Sea Control - Sea Control 328 - On Wide Seas with Dr. Claude Berube

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

Links1. "On Wide Seas," by Claude Berube, University of Alabama Press, 2021. 

Hey folks, Jared here. Today I'm joined by Dr. Claude Baraby, and we'll be discussing his book On Wide Seas. This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams. We are still looking for audio editors to add to our team, so if you're interested, go ahead and reach out. Our email is seacontrol at simsec.org. Send us your resume. I did want to highlight a couple of developments at the website. In the last few months, we've launched the Flotilla, SimSec's warfying society focused on tactics, and we recently launched our Naval Wargaming Discord. You can find more information at SimSec.org.

Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, the Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello, Hashimates, and welcome aboard Sea Control. My guest today is our old friend, Dr. Claude Baraby. Today we're going to be discussing his new book, On Wide Seas, available pretty much everywhere now. So, Claude, welcome. Would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners again?

Hey, thanks, Jared. Thanks for having me back. And it's always good to talk with you and folks from CIMSEC, where I served on the board of directors a few years ago. So I'm Claude Baraby. I taught at the United States Naval Academy for about 16 years. I'm a commander in the Navy Reserve, intel officer, deployed a few times, including as the N2 on the USS Bunker Hill to the Persian Gulf. I am also an author. My fourth nonfiction book just came out. And my third fiction book, my third novel in the Connor Stark series comes out this fall. and we used to work on Capitol Hill for a couple of senators and briefly for briefly for a member of Congress I've worked for NAVSEA and Office of Naval Research as a contractor I've worked at

Office of Naval Intelligence so I think I I tried to bring the full gamut of 30 years of the Navy experience in intel R&D acquisition and education to to this whole latest book yeah a lot of that bears out here and we'll get into the different elements as uh as we run through the the questions here and hopefully have a broader conversation as well it's actually it's actually kind of funny i i should probably preface this with uh you know when you're going through a book review process with an academic publisher there's always reviewer a and reviewer b and uh i had i ended up having to go for uh a different reason to reviewers a reviewer c and a reviewer d and reviewer d basically said in their statement, you know, this person writes like a naval officer. And I'm like,

okay, that's a good thing, right? And they came back and said, no, you sound like more of an academic. And I said, well, you know, I was truly trying to bring things to this book that a pure academic would not have done. And there's nothing wrong with obviously being a pure academic, But those people would not have had the experience in, again, research and development programs, how investments are made, what goes into the shipbuilding process, the ship design process. And those three or four years that I had with NAVSEA were instrumental in helping me understand the 1830s Navy. So I think it's really important for naval officers to understand where academics are coming from. But by the same token, we're at that academics can possibly learn something from the experience of naval officers. Yeah, and it's always confusing to me as I've interacted with academia when there's feedback is like, oh, this needs to be more academic.

Well, who is your audience? Is it only other academics or are you writing for wider distribution? because I've never written a book, but I would assume that when you write something and put it out into the world, you want the widest possible audience. Yeah, that's a really good point. No, it's a fantastic point. In fact, when you're writing your dissertation

on which this book was based, your audience is really two people, three. You're a dissertation advisor, but then when you go to defend before an internal and external examiner, that's your audience. If they don't approve it, you're done. But I always had at the back of my mind and I kept stories on the back burner that I would eventually use to a more popularized book.

Well, you admitted pretty early on the book that you didn't have a tremendous appetite for any real study of Andrew Jackson, the individual. So why did you decide to research the Navy during his presidency? I assume it had something to do with Robert Remini, because you mentioned him in the book. I read both his books on Jackson, pretty much the foremost Jackson historian. He have something to do with it or was there something else that caused you to look at it? Yeah, there were there were a couple of things. The first factor was I was actually looking at a different topic on Anglo-American naval relations just prior to World War Two. And there were documents at the Naval History and Heritage Command that I needed access to for this one particular admiral. And the person at NHHC would not give me access because they were classified under Kyle Lott.

