Toll is as insightful about the essential domestic and diplomatic background as he is with his dramatizations of the naval engagements of the new navy, which produced a crop of national heroes such as Stephen Decatur. Besides money, their construction involved politics the Federalists favored the naval program (creating the Department of the Navy in 1798), while Jefferson's parsimonious Republicans were more diffident. It centers on the first vessels purpose-built for the navy, the half-dozen frigates of which the USS Constitution moored in Boston today is the last survivor. Navies are not inexpensive, and the costs of building and maintaining ships appear lightly but persistently in Toll's narrative. Navy's formative decades, from the mid-1790s to the War of 1812, rounds out affairs by anchoring the nascent navy to its financial supports. Not confined to sea battles, Toll's history of the U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |