Budiansky gives a far deeper view of the English side of the War of 1812 Toll sets the war more thoroughly into the context of the French-English conflicts that surrounded it. Toll gives us more insight into the captains’ careers. Budiansky takes on the human aspect a great deal more, and we get more of a sense of the day-to-day lives of sailors in his book, as well as the captains’ personalities. Toll covers many of the same main points regarding the War of 1812 as Budiansky, but there are differences. So using them requires some searching that a more thorough documentation effort would have prevented.
There are endnotes following the text, and they are tied to a page number, but not to a specific point in the text.
While Toll’s work is on a par with Budiansky’s for being well-written and engaging, his documentation is not quite as thorough and is a bit unwieldy to use. Not long ago, I reviewed a similar work by Stephen Budiansky and it is difficult not to compare the two. Thus the War of 1812 appears in Toll’s narrative as a result of the United States’ dependence upon foreign trade in a time when the world was split between Britain’s and France’s wars and colonial ambitions. Later, after our relations with France improved, and as British impressment threatened our own shipping and their maritime hegemony our trade, the War of 1812 was the result. America depended upon trade with both France and Great Britain, and as relations with the British improved during the 1790’s, the French became hostile, leading to the Quasi War, an undeclared naval war with our former Revolutionary allies. Any interruption of this policy, as when the British shut the West Indies to us in 1783 or when the Barbary Pirates made the Mediterranean unsafe for us ten years later, created dire economic crises at home. Toll places the story of the early United States Navy in its broader economic and international contexts: the United States, beginning with Washington’s policy of neutrality, depended economically upon the ability to trade as a neutral nation with multiple parties to conflicts. It is very engagingly written, a non-fiction book you will not want to put down. Toll’s Six Frigates (467 pp.) is the story of the United States Navy from its birth under the Adams administration, when Congress was successfully persuaded to provide six frigates for the protection of United States commerce against the Barbary pirates, through the end of the War of 1812.
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