But long story short is I said, you know what, what do you need in order to let me review these? She goes, well, we really need somebody here to be able to, who has a clearance, who can review it, who, and who has the time. I said, well, you know, I'm a Navy reservist. I'm an intel officer. You guys have a reserve unit. I could just get no cost orders right to here. Wouldn't cost you a dime and I'll look through them for you. And that way we both benefit. And she just looked at me and said, no, we're not going to do that. I was like, okay. So I had to find another topic. My first book, A Call to the Sea, Captain Charles Stewart of the Constitution, spans a period of roughly 1778 to 1865, most of his life. and there was always this one period that seemed like a gap in in naval history and that was the 1820s and 30s so i went back and i ended up writing a uh there was a paragraph in my book

about the ship of the line uss pennsylvania and in 2010 11 i ended up writing a full article about the uss pennsylvania for a magazine and so when i was looking for another topic you know having already gone through one year of my dissertation, thinking I was doing, you know, World War II history, I decided to take a look back at that article. And at the same time, I happened to be reading a book called What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe, prize winner. I mean, this is a phenomenal book of the period 1818 to 1848. But one thing that struck me throughout Howe's book is that he never mentions the Navy. And you would think we weren't doing anything during that period. I mean, he mentions the army, he mentions Congress, he mentions technology,

culture. It's an extraordinary book, but it doesn't mention the Navy. So then I had a meeting with Dr. Robert Remedy, now the late Dr. Robert Remedy. He was historian in Congress at the time that I met with him. And I had a one-hour chat with him. And I said, what's your bottom line assessment of Jackson and the Navy? He said, he didn't like it. He didn't understand it. He didn't use it. And he went on to talk about some other things. Unfortunately, I was able to record the whole thing with his permission. And then I went back into his books and I noticed of the 15 or 16 books that he writes of the period, he never really talks about the Navy. So that's really, it was a curiosity thing. What was happening in

the Navy during this time? Was there anything special? Was it truly a maritime gap in our understanding of the progression of the Navy? And so I tried to answer that question. What was the Navy doing in the 1830s? The result was my dissertation and eventually this book on wide seas. So how did Jackson view the Navy at the outset of his presidency and what sort of Navy did he inherit? He was, I don't want to say he was unfamiliar with the Navy, but he would not have been familiar with it in a way that other presidents had been. Going right back to George Washington, if you look at a lot of the presidents, the first presidents, they had had, they served as ambassadors in Europe? And as a result, how do you go to your posting if you're a minister

or ambassador to Europe? You go by sea at that point. And who is transporting you? It is by and large the United States Navy that's transporting these people. So at least as an ambassador or minister, you would have had some time on a Navy ship watching day-to-day operations, interacting with the officers and crew observing how they behave what what uniforms if any they had how often they were practicing uh you know shooting weapons uh jackson's first view of the navy was actually the british navy when his mother went to tend um wounded and ill soldiers in the harbor of Charleston. And he saw this massive British fleet, very impressionable on a young boy, especially since his mother dies as a result of caring for them. She had contracted the same

disease that many of them had. And then the next time really is during the War of 1812 at the Battle of New Orleans, where Lieutenant Thomas A.P. Catesby-Jones has his flotilla operating, mostly serving a delaying action to General Pakenham's British force, but it gives a lot of time for Jackson to prepare for that seminal battle for Jackson. It's not for the war, really, because the war was ended by then. We just didn't know it. So Jackson was not entirely unfamiliar, but he wasn't really familiar with the Navy. What he inherits in 1829 is a Navy that is now fought in three wars outside of the american revolution i'm talking actual under the constitution of the united states it is it's fought in the quasi war with the french it's fought

the barbary war it fought in the war of 1812 and also sends a force in uh to to uh immediately after under uh with under decatur and uh one squadron under bainbridge for the second barbary War, which is very abbreviated. So, since 1815, this navy has changed. It has changed because now it is deploying squadrons. It is deploying a permanent squadron to the Mediterranean, which wasn't there before. We had served for a long period of time in the Barbary War. It sent a squadron to the Pacific. It is sent a squadron to the West Indies. So now you have a Navy that is progressing in terms of expertise. And that is one important factor. The next is that Jackson immediately comes into the presidency with a jaundiced view of the Adams administration,

