Modern biographies of Civil War naval officers are relatively rare, especially for those who are not household names like David Farragut and David Dixon Porter. An Officer of Six Navies: The Life of Confederate Commander Hunter Davidson is an excellent book highlighting the life and career of one of the Confederate Navy’s most important junior officers who served aboard the famed ironclad Virginia, led mining efforts on the James River, and helped supply rebel warships abroad.
This book has been decades in the making. Charles T. Jacobs spent years compiling research and files about Davidson’s life and career. When he passed away, those notes and outlines passed to John Coski. Having previously written about Confederate naval activity in Virginia where Davidson spent most of the Civil War, Coski is the best person who could have picked up the project to honor Jacobs’s work and legacy.
This is not a standard Civil War biography where almost every chapter is devoted to the war itself. This is because Davidson’s life encompassed travel in North America, South America, Africa, and Europe as part of six distinct naval or maritime forces: The US Navy and Coast Survey, Virginia Navy, Confederate Navy, Chilean Navy, Maryland Oyster Navy, and Argentine Navy. Of the book’s nine chapters, two are devoted to Davidson’s antebellum service, three to his Civil War time, and four to his postwar activities. Most interesting are the treatments of his time at the US Naval Academy, his time attached to the US Coast Survey, Davidson’s rarely cited account of the Battle of Hampton Roads aboard the ironclad Virginia, his time leading naval forces laying underwater mines on the James River, and his postwar attempts to justify his own actions in the emerging narrative of Civil War history.
While the book follows a standard chronological narrative, Coski does an excellent job of exploring central themes of Davidson’s life including questions of duty, honor, race, and the constant need to provide for his family. Many of Davidson’s choices make sense when weighed against other Confederate naval officers, while others prove quite surprising. Throughout it all, Coski maintains a tone that understanding someone with such a widespread career is important, even if moder readers will not agree with his politics and racial opinions.
Many of Hunter Davidson’s letters and diaries were lost during his life, but throughout the book Coski does an excellent job of parsing through Davidson’s surviving correspondence. Source material encompasses what one would expect in a Civil War biography, including letters from the National Archives, reports in the Official Naval Records in the War of the Rebellion, and postwar writings such as those in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. Coski’s research goes a level above this however, diving into foreign archives and Spanish language documents that most would have missed or not been able to access. The book clearly indicates what is proven fact, what is inferred based on Davidson’s personality, and what remains unknown. The source material and its analysis is nothing short of excellent, as are the maps and included imagery.
This is a book I have been looking forward to for some time, and it did not disappoint, either as a Civil War title or as a biography. John Coski’s An Officer of Six Navies is a most welcome study of a complicated Confederate naval officer. It will be well received by wartime navalists, those studying postwar memory, and those interested in international impacts of the conflict itself.
Neil P. Chatelain is an associate professor of history at Lone Star College North Harris, and the president and editor-in-chief of Emerging Civil War.
