 Thank you all for coming, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great honor to be here, and especially in the room where Mahan gave his lectures. I was trying to quickly, and not entirely successfully, reread my book for the last couple of days, so I'd be really on the ball today. But I found a line from Mahan that's a great opening line for my talk today. It's when he responded to Admiral Luce's invitation to come and give lectures on naval history at the War College, which was then only still in the planning stages. And Mahan wanted the job very badly, but felt he wasn't qualified or wasn't sure if he was qualified for what Luce wanted. And he wrote back, I fear you give me credit for knowing more than I do. So that's kind of my opening remark today. And I say that because I'm not really a naval historian. My specialty is American religion, history of American religion. But I've always been interested in military and naval history for many years, going back to when I was a kid. But I consider that more of a hobby, not a professional specialization. But the two came fortuitously together when I got interested in Mahan and his religious beliefs and his religious writings. And even though John Hattendorf's left, so I won't embarrass him, but I want to say this anyway. He was a tremendous help to me in getting me started. And when I was just thinking about this project, and maybe I ought to sort of drop what I was doing and pursue it. And I didn't know him well, but I'd met him at several naval history symposia. And I knew he, like myself, was an active Episcopalian. So we had a lot in common, but just I called him one day, found his number. Luckily he was in his office and had time to chat. And we talked about this, and I asked him, did he think this project, a project is looking into Mahan's religion and his religious writings, which were numerous, was worth pursuing. And John said, and this is very, very flattering, but I was very encouraged by it coming from such a distinguished historian. As John Hattendorf, he said, this project is long overdue, and I think you're the ideal person to do it. So thanks, John. And as I say, very, very flattering. I'm going to go about 40 minutes and then leave time for Q&A. Let me tell you a little bit about how I got interested in the book, or in this project, and also say a little bit about why Seger's book is so bad. And then give you time permitting one or two examples. I also want to talk a little bit about Mahan's father and uncle, who were very important in his development, both militarily and religiously. And then time permitting, maybe give an example of some of the theological slash political controversies that Mahan got into in print during his retirement years. As I say, I was always interested in naval and military history. I knew who Alfred, say, or Mahan was in his important book. I knew that influences sea power in history, but I really didn't know much about him. And at some point I saw Seger's biography for sale, and I bought it thinking I would learn a lot. I did learn a lot, but in a different way than I intended. Let me ask, how many have read Seger's biography? It came out in 1977. Okay. Well, it became the, I don't want to, I have to, not to succumb to temptation to make my speech an anti-seger rant, but the book still considered, even though it's getting on to 40 years old, really the definitive biography, there hasn't been one since. But it's terribly flawed, but I read it in a state of innocence, as it were. And I just found it really puzzling, and I came away very unsatisfied, that I didn't really know Mahan better than when I started, although there were lots of interesting little factoids in there. But when I got into research in Mahan's papers, some of which were published, edited by Seger and Doris McGuire, but also I did come up here and do research in the library here, see his papers in the Flesh as it were. And I began to see that Seger's view was really inaccurate, is putting it charitably. I don't know if the gentleman who read the book remembers or would concur or not, but Seger intensely disliked Mahan. Okay, I was seeing nodding, yes. And the more I got into Mahan's papers myself, I began to see some real problems here. And I don't want to belabor the point, but I think Seger got a free pass from most book reviewers, and that's understandable because if any of you review books, you know, there's Royce on a deadline, a time deadline, and we're not going to examine every footnote and check it out. We give the author the benefit of the doubt, and I think most reviewers did that with Seger's book. But as I found doing my research, he just got so many things wrong, whether this was deliberate or not, I couldn't possibly say, whether it was just carelessness or what. But he put everything that Mahan did from birth to death, you know, from significant things to really trivial things, Seger put everything in the worst possible light to show Mahan as this really bad person, and these are sort of Seger's words, racist, arrogant, elitist, wanting Anglo-Saxons to dominate the lesser peoples of the world and this sort of thing. Well, my book wasn't written for the express purpose of refuting Seger. I wound up having to counter many things he said because the sources just did not back him up. Often he misread the sources, again, whether deliberately or not I can't say. And I wound up, as I say, criticizing Seger quite