Sea Control - Sea Control 487 - Naval Exploration and Global Empire with Michael Verney

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

A Great and Rising Nation – Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early US Republic, by Michael A. Verney, The University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Hello and welcome to the Sea Control Podcast. I'm Nathan Miller. Today, Jared speaks with Dr. Michael Verney about his book on the U.S.'s early naval exploration. Brian Kalukasulia edited and produced this episode. Here at CIMSEC, we aim to further international maritime peace and security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out CIMSEC.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you would like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab and learn how you can submit articles for publication. Finally, I would like 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.

And on that note, Kimber's Men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, Shemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Michael Verney, and we're going to discuss his book, A Great and Rising Nation, Naval Exploration, and Global Empire in the Early U.S. Republic. So, Michael, welcome. Could you please tell the audience a little bit more about yourself, please? Sure.

And Jared, it's a pleasure to be here with you and talking to your listeners. I'm originally from Massachusetts, and I studied at the University of New Hampshire for all of my graduate work. I graduated with my PhD in 2016, and I had the great fortune of studying under W. Jeffrey Bolster and especially Elijah Gould, both of whom are phenomenal historians who have deeply shaped my theory, my methods, and my approaches to history. And currently, I'm assistant professor of history at Drury University, which is a small Liberal Arts College in Springfield, Missouri. And I'm really very happy to be here. And I have

students who, despite the fact that most of them are Midwesterners, they end up really loving hearing about the sea and pirates and the Navy and whalers and all of the subject matter that you and I and all of our listeners adore. So as a Midwesterner who has spent his adult life on or near the sea, I can definitely understand the impulse, especially if you grew up in like the flat part of the country. Can I ask, was your background always in naval history? Pretty much. I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I had the opportunity to study under Heather Cox Richardson, was my undergraduate mentor. And we focused heavily on 19th century U.S. And I'm really grateful that she encouraged me in studying

maritime and naval history, despite the fact that it's not her main focus. I did an undergraduate honors thesis on the Pacific Theater of the War of 1812, which, of course, I kind of mentioned at the beginning of my book, which was kind of a nice full circle. So really, from a fairly early age, as far as sort of formal education, naval and maritime history have been central for me. All right, I'm going to circle back with you on that thesis afterwards here, because Pacific Theater, War of 1812 is a not-off-discussed thing that I think we'd make for a good discussion at a later date. But as a reminder to the listeners, all opinions expressed today are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So we'll jump into the

book now, Michael and Linda. How did the U.S. initially get into naval exploration? Was there any sort of unifying purpose to the various expeditions that were launched? It's a great question to start with, Jared. So there were, it turns out, 16 of these naval exploring expeditions around the world that were dispatched between 1838 and 1860. Nonetheless, my book opens 1815 and has a chapter on the 1820s. So this is a really important question that you're asking that kind of gets at the heart of the book and also sort of its genesis as a project. U.S. interest in naval exploration originates in this post-war of 1812 moment when U.S. naval officers, army officers, and some statesmen are really feeling emboldened about

their performance in the War of 1812. They feel that they've really kind of held the line against the British. This, in some sense, is America's second war of independence. And, you know, somewhat at sea with sort of the famous ship-to-ship actions of the war, in the War of 1812, but also with the Battle of New Orleans, there's a real sense of pride at having sort of survive in particular moments triumphed over British arms. And that background is important because in the 19th century, there were three qualifications for being a great power in the Western world. One was having pretty significant military strength. Another was economic power being prosperous. A second had to do with cultural sophistication, especially according to Western

civilizational standards, including contributions to art and to science and to literature. those were sort of requirements for being a great power. And then thirdly, there was the diplomatic dimension that you had to be recognized formally as a great power by another great power. And oftentimes that even meant diplomatically that there'd be an ambassador between the country as opposed to just sort of lower level minister. Oftentimes that last part, if you were recognized as a great power, that oftentimes the expectation was that you'd play a role in the balance of powers politics in Europe. And that was not of great interest to Americans. There are some navalists and sort of big Navy people in the 1810s, 1820s. There is sort of a navalist moment

