Those Who Have Borne the Battle (7 page)

The military effectiveness of the militia proved at best uneven—although the frontier states and territories certainly did provide forces that fought viciously in the Indian campaigns. The army had trouble meeting its recruiting goals as Congress authorized strength finally of more than 60,000 men. Probably the number who served in the national army was fewer than 50,000. One Federalist politician noted, “Nothing
short of a little fortune will induce our Farmers or their sons to enter on a life which they cordially despise: that of a common soldier.”
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By the war's end, the army had executed 181 of its soldiers for desertion—having already twice provided presidential amnesty for this crime. One estimate is that nearly 13 percent of the troops deserted during the war, many of them apparently based on a calculated plan to enlist, receive the enlistment bonus, and then desert. Andrew Jackson ordered six Tennessee militiamen shot by firing squad in February 1815 for encouraging troops to leave the front and return home.
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If the War of 1812 affirmed American independence, the Mexican War established the United States as a continental power. Territorial ambitions, messianic imperatives such as “manifest destiny,” a condescending view of Mexicans, sectional goals, partisan ambitions, and the politics of slavery all contributed to this war—along with some serious Mexican miscalculations about the will of the United States to engage and about American military capability once war began. And the war proved just as unpopular as the War of 1812—especially in New England.

When the Mexican War began in 1846, the US Army was significantly under strength—the authorized force of 8,613 officers and men had nearly 3,000 vacancies. The regular army troops were distributed at some one hundred forts and posts guarding thousands of miles of border. During the war, Congress authorized raising more regular army troops on several occasions and also provided authority for President Polk to call up 50,000 volunteers from the states. In the end, some 88,000 troops saw service in Mexican campaigns.

There were, as always, tensions between the volunteers and the regulars, especially when regular army officers were given command positions in volunteer units. As one volunteer officer pointed out, regular enlisted men “are but machines and will obey implicitly without murmur. Hence it is an impossible task to drill and discipline an army of volunteers like the Regular Army.” Volunteers often rejected army expectations of appropriate military conduct and training. One militia officer argued, “The American volunteer is a thinking, feeling, and often a capricious being. He is not and never intends to become a mere moving and musket-holding machine.”
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In March 1847 General Winfield Scott conducted a major amphibious landing at Vera Cruz. After a series of successful battles with Mexican forces, he occupied Jalapa. Then more than 30 percent of his troops—volunteers whose enlistments had expired—left the field! Even though the volunteers did not always conduct themselves well or prove good soldiers, they could also provide an effective fighting force; one military historian observed that if they had good leadership, they could be as effective as the regulars.
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Prior to the Mexican War, some observers noted that the foreign born increasingly stood in the enlisted ranks of the army and navy. This was symptomatic of the low pay and low prestige associated with military service. The trend continued following the war. By 1850 some 60 percent of enlisted men were immigrants—largely Irish and German. The army as a whole was small and invisible. The armed forces in 1850 constituted only an estimated 0.03 percent of the US labor force.
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Edward Coffman, a historian with an exceptional understanding of the nineteenth-century army and its place in society, wrote of this period: “Enlisted men had an unenviable place in American society between wars. The best a soldier could hope for was that his fellow Americans would ignore him, and most did. When he attracted comment, he became an object of contempt and fear.” The latter reaction, according to Coffman, was because “membership in an institution which so much of the public despised and feared would arouse suspicion as to his competence.”
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Joining the army was simply not a routine choice for young American men at a time when both the country and the economy were expanding markedly—and at a time when there was little prestige associated with military service. And the more the ranks were filled with Irish and German immigrants in this period of nativism, the less the prestige. As one recruiting officer in the 1830s snarled, he was tired of dealing with the “unsophisticated, untutored, and intractable sons of Erin” who were the bulk of his applicants. Indeed, he observed, “it had become plain that the ranks of our army could not be filled with men whose intelligence and industry enabled them to fill the higher places in the walks of life.”
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Not surprisingly, this feeling of contempt was reciprocated by the rank and file—although few in the military spoke publicly about their views.
William Skelton noted in his rich study of the officer corps, “Frontier service, especially the inglorious and morally disturbing suppression of the Indians, led regulars to perceive themselves as a faithful and long-suffering instrument of the national will, performing unpleasant but essential tasks for an uncaring and somewhat degenerate public.”
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The increasing professionalization of the army officer corps was a crucial element in the history of the US military in the period from the Revolution to the Civil War. During the Mexican War, the young officers conducted themselves professionally and well. Five hundred twenty-three West Point graduates served in the war.
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And many of them—Robert E. Lee, George McClellan, Ulysses Grant, George Meade, James Longstreet, Ambrose Burnside, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis—would assume major responsibilities during the Civil War. The United States Military Academy at West Point contributed increasingly to this professional officer corps. When Sylvannus Thayer assumed the responsibility of superintendent following the War of 1812, he introduced discipline, order, structure, and a set curriculum with an emphasis on mathematics and engineering. He also raised the standards for entering cadets and for graduates.

