CHAPTER ONE

A Profession Born in War

FOR A COUNTRY conceived in conflict, the United States began with a notably inadequate framework for organizing the military. In the years immediately after the American Revolution, the political and military leaders of that war, who had only recently struggled with the practical problems of creating and sustaining military force, debated the issue in surprisingly impractical terms; perhaps this was inevitable in a post-revolutionary society where the paramount problem was political rather than military: how to distribute power and ensure individual liberties. Military policy—the method by which the country raises and organizes its armed forces in peace and war—was reduced to two impractical alternatives, each distorted to a caricature by ideology.
The Federalists advocated a professional military organized by a central government. Such an army would advance the Federalists’ political goal of centralizing power. But many of the former officers of the Continental Army were Federalists, and they sincerely believed that the American Revolution had demonstrated that professional soldiers were more capable than military amateurs. Though reasonable, it was not yet clear whether the public would tolerate a military establishment or a central government competent enough to make such a force effective.
In opposition were the Antifederalists, who wanted to rely upon the militia for national defense. This bolstered their political aim of keeping powers with the states. The Antifederalists were far less sanguine about the benefits of a standing army; they associated professional soldiers more with King George’s redcoats than with Washington’s Continentals. But many also drew quite different conclusions from the Revolution. There was a popular belief that the militia had won the war, a notion grounded in the conviction that men fighting as a matter of republican duty and patriotism were better soldiers than professionals fighting out of mercenary interests. Though a highly selective and quite flattering interpretation of the military record of the militia, that view was initially the ascendant. In 1783 and 1784, Congress debated whether it even had the authority to maintain a peacetime standing army. Thus, the initial military policy debate pitted a mythical militia against the aspiration of a professional force.1
But while a few years of government under the Articles of Confederation created the conditions for pragmatic political compromise that eventually led to the Constitution, the discussion of military policy remained polarized, abstract, and ideological. The Federalists succeeded in creating a standing army and even won constitutional recognition of the federal government’s right to regulate the states’ militia to ensure some measure of uniformity. But the Antifederalists, fearing that this was a cynical ploy to weaken the militia, won the battle in practical terms; the 1792 Militia Act essentially abrogated federal oversight, leaving the states free to regulate or neglect their soldiery as they saw fit. This established the pattern that would endure until the twentieth century: In peace, the United States would maintain two distinct military systems, federal regulars and state militia, with virtually no coordination or planning as to how they might be used in time of war. Because neither element was sufficient to provide for the national defense, this elusion left the practical problems of raising and maintaining armies to later generations who would have to improvise in times of crisis.2
It was an extravagantly inefficient system for a young republic with scarce military resources. A better policy would have been to draw upon the various levels of government to cooperatively mobilize, organize, and administer armies, each according to its own capabilities. Only the central government could provide a national framework enabling cooperation among the states. It was also the logical sponsor for specialist capabilities and functions that were impractical for the states to maintain, such as fortifications, depots, and arsenals. The states were better suited to mobilizing the raw human and material resources necessary for war. This was essentially the point made by Washington in his treatise “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment.”3 But his advice was ignored amid the bitter ideological struggle, which made military policy an adversarial competition between federal and state activists rather than a collaborative enterprise making best use of the comparative advantages inherent to each level of government.