the Quincy Adams administration. Because remember, in 1824, a very controversial election, Jackson felt it had been stolen from him. And so he views anything that comes out of the Quincy Adams administration as tainted. He was correct with regard to Navy finances. He appoints a gentleman named Amos Kendall, a political appointee. He had been an editor, no experience really in finances, but he's the one who gets down to the basics on how Navy funds had been misappropriated. He invests in the infrastructure. He invests in pay and personnel. He identifies initial needs of repairs and ensures that money is going to that first. He does not build in initially, but we can get into that about his force structure and how he approaches it.

So those are the, I think, what he inherits. He inherits a more experienced Navy than other presidents had at that point. And he starts to develop his own strategy. And it's based largely on his view of the United States and what he wants to bring to it. He wants to bring financial security. He does so by 1835 when he balances the budget. He wants to expand trade. So number one, he comes up with this – he doesn't actually say it's a maritime strategy.

This is obviously what I'm calling it because I had to see what was his strategy. Did it exist? It existed in three forms. Number one, expand trade, and trade meant maritime trade. Very little trade was done with Mexico and Canada at the time. so uh you that meant you had to expand uh the opportunities for your merchant ships and there are i think are three or four times as many uh u.s merchant ships at the end of his administration as there were at the beginning the second component is that you have to protect those

merchant ships your navy is primarily a coastal defense but you have to provide forward presence but not intervention. And third, you have to respond when necessary. And this is again, where I would take issue with Dr. Remini, where Dr. Remini says that, you know, whenever Jackson sees an affront, he takes action and that's it, even with the Navy. And what I found was not the case. Thanks. You reminded me of another episode. I forgot to write it down here, but how did Jackson actually conduct his transit to the White House on his way to take office? Because I thought that was one of the more, as we have all these ongoing discussions about improving our maritime infrastructure, I thought Jackson's transit was very pertinent to a lot of the discussions we're

having today. Yeah, that was actually really surprising to me. I'd never heard or thought about how he went to his inauguration in Washington, D.C. from his home at the Hermitage. 1,100 miles of it, about 80% of his trip were done by rivers, the riverine system, because that is how you, it was the most efficient and quickest way to get from point A to point B. Granted, it was a rather securitist route, but there was not a road infrastructure, a highway infrastructure that went that far into the United States at the time. So he not only takes a ship by river, it is a steam-powered, actually a series of several steam-powered boats. uh so he is becoming familiar with the importance number one of the riverine system in terms of of trade and internal expansion but now like those ambassadors like adams and quincy adams and jefferson who had gone overseas on u.s navy ships now he's seeing the value of steam

propelled ships and this is very early on in their production i mean between 1825 and 1830 something like 300 people had been killed by steam boiler explosions not not all on i don't think those are all on steamboats but this is very early on in this technology and yet we know that he is going to support this new steam powered technology why because we find in in In directives, Jackson uses steamships during the Second Seminole War. Now, although a steamship had been used before in the West Indies under Commodore David Porter, that was the Seagull, this is the first time that steamboats are used for joint U.S. Navy-Army operations in an actual widened military conflict specifically. in Florida. So Jackson is not some Luddite, but he recognizes that they can be used

when appropriate. It's just that the technology hasn't evolved to the point where you can build all of your ships as steamships. I mean, he actually sends a Navy officer, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie in 1834 to England to basically do intelligence on the British Navy's use of steam warships. At that time, I think they have two or three dozen ships. And Mackenzie comes back with a rather extensive report for the Navy and for the president on what the British are doing. Jackson's presidency coincides with an intellectual awakening for the Navy. So what drove that movement? And then what form did that awakening take? I think it goes back to those officers, the junior officers especially, who are now spending lengthy times deployed.

