Admiral
Franklin Buchanan

Fearless Man of Action

by
Charles Lee Lewis
Associate Professor
United States Naval Academy

The Author and the Book

Charles Lee Lewis was born March 7, 1886 in Doyle, Tennessee. He graduated from Burritt College with a B. S. degree, then from the University of Tennessee in 1906 with a B. A., which he followed up with an M. A. from Columbia University in 1911 (Master's thesis: The early 'Gothic' and evidences of its influences in the poetry of William Collins), then going on to teach briefly in several small colleges in the United States and Europe, before finding his professional home as the professor of English and history at the United States Naval Academy (1917‑1951).

I've been unable to discover the date of his death: despite what one sees in multiple places online, he did not die in 1951, but he lived well after his retirement from the Naval Academy that year, until at least September 1962. His personal papers are preserved at the U. S. Naval Academy and at the University of Tennessee.

He was a prolific writer, almost exclusively on naval topics. His most important published works are naval biographies: the one you are about to read, and

His other books include:

To these may be added several booklets; those I find traces of online are:

He also wrote poetry but it seems to have remained unpublished.

Being prolific has its pitfalls. Lewis's books tend to be serviceable, even pretty good, as to the naval careers of his subjects, but give short shrift to the wider, non-professional aspects of their lives. In a review of The Romantic Decatur in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 62:105‑107, Marion Brewington pointed out that Lewis did a good job of accessing convenient major sources and collating them, but missed a whole deeper set of primary sources which time-consuming research would have ferreted out, altering Lewis's conclusions and enriching the book; as I worked on Buchanan (and before seeing that review), I grew very much to suspect something of the kind here, although I'm no naval historian and can't back up my impression.

One thing is quite certain, though: although we have a solid, readable account of Buchanan's naval career, Lewis fails to cover such aspects of his life as the man's character, except here and there in passing — Buchanan seems to have been something of a hothead and a martinet — or his personal relations, his finances, his religion, and in general, what made him tick. So to a reader seeking information on Buchanan's rôle in American history, the book is much more than satisfactory; if we want to learn about the man, the book is something of a failure. (In fairness, there is a mitigating factor. In order to access valuable sources and obtain irreplaceable first-hand oral history, Lewis sought and got the coöperation of many of the Admiral's family members, who are credited in his preface and thruout the book: he must no doubt have felt constrained, maybe even by explicit agreement, as to what he could reveal or how he could evaluate the man.)

Foreword

Franklin Buchanan, entering the Navy as a midshipman on January 28, 1815, had thirty years' service and was a prominent officer when he was selected by George Bancroft, then Secretary of the Navy, to be the first Superintendent of the Naval Academy. Bancroft said of him that "Commander Buchanan, to whom the organization of the school was entrusted, has carried his instructions into effect with precision and sound judgment and with a wise adaptation of simple and moderate means to a great and noble end." The foundation so firmly laid has been the base on which all succeeding superintendents have builded. Throughout a long and varied career, Buchanan gave himself freely, completely, and with great ability to the tasks assigned, following fearlessly and with whole-hearted devotion the path which he believed to be right.

S. S. Robison

Rear Admiral, U. S. Navy

Superintendent, U. S. Naval Academy

Annapolis, Maryland

October 17, 1929.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Technical Details

Edition Used

These webpages transcribe my copy of the original 1929 edition, bearing the notice "Copyright 1929, The Norman Remington Co."; but the work is now in the public domain because the copyright was not renewed in 1956 or 1957 as then required by law: details here on the copyright law involved.

Illustrations

The printed edition includes 32 illustrations: engravings, lithographs, a few photographs, all black-and‑white except for the frontispiece; the others are tipped in on glossy paper next to the relevant text. In this Web transcription, not being constrained by print limitations, I've moved a few of the illustrations by a page or two to what I felt were more suitable places. I colorized almost all of them to navy blue, as I've done with almost all the illustrations in my Naval History site: the exceptions are the photograph of Adm. Buchanan in his Confederate grey uniform (facing p198), where it seemed inappropriate; and the pair of maps found on the pastedowns, in two identical copies, on the front and back covers, which I colorized for readability according to my usual scheme.

The table of illustrations above is from the printed edition. It did not include the maps. I added them to the table.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents below, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree; a red background would mean that the page had not been proofread. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was remarkably well proofread. The inevitable typographical errors were very few, and all trivial: I marked them with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the underscored words to read what was actually printed. Where a correction didn't lend itself to that treatment because it conflicted with HTML, it is marked with a bullet like this.º Similarly, glide your cursor over bullets before measurements: they provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked. They are also few.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is a cropped detail of the frontispiece.

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