Those Who Have Borne the Battle (6 page)

Bonuses, bounties, and promissory notes were critical often as the individual colonies struggled to meet enlistment goals. In the early years, these had not always been necessary. The local citizens of Peterborough, New Hampshire, joined readily in the early militia in 1775, fought at Bunker Hill with the militia, and enlisted for Ticonderoga and the Battle of Bennington. But their enlistments declined significantly by the late 1770s.
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Washington and others had worked hard to train and discipline the Continental army under their command, and they did so against a background of some suspicion of this standing force and of ongoing political celebration of the militia, even though increasingly these units were not major factors in the war. By 1782 the regular army officers and noncommissioned officers had put together a professionalized army, marked by a
sense of discipline and growing pride. The officer corps was particularly frustrated by the lack of public support and recognition of their accomplishments—and by the failure of Congress to provide the compensation they had negotiated and earned in battle.

Shortly after Washington's intercession in the officers' meeting at Newburgh in March 1783, the Continental Congress approved authorizing payment of the pensions negotiated with the officers. Then George Washington ordered his officers to begin the demobilization of the army. Under terms finally approved by the Continental Congress, enlisted men were to receive three months' pay and officers five years' pay. The Treaty of Paris was signed in September—and on November 25 Washington marched the remaining units of his army down Wall Street to watch the last of the occupying British troops sail away from Manhattan.

Well before this symbolic moment, the weak national government had been wrestling with the question of what, if anything, should be the status of a peacetime army. This question would always be complicated by the ideological fear of the potential power of the army to influence political events and by the practical fiscal concern about the cost of such an organization. And despite the experience of the war just completed, many continued to insist that a militia of volunteers, to be mobilized as necessary, was adequate for defense of the new nation.

The narrative of the citizen soldier, the reluctant soldier, the patriot on standby with ready musket, evolved into the dominant view in popular American history. This was about even more than the willingness on the part of citizens to stand up when needed. It also celebrated, often exaggerated, the effectiveness of civilians at arms. In this telling, from Lexington and Concord to New Orleans and from Gettysburg and Belleau Woods to Normandy, the citizen soldiers triumphed. As military historian Don Higginbotham has written, “When in 1940 Senator Bob Reynolds of North Carolina warned Hitler not to take lightly American boys who grew up with squirrel rifles in their hands, he implicitly gave testimony to an attitude not wholly dead.”
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The attitude was not wholly dead because the model had largely worked. If Reynolds and others greatly exaggerated the natural preparedness of Americans for war, particularly modern warfare, it was not an exaggeration to suggest that there has been a preparedness
to become prepared when necessary. If time and circumstances allowed, the United States could mobilize an army.

The model worked, partially because despite apprehensions about the power of a standing army and the celebration of the power of the mobilized citizenry, the professional army came to provide the military force for most of American history. Even Jefferson, fearful of the antidemocratic threat of the army, expanded the professional force and agreed to the creation of the Military Academy at West Point, despite the fact that such an institution, with its graduates forming a professional officer corps, was the antithesis of eighteenth-century antiaristocratic thought.

In the years following the Revolution, many political leaders came to understand, quietly, the need for a discreet and focused military force. They shared Adam Smith's belief that as society became more complex, a professional military was even more essential and a far more efficient use of resources.
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And democratic theorists, including Jefferson and Madison, came to agree with Washington: that the key was control, and as long as the military was subordinate to civilian control, a professional military constituted a
tool of
democracy rather than a
threat to
democracy. This largely shared understanding of the need for a professional core force did not interfere with the narrative.

The militia and the citizen soldier continued to back up the standing army and provide the soldiery for major mobilization. The militia was still the dominant cultural symbol, while the standing army was the small, quiet, and less visible force. Even as steps were taken to institutionalize an American professional military, the militia continued to be the institution that represented the obligation that citizens owed to their government and nation. Washington, an advocate of the professional army, also insisted upon militia service as a common obligation of citizenship. Nonetheless, militia units declined in military readiness in the nineteenth century as they came to be social groups as much as military organizations. “Their enthusiasm was sartorial, fanciful, social rather than warlike.” Indeed, “There is a thread of make-believe” marking the militia organizations.
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American citizens largely reconciled these conflicting images by ignoring the conflict, by rhetorically reciting one principle celebrating
valiant citizen soldiers while quietly accepting a regular standing army that stood watch during peacetime and provided the professional military core for wartime. This state of affairs seemed mutually acceptable to the uniformed services and to the citizenry. And it was not quite make-believe, for the calling up of state militia units was indispensable for any large-scale mobilization.