a bit in my work. But I'm not going to, as I say, I'm not going to belabor that any further. I found Mahan very interesting, and the reason I wanted to do this project was when I found out he had a whole extensive body of work, mostly from his retirement years, writing for publication on religious topics in religious periodicals, but also in the secular press as well, giving speeches, again, both to church groups and to military groups, other secular groups, and getting involved in some very interesting battles fought out in print. And nobody had really done anything with this body of literature at all except for Seger a little bit, and he always put a bad spin on it. All those bad adjectives I just mentioned, that Seger called Mahan, he blamed that all, all those bad traits he blamed on Mahan's religious faith. So make of that what you will. People have speculated about it. If you read the Dust Jacket of Seger's book, it says he was the child of missionary parents in China. So whether this is some kind of rebellion against his upbringing or what, I'll leave that to the psychiatrist to figure that out. But I thought the only author who's dealt with this at all, Mahan's religion at all, has done so in a really shoddy and careless way. So that was the reason I called John Hattendorf that day back in, I'm guessing it was 1996 or so. So that was my project. It took me a long time because I pretty much only worked on it in the summers. But here it is, and it finally made it to print, and I'm happy to say it's causing some buzz in naval circles, and I have gotten a number of speaking engagements out of it. So let me say a little bit about Mahan's father, whom some of you, if your military history buffs may know, Dennis Hart Mahan, who was a legendary professor at West Point from the mid-1820s until his death in 1871. And amazingly, there's never been a full-length bibliography published on Dennis Hart Mahan. There was an excellent dissertation done in the 60s, I think, by an army general named, is it Grease or Grice? Grease. Grease, okay. I never met him in person, but I did correspond with him, and he was very helpful to me also. He wrote an excellent dissertation on Dennis Hart Mahan, why it was never published. I don't know. It should have been, and I'm sure the military history community would have benefited greatly from that. But Dennis Hart Mahan, I devote introductory segments of my book, one to Dennis Mahan and another to Alfred's uncle, Dennis's younger half-brother named Milo Mahan, who was an Episcopal priest. But let me just say a little bit about Dennis Hart Mahan and then we'll go to Milo again briefly. Dennis Hart Mahan, again, if you're a Civil War buff or a military history buff, I'm sure you are familiar with him. He was a professor at West Point for so long and during those crucial pre-Civil War years that he taught virtually everybody who was, well, any West Point graduate who wound up in either the Union Army or the Confederate Army and a number of Civil War scholars, again in articles, not books, often talk about what influenced his teachings on strategy and tactics and so on, may or may not have influenced the Civil War, battles in which his students fought. Again, I don't really have the expertise to get into that and I don't attempt that, but Dennis Mahan is also a very interesting person. St. Patrick's Day, Dennis is the son of virus immigrants, although Dennis himself was born in the U.S., and he was, by trade, he was a military engineer. But he, except for a very brief couple of months assignment elsewhere and then four years in France as a young professor, he got what was supposed to be like a one-year leave of absence stretched into four, where he studied military engineering with the French who at the time were considered the best military engineers in the world. Then he came back to West Point and remained there the remainder of his career. And he's famous in his own right, again in military history circles, and often at that time, I'll just mention this, I guess showing an intellectual pedigree here. There weren't even military engineering textbooks in English, and Dennis Mahan translated himself books from French into English, and then he wrote a number of military engineering textbooks that were used at West Point. And as they say, he had a tremendous impact on students, and it was quite a character. I tell some, what I thought, kind of interesting anecdotes here. He was a very tough professor and broke no nonsense. But one of my favorite remarks comes from William Tecumseh Sherman, who later became friendly with Alfred, more in a professional sense than a personal sense. But Sherman was quoted as saying that even as a general, he still used to have nightmares about showing up for Mahan's class unprepared. So that gives you a little indication right there. Another interesting thing I found out was that, and this amazed me too, but it gives you an example of how, in what a steam Dennis Mahan was held, even during the Civil War, and Dennis, even though he grew up in Virginia, was a staunch unionist and staunch Lincoln supporter, he would actually write to his graduates only on the Union side, that he considered the Confederates traitors, but the West Point alums on the Union side, he would, Grant and Sherman being the most prominent obviously, but others too, he would actually write to them, asking them to basically turn in homework, send him analyses of the battles