Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War.

Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War. By Michael J. Bennett. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xviii, 337. $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2870-X.)

The American Civil War was overwhelmingly a land war. Millions of men were enlisted in the Union army, participating in battles that were Napoleonic in scope and intensity. By contrast the federal navy mustered only some 51,500 bluejackets at the peak of its strength in 1865. Even this small number represented a dramatic expansion from a prewar strength of 7,600 enlisted sailors. Relatively little is known about the social history of these men, a deficiency that Michael J. Bennett has attempted to rectify in a searching and exceptionally well-documented volume. In doing so, he has discovered that Union sailors had very different motives for enlisting in their service, came from markedly different backgrounds, endured exceptionally harsh conditions, developed only a very limited camaraderie with each other, and had a much more strained and distant relationship with their officers than men serving in the land forces. Conditions were so bad in the navy that when the call went out for experienced seamen to enlarge its ranks New England fishermen ignored it almost to a man and flocked to join their state's volunteer regiments. They well understood that the soldier boys would become the heroes and darlings of their communities, while the sailors would be strangers and outcasts.

These calculations were fully justified by tradition and contemporary practice. The navy was a remarkably authoritarian institution known for harsh punishments and minute regulation of personal behavior aboard ship coupled with incredibly debauched conduct and riotous behavior ashore. Only the officers were really "in" the navy. Seamen and stokers enlisted for individual commissions, normally three years in duration, after which they were discharged and largely forgotten. They were drawn mainly from the coastal cities' unskilled working class, recent immigrants, social misfits, and, later in the war, draft dodgers.

The ships they joined were in the midst of technological transformation. Sail power was slowly giving way to steam, but little improvement in living conditions had been realized. Mess decks were as dank, crowded, and lacking in creature comforts as they had been in the days of Truxton and Preble. The newfangled engine rooms were hot and rank with coal dust and tallow lubricants. No real improvement had yet been made in the sailors' diet, so salt beef, hardtack, and beans appeared with monotonous regularity.

The infernal institutional conditions on board navy ships were further aggravated by a hell of the sailors' own making. The old hands brutally hazed the newcomers, subjecting them to cruel pranks and social isolation. They deliberately withheld knowledge while bitterly castigating the green hands for mistakes. There was no formal training regimen, and supervision by the officers was punitive and often incompetent. Shore leave was infrequent, and, when it was granted, the men got completely out of control, returning to the ship sodden drunk and bearing the marks of nasty barroom brawls.

Michael Bennett has described all this and more with remarkable documentation and attention to detail. Indeed, his endnotes and sources occupy fully one-third of the entire volume. Buried in the notes are some fascinating additional facts and insights that this reviewer would have preferred to see included in the main body of the text, but aside from that there is little to fault in this valuable new addition to the social history of the navy.

Delaware State University 

JAMES E. VALLE