In any event, the organized militia and the other potential volunteers were celebrated even if their actual military effectiveness was often limited. As Massachusetts congressman Jabez Upham argued in 1808, the idea of using the militia as the force in ready “will do very well on paper; it sounds well in the war speeches on this floor. To talk about every soldier being a citizen, and every citizen being a soldier, and to declaim that the militia of our country is the bulwark of our liberty is very captivating. All this will figure to advantage in history. But it will not do at all in practice.”
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There were fundamental differences over how to proceed and pay for any plan for the army. The first regular army force in 1784 had some seven hundred men and was assigned to the Old Northwest territories (the Great Lakes region). The authorized size ranged up and down for the next thirty years, based on the interplay of a number of complex factors: Indian threats to settlers (two major defeats in the early 1790s resulted in a nervous Congress authorizing an increase in the army), political fortunes (the Jeffersonian group, the Republicans, being more hostile to a standing army and the Federalists being more supportive), economic conditions (in peacetime the army was always subject to significant and unexpected budget reductions), and foreign threats (ongoing conflict between Britain and France regularly threatened to involve the United States). Shays's Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786–1787 was an insurrection of debtors that was finally suppressed by a hastily organized “militia.” This galvanized many, such as Washington, who believed a national army was essential. The Constitution drafted in 1787 provided for a standing army and gave the national government authority to “suppress Insurrections.”
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In his Farewell Address in 1796, George Washington reconciled the tension regarding a standing army neatly, if not always consistently. He affirmed
the importance of national union and a central standing army so that independent colonies could “avoid the necessity of those overgrown Military establishments, which under any form of Government are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.” He also suggested that a professional and trained peacetime army enabled the country to protect its credit by using debt “as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it” during the inevitable times of war.
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The tensions that marked the early military would follow it throughout much of American history. Partisan differences, perceived and actual threats, fiscal conditions, and the cultural understanding of the military: all of these would regularly affect the authorized size and the morale and condition of the military forces. Most Americans thought of the military only in times of war. They saw little need for a force in peacetime—and political leaders and citizens alike leaned heavily on the presumption that in the United States, the citizen soldiers would provide a response to any sustained threat. Accepting this view was politically, culturally, and economically palatable to most Americans. This in turn placed a heavy burden on political leaders when they needed to mobilize a force.

 

 

Prior to 1940, Americans mobilized in response to war rather than in expectation of war. As a result, outside of those periods of major mobilization for sustained wars (the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the extended Cold War conflicts in Korea and Vietnam), the military has not had public visibility in most parts of American society. In the periods of relative peace, families as well as most communities and neighborhoods have not been involved in military service.

This pattern changed during the war years. More than 10 percent of the total US population served during the Civil War, including the equivalent of nearly 20 percent of the white population in the Confederate states. This figure would be inflated because a number of volunteers came from nonseceding border states that are not included in the
Confederate-state population base. Roughly 4 percent served during World War I. During World War II, approximately 12 percent of the US population was in the military. In Korea this percentage was more than 3 percent, and in the Vietnam War it was more than 4 percent. These figures only hint at the impact of these wars upon many families and upon most communities, especially during the Civil War and World War II. Other wars in the nineteenth century—the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War (also referred to as the War of 1898)—mobilized but a fraction of 1 percent of the population.
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The American Civil War was in political, emotional, and military terms the major defining event of the nineteenth century. But prior to it there were two other wars, the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, which were relatively brief and relatively less costly but in their own ways helped to affirm and physically shape the Republic—and to influence positively the ways in which citizens came to view the military.

Some Americans considered the War of 1812 to be a second war for independence. Following the war, Americans would no longer fear a British threat to reassert control over the United States and its territories. The war would end the serious threat of Indians in the Old Northwest with William Henry Harrison's defeat of Tecumseh and his British allies at the Battle of the Thames in Canada in 1813. Andrew Jackson's defeat of the Creek Nation at Horseshoe Bend in Mississippi in 1814, described as a “slaughter” as much as a battle, ended major Indian resistance in the South.

The War of 1812 commenced with a series of perceived insults, in a context of misunderstandings and misjudgments, abetted by aggressive war hawks in both Britain and the United States. Britain was absorbed by the war with Napoleon, and the United States was absorbed with the problems of developing a new republic. The old Federalists, especially in New England, were deeply opposed to this war, and, before it ended, some formally challenged it. Nonetheless, war began, and Americans failed in their initiative to take Canada; the British succeeded in sacking Washington in their Chesapeake campaign but failed at Baltimore, where Francis Scott Key penned “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the assault on Fort McHenry; and the US forces led by Andrew Jackson inflicted a major defeat on the British outside of New Orleans. Ironically, this occurred
after the Treaty of Ghent had been signed, bringing the war to a close with both sides accepting the status quo ante bellum.
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Few wars better demonstrate the power and the selectivity of the public memory, the public narrative, the cultural legacy, of war than does the War of 1812. The defense of Fort McHenry, Commodore Oliver Perry's victory on Lake Erie, and the defeat of the British at New Orleans constitute the remembered heroic history of the war. This memory was sustained by “The Star-Spangled Banner”; by Perry's succinct summary, “We have met the enemy and they are ours”; and by the enduring political and military mythic image of “Old Hickory,” Andrew Jackson. He, along with William Henry Harrison of the Battle of the Thames, would build upon their military reputations to each serve as president of the United States. The war's reality, however, was not so heroic.

At the outset, as has been true in most American wars, few expected this effort to be lengthy or costly. It has also turned out to be the case that in this war, as well as those that followed, the initial confidence was unrealistic. When the War of 1812 began, the regular army had 6,700 officers and men. An augmentation of this force and the calling up of state militia units would, it was presumed, be adequate to conclude the war quickly and satisfactorily. War supporters assumed that Canada was there for the taking—that Canadians, in fact, would welcome Americans. Virginia congressman John Randolph predicted “a holiday campaign,” and Henry Clay of Kentucky promised that the “militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at our feet.” Even the cautious Jefferson insisted that taking Canada would be “a mere matter of marching.” Of course, they were wrong about the Canadians'willingness to stand with the British to defend against the Americans, and they were wrong about the American militia's willingness to carry on an offensive campaign across the border.
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