they had just won. And amazingly they do it. How they had time I don't know, but they still hold him in such awe, and maybe you're even afraid of him still, that they actually do it. The guy is, you know, the overused word today, but I'll use it. The guy was awesome. Also he became a staunch Episcopalian, and brought up his children that way, Alfred was the eldest. There were three boys, Alfred had two younger brothers, Frederick who went in the Army, Dennis Jr. who went in the Navy, and then there was one sister who lived to adulthood, and the other sisters that died young. So Alfred gets not only a very solid Episcopal upbringing, but also this tremendous intellectual patrimony from his father. But he's also strongly influenced by his uncle, whose name was Milo Mahan, 17 years younger, he was half brother, they had different mothers, 17 years younger than Dennis. And Milo becomes an Episcopal priest, and was also quite an intellect, and he became a professor of church history at the General Theological Seminary, which was the Episcopal Seminary in New York City, where he taught for many years. And Alfred gets a lot from him too. When Alfred goes to an Episcopal prep school, named St. James, which still exists in Hagerstown, Maryland, when he's like 14, 15, and then he comes back home, and then for two years goes to Columbia University. So he's still very young, only like 15, 16, and during that time he lives with Milo and his family in New York City, and they become very close, the nephew and uncle. One of the things I get into in some detail in the book is their relationship, and how Milo, even after Alfred goes to the Naval Academy, serves in the Civil War, and then continues as an officer, Alfred becomes very... he sort of goes through a brief irreligious period at the Naval Academy, and then after graduation and Civil War service, he gets really serious about his religion, and then goes on a three-year voyage on a ship called the Iroquois, where they go to the Far East, spend a lot of time in Japan. And that's the only time Alfred Mahan ever left a diary. It's not complete, but it covers... The first year's diary is missing, but the second two years of the Iroquois voyage, they're here at the Naval War College in the library, and they're also published in the letters and papers. And you can see from this how as Alfred is sort of struggling to get into a right relationship with God, he relies on his uncle, and I guess communications must have been adequate in that day, maybe more than we think, but his uncle gave him a sort of directed reading list. And so Alfred read... I think long stretches of this voyage must have been very boring, and even though Alfred was the XO on the ship, he had a lot of free time, and he was basically reading theological works and, of course, studying the Bible. Again, based on a reading list that his uncle sent him, and then he would correspond with his uncle about the books and ask questions and so on. Unfortunately, the correspondence, apart from the diary, is missing. But we do have the reading list, and I even ran it by the current professor of church history at general, who still fills the chair that Milo Mahan once filled, and I ran the list by him. And what's interesting about it is that it's quite eclectic. I'm only mentioning this to show that, again, contrary to what Seger said, presenting Alfred Mahan is so rigid and narrow-minded, his reading list was quite extensive, not just in people, not just in theologians Uncle Milo approved of, but also in people who had differing views. This is a very heady and controversial time in theology. Darwin had published in 1859 Origin of the Species, and that was sort of like to some people throwing a grenade into the Christian religion. There was something called, I'll use the air quotes here, higher criticism, something coming out of Germany, a way to interpret the Bible where you didn't, you didn't take anything literally, and you viewed it as just another ancient misdocument. But what I thought was interesting is that Milo has Alfred read sort of across the board, people he disagreed with as well as people he agreed with, and I think this really pays off in later years when Alfred gets into theological quarrels, sometimes with clergymen, Alfred can more than hold his own theologically. He knows the Bible backwards and forwards, and he's read all these theologians, so no clergymen can say, literally or metaphorically, to Alfred, well I went to seminary and you didn't, but it was basically his uncle through his directed readings provides Alfred with what I would consider really sort of the equivalent of a seminary education. So as many, I shouldn't say many, as some clergymen learn to their dismay in the early 1900s, you take on Alfred Mahan as a theological opponent at your own risk. But both Dennis and Milo have tremendous intellectual and religious influence on Alfred as well. Let me say a little bit about some of Alfred's religious ideas as we read them in the early 1900s. As I say, in his Seapower books and other naval books, he's pretty scrupulous about leaving religion out of it. Except for a few things like in his biographies of Farragut and Nelson, he'll talk about his subjects, religious beliefs, but he doesn't like bringing religion into the Seapower series, for instance. But in his retirement years, he began to publish quite a bit about religion. He becomes a regular contributor to an Episcopal