They are spending time in the Mediterranean, in the Pacific, in the West Indies, off of Brazil and elsewhere. And they're getting off the ship. They're going into these countries that they only read about before. And keep in mind, during the Quasi-War and the War of 1812 and the Barbary War, They're not spending a lot of time on shore because they're conducting military operations. They don't have time for this. But now it's like, you know, Jared, you and I, I mean, you and I have both done deployments. You actually have, you know, ports that you pull into that sometimes you're allowed off the ship, depending on if it's COVID or not, and you are able to do some exploring. And that is exactly what these junior officers are doing. And early in Jackson's administration, a key figure in event happens. And this is Master Commandant Matthew Perry. Before he becomes Commodore Perry of the Japan era, Perry is the executive officer of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. and what he does is on Monday afternoons, noon in his office, he calls in the junior officers and they start talking about issues of the day. This is the genesis of the Naval Lyceum.

The Lyceum movement of the 1820s, 30s was happening all across the Eastern Seaboard. These were part museum, part lecture hall, part library, and you still see vestiges of them today. You can see one in Old Town Alexandria, for example. You can see one in my hometown up in Maine. And they formed this new organization, the Naval Lyceum, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, specifically to talk about the Navy and its role in the world. The officers start bringing back items from across the world. And how do we know this?

Because in 1888, when the Naval Lyceum becomes defunct, All of its collection goes to the United States Naval Academy, specifically to the Naval Academy Museum, which had been called the Naval School Lyceum until then. So you're seeing this intellectual curiosity happen. The second factor is a widening movement of literacy and availability of publications. In the 1830s, with the common school movement, you now have a literacy rate across the nation of about 70, 71%. Secondly, you have a dramatic drop in the price of newspapers, journals, and magazines in the 1830s. I think by a factor of five, it costs like one-fifth of what it had in the previous decade because of new manufacturing techniques and printing presses that were now available in the United States. So with these things, the Naval Lyceum then establishes its own magazine, the Naval Magazine.

And in this magazine, junior officers are writing about rank and pay issues, how to better educate sailors, not just officers, but sailors, how to use steamships in warfare. There are articles about Clausewitz. So it's a real interesting period in understanding. And they're meeting primarily lieutenants and midshipmen, not a lot of captains, Commodores. it's primarily lieutenants and midshipmen who are driving this they are the first what i call the first uh wave of intellectual enlightenment in the navy that where there was some convergence second happens shortly after the civil war and i have argued for more than a decade that simsec is part of that third wave that is happening because why it was founded by junior officers

like scott cheney peters you know that there is a different way of approaching issues that is different than than the decision makers than the establishment and those are those are what will carry uh a successful end to to the navy i think so all of these factors and the other thing is that all of these officers are now writing to each other because they're spending so much time deployed. They are writing to each other on other ships. And those letters, not by and large, but a lot of those letters from key individuals can be accessed today. People like Samuel DuPont, for example, who has an extensive collection, Augustus Ludlow case, another extensive collection. So they're not just writing like, hey, how are you? And hey, I've got a sister.

I'd really like to introduce you to my sister in Norfolk. They are writing about, hey, what's going on with the latest court martial or what's going on with the Marine Corps? I understand they're going to be incorporated in the Navy and et cetera, et cetera. So they are discussing these issues in a way that hadn't been done before. I feel like we could off-ramp and speak for another two hours about the Naval Lyceum and draw parallels to today, but I'm going to pass on that opportunity in this case. And I'll just finish off the Lyceum thing with two very important names, Jared, Stephen B. Luce, Alfred Thayer Mahan. Both of them were members, not in the 1830s, obviously. Luce in the 1850s when he was a midshipman, and then later Mahan. But both of

them are part of this intellectual awakening that is generated by the Naval Lyceum. That has, by the way, I should add, there are foreign officers coming into the Lyceum. There are politicians there are scientists and engineers coming in so it's not just you know let's talk amongst ourselves among the the officers it's let's bring in experts and really educate ourselves then quick follow-up question mahan and loose more or less influential than scott cheney peters well as a historian i would say we have to wait another hundred years okay then we'll know all right it could well be you know the jury is going to be out until we have a proper perspective on this.

