The Navy of the American Revolution: Its administration, its policy, and its achievements

About this book

Charles Oscar Paullin’s work is a scholarly survey of the United States Navy’s formative years, focusing on the administrative structures that guided the Revolutionary fleet rather than the battles themselves. The opening pages set the book apart by explaining that earlier histories, such as Thomas Clark’s 1814 account and James Fenimore Cooper’s 1839 narrative, tended to follow the actions of officers at sea. Paullin argues that those accounts, while vivid, are fragmented, and he proposes a “new method of treatment” that restores the naval bureaucracy: committees, boards, secretaries, and agents who drafted legislation, organized shipbuilding, and managed prize courts. The detailed table of contents shows the breadth of his study, ranging from the Continental Navy’s early committees to state navies, foreign diplomatic duties, and the evolution of naval policy through the war’s end.

The book reads like a turn‑of‑the‑century academic monograph, with a formal, precise prose style and extensive footnote‑type acknowledgments to libraries and scholars. Paullin’s voice is that of a meticulous historian intent on balancing narrative economy with exhaustive documentation, avoiding the romanticism of heroic sea battles. Readers who enjoy institutional history, naval administration, or the legal and logistical foundations of early American military power will find this volume rewarding, while those seeking a dramatic recounting of famous captains may prefer more conventional naval histories.

Opening lines

Several narrative accounts of the navy of the American Revolution have been written. These usually form the introductory part of a history of the American Navy since 1789. The earliest of these accounts is that of Thomas Clark, published in 1814, and probably the best that of James Fenimore Cooper, first printed in 1839. Later narratives are rather more popular than Cooper’s. Many sources of information, which were not accessible to the earlier writers, and were not much used by the later, were drawn upon in the writing of this book. Moreover, the information that is here presented is of a somewhat different sort from that of previous writers; and the method of treatment is new. …

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