“War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865” by James M. McPherson

In McPherson’s view, the Union’s “much maligned blockade” of cotton and the money-starved Confederates’ emphasis on shipping cotton bales through the Caribbean islands and thence to Britain are main themes of the blue -water conflict. But McPherson also argues for a fuller appreciation of the “brown water” navies, particularly on the Union side. The Union’s greater facility for building shallow-draft gunboats and coordinating their movements with ground-warfare and transportation needs was largely the work of one man, Foote, a Lincoln favorite who died of kidney disease in 1863. McPherson shows that in a fairer world, this Connecticut Yankee, who could “pray like a saint and fight like the devil,” would rank near Farragut in postbellum fame.

Fans of glorious Rebel tidbits will appreciate the credit given Confederate Navy Secretary Stephen R. Mallory’s “strategy of countering Northern naval superiority with Southern ingenuity.” The result was a technological head start for the South on saltwater ironclads and submarines. One of Mallory’s two submarines scored history’s first sinking of a surface ship by an underwater craft. His Confederate Submarine Battery Service also put out thousands of mines; these were the “torpedoes” that Farragut may have damned.

(Univ. of North Carolina) - ’War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861-1865’ by James M. McPherson

A crewman near Farragut on his flagship at Mobile heard no such words when Farragut ordered the ship forward. There’s no dispute, however, that he personally led the fleet into harm’s way and lashed himself to the USS Hartford’s rigging as it passed under the guns and snipers at Fort Morgan. With worse luck, McPherson reminds us, the hero of Mobile Bay could have wound up martyred like Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar.

McPherson has spiced his book with lots of true but largely unexploited facts and vignettes. His summation seems imminently fair: “To say that the Union navy won the Civil War would state the case much too strongly. But it is accurate to say that the war could not have been won without the contributions of the navy.”

bookworld@washpost.com

Howell Raines , a former executive editor of the New York Times, is working on a novel set in the Civil War.

WAR ON THE WATERS

The Union and Confederate
Navies, 1861-1865

By James M. McPherson

Univ. of North Carolina. 277 pp. $35