Engineering Security

“The author's thoroughly researched analysis deftly places the Corps of Engineers and the system it devised in the political and military context of the 1820s-50s, demonstrating the consistent support political leaders gave to the defense strategy it embodied.” Highly recommended.
—CHOICE

“Solid and single-minded, this study argues that historians have been unfair to the builders of these fortifications. It maintains that Congress, and the engineers it hired, knew exactly what they were doing, . . . that despite the fact that Civil War historians have damned the forts for their obsolescence, Smith still drives home his point: America’s giant seaboard forts achieved their limited strategic goals.”
—Todd Shallat, author of Structures in the Stream: Water, Science and the U.S. Corps of Engineers
 

“[Engineering Security] stands as an important addition to literature on the American defense policy, coastal fortifications, and the Corps of Engineers in the antebellum period.”
—Army History

“Smith has produced a thoroughly researched, carefully reasoned, and clearly written analysis of a key element of nineteenth-century US defense policy, and he makes a solid contribution to the field.”
—Journal of Military History