at the war of 1812. But by and large, there's concern about having a huge standing Navy in this period. So therefore, these three sort of qualifications, some of whom Americans are on board with having a prosperous economy, yes, having the esteem of being a great power by the other great powers, but others, they really have no interest in pursuing. And so therefore, what these early explorationists or supporters of U.S. naval exploration come to articulate is that now that the United States has proved its military mettle in the War of 1812, there's an opportunity with the prosperity of the country unfolding to go and seize that second component, that this is a chance if we embark on these voyages of discovery in the same way that the European powers have,

that we will get recognition as a cultural great power with the great powers of Europe. So initially, there's this strong push that has to do with a sense that in order for the United States to be accepted as a modern Western imperial nation, they have to do the kinds of things that those nations do. And they have to embark on similar voyages of discovery as Captain James Cook, in essence. And actually, President John Quincy Adams, who begins this process, is a huge, huge fan of Cook. So initially, naval exploration is a vehicle for cultural diplomacy in regards to Europe. And there's a lot of rhetoric about this being a moment of repaying sort of a cultural debt to European geographers, European explorers, if we can embark the Navy on

this expedition to explore the Pacific Ocean. Those arguments end up crashing and they make some progress. John Quincy Adams as president embraces this in December 1825. In his first annual message to Congress, he says, yes, the Navy should send a public vessel to explore, in his case, the Pacific Northwest coast of North America. And by 1828, that objectives have shifted to the South Pacific to support whalers and sealers. And in May of 1828, the House passes a small bill to send the Navy to go out into the Pacific. But that ends up crashing in 1829. The Senate does not approve of this measure. And what I argue in the book is that that's a pretty important seminal moment because these explorationists initially have been promoting

naval exploration in this high nationalistic diplomatic dimension appeals to national honor and also for international recognition. And what they discover is that appeals to national honor are not enough for these early American Republicanists. Here, I'm interviewing you from the show-me state of Missouri. They want sort of the practical, tangible, pragmatic benefits that are going to come. And so after that moment, what we see is that explorationists change their tactics. And they emphasize that these missions will have tangible benefits in particular areas for key constituencies in the white body politic. And the first of these, I think we're going to talk about, but the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838 to 1842 was the very first

of these official U.S. Navy voyages of discovery. And what I suggest in the book is that they appealed very much to Jacksonian Democrats who were keenly interested in supporting U.S. commerce and U.S. capitalistic development. And by this point, there's enough U.S. economic activity and the South Pacific to really justify seeing it as kind of an extension of the American marketplace, and it needs to be shored up and protected. So we'll talk about some of these other missions. But in essence, what occurs is that naval exploration becomes a potent imperial tool for all kinds of expansionist agendas in the Arab Republic. But there is a common thread that continues. It's no longer quite as dominant until we get to the 1850s of these various Arctic

expeditions. But there's always is some appeals to national honor and some appeals to the idea that Europe is waiting for us to contribute to international science and knowledge. So what was the XX? What was its purpose? And then what did it accomplish? Yeah, so the United States Exploring Expedition was a pretty massive undertaking. And as I was sort of mentioning, it sails in order to try to shore up American commerce, especially in the South Pacific. They are trying to lay claims to U.S. interest on the West Coast of North America. So they do chart and survey San Francisco Harbor, some of the major rivers in California that enter into San Francisco Bay. They do chart and survey portions of the Oregon country coastline and

current day Washington state. So there is a little bit of Western expansion interest there. But most of their time and most of their energy is really spent in the South Pacific. And by the 1830s, there's an enormous increase in American commercial activity, especially through whaling in the South Pacific. And Herman Melville and Moby Dick really kind of waxes poetic that American whalers are like all these famous European navigators in terms of visiting these islands that are uncharted and kind of unknown to the Western world. And there is some truth to that. That's also the case that it is, and this audience especially would know, it's really important to have charts of where you're sailing and to be able to reference them, in addition to