All right, I'll let Scott know and our grandchildren can sort all this out. But what was James Fenimore Cooper's role in the Navy's development? So James Fenimore Cooper is one of the early literary greats of the United States. And probably a lot of listeners in high school had to read Last of the Mohegans

or something else by James Fenimore Cooper. What I hadn't realized when I first undertook this was how involved he was with the Navy. He writes the first history of the United States Navy. He writes articles on the Navy, specifically for the Naval Magazine through the Naval Lyceum. Cooper is adding books to ships. He's writing articles on his thoughts on ranks, on manning, on ships themselves. He's talking about the USS Pennsylvania's construction in Philadelphia. He advocates increasing the Navy by 50%. At one point, he's saying, hey, we need to have some sort of battle at Trafalgar against the French, because in 1835, we weren't quite going to war with them. But there were some tenuous diplomatic negotiations going on, and Cooper was in favor of going to war with them and using the Navy in a dramatic battle, which we wouldn't have been able to do at that point.

So, but a larger issue is why is Fenimore Cooper involved in this? Well, he had been a midshipman prior to the War of 1812, but also he's part of this literary movement that is interested in the Navy, and that is a second important component of this intellectual awakening that you asked about earlier, because if it had just been the lieutenants and the midshipmen talking amongst ourselves. It would not have gone further than that, I don't think. What was important was that people like Cooper, literary great Washington Irving is part of this, James Kirk Paulding, who would eventually become Secretary of the Navy himself in the latter part of the decade. All of these literary figures, Joseph Hart, who writes the novel Miriam Coffin, in which he talks

about the ocean being America's great national destiny. So literary figures play a very important role in helping the public understand the Navy in a way that the officers themselves could not have done. Even today, I would argue, you need Hollywood showing movies about the Navy. You need books. Look what Tom Clancy did for submarines, for example, in bringing it into more popular a popular lexicon of what a boomer was you know so it's i don't know where the literary figures are today who are writing i sure try in my novels to talk about the navy but there needs to be that additional component to reach out beyond the echo chamber i think that we have i mean we can you know i'm gonna deviate for just a moment here jared we can you and i and simsec

and other folks can talk about the Navy all day long, the Navy that we love, the Navy we believe in and why we need, we believe it needs to be the most dominant force when necessary in the world. But you don't have a lot of members of Congress saying the same thing. And you sure don't have a lot of the public saying things. So if you don't have the public understanding what the Navy is for or the Merchant Marine, I would argue as well, because that's part of our maritime strategy. then congress is not going to respond to that if if there's an absence and why is that because in the 1830s you had so many americans who were involved in the whaling industry and on merchant ships or in major ports supporting those ships so your average american understood what a ship

was doing for trade and why we needed a Navy to protect that trade. You don't have that immediacy of understanding and prioritization you do today as you did in the 1830s. So I think that's a pretty important way to distinguish that as well. Yeah, that's good. I mean, you and I participate, I think, in a lot of these conversations, some online some offline about how people are advocating for their particular position and the way that they're supporting the organization and I guess the uh the analog piece today is it not necessarily looking for the literary advocate for the navy but the first question I always ask somebody who brings me something that they want to publish it where

are you going to publish this because if you're going to publish it with like I would love if everybody publish with SimSec but SimSec has like a very defined readership as does the U.S. Naval Institute as do these other places like if it's all naval officers reading what it is that you're writing and you're advocating for more that's not going to go anywhere you're talking to the people who already kind of believe the position that you're advocating for so are you are you going to publish with Forbes are you going to publish in the Atlantic some other play one of these other outlets where you're going to reach a wider audience that uh that was what i found is as far as like an analog to cooper's advocacy roles now you have more outlets where you can uh you

can take some of these things more mainstream but uh sorry i've gone off the rails here but um let's go back to uh jackson here tell me about jackson's relationship with his three secretaries of the Navy. A naval historian in the 80s wrote that Jackson's administration and specifically his secretaries had very little vision, very little impact on policy. I disagree with that respectfully in the book and the research. Jackson had three secretaries of the Navy. He actually almost had a fourth. His first choice was John McClain, a longtime politico. He had been postmaster of the United States, which at that time was a very, very senior position in the cabinet. But John McClain had been offered both sec nav and secretary of war at the outset of