newspaper called The Churchmen, and it started out as, this was not an official church publication, but it seemed to have had a pretty wide circulation, especially among movers and shakers in the Episcopal church, both clergy and laity. Alfred starts out writing letters. He's been a regular subscriber for years. It comes out weekly. Even abroad, he gets back issues shipped to him. So he's up to date on everything that's all the religious quarrels that are going on at that time. Anyway, he starts out just writing letters to the editor, and then the editor asks him, eventually asks him, can you do a book review for me? And he does book reviews. And then he's finally asked, we write an article, and he becomes a regular contributor of articles to The Churchmen. And these were fascinating. Read about them in the book. And no scholar had even looked at these. So this was really all virgin territory for me, so I was glad to be the one to get into it. Let me just mention briefly, this actually starts in the 1890s. One of the things that Alfred Mahan gets involved in is his opposition to what was called the social gospel movement. This starts after the Civil War was kind of reaching its fruition in the 1890s, nearly 1900s. This was a movement within Christianity in general, sort of criticizing traditional small orthodox Christianity by saying Christianity has to become more relevant to the social problems of our day. And one of the main offshoots of this, or main manifestations of it, was pacifism. And the view was kind of interesting. Some of these people were not pacifists in the traditional sense of saying, well, Jesus was a pacifist and so am I, and that's it. There was that tradition, a minority tradition, but that tradition in Christianity that went way, way back. You think of groups like Quakers or Mennonites, for instance. But the social gospel pacifists were sort of a new breed. They weren't so much saying past wars were wrong, but simply that war had become outmoded, and war would end because the human race was advancing. It was like a religious version of progressivism in a way. The human race is getting better and better all the time, and war has simply become outmoded. Maybe it was necessary in the past. We had to free the slaves and so on. But now that the human race is so much better, war is outmoded. One writer called it a relic of our barbarian past. And Mahan didn't agree with this. He felt war, while regrettable, was an inevitable part of the human existence, since he believed in the concept of original sin and all human beings throughout the history of time, with the sole exception of Jesus, everybody else was a sinner, had a tendency towards sin and selfishness. So Alfred wasn't buying it, that war was outmoded. I think we all know it was proved correct in the end, since these people were still insisting, like right up until 1914, that war was outmoded. But in any case, many of these writers, these social gospel pacifists, were very critical of Mahan in print. And he responded to them. And I have a section on that in my book. And he really goes after them, but in a way that's very calm, very scholarly, very intellectual, showing here's why you're wrong, and history proves it, as the future will prove it too. But it was kind of interesting, some of the abuse he takes in print from some of these people, calling him a warmonger and so on. I found that very interesting. But Mahan is a defender of what's called the just war theory. War may be regrettable and has many bad things about it, and has many evil things about it, but it's not the worst evil, and often war is the lesser of two evils. And he makes a clear theological case, again even going back to the Bible, and Saint Augustine, and it's quite an interesting argument. My own view is I think Mahan is correct, theologically, as well as really gets the better of these people, of some of these opponents. But kind of interesting, because he's already world famous by the time of his own retirement from the Navy. He does take a lot of abuse from these people, but he always answers back, but not in a personal way, but in an intellectual way. Let me just mention one more interesting quarrel he gets into, and then I'll open it for questions. I don't know if any of you have heard of this person, maybe some of you have if you're a Naval Academy grads. There was an American writer named Winston Churchill. I think the English department club at the Naval Academy calls themselves the Winston Churchill Society, but in the British Churchill, they mean this American writer, Winston Churchill. Really interesting. Who was no relation to the British Churchill at all, although interestingly the two did meet when the British Winston took one of his early trips to America and found out that there was an American, named Winston Churchill as well, an American writer. Anyway, the American Winston Churchill, ironically a Naval Academy grad but never served on active duty, published a novel in 1913 called The Inside of the Cup, and the periodical, The Churchman, asked Alfred Mahan to review it, and he gave it a scathing review, and then he gets into a back and forth thing with Winston Churchill in the pages of The Churchman. The Inside of the Cup was a novel, and it was part of a genre of novels, which we really don't have anymore, called the social gospel novel. The most famous of which was in his steps by Charles Sheldon, maybe something. That's still in