U.S. Navy photo Commodore Edward Preble, noted commander during the First Barbary War, was the mentor to the future naval commanders of the War of 1812. This fact is generally accepted, but often open to interpretation.

The youthfulness of these young lieutenants, it is said, led Preble to fume that he had been given ‘‘nothing but a pack of boys”—a more reliable source has it, ‘‘nothing but a parcel of children.”

Preble’s lieutenants are supposed to have nurtured their aggressive spirit and formed their tactical ideas under the powerful influence of that fighting Sailor’s, taut disciplinarian, and dyspeptic personality. From this supposition comes the notion that the Navy’s most successful leaders in the War of 1812 were ‘‘Preble’s Boys,” a phrase popularized by Fletcher Pratt’s 1950 book of the same name, ‘‘Preble’s Boys: Commodore Preble and the Birth of American Sea Power.”

‘‘With the single exception of the Battle of Lake Erie,” writes Pratt, ‘‘every victory in the War of 1812 was won by one of Preble’s boys. All but three of Preble’s boys who had a Navy command in 1812 brought home at least one British battle-flag.”

But, there is another point of view.

Christopher McKee’s scholarly statistical analysis of the ages, experience, and ranks of the pool of naval officers in the War of 1812 demonstrates that Pratt’s thesis is more art than science. McKee concludes that the men who served under Preble in the Tripolitan War won the Navy’s battles in the War of 1812 not because they had learned from Preble’s example, but because, owing to their seniority and other reasons, they were the officers who held fighting commands in the later conflict.

‘‘It was absolutely impossible for any captain who was not a Preble veteran to win a victory at sea in the War of 1812, for there was not one afloat!” Besides, all the naval officers of the War of 1812 who had served under Preble had also served under other officer role models, Thomas Truxtun, John Rodgers, William Bainbridge, and others.

McKee exhorts us to avoid the ‘‘simplistic approach that has dominated and distorted the study of the U.S. Navy’s history. One speaks here of the focus on individual combat commanders, often accompanied by the implied or explicit claim that the officer in question is the premier shaper of the American naval tradition.”

If not the chief cause, Preble’s example of leadership certainly contributed to the development of the naval officer corps into a highly competent body. In McKee’s words, Preble’s moral virtues—readiness to spend himself for his country, holding himself and subordinates to the highest standards of professional conduct and ethics, willingness to delegate responsible assignments, and vigorous action in the face of reverses—‘‘made him the preeminent mythic hero and model to the officer corps of the War of 1812.”

Editor’s note: Michael J. Crawford is the head of the Naval Historical Center's Early History Branch. He is editor of two award-winning Navy publication series, ‘‘Naval Documents of the American Revolution” and ‘‘The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History,” and is currently researching and writing a history of petty officers during the Navy's first hundred years.