the administration in March of 1829. He turned both of them down. He said, no, I don't want those. I want to be Supreme Court justice. So that's the job he held for the next 31 years. then the question becomes from from historical point and i want to tie in the previous presidential administration not the john quincy adams but uh just prior to president biden there was a general feeling in in the white house and among uh president trump supporters that and trump himself that jackson he he had an affinity with jackson that jackson was this take charge guy who wanted to drain the swamp, who wanted to bring people in who weren't part of the establishment. But that was completely wrong, especially with the Navy. Because Jackson

in his two terms had three secretaries of the Navy, all of whom had served in the United States Senate, all of whom had served as governors of their respective states. They weren't anti-establishment. They were the establishment. So he turns to his, when McLean turns him down, he goes to John Branch, who had been governor of North Carolina. And Branch shares his ideas on fiscal reform. We know from Amos Kendall's letters that he was very impressed with Branch's commitment to fiscal reform during that time. He calls them, or Branch calls them derangements in finance with regard to the Navy. Branch's tenure is abbreviated because of the Eaton affair, and your listeners will probably remember Peggy Eaton. She was known as Margaret Eaton. Nobody

really called her Peggy, but Margaret Eaton had married John Eaton, the Secretary of War. There was a question about adultery. There was, in the circumstances in which she married him, because her previous husband had been a purser in the Navy, John Timberlake, And so the wives of the cabinet members basically turned their back on Margaret Eaton at all these society events in DC. So Jackson basically fired half of his cabinet, including John Branch, for their treatment of the Eatons. So when he goes by the wayside, Jackson turns to his second SECNAV, Levi Woodbury, the governor of New Hampshire. Levi Woodbury is interesting because he brings in reforms to personnel, basically a proto-civil service, if you will. Because keep in mind, all positions within the Navy, there were about only 10 real positions in the Department of the Navy. Beyond that, you had constructors, you had designers, you had just other folks, and these were all hired ad hoc.

What Woodbury did is he made these people now subject to congressional regulation and pay. He also invested much more in fleet repairs. He proposed the use of supply ships, which we really hadn't done before. We ended up, the Jacksons administration ended up building a supply ship during that period. And then he goes to the third SECNAF, Malon Dickerson, who was governor of New Jersey. And he is the one who really advocates steam warships as a revolution in defense of the United States. They had already considered Commodore James Barron's design of a steam-powered, tri-hulled, double paddle wheel ram ship. Didn't have any guns, but the paddle wheels were between the three hulls to protect them from any fire.

It would have been a really interesting ship. It was never built. It was very close to being funded. They ended up going with the Fulton II. But those are the three that you have. And then the next one that comes into the Van Buren administration is James Kirk Paulding, who I mentioned before, a literary figure and, you know, is the first. I don't know if George Bancroft, a teacher, a history teacher and a writer from Massachusetts who had been part of this common school movement in the United States. I don't know if he would have been Sekhnav or considered for it if Paulding hadn't been there first.

Can you tell me any more about the supply ship that you mentioned? I was the first time hearing that, and I just have a hard time conceptualizing how a supply ship would be different at that point in time from a warship, other than just installing the spaces for all the cannons. yeah i mean you would have had more space specifically for uh for supplies i wasn't able to track down a uh the original design for what was called the supply uh you know it wasn't just a supply ship it was called the supply um but it would have probably been a lot beamier uh more much more like probably an east indiaman uh the hull would have been had a deeper draft uh far beamier more look if you would have taken out of the water an east indiaman looks pretty boxy whereas if you take the the constitution out of the water uh you know she's got a a length to to beam ratio a little longer than an east indiaman a little more streamlined um so uh some