print, but The Inside of the Cup is not. But in its day, it was the number one best seller in 1913, and it's about, as the social gospel genre books tended to be, they were all really the same. It's always about an idealistic young clergyman of one Protestant denomination or another who becomes disgusted at what he sees around him, the poverty in the plight of the factory workers or the steel mill workers or whatever, and also is influenced by Darwin and these higher critical scholars from Germany and begins to question the Bible and then begins to become disgusted with his own parishioners because they're so affluent and comfortable and don't care about the poor and so on. And then the young clergyman in the novels goes through a crisis and becomes a liberal and lives happily ever after. Having seen the light, that traditional religion is outmoded and evil because it doesn't care about the poor. So that's what The Inside of the Cup is about. And Alfred Mahan writes a scathing review in The Churchman, which Winston Churchill was highly offended at, but Mahan brought out really good criticisms claiming that Churchill's view of the church and the traditional Christians was really a caricature, a negative caricature and a parody. Like he was setting up strawmen and then thinking he's courageous for knocking them down. And Alfred Mahan criticizes a number of other points. I'll just name one. One was that this Winston Churchill, the American Churchill thought, recommended in the book that clergymen who had in effect lost their traditional faith and gone over to be sort of social gospel types. Churchill advocated that they should stay in the church and kind of be stealth agents, subvert it from within. And Alfred Mahan in his review wrote in response to this point that he thought it was entirely dishonest. If you had genuinely become disillusioned with your faith or lost your faith and you were a clergyman, the only honest thing to do is resign and leave the church and at least be honest about your views. But the notion that there would be like stealth agents within the church trying to subvert it from within, he really characterized that as not only dishonest, but un-Christian. And Churchill writes a counter response to Alfred's review. You've misunderstood me. And Mahan writes back, no, I haven't. You hear your own words. So I thought that was kind of an interesting little quarrel they have played out in the pages of the churchmen. There were several others. My other favorite, I'll just mention it really quickly. Mahan also gets into a quarrel in print with the president of Harvard named Charles Elliott, who was a prominent Unitarian. Mahan didn't even think Unitarians were real Christians because they didn't believe, they thought Jesus was just a great human teacher but not God incarnate. And Alfred said, well, he can't call them, he can't consider them fellow Christians. But in any case, Elliott, the president of Harvard, thought that Unitarians should be more aggressive in proselytizing their faith and thought that Unitarianism would become the number one religion in America. And Alfred wrote a response to this. Again, just really decimating the guy intellectually and showing his ignorance of the Bible and church history and so on. So I don't know if you would all agree, if you read this stuff, but I always thought that Alfred Mahan got the better of these arguments with the clergy. I've talked long enough, let me shut up and take questions. I want to talk about what's interesting to you. So I'd be happy to take any questions or hear any comments you might have. I guess, sir. One quick one. Sure. When Mahan was here locally, did he attend, we have a very prominent Episcopal church, Trinity Church and several other Trinity churches. Did he attend services? Yes, oh yes. He was a diligent churchgoer. In fact, on a normal Sunday, he would actually attend three services a day. An early morning communion, morning prayer, and then in the evening prayer. But yes, when he's first in Newport, it's when the Academy relocated here during the Civil War and immediately thereafter, Trinity was the only Episcopal church and he attended Trinity. Later, when he comes back to serve at the New War College, St. John's, which is very close by, had only recently opened and he and Mahan and his family attended St. John's and he was on the vestry. Mm-hmm, my pleasure. A window of which my dad doesn't remember St. John's. Are you? If you walk into the vest you open the main door, there's a window on a plaque dedicated to that environment. No kidding. You know, I did visit there once when I was visiting here doing my research here and somebody said, you know, St. John's is really close, you want to go. And I went, but it was pouring rain and there was nobody there. So I never, I saw the outside of it, but I never got into the inside of it. That's very interesting. But yeah, yeah, he did serve on the vestry there. Mm-hmm. Yes, sir. Where did he serve in the Civil War? He was on blockade duty in the, well, sometimes in the Gulf. He also took part, his only combat was when they, you know, I'm drawing a mental blank on it, on the Mississippi. I forget the name of the fort that they took. But yeah, he was mostly, most of his Civil War duty was blockade duty. Again, another anecdote. When Sherman took Savannah, Mahan was on Dalgren's boat, ship, excuse me. And he got a congratulatory letter from his father to Sherman, from