doing celestial navigation or modern day satellite technology in terms of navigation. But in this period, charts are really, really important. And so there was quite a bit of shipwreck in the American whale fishery. There was also some other industries associated with the China trade, like the sea slug industry in the Fijian Islands, that also had some issues with and sort of instances of violence with indigenous Oceanians, indigenous Fijians, that also sort of called loudly for an American response. So really, this is very much a commercially oriented mission. And what they sought to do, this United States Exploring Expedition, and it was a fleet, really, it was like a squadron that was sent out to the South Pacific. What they're trying to do

is they're going to shore up US commerce and protect US mariners and US capitalism through both diplomacy with Oceanian societies, and they actually go through these different major Oceanian societies, and they have them sign these treaties, these regulations governing the rules of commerce. And these are very much like the Indian treaties that especially army officers and other commissioners were signing with indigenous nations in North America, in the sense that the Senate doesn't ratify them, but nonetheless, they're seen as sort of being binding. So they signed these agreements.

They also engage at times in some pretty spectacular violence, counter-violence, or sort of judicial violence. And then most of their time is spent doing cartography. So by the time the XX comes back, the mission's leader and his subordinates end up creating 249 navigational charts for the South Pacific. And these would be sold at basically the cost of printing and engraving at U.S. custom houses. And we have the letters from various U.S. merchants saying these are incredibly helpful for us in being able to chart and sort of navigate places, especially like Fiji, but other areas as well. And then they also do come back, you know, the scientific component continues. So they come back with tens of thousands of scientific specimens. They have scientists on board.

And these will form some of the basis for the earliest collections for the Smithsonian Institution. In fact, the Navy ends up being kind of a founding institution for the Smithsonian there. So that's also a major influence. How is the XX received by the public? Yeah, it's received very poorly in terms of state officials, in terms of government leaders. So, for example, there's no congressional issue of thanks for Charles Wilkes, the commander of the exhibition, or the sailors. When Wilkes, after he comes back from the mission, he visits the White House and he visits President John Tyler. And Tyler does shake his hand, but pretty much ignores him, really doesn't seem to know

who this person is, et cetera. And Wilkes is greatly stung by this. He's one of these classic naval officers who's very, very prickly when it comes to one's honor or reputation. And so what he sets out to do is to embark on a pretty remarkable publicity campaign. And there's kind of two components to it. One is that the other part of sending these voyages out, the other expectation is that there'd be publications that would result from it. So that Wilkes and others, Cook,

Krusenstern, any of these sort of European navigators or American navigators, there is expectation that they'd come back and write a big narrative. And in fact, with the Lewis and Clark expedition, that's one of Jefferson's huge, huge disappointments with his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, that Lewis doesn't write a narrative. He was supposed to, that was expected. That was the other part. It's not enough simply to send an expedition out. You have to come back and provide a history of the mission, and you have to provide sort of scientific findings of the mission. So Wilkes is going to use this as a way to really try to sort of burnish what he sees as the major accomplishments of the mission. So he ends up writing a five-volume narrative about the expedition,

and he's really intent that not only should these be published in a very handsome style by Congress, which they are, but they should also have more sort of middle-class and working-class editions that are able to reach a wide audience. And then another crucial component is to produce all of these scientific volumes. And there's actually 17 volumes, I believe, in total for all of these. So there's many, many scientific volumes. In terms of science, the other thing is that Wilkes wants, as part of the scientific contributions of the XX, he wants to set up a national museum. And he does that. He is able to secure the second story of the U.S. Patent Office, which is now the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and he creates the very first

publicly funded Museum of Natural History in the United States. And in doing so, he is really trying to shape public opinion of this mission, and then I argue future missions also. The white middle class, literate middle class, are not only buying these volumes, his narrative volumes in high, high numbers, and they're giving them as gifts to each other, but they're also going to Washington, D.C., and they're going to this very first publicly funded Museum of Natural History. And Wilkes makes sure that over the entrance to the hall, he has a large banner with gold lettering that says the Collections of the United States Exploring Expedition. So he wants to be very clear about where all these scientific specimens came from. And it was a hugely popular