design differences that i can we can assume that that ship would have entailed wouldn't have been as fast, but it was designed to provide support to the Pacific Station specifically. So how did the Navy's infrastructure change over the course of the Jackson administration? One of the things Jackson does is he continues the policy of Adams, not only in terms of the ships remaining on station, he ends up having an additional squadron posted to the East Indy Station in his second administration. The first two years, he focuses on maintenance. He takes that budget and he looks at what ships are working, what ships aren't working, what he needs to build in the future. He wants to make sure that his fleet is operating optimally,

and that means reinvesting in it. He, as I mentioned before, by 1835, he has a balanced budget. So by then he's able to increase money for more ships. I'll mention the shipbuilding in just a second. He continues the construction of the Navy, the first Navy's dry dock in Norfolk. He then supports a second dry dock in Boston, in Massachusetts. So what he does is he realizes that But there are very high deployment rates on these ships. A ship of the line, which we had a 74-gun ship of the line and later a 120-gun ship of the line during this period, they only had 17% deployment rates. The frigates, about 40%. The sloops and schooners, about 80% to 90% of the time they were stationed overseas. So that means they're taking a lot of pounding. They are high-value assets in terms of presence. So he invests far more in ship repairs. In 1829, for example, he put in $430,000 for his budget for maintenance and repairs.

The next year goes up to $590,000. Now, for us, that doesn't sound like a lot. But when you've only got a budget of $3 million, that's about 12% to 15% of your Navy budget going into maintenance and repairs. And by 1837, he's now investing $1.2 million out of the budget for maintenance and repairs. So he leaves the Navy much stronger than he received. And it's not just that he's repairing these ships. He's building ships in a way that other peacetime presidents before him hadn't. For example, if you look at the number of commissioned ships from 1798 to 1837, the average built annually was 2.3.

Jackson built 2.1 on average every year. However, if you remove the wartime years during that period, during peacetime, the average was 1.4. Compare that to Jackson's 2.1. This is somebody who really didn't have to build a Navy, but understood the purpose of it to fight the enemy abroad before you had to fight them at home. He's really one of the first who really gets this. I mean, Jackson ends up building 17 ships out of the 91 total that were built during this four decade period. I'm excluding the Jefferson's gunboats for obvious reasons. I'm talking about ships that can go overseas. And I didn't include the Great Lakes ships either during the War of

1812, because they were contained and unable to do trans-oceanic operations. So I think that's really important understanding in his commitment to these. And he had to, I mean, you think about some of these ships that he inherited, four of the first six frigates were still operational by the time, and this is 30, 29, 30, about 29, 30 years that these ships have been going on. In the first year of his administration, he ends up losing two ships, one, the Fulton, also known as the Demolagos, which is destroyed because the ammunition went off accidentally. And the Hornet is lost. The Hornet, a very famous ship from the War of 1812, that ship goes down in a hurricane off Tampico, Mexico. So I think the investments that he makes,

the infrastructure support, the increase in pay and personnel, all of which contribute to A Navy that was, this wasn't quite the birth of the Navy, but this was certainly the very strong teen years in which they're just about to reach adulthood. You also devoted quite a bit of time to talking about the professionalization of the Navy, which kind of begins in this period and then continues through the Civil War. But how did that change over the course of the Jackson presidency? You start to see a couple of things happening. The breakout of ranks, you start to see the evolution of schooling. There had been schools at the various Navy yards. The most prominent one was probably New York, followed by Norfolk. In fact, in New York, the president of what was then Columbia College is now Columbia University, William Dewar, offers to Commodore Chauncey, the commander of the Navy Yard, hey, if you want to have your midshipmen come over to Columbia and take some classes, you're more than welcome to. And I've once said that this is probably the first concept of an ROTC billet. Dewar himself had been a midshipman at the turn of the century.