Dennis, asking Alfred to deliver the message to Sherman. So Alfred goes ashore. He's only in his 20, you know, young, early 20s. And he goes ashore to Sherman's headquarters to deliver the note. And Sherman greets him by saying, Dennis's boy! Maybe I didn't have any specific comments about slavery. I'm glad you asked that. Seeger's highly critical of Mahan, but I think totally wrongly. Yes, there's a period during Civil War service where his ship is patrolling the Mississippi River, and slaves are running away to Union lines. And that's the first time he sees field hands. And he's shocked, he writes in a letter to his friend Sam Ash, Naval Academy classmate who didn't finish the Naval Academy but remained lifelong friends with Mahan. He writes how shocked he was to see their condition, and he never knew really what their lives were actually like. And he does say his only previous experience of even seeing slaves was house slaves in Maryland, who of course were much better treated than field hands. But he's shocked at this, and he sort of becomes kind of an overnight abolitionist and is afraid to tell his father, because his father had, when Alfred was a boy, his father was highly critical. Alfred wanted to read Uncle Tom's Cabin, and his father forbade him, saying it was poison. So Alfred's sort of afraid to go home, but he feels so strongly against slavery that he wants to confront his father about it. Not that he misunderstood, I think. His father never defended slavery. But much to his amazement, he found that his father had become a staunch abolitionist as well. So yeah, he's very much against slavery. And interestingly, when he writes his one full-length book on religions called The Harvest Within, it was published in 1909, he actually has in a footnote a long explanation of why, even though he, as a general moral Mahan believes, Christians should obey the law, that the secular government has been put there by God, but the one exception he would make looking back in history was the fugitive slave law. And even though he was only a boy of ten at the time it was passed, as an older man looking back, he said he agreed with those who defied the Fugitive Slave Act. That was the law saying that it was a federal offence to help an escaped slave. So that's the long-winded answer to your question. Yes, he's very much against slavery. Yes, sir? Looking up there, the father is also, do you have any sense of their influence on American thought with large in the 90th century? Are they influencing it, or are they more proud of the American thinking? Yes, I would say Alfred himself, obviously, his impact is literally worldwide. I would say with Dennis and Milo less so, they have a huge impact, but only in their niche areas. Although interesting, Alfred and Dennis, excuse me, Dennis and Milo die within a year of each other, but Milo is an important figure in the 19th century Episcopal church, and he wrote a, you know, as Dennis did with engineering textbooks that were still in use years after his death, Milo wrote a church history survey textbook that was still being used in the early 1900s. But I would say they're more like narrowly niche figures. Yes, sir? An interesting book would be about atheism compared to people who had a bad background. When I went to sea, we broke down at sea for 35 hours, dead in the water, and it was a bad blizzard offshore. After we got the thing running, the crew had gone to their boats. So I criticized them. I said, why didn't you do something? He said, we were, we were praying. We saved the ship. There you go, man, wouldn't dispute that. But he wouldn't attribute it solely to that either. He would say God works through secondary causes, and the crew needs to tend to their duties as well. But he certainly was a big believer in prayer, absolutely. Later on, I was in the Naval Hospital in Corona, California, and there were a lot of Marines there. There wasn't a single man there who was an atheist. It wasn't on the ship. So I think there's a relationship to your experience in life and to your regard for God. And you can write a book about it. Yeah, exactly. Yes, sir. Would you say that Abel Mahan was more a man of his time than anything else? I think some of the criticisms that are looking backwards and saying, well, he should have done this, he should have done that. But, I mean, to say that he was racist is to say the obvious. The country was racist. And this is not an unusual point of view. The fight man's version of it, it just seems to me to be a mislead of what things were like. I totally agree with that. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And the irony is, contrary to Seeger, for his time, Mahan, I would say, is actually ahead of the curve. Yeah. Far from being a racist, and I mean, let's face it, can I say this here, that word is so overused today. Okay, yeah, okay. But, you know, I don't believe in judging historical people by the standards of today. By his own time, he's far in advance of others because, for one thing, he believes, well, it's not clear whether he believes in the literal Genesis story, but he certainly believes in its theological lesson, which is that all of humankind is descended from Adam and Eve, so we're all brothers and sisters, and so race is just like a convenient category, but somewhat arbitrary. But also, he becomes very involved, and I talk about this in my book, with an Episcopal church charity called the American Church