A Rage for Glory
The Life of Commodore Stephen Decatur, USN
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Stephen Decatur was one of the most awe-inspiring officers of the entire Age of Fighting Sail. A real-life American naval hero in the early nineteenth century, he led an astonishing life, and his remarkable acts of courage in combat made him one of the most celebrated figures of his era.
Decatur's dazzling exploits in the Barbary Wars propelled him to national prominence at the age of twenty-five. His dramatic capture of HMS Macedonian in the War of 1812, and his subsequent naval and diplomatic triumphs in the Mediterranean, secured his permanent place in the hearts of his countrymen. Handsome, dashing, and fearless, his crews worshipped him, presidents lionized him, and an adoring public heaped fresh honors on him with each new achievement.
James Tertius de Kay is one of our foremost naval historians. In A Rage for Glory, the first new biography of Decatur in almost seventy years, he recounts Decatur's life in vivid colors. Drawing on material unavailable to previous biographers, he traces the origins of Decatur's fierce patriotism ("My country...right or wrong!"), chronicles Decatur's passionate love affair with Susan Wheeler, and provides new details of Decatur's tragic death in a senseless duel of honor, secretly instigated by the backroom machinations of jealous fellow officers determined to ruin him. His death left official Washington in such shock that his funeral became a state occasion, attended by friends who included former President James Madison, current President James Monroe, Chief Justice John Marshall, and ten thousand more.
Decatur's short but crowded life was an astonishing epic of hubris, romance, and high achievement. Only a handful of Americans since his time have ever come close to matching his extraordinary glamour and brilliance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The most celebrated naval hero of the young American Republic returns to life in this slender but rousing biography. De Kay (Monitor: The Story of the Legendary Civil War Ironclad; The Chronicles of the HMS Macedonian; etc.) recounts Decatur's naval and diplomatic exploits fighting Barbary Pirates, French privateers and the mighty British Navy in the War of 1812, the public adulation that greeted his victories, and the outpouring of grief following his untimely death in a duel. Indeed, the counterpoint between military heroics and personal vendettas forms the book's organizing theme. The flip side of the courage and gallantry expected of Navy officers was an obsession with defending one's manliness, manifested in a tremulous sensitivity to insults and a plague of dueling, which seems to have been one of the Navy's chief peacetime occupations. Despite cracking down on them in his own command, Decatur fought or participated in his share of absurdly trumped-up and elaborately choreographed duels throughout his career, culminating in his death at the hands of a former friend and mentor whose soldierly qualities he had impugned. De Kay's fast-paced account, steeped in the lore of fighting ships and full of well-drawn battle scenes, keeps the focus on Decatur's adventure story, but when the smoke clears there's also a revealing look at the code of masculine honor that sustained and ultimately destroyed him.