Prior to the War of 1812, the regular army was buffeted by multiple reorganizations and upheavals as it alternated between failure and triumph. In the early 1790s, two successive veterans of the American Revolution, Josiah Harmar and Arthur St. Clair, were routed by Native American tribes on the Northwest frontier. These embarrassments led to an authorization for a larger army of 5,424 officers and men and the appointment of a commander equal to the task, “Mad” Anthony Wayne, another hero of the War for Independence. Through sheer force of will, Wayne instilled competence and discipline in the newly christened “Legion of the United States.” Though many of the officers were veterans, he believed that they had grown lax in their duties. Through exacting discipline, realistic training, and the organization of flexible combined arms “sub-legions” suited to frontier conditions, Wayne brought the Legion to a high state of proficiency. Less than three years after St. Clair’s defeat, he won a decisive victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794. The victory was a dramatic demonstration of the benefits of a standing army and so helped end the debate over whether the federal government should have such a force.4
Yet in victory, the effectiveness built by Wayne began to dissipate. With his death in 1796, the army lost its animating spirit, and he had left no institutional framework that might fill the void. There was no comprehensive set of regulations and procedures; training and discipline were largely left to the discretion of the local commander. With a general condition of peace across the Northwest after Fallen Timbers, the army was scattered in small detachments across the frontier. Senior officers rarely inspected these far-flung commands. With few external pressures to impel work and discipline amid the quiet routine of garrison life, the excellence of Wayne’s legion disintegrated by increments.5
The Quasi-War with France (1798–1800) brought another pulse of vigor to the army, though it was one that occurred more on paper than in camp. The war itself was largely a maritime conflict, but for a time it seemed that a large army—several times larger than the one then in existence—would be necessary. President John Adams entrusted the work of organizing this force to the venerable Washington, who in turn left much of the work to his two major generals, Alexander Hamilton and Charles Pinckney. Though Hamilton continued to practice law in New York, he imagined a well-organized army and then sought to give that vision life through correspondence. His proposal for a staff organization with components for supply, administration, medical, and inspectorate became law in March 1799. He also issued directives mandating everything from unit organizations to details of uniforms. Hamilton had even greater ambitions for the creation of a military academy and the establishment of a comprehensive set of tactics and regulations to replace the “Blue Book” of Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. Those projects, however, were not complete when the crisis ended, and the “New Army,” along with Hamilton, was mustered out of service.6
Hamilton’s staff never had the chance to set down its bureaucratic roots, as Thomas Jefferson’s election brought to power a Republican administration that was skeptical of federal bureaucracy. The 1802 Military Peace Establishment Act eliminated the system of inspectors and much of the War Department’s capacity to ensure that its policies and directives were properly executed. The legislation also did away with the quartermaster general, for Republican ideology emphasized the use of private contractors to conduct government business whenever possible. Oversight and accountability quickly suffered, as the secretary of war and his handful of assistants were unable to ensure that contractors consistently provided satisfactory rations on schedule. The act also cut the authorized strength of the army by nearly a third, eliminating the expensive cavalry altogether. From the standpoint of the regulars, the only positive aspect of the legislation was the creation of the United States Military Academy. In 1794, Congress had established a Corps of Artillerists and Engineers to foster technical expertise, and the Adams administration later hired a mathematics instructor for the younger officers of this corps located principally at West Point. But it was Jefferson who gave military education a permanent place within the army. With this exception, however, military effectiveness suffered under the Jefferson administration. The emasculation of the War Department bureaucracy was followed by years of zealous economy enforced by Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, who retained the authority to approve any expenditure over fifty dollars.7
In contrast to the changing fortunes of the regular army, the trajectory of the militia remained fairly constant. Without federal oversight, most states allowed their military capacity to deteriorate. The exception to this was the western states, which could field effective forces such as those used by Governor William Henry Harrison in his 1811 victory at Tippecanoe. Yet even the western militia required logistical support, capable leaders, and could face well-organized European armies only under favorable conditions. These nuances and the disparity between the citizen-soldiers of the frontier states and the militia from more settled areas were largely lost on the ideological successors to the Antifederalists, the Democrat-Republican party (hereafter referred to as Republicans) led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. As president, Jefferson was particularly prone to overestimating the effectiveness of the militia, even while pursuing a bellicose foreign policy that risked war with Spain and Great Britain.8