Institute for Negroes, which came about after the Civil War, and they supported, like, high schools and colleges for black students in the South, and he becomes a member for many years of the board of directors of this group, and visits black college in the South called St. Augustine's in North Carolina. There were a handful of black Episcopal priests in those days, not many, but there were some. He becomes friendly with those. He tries to encourage more black young men to go into the priesthood, so I'd say by the standards of his day, he's way ahead of the curve, not behind it at all. Go ahead. He lived in a period when radical reconstruction morphed into Jim Crow. Where was he in that debate? Because that was a major change in the way the South and the general of the blacks in the South were treated. Yeah. I really haven't found anything about comments on that at that time. You know, it's the election of 1876 that sort of was rather for B. Hayes that kind of brings that turning point, but at that point he's still really involved with family stuff and his career. He's not famous yet, but to be honest, I haven't really found anything in, say, the 1870s or 80s. He doesn't seem to get interested in it. No, maybe he isn't, there's just no documentation, in terms of finding sources. You don't really see that till, like, the 1890s. Yes, ma'am. Was he in agreement with Darwin? No. No. Yeah. Now, mind you, he doesn't... There's no single treatise I could point to to say where he addresses Darwin point by point. But in some correspondence with his uncle and just, like, you know, references here and there. One of the big accusations, along with the term racist, the other accusation against Mahan in that timeframe was he's a social Darwinist. Survival of the fittest. Somebody like the white man's burden thing and this sort of thing. And he is definite... That's, in addition to the word racism, social Darwinist has often been flung at him as well. And I address that too. That's, again, it's really not accurate. He's not a social Darwinist at all. Not at all. He doesn't believe in whatever that would mean in the, you know, in terms of human beings. Survival of the fittest. That would go against all his Christian beliefs about loving your neighbor and so on. And he does, again, there's no treatise, but it's references he makes in correspondence and things like that. This one? Yeah. Two questions. On the way he viewed Christianity in general, he had the system failed. And then there was sort of like everybody else down here had the ability to mourn. What? He... Yeah, he sort of has, in his own mind, and he actually writes this down, kind of a hierarchy of religion. But it's also a little more... I don't want to say open-minded, but it's a little more open than you might expect. Where do I want to... Sort of a pyramid thing. The Episcopal Church was clearly at the top for him. He thought that was the best expression of Christianity. But he never says it's the only one. Below the Episcopal Church would be other Protestant denominations. And then below that, and I'm not sure he rated them against each other, but below that you would have Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic. Which he definitely thinks... They're definitely Christians. He doesn't put them outside the Christian church, but he thinks they're not the most accurate biblical expression of what Jesus would want. And then of course below that you have non-Christian societies, which he doesn't rate against each other. But the only distinction he draws, and I thought that's kind of interesting, within the category of non-Christian societies was those that may not be Christian, or the bulk of their people may not be Christian, but yet their governments are open to allowing Christianity to exist in that country, versus those that just ban Christianity completely. And he thought that ones who were, at least if they weren't, the country wasn't Christian itself, and Japan would be his favorite example of this. Most Japanese were not Christians, but the Japanese government did not ban Christians or ban Christian missionizing, and therefore that would make them more superior than other countries, say some Muslim countries. He has a lot of critical things to say about the Turks, but it's more about the Ottoman Empire than about their religion. But a country that banned Christianity completely, they're the very bottom to him. But those that allow Christianity to exist, even if the bulk of the people aren't that, they're one step up the hierarchy. So that's how he kind of explicitly does that. Yes, sir? As an 18th century man, and presumably a historian, he must have known that until the 18th century at least, almost every war has a strong religious background. Oh yeah, absolutely. How did he accept that? Religion caused more wars and suffering than almost any other. That's true. Mind you, mostly when he starts with the first sea power book, you're already a little bit beyond that. But you're right, he's a keen student of history and he's well aware of that. He doesn't really address it directly, at least I'm not coming up with anything in my head, but my general feeling is he would grant that point that religion can, not must, but can cause a lot of problems, and we'll also say there were many other factors as well within that. I hope that's not too wishy-washy an answer, but he doesn't really address that. He starts when we've already passed