Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Ungentle Goodnights uses the records of the United States Naval Asylum (later the United States Naval Home), a residence for disabled and elderly sailors and marines established by the United States government, to recover the lives of the 541 men who were admitted there as lifetime residents between 1831 and 1866. The records of the Naval Asylum are an especially rich source for discovering these lower-deck lives because would-be residents were required to submit summaries of their naval careers as part of the admission process. Using these and related records, published and manuscript, it is possible to reconstruct the veterans' lives from their teenage years (and sometimes earlier) until their deaths. Previous historians who have written about the pre-Civil War naval enlisted force have depended on published nineteenth-century sailor and marine autobiographies. These, in this author's opinion, do not accurately reflect the realities of enlisted life. Some of these alleged autobiographies are actually fakes, generated to feed the public's appetite for such stories; they are sometimes cited as authentic sources by scholars of enlisted life who have been deceived as to their validity. Ungentle Goodnights seeks to discover the life experiences of real marines and naval sailors, not a few of whom were misbehaving, crafty and engaging individuals who feature prominently in the book.