ALFRED THAYER MAHAN

Nathan Miller
The U.S. Navy: A History (Third Edition)
Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1997, 152-153

            Tall, balding, and ascetic-looking, [Alfred Thayer] Mahan was not a typical naval officer. Born at West Point, he was the son of Dennis Hart Mahan, a member of the faculty at the Military Academy and a pioneer in the teaching of strategy. Mahan obtained an appointment to the Naval Academy and because he had previously attended Columbia College for two years was allowed to enter the third class, the last man in the school’s history to be permitted to skip plebe year. In the twenty-five years of service that followed his graduation in 1859, Mahan drifted along with the tide, accomplishing little except for writing a small book on naval operations in the Civil War, The Gulf and Inland Waters. Impressed with this work, Luce [Commodore Stephen B. Luce, president, Naval War College] offered its author the post of lecturer in naval history. Mahan accepted with alacrity, but because an unsympathetic Navy Department ruled that he would have to complete his tour on the Pacific Station before reporting to Newport, he missed the school’s first term.

            Mahan’s duties on the Wachusett were not onerous, and as she lay in the dreary Peruvian port of Callao, he spent most of his time at the local English Club devouring every history book he could find in order to prepare himself for his new assignment. Trying to find a way to “make the experience of wooden sailing vessels, with their pop-guns, useful in the naval present,” he perceived in the long sweep of history a pattern that indicated that command of the sea had been a decisive factor in the rise and fall of empires. The idea came to him while he was reading Theodore Mommsen’ History of Rome. “It suddenly struck me,” Mahan related, “how different things might have been could Hannibal have invaded Italy by sea..instead of by the long land route, or could he, after arrival, have been in free communication with Carthage by water.” With every faculty “alive and jumping,” he saw that “control of the seas was an historic factor which had never been systematically appreciated and expounded.”

            When Luce was ordered to sea duty in 1886, Mahan was appointed president of the college. This was something of an empty honor. Government financing for the institution was pitifully inadequate, and he had to lobby steadily for funds to keep its doors open. The president’s quarters were in such deplorable condition that Mahan had to attach rubber tubing to a radiator to obtain bath water. he also had to fight off officers and civilians who wanted the course at Newport to devote less time to the study of strategy and more to the use of evolving technologies. Now a captain, he persevered in his efforts to keep the school open and found time to turn his lectures into a book that, after being rejected by several publishers, was published by Little, Brown and Company in 1890 as The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783...