that point. But that's an interesting point. Yes, sir? Just one more about how opinionated he may be Jewish religion. Yeah, okay, I'm sorry, I left them out. No, Jewish religion is a special category with him because they're the older brother of Christianity. So he's actually very positive towards Judaism. Sure, he does address that in his book, The Harvest Within. Oh, one right there in the back, yeah. I haven't looked at the table of contents. I've read Mahan, teached Mahan at War College, so we know Mahan had a huge influence on the thinking around the world about sea power, and it's clear that God had a huge influence on Mahan. Yes. But in your book you explore the relationship between God and sea power. Actually I don't, and a couple, some online reviews have sort of a little bit criticized me for that, but I actually felt that was because he doesn't get into it. That's the reason I didn't get into it. He's very careful. He doesn't, about his history writing on naval topics, and he doesn't, he's a sophisticated enough historian to know that sort of like imposing a religious template on it isn't going to help anything or help anybody understand like what really happened between Britain and France and so on. So he pretty much leaves that out of it. He doesn't speculate, let me put it this way, he doesn't speculate in his historical works, he doesn't speculate about God's purposes, although he does believe that God's providence in the end or God's purposes will always come to pass, but he doesn't really speculate on that. There's one, only one passage, and it's very oblique in the, in his second volume, where he talks about the Napoleonic Wars, where he briefly alludes to, well it may be providence wanted Napoleon defeated, but beyond that one sentence, he really doesn't speculate on that at all. I guess you might say he leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions, but he didn't feel that that was part of what, he did believe God called him to be a naval historian and that God put the Holy Spirit, put the sea power ideas into his head, although he was certainly, you know, he was certainly open about all the authors he read, he didn't just say it popped into his mind one day, you know, he read Theodore Momsen and other people, where he got a lot of his, the germs of some of his ideas, but in a larger sense he believed that God was calling him here to the Naval War College to give these lectures and then ultimately to write these books. Have I answered your question? Yes. Yes, sir. Sure. I can't say I really found that directly. To be honest with you, I really don't. And I think he leaves that out on purpose. The only thing I did find, and you know, again, you could obviously have your own judgment on this, I thought in the first sea power volume, in the first chapter where he talks about the six characteristics, and in my book I just talk about the last two, character of the people and character of the government, where again he kind of writes the English are at the top, the Dutch are just below them, the French are below them, then you have the Spanish and Portuguese on the bottom. Now he doesn't anywhere explicitly say, that's a Catholic versus Protestant thing, but you may kind of think that since the two top, the English and the Dutch are the Protestants and the bottom three are the Catholic countries. But he never explicitly says that, but that's his hierarchy. And I think religion, being fair to him, the religious characteristics of what put the English on top would be part of the mix, but they wouldn't be the whole mix, if you will. Yes ma'am. How do you think he would fit into today's society and the Episcopal Church? Oh, if there were only a time machine where we could bring him here, I would love to see him kick some butt in the Episcopal Church, I really would. I'll just give you one little hint, and I have a lengthy section on this, because I found it fascinating. If any of you are Episcopalians, you will recall, whether it seems like yesterday or many years ago, we've got a new prayer book in 1979 that had been worked on for many years, but what we call the old prayer book is the 1928. But in Mahan's day, there was the issue of prayer book revision, and this would be in the early 1900s. 1928 book didn't even exist yet, and in its day that was considered a radical revision. Mahan grew up using the version that was adopted from the English right after the Revolution, the 1789 prayer book. And then there was an 1882 prayer book where they just made very, very tiny revisions. But Mahan gets into a quarrel with a clergyman from near where I live, an Episcopal priest named Gwen in Summit, New Jersey, in the pages of the churchman where this Gwen wants liturgical revision and says our liturgy is too rigid. He uses the word starch. Our liturgy is too starchy, and we need to open it up and have more options. It's too rigid. You do this, this, this, and this. And in that day, there were no options at all. And this Gwen wants more options for the clergy. And Mahan just, again, in this very calm, intellectual way, just totally rips his argument to shreds. So, and explaining why. And Mahan was very, not only was he very interested in religion and theology and the Bible in general, but his real passion was the liturgy. And he doesn't want any liberal clergyman messing with it. So, yeah, I'd love to see that. I'd love to see that. Anybody else? Thank you so much for coming in.