On the eve of the Civil War, the officer corps stood on solid foundations. West Point graduated professionals who understood the role of the American military and the conception of an army that sustained a culture of “nonpartisan national service.”
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They understood their responsibilities as “gentlemen,” and the graduates may have been better prepared as engineers than as strategists and tacticians. Their code stressed patriotism and duty. These values would be tested. The southern graduates especially were torn between loyalty to state and nation, and 151 resigned from the United States Army to become Confederate officers. In this war, 294 West Point graduates served as Union officers.
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Throughout the period from the Revolution to the Civil War, the army symbolized all of the conflicting views regarding the role of a peacetime military force and the role of militia and citizen soldiers in the defense of the Republic. There was, of course, another major branch of
military service, the US Navy, which was founded as the Continental navy in the fall of 1775 and permanently organized in 1794 by an act of Congress. In the early years, the navy, with its separate Marine Corps, was not subjected to the same levels of political controversy that the army confronted. The original colonies all had ports, some of them quite consequential, and the public understood the need to protect ports and shipping. Nonetheless, for a time the new nation did not have a formal navy. David Ramsay, a South Carolina political leader and historian, argued in the 1780s that financial support from the national Treasury was essential, because “without a navy, or the means of even supporting an army of our own citizens in the field, we lie at the mercy of every invader; our sea port towns may be laid under Contribution, and our country ravaged.”
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The long maritime experience of the colonies meant that in their ports were experienced sailors and shipbuilders—and these seafarers went right to work in the Revolutionary War. Clearly, few imagined that the colonies could put together a naval force that could challenge the British navy. But they could harass it, and they could work to maintain some crucial shipping lanes. Privateering—issuing letters of marque for what amounted to licensed piracy—became both important to the colonial disruption of British merchant ships and lucrative to its participants. By war's end these private ships and the French navy were far more consequential than the new American navy.

In the period from the Revolution to the War of 1812, maritime considerations were often paramount in US defense strategies. Continuing harassment from British vessels and increasing tensions with Napoleon's French forces on the high seas as well as the provocations of the Barbary pirates resulted in support for a navy. Jefferson was especially incensed about the raids of the Barbary pirates and finally sent a US Navy force with marines to deal with them. When the War of 1812 began, the US Navy was limited, but it had a small fleet of frigates that were among the best in their class. And, of course, England was preoccupied in European waters with France. Nonetheless, shortly after the war started, the British navy appeared and within a year or two had effectively blockaded most American ports. Congressional authorization for shipbuilding could not
keep up with the challenge. But privateers again were highly successful, and Commodore Perry's victory on Lake Erie was an important psychological and strategic success.

Following the War of 1812, the navy received support from Congress for a larger peacetime fleet. But within a few years, enthusiasm for these expenses waned. The navy entered a period in which protection of shipping and American maritime interests was its primary assignment. And a nation intent on continental expansion largely ignored the navy as long as it met this assignment. Navy leadership was not focused on modernizing tactics, and in fact the fleet suffered in comparison to other nations, always in size but increasingly in quality. Congress did not provide for professional officer training until it commissioned the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845.
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The Marine Corps was founded within days of the authorization of the navy in November 1775. Its role for much of its early history was essentially as a shipboard force to be used in defense of US Naval vessels, as boarding parties, to enforce discipline on navy ships, and for any assignments at ports or as landing parties. It was (and remains) a service branch responsible to the Department of the Navy. In these early years, the strength of the marines was often several hundred men; even mobilized for wars they were seldom more than two thousand.

Marines participated in a successful campaign at Tripoli against the Barbary pirates and had a small unit in the Chapultepec campaign during the Mexican War. Archibald Henderson, an extremely able commandant with a commitment to ensuring public recognition of his Corps, reminded all that the marines' glory began at the Halls of Montezuma—and chronologically if not lyrically earlier on Tripoli's shore.
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Altogether, there was a lengthy history and experience shaping the branches of the US armed forces on the eve of the Civil War. Americans had largely come to accept the place of the military, as marginal as it might be. This history inadequately previewed what would follow. Nothing—not the occupation of Boston and New York during the Revolution or the sacking of Washington and the siege of Baltimore during the War of 1812—prepared Americans for the trauma of the Civil War. From April 12, 1861, to April 9, 1865, parts of the United States became
incredibly bloody battlefields. Few families in the North and even fewer in the South were untouched by this war. American soldiers, Union and Confederate, for the first time were subjected to sustained warfare engaged in by mass armies in the open field, facing and killing each other, fighting war from trenches and fighting a war in which killing was abetted by new and more lethal weapons and munitions.
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As has perhaps been true of all wars, the Civil War began with political goals and with some calculations and miscalculations. And it began with each side assuming and assuring that this would not be a war of long duration, for the other side would surely sue for peace. In 1860 the total armed forces of the United States were slightly fewer than twenty-eight thousand officers and enlistees, between all services. This was 0.09 percent of the US population. The Confederate states had to build their military from scratch—but when the war began in 1861, approximately one-quarter of the officers in the regular army, including one-third of the West Point graduates, resigned their commissions and returned to their Southern homes, with many accepting the call of their states to organize regiments there.

The Union and Confederate governments initially organized forces with short-term volunteers—serving with formal military units that were organized at the state and local levels. By July 1861 President Lincoln was calling for three-year volunteers. The original three-month volunteers had quickly found their terms extended, often for the duration of the war, especially in the Confederate states. Volunteer units elected their own officers in the North—and needless to say, they were quite uneven in their early performance. Nonetheless, long and often tragically bloody battles soon made the survivors hardened combat veterans.

James McPherson, a distinguished historian of the Civil War, has sought to understand what motivated men to serve in this conflict. He pointed out that, especially in the first two years of the war, men were there simply because they volunteered to be there. “The initial impulse came from what the French call
rage militaire
—a patriotic furor that swept North and South alike in the weeks after the attack on Fort Sumter.
Northern cities and towns erupted overnight into volcanoes of oratory and recruiting rallies.” Enlistments “rose and fell, often in inverse proportion to the fortunes of war.” Humiliations and defeat would be followed by spikes in enlistment, North and South: “Victorians understood duty to be a binding moral obligation involving reciprocity: one had a duty to defend the flag under whose protection one had lived.”
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George Washington would have been pleased; by this reading the Victorian age mirrored the revolutionary concept of the obligation of citizenship.