Although his travel books were actually written--anonymously--by Alexander Slidell, the author's books and papers are catalogued under his mother's maiden name, Mackenzie, which he legally adopted to assure himself of an inheritance from a maternal uncle. Such a change was unusual but not unique; James Fenimore Cooper, his neighbor in Tarrytown, New York, had already done the same thing. The two men were initially cordial, but they came into conflict when Cooper blamed the failure of his history of the United States Navy on the publication at about the same time of Mackenzie's biography of a naval hero. Cooper exacted his revenge when Mackenzie was court-martialed in 1842 for executing aboard ship, without trial, three young sailors whom Mackenzie believed to be plotting a mutiny. The proceedings caused a sensation because the supposed ringleader, and the only crew member against whom any evidence had been found, was the youngest...