This entry is a subentry of U.S. Navy.
Following the Civil War, the U.S. Navy suffered a sharp decline for over a decade. American commerce was in a shrunken state, and the country, with little foreign menace, was preoccupied with domestic matters. But in the 1880s a resurgence of “manifest destiny,” increased involvement in foreign affairs, and heightened professionalism within the service brought a naval renaissance that culminated in the navy's overwhelming victories during the Spanish‐American War of 1898.
In 1865, the U.S. Navy, with 471 warships on its roster, ranked as one of the world's largest in numbers, but it was strongly oriented toward coastal and riverine operations. With peace, Congress quickly ended funding for new construction and laid up or sold off the bulk of the Civil War fleet. The principal remaining mission for the navy was to show the flag on foreign stations; its active sailing warships, mostly wooden vessels, were prized more for their economy and cruising radius than for their military qualities. The few ironclad monitors retained were overhauled for lengthy periods at great expense, essentially with an eye to keeping the dockyards in existence rather than to strengthening the force. In personnel, the service grew top‐heavy with officers (one for every four enlisted men in 1882), and promotion, based entirely on seniority, came to a virtual standstill. As late as 1896, some lieutenants dated their ranks to the Civil War. Enlisted life was so unattractive that in the late 1870s, the navy averaged 1,000 desertions yearly out its authorized strength of 8,000 men. At the top, the navy was run by a series of political secretaries, some of whom were incompetent or corrupt. Abroad, its reputation so declined that an Oscar Wilde character who lamented that the United States had neither ruins nor curiosities was contradicted by reference to its navy.
Behind this facade of stagnation, the navy made some important advances. The quasi‐official U.S. Naval Institute, organized in 1873, initiated the next year the publication of a journal of professional opinion, the Proceedings. The pace of reform accelerated in the next decade. In 1882, the Office of Naval Intelligence was established. Two years later, the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, began instruction under its first president, Rear Adm. Stephen B. Luce. One of its early luminaries was Alfred T. Mahan, president in 1886–89 and 1892–93, whose stress on war games highlighted for the navy the importance of such disparate items as oil fuel, an isthmian canal, and bases in Hawaii. Mahan's cardinal book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783, published in 1890 and soon translated into six major languages, established him as the world's foremost naval thinker.
In force structure, the navy began in 1883 to match these quickening steps toward modernization when Congress provided funds for three new steel cruisers. This modest program was augmented later in the decade with the authorization of twelve more cruisers and the navy's first big‐gun ships, the Maine and Texas. Early in the 1890s, four battleships and three large cruisers followed. The military characteristics of these new steam‐powered ships reflected the essentially defensive mission of the service. The battleships were of low freeboard and thus best suited for coastal defense; the cruisers, such as the Columbia, possessed high speed and were designed as commerce raiders to hunt down fast passenger liners. The navy also experimented with smaller craft, such as torpedo boats and the ram Katahdin.
This expansion was stoked in part by a war scare with Chile in 1891, by the resurrection of the American merchant marine, and by rising imperial ambitions. Also, Mahan argued forcefully for the construction of a battle fleet and influenced civilian policymakers such as Secretaries of the Navy Benjamin F. Tracy (1869–93) and Hilary A. Herbert (1893–97). Congress in 1895 and 1896 funded five additional battleships.
Before these could be completed, the steel navy was tested in war with Spain in 1898. Competent prewar preparations by Secretary of the Navy John Davis Long and his assistant Theodore Roosevelt paid dividends at the outset, when Commodore George Dewey moved quickly to defeat the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Manila Bay. Off Cuba, the fleet of Rear Adm. William Sampson won an easy naval victory at Santiago Bay. Materially, the new ships of the navy performed well, with the battleship Oregon steaming from the West Coast around Cape Horn to the Caribbean in seventy‐one days, arriving in time to play a key role during the Santiago engagement. The Marines impressed observers with their élan and professionalism at Guantanamo Bay, earning the sobriquet from reporters of “first to fight.”
The navy's victories in 1898 helped lead to far‐flung bases and vast new commitments; the successes also garnered public acclaim, which translated into congressional support for ambitious construction programs that moved the navy rapidly into the first ranks of the world's powers. The contrast with the demoralized and decrepit service of only two decades earlier was marked indeed.
[See also Academies, Service: U.S. Naval Academy; Luce, Stephen B.; Marine Corps, U.S.: 1865–1914.]
Bibliography
- Harold and Margaret Sprout, The Rise of American Naval Power, 1776–1918, 1939.
- Walter R. Herrick, Jr., The American Naval Revolution, 1966.
- Robert Seager II, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 1975.
- James C. Bradford, ed., Admirals of the New Steel Navy, 1990.
- Robert W. Love, Jr., History of the U.S. Navy, Vol.
1 : 1775–1941, 1992