tourist site. Ralph Waldo Emerson called it the best site in Washington is to go down there. And you can actually access the visitor's registers for the period. And we have tens of thousands of people going to see these collections. So he very much tries to promote both his achievements and the mission's achievements. And I suggest in the book that that ends up very much influencing the broader public to view these missions as being favorable. All right, we're going to move on to the next one. And just for the listeners, we're not touching every expedition that gets mentioned here, but I would recommend that you go buy the book and read them all. I'd like to single out the ones that are like a little more oddball to me. And that was the next one is like,

why did the US launch an expedition to the Dead Sea? And what was the result of that expedition? There's three reasons that we can distinguish for the Dead Sea mission. One is personal. The commander of the expedition, Lieutenant William Francis Lynch, was a conservative evangelical Christian from Virginia. He had a very deeply evangelical mother who died when he was quite young, but still nonetheless made a very big impression on him. And Lynch is born in 1801 at the very sort of start of what historians call the Second Great Awakening, the period where there's a huge flowering of religious revivalism and deep attachment and interest, sort of a very conservative interpretation of American Christianity, even though there's a liberal

side to it as well that I'll talk about. So Lynch, in this sort of cultural context, has the sense that the right kind of Protestant Christianity that holds that the Bible is literal truth is under assault and in danger. And he's concerned partly about Catholic immigration from Germany and especially Ireland. Later on in this period, there's going to be a concern about the acquisition of Mexican territory in the midst of the Mexican-American War of incorporating all of these sort of Mexican Catholics into the country. There's also, and I argue probably most importantly, concern within Protestant Christianity that Lynch has that there was a rising school of interpretation, a sort of a liberal Christian interpretation of those who

subscribe to biblical criticism. This is an approach to studying the Bible that's originating especially in Germany and then coming to the United States. And the tenets of that was that the Bible was a combination of both divine revelation, but also sort of fallible human hands and historical influences. And so therefore, when reading the Bible, one has to not read it as literal truth as a literal history of what truly happened in the past or true revelations from God, but also something that needs to be approached on a symbolic level and on an allegorical level to really understand the true meaning of this. So this is people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who I mentioned a moment ago, Unitarian Universalists,

especially coming out of New England, are seen as being really threatening to the core tenets of what this sort of more conservative brand of evangelical Christianity entails. So Lynch is really concerned about this trajectory. And he also wants to build on the work of the father of biblical archaeology. So there's a man named Edward Robinson who goes to the Holy Land in 1838, and he uses archaeology to really try to prove that the Bible was actual literal history. And Lynch sees an opportunity to follow up on this. And what he wants to prove is that the Book of Genesis account of the destruction of Sodom

in Gomorrah is literal truth, that there were once these prosperous cities of the plain that were then destroyed because they had fallen into sinful errors. They were destroyed by God, and that plain was sunk, and then it was overwhelmed by not only sort of through volcanism, but then later on filled up with water to form the Dead Sea. And he wants to prove that that is literal truth that really, truly happened, and that's going to be a way to refute those who he calls infidel philosophers. So he has this very, very clear objective there. But then sort of another question would be, why did the Navy, the Navy Department, the Secretary of the Navy, why would he approve of something as quirky as this? And Secretary of the Navy, John Young Mason, who's serving under James K. Polk at this time, sees it as a very useful publicity stunt in part for the Navy. That, of course, during the Mexican-American War, it's the army, the Navy plays a role, but nonetheless, it's the army that's really winning sort of these headline battles. Zachary Taylor, the Battle of Buena Vista, Winfield Scott's amphibious operations, where we especially see sort of a naval component, but landing on the shores of Veracruz and then marching overland to capture Mexico City. And that was a feat that earned praise from people like the Duke of Wellington, in fact.

So there's a lot of attention being paid to the army in the next American war. And so Secretary John Young Mason sees this and says, here's a chance for the Navy to get back in the headlines. And then also politically, Democrats like Polk and Mason are really concerned that there's going to be a lot of sort of political capital that these army officers are winning in the war because they're Whigs. Zachary Taylor, Winfield Scott, they're both very open members of the opposing party, the Whig party.

