The Naval War of 1812

Norwalk, Connecticut: Easton Press, 2005. Full leather. This is the lovely Easton Press edition of the first book by the man who would become the twenty-sixth President of the United States. Condition is as-new, still sealed in the publisher’s shrinkwrap.

Easton Press publications are regarded for their production values. Standard features include full leather binding with raised spine bands, extensive gilt lettering and decoration, all edges gilt, satin ribbon page markers, archival paper, sewn pages, and moire fabric endsheets.

Statesman, reformer, explorer, naturalist, soldier, rancher, and author, Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was the youngest ever president, both herald and agent of America’s assumption of global power. Though widely known as a quintessential man of action, Roosevelt was accomplished as a scholar and author. Roosevelt “was educated by private tutors until he entered Harvard College in 1876, and he read voraciously even before glasses gave him almost normal vision. By his fourteenth year he had mastered Darwin. He also had begun to acquire the practical knowledge that enabled him to become an accomplished field naturalist. At Harvard, where he ranked twenty-first in a class of 171 and “second among the gentlemen,” in his own phrase, he won election to Phi Beta Kappa, while gradually shifting his academic emphasis from natural history to political economy. He became a competent horseman, boxer, and marksman. He published (with a friend) a paper of professional quality on birds of the Adirondacks and wrote a senior thesis that called for limited voting rights for women and their “most absolute equality” in marriage. He also wrote the first two chapters of The Naval War of 1812, a work of meticulous scholarship acclaimed in British and American naval circles alike. “ (ANB) It become Roosevelt’s first published book in 1882.

Naval power would prove a prophetic and consequential subject for Roosevelt. Before the Spanish-American War, as Under-Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt pushed the boundaries of his authority to prepare the American Navy, enabling decisive victory over the Spanish at Manila Bay. But no sooner had Congress declared war on Spain, on April 25th 1898, than Roosevelt declared he would resign to volunteer for the army, contrary to wishes of his friends, colleagues, and President. Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill with his “Rough Riders” became emblematic of his boldness, courage, and unapologetic assertion of both moral and military American hegemony. However, more substantively, it was the Panama Canal – the great linking of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, bisecting, empowering, and asserting the western hemisphere, that would indelibly embody Roosevelt’s unfettered ambitions for America.