reject any assumption or belief that my race is superior to the Chinese, or to the Japanese. My own suits me better, probably because I am used to it; but I wholly disclaim, as unworthy of myself and of them, any thought of superiority … Now while recognizing what I clearly see to be the great superiority of the Japanese, as of the white over the Negro … America doubts her power to digest and assimilate the strong national and racial characteristics which distinguish the Japanese, which are the secrets of much of their success.27
While Japan was forward thinking in its emphasis on Western-modeled modernization, Mahan believed that its people—“a very small race and nearly beardless, which tends to make them appear like boys playing at soldiers”—lacked the martial qualities to truly become a power of the first rank. The nation that he admired above all was Great Britain, which combined political stability, cultural achievement, the rule of law, economic ingenuity, hirsuteness, and a judicious emphasis on the vitality of naval preeminence. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, as Mahan was attached to ships destined for East Asia, Europe, and Latin America, his greatest comfort came not in the company of his fellow Americans but on British ships, where he could congregate with men of superior taste and sensibilities—and where his Anglophilia guaranteed a warm welcome. Reflecting on the historical necessity of the British seizure of the Yemeni port of Aden in 1839, Mahan would remark, “Are a pack of savages to stand in the way of the commerce of the world?”28 This sentiment neatly crystallizes his worldview. The British were doing the world a favor in their colonial expansion during the nineteenth century. They were opening backward nations up to trade, cleansing the arteries of global commerce, and thus doing all exporting nations a great service. As Great Britain inevitably lost strength, Mahan believed that the United States had to follow its path in building a similarly dominant navy.
This instinctive preference for British models and values, which
his father imparted from an early age, was the bedrock upon which Mahan’s philosophy of sea power was built. Bolted up in his room, poring over volumes of those two giants of French and German historiography—François Pierre Guillaume Guizot and Leopold von Ranke—Mahan developed a sophisticated understanding of world history. But it was through traveling and observing the world that Mahan could see firsthand the Royal Navy’s unrivaled reach and influence, which in turn allowed Britain to enjoy high levels of economic growth and a constantly improving quality of life (even if it was becoming increasingly godless). Meanwhile, the United States was the rising power of the world. A combination of America’s abundant natural resources, high fertility rates, and a declaration of fidelity to British models of economic and military development would make it virtually unstoppable. But the America of 1880 was still far from reaching that Promised Land.
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In 1880 the sultan of Turkey, concerned at the parlous state of his nation’s finances, made some cuts to its diplomatic service. He closed his missions and embassies in Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United States. His rationale was straightforward: all were medium-size powers that played a minimal role in world diplomacy.29 In retrospect it is easy to characterize the sultan’s decision as myopic, but in 1880 few world leaders would have been surprised by the news. In the two decades after the Civil War, successive U.S. presidents failed to chart a distinct, activist path either at home or abroad, and all have relatively undistinguished reputations today. From 1865 to 1885, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Chester Arthur scarcely approached Abraham Lincoln’s leadership and sense of purpose. Drift at the top meant that America was commensurately weakened as its prestige and position on the world stage waned. Particularly distasteful to Mahan was the pervasive corruption of that era.