And they're concerned that this is going to translate to Whig electoral success. And it ends up being exactly as they fear, because Zachary Taylor, of course, would win the 1848 election as a Whig, defeating Democrat Louis Cass. So those are sort of three reasons and sort of the origins of the expedition. And of course, what's kind of ironic and fascinating about it is that Lynch needs to rely heavily on Muslim actors, both in Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire. And then also he secures some Bedouin Arab allies in Palestine in order to fulfill this mission. So he's coming in as a very conservative sort of fundamentalist Christian, but he's actually quite adept at forming these intercultural partnerships in the pursuit of his very, very sort of narrow religious goal. What was the genesis and intent of U.S. expeditions to South America? Yeah, so those are far and away the darkest of these missions. After the Mexican-American War, there's increasing concern amongst pro-slavery expansionists that there's going to be less and less opportunity for them to expand the institution of slavery

into the West, if not beyond that. The Navy plays a role in that in terms of arresting prominent filibusters, these private pro-slavery expansionists who are trying to raise armies and invade countries like Nicaragua, northern Mexico, Cuba. At various moments, the Navy actually arrests some of these figures, and there's a big outcry in the South. And they're trying to expand the scope of American slavery. And so especially with the Compromise of 1850, that both introduces, to some extent, the notion of popular sovereignty, but also starts sort of tightening the opportunity for slavery to expand. There's a young naval lieutenant, a very influential one, a Matthew

Fontaine Mori, who's the head of both the depot of Navy charts and instruments, and also essentially in charge of the U.S. Navy's Astronomical Observatory. And he really feels that the U.S. should look even further south than the Caribbean and Central America, that really there could be opportunity to expand U.S.-style slavery into South America, including in some slave-holding empires of the South. The Southern Hemisphere, like Brazil, was already a slave-holding empire. And Morey sort of sees that there could be an opportunity to expand U.S. slavery to the South, particularly by creating colonies, pro-slavery colonies in the South. And part of his vision ultimately is that there'll be steamship lines between Southern ports and places like Para

at the mouth of the Amazon in Brazil. And so what he does is he sends his brother-in-law, William Herndon, a Navy lieutenant, to explore the Amazon River Valley and to come back and report on their feasibility for pro-slavery settlers. As part of this, he's also hoping that there'll be diplomatic pressure applied to Brazil to open up the Amazon to this kind of exploration and settlement. And Brazil, from the very beginning, really knows exactly what Mori's up to. They know that Mori essentially wants to establish these American colonies in the Amazon. And they also know very much about what happened to the Mexican province of Texas when Mexico allowed for that to happen. So they're going to permit this expedition to unfold because they have to. It's

part of the hallmark of being sort of a modern, great sort of Western power to accede to interests of commerce and science. But nonetheless, they're certainly not going to allow for Mori's vision to unfold, and it doesn't. There's also a larger expedition, kind of series of expeditions in the sense, that come after that, that look even further south to the Rio de la Plata region. And there was a U.S., rather than being basically two naval officers and their porters for the Amazon Expedition of the early 1850s. By the later 1850s, there's a U.S. Navy warship, the USS Waterwich, that goes up the Rio de la Plata and explores all of the major tributaries of South America. And the Rio de la Plata watershed, I should clarify, between mid-1850s to up until 1860.

And I argue that those two were also pro-slavery missions. They have other objectives, but at heart, they're really trying to expand slavery as well. But they're going to be much quieter about it because it did not work when they were a little bit too loud regarding the purposes of the Amazon expedition. So they're going to be quieter about their ultimate objective. But nonetheless, that is, in my view, the objective for their missions. So you mentioned Maury, who's kind of a famous Confederate naval officer eventually. I did think it was kind of unusual the number of future Confederate Navy officers who show up in the various expeditions here. Do you think that there is any specific correlation between your release at the time and the reasons for these