Unfortunately, he had to leave because he had stabbed and threatened to murder another midshipman. So I think maybe this was a way for him to pay it back. But you also start to see a breakout of the medical profession, the improvements there. You have surgeons like William Barton, who ended up writing books about medicine, in part Navy medicine. He's the guy who starts using lime and lemons to fight scurvy for the Navy. And again, now that the Navy is operating in other places, Africa Squadron, Brazil Squadron, West Indies, you're going to encounter tropical diseases in a way you wouldn't have during, say, the War of 1820, how you respond to these new environments. Barton is the first to advocate for employment of female nurses for the Navy. Commodore Barron himself has a patent through a series of large bellows for ventilation there's a Navy doctor who performed surgery on Andrew Jackson in fact Jackson goes to the White

House one morning and he had this musket ball in his in his pistol ball in his shoulder I think it was or his arm from a duel two decades before he goes to the office goes down to the Washington day Navy yard, I guess around noon or one o'clock has a surgery doesn't have, he's not knocked out or anything. They didn't have anything back then. And then a couple of hours later, he's working back in, in the white house. Uh, in February of 1837, you start to have proposals for a medical core of the U S Navy. You have a chaplain service that is now evolving as a professional part of the Navy. Before it had only been a captain wouldn't, if he had a frigate or a ship of the line, he would have to have a chaplain aboard. They may have one on a sloop or schooner, but on

a sloop or schooner, you wouldn't have a, you wouldn't be big enough for a school, having a schoolmaster. So you would have a chaplain double as the schoolmaster. And of course the chaplain wouldn't know about engineering and mathematics. So you, there was a problem there. And so the sorry, the lieutenants and the midshipmen of the Naval Lyceum see this, and they understand that STEAM is what is going to propel us literally and figuratively in the future. We need to understand that, and we can't do that individually on ships. What we need is a collective school where we all have the same baseline understanding of these courses. So they are advancing this cause for a naval academy that won't be established because of this logical

reasoning that the midshipmen have and the lieutenants have. It's eventually established out of the political and public outcry over the 1842 mutiny on the USS Summers, in which a midshipman, the son of the Secretary of War, and two sailors are executed summarily by Alexander slide on McKinsey. So even though they had the real reason. So here is, excuse me, again, why I think you have this professionalization. You also have changes in the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps, you know, it's kind of funny when you read some of these letters, they were considered to be the dregs of humanity back then. It was a very different Marine Corps than we're accustomed to today. And there were high rates of courts martial for desertion,

drunkenness and subordination. I will say that the same numbers were true for the army as well. And in 1830, Jackson wanted to dispense with the Marines and just include them in army artillery and infantry units. And naval leadership itself was divided. Half of them wanted them, half of them didn't. People like Commodore Stewart, who was commander of the Constitution during the War of 1812, was a strong advocate for having Marines remain with the Navy because his lieutenant during his greatest battle against the Cyan and Levant in February of 1815 was a young Lieutenant Archibald Henderson. Archibald Henderson would end up serving as the longest, he was the longest serving Marine Corps Commandant. And during this time, he is

in the 1830s, the Commandant. What ends up happening is you have the 1834 Act for the better organization of the Marine Corps. What does it do? Number one, it puts the Marine Corps under the Department of the Navy. Second, it promotes Henderson to colonel. Third, it increases the size of the Marine Corps by 40%. It reduces the enlistment periods, and it makes them subject to the same regulations as the Navy. So those are just a few of the personnel changes that happens during this period. Well, unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Claude Baraby. So, Claude, you told us we can find you online at C.G. Baraby. I'm aware that the next Connor Stark novel is coming out later this year. Can you tell

us sort of a little plot synopsis of what we have to look forward to with that, and when do you expect it to be out? Sure. I expect it to be out this fall. It is the third book in the Connor stark series it and the first two will actually be a revised version uh revised second second editions will be released simultaneously with them and uh this one the first one dealt with the gulf of aden and somali piracy and yemen the second one dealt with sri lanka and the tamil sea tigers this one will deal far more directly with china and the south china sea uh in a very Connor Starkey way. And I'm currently working on the draft for the fourth Connor Stark novel right now. I'm also working on a couple of Navy history books as well, but those are longer term projects

and it's a lot more fun to write the novels than I think the history books. Yeah, absolutely. We look forward to seeing those out later this year. Thanks to listeners. Thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Oh, help me, oh, my, believe me, I believe. Why, why, believe me, I believe. Help me, oh, my, believe me, I believe. Put it on the ship, oh, now.