Thus, when the British warship Leopard seized the USS Chesapeake in 1808—the last full year of Jefferson’s administration—the army was small and poorly administered. As the prospect of war loomed, though Jefferson still preferred the militia, he agreed to a substantial increase of the regular army to three times its previous strength. The regulars, however, lacked both a Wayne to give them steel and a Hamilton to organize them. Instead, the army had the misfortune to have as the senior officer Brigadier General James Wilkinson, perhaps the most unprincipled figure in American military history. During the American Revolution, Wilkinson had been twice forced to resign: first for taking part in the Conway cabal to unseat then-General Washington from command and then later for irregularities in his account as Clothier General. Yet after the war, President Washington had been so desperate to appoint prominent figures from Kentucky to posts within his administration that he made Wilkinson a brigadier general. Wilkinson was soon unhappy in his role as the second-ranking officer and set his sights upon unseating Wayne from the army’s senior position. Wilkinson took every opportunity to eliminate officers loyal to Wayne and spread rumors about his senior’s unfitness for command in the hope of forcing a congressional investigation. Wayne survived the plots of “that worst of all bad men,” but in 1796 gout succeeded where conspiracy had failed.9 With Wayne’s death, Wilkinson became the army’s senior officer, a post that he would hold until 1812 except for a period during the Quasi-War when he was superseded by Washington, Hamilton, and Pinckney. Though Wilkinson showed some interest in training and readiness, he mainly devoted his considerable talents to advancing his own interests, including conspiring in filibustering schemes against the Spanish for whom he was also a paid agent. His genius for duplicity culminated with the trial of former Vice President Aaron Burr for treason in 1807; during that affair, the general betrayed his country, the Spanish, and his coconspirators, yet somehow retained his commission.10
Yet politics caused more damage to the officer corps than just the appointment of Wilkinson. During quiet periods, both Federalist and Republican administrations seem to have attempted to grant commissions on merit, though both parties likely gave some additional consideration to those of their own political inclinations. But during the crisis-fueled expansions—1798 for the Federalists, 1808 for the Republicans—the party in power abandoned even-handed moderation for frenzied patronage. The War Department lacked the capability to carefully vet the thousands of applicants for hundreds of positions, even if that had been the intention. The problems created by the influx of officers selected for their partisan affiliation rather than military experience or aptitude were made worse by the practice of associating commissions with specific regiments. Regiments quickly created in a crisis could easily be disbanded in calmer times as happened after the Quasi-War, and so officers already in the service—particularly those of the political opposition—were reluctant to surrender their position in an established unit. This meant that the colonel of a new regiment might have no military experience, while a lieutenant in an older regiment might have years of service. With little job security and no meaningful link between performance and rank, there was little incentive for officers to develop expertise. With only sporadic active campaigning in the first decade of the nineteenth century, training degenerated. Most often, it consisted of little more than half-hearted repetition of rudimentary drill with a few dozen men. Poor pay, miserable conditions, and the insecurity of the boom-and-bust cycle of expansion and neglect led most officers to regard the army as only a temporary occupation to be abandoned as soon as a better opportunity presented itself. Many of the most energetic devoted their energy to private enterprise rather than military affairs. The most common pursuit was land speculation, particularly for those on the frontier, but others were more creative. The officers at one fort created a partnership for the manufacture of maple sugar; others owned distilleries.11 Winfield Scott, who entered the army during Jefferson’s expansion of 1808, described the senior officers as having “very generally, sunk into either sloth, ignorance, or habits of intemperate drinking,” while the junior officers with only a few exceptions were “positively bad, and a majority of the remainder indifferent.”12
Though Scott would go on to become one of the most distinguished soldiers in American military history, his entry into military service was emblematic of the problems of the early army. At the time, he was twenty-one-years old and had no qualifications aside from a few weeks of service as a corporal in a militia cavalry troop the previous year. Yet a senator from his hometown of Petersburg, Virginia, arranged an interview with the president that led to the young man’s commissioning as a captain of artillery. Thus, Scott was instantly senior to the first thirty-three graduates of West Point, a school that Jefferson had founded upon the theory that engineering and gunnery were too complex to be left to those without technical training.13
Scott’s battery, along with many of the other units created during the 1808 expansion, was sent to New Orleans, a vulnerable strategic prize. The still-barely-American city had the army’s largest garrison—over two thousand men or nearly a quarter of the total strength—and at the time it was customary for the senior officer to command the greatest concentration of troops. Wilkinson arrived in New Orleans after his men, for he had taken the opportunity of an informal diplomatic mission to the Spanish in Cuba to also engage in illicit trade. By the time he joined his command, disease and dissipation had already put a third of the army on the sick list. Wilkinson decided to move the army to a site outside of the city, though as with many things related to the general his motivations were open to quest...