forages, certainly like the pro-slavery ones? Or was it just a function of the time period you were studying that people like this were just sort of bound to turn up because the country was divided in that sense? Yeah, wonderful. Good question. I wondered about that too, and I appreciate you raising it. First of all, I should say that the sample size we're looking at, it's not a really big one. You know, there are these 16 exhibitions in the period. Some have the same commander. Some died between the time of their exhibition, the Civil War. So therefore, while we can anticipate oftentimes quite clearly which direction they would have headed, we don't ultimately know. So therefore, what that means is that for those who survived, five commanding

officers would serve in the Confederate Navy, and six commanding officers would serve in the Union Navy. And this is indeed higher than the percentage of the U.S. Navy officer corps as a whole that went south. So that was about 24% went, resigned or fired, were dismissed and joined the Confederate Navy in 1861. So with the caveat, important caveat, that the sample size is small, one way to potentially explain this is that many of the prominent future Confederate naval officers who were involved in these missions are Southern Whigs. And Whigs as a party, this is the party that would eventually produce the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln is very much a steadfast Whig, actually. He takes a long time before he becomes a Republican. But the Whig Party was very

much the party that viewed a more powerful centralized federal government more favorably, particularly one that was directly involved in improvement and elevation of the country nationally and abroad through direct action. They're in favor of internal improvements of building roads and canals across the country, et cetera. And so these officers that become future Confederates are often subscribing to that philosophy. And of course, the Whig Party dies out in the mid-1850s.

It's replaced by the Republican Party by and large. And so they no longer have that orientation, but their ideological commitment to that kind of idea continues. And what's intriguing, actually, is we used to think of the Confederacy as being a kind of anti-statist, more confederated states' right movement. But the more recent scholarship has noted that the Confederacy and the Confederate Constitution actually created a much more powerful centralized government in terms of its foreign policy powers than the U.S. Constitution, That the president under the Confederate Constitution would serve for six years, one term, which gives them a pretty free hand to do what they want to do. Their members of the cabinet could also serve in Congress and the Confederate Congress, and therefore the administration would have some additional leverage in terms of congressional support for their foreign policy, etc. And so that fundamentally, slaveholders would retreat to the old ideological bastion of

states' rights rhetoric, but when they had an opportunity to promote slavery through federal power, they were really, really into it. And I'm drawing very much on the work. There's a wonderful piece of work by Matthew Karp called This Vast Southern Empire, Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy, that deals quite a bit with naval history that I'd recommend to your readers. But I think what we can see here is potentially we have naval exploration being more palatable to Southern Whigs who then become Confederates later on. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Michael Verney.

So the book is called A Great and Rising Nation, Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early U.S. Republic. We'll have a link to it in the show notes on the website. You'll see it's from the University of Chicago Press. Michael, I know you have a promotional code here for folks who want to go check out the book, if you want to drop that in there real quick. Oh, sure. Yeah. For those viewers who are interested in reading this, you could use the promotional code RISING, as in a great and rising nation, all caps, at the University of Chicago website, and you will get 30% off on your purchase of the book. Well, thank you again for coming on today. Michael, where can we find you online, and what are you working on next? Yeah, so you can see me on Twitter,

at Michael Verney. And my next project is a reevaluation of the Perry mission to Japan in the 1850s, largely because one of the missions that I touched on very, very briefly, but consciously left out of the first book, is called the North Pacific Exploring Expedition. And it was the largest voyage of discovery ever dispatched by any Western power. It's by the US Navy. It's this mission to chart the Northern Pacific Rim. So if the USXX was able to chart the Southern Pacific Rim, in essence, especially focused on islands. In the 1850s, U.S. Navy chartered the Northern Pacific Rim, and they paid a special attention to Japan and to create accurate charts of the Japanese coastline. And they're arriving right after the Treaty of Kanagawa. And they're

going to try to push the interpretation of the Treaty of Kanagawa as far as they can. And they have all kinds of encounters with Japanese officials and Japanese peasants in the course of that expedition. So I'm going to be examining that, that really what we think of the Perry mission, we're only hearing about half the story because nobody very rarely knows about this North Pacific exploring expedition that went right after it. Well, I look forward to reading it, what comes out. Maybe we can bring you back and talk about it. But thank you again for joining us, Michael. To listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021

© transcript Emily Beynon