Towards An American Army: Military Thought From Washington To Marshall

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TOWARDS AN AMERICAN ARMY:

MILITARY THOUGHT FROM WASHINGTON TO MARSHALL

BY

RUSSELL F. WEIGLEY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

PREFACE 5

I—THE DUAL MILITARY LEGACY OF THE REVOLUTION 8

II—GEORGE WASHINGTON AND ALEXANDER HAMILTON—Military Professionalism In Early Republican Style 15

III—JOHN C. CALHOUN—The Expansible Army Plan 31

IV—DENNIS HART MAHAN—The Professionalism Of West Point 37

V—HENRY W. HALLECK AND GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN—The Disciples Of Dennis Mahan 49

VI—WILLIAM T. SHERMAN AND ULYSSES S. GRANT—The Rise Of Total War 69

VII—EMORY UPTON—The Major Prophet Of Professionalism 85

VIII—JOHN A. LOGAN—The Rebuttal For A Citizen Army 106

IX—THE DISCIPLES OF EMORY UPTON 114

X—JOHN M. SCHOFIELD—An American Plan Of Command 134

XI—R. M. JOHNSTON—The Search For An Escape From Uptonian Despair 145

XII—LEONARD WOOD—The Inevitability Of A Citizen Army 161

XII—JOHN MCAULEY PALMER AND GEORGE C. MARSHALL—Universal Military Training 181

EPILOGUE 202

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 206

DEDICATION

To FRANCIS WEIGLEY

7th Pennsylvania Cavalry, Minty’s Brigade, Army of the Cumberland

A CITIZEN SOLDIER

PREFACE

THIS book is a history of controversies that have surrounded the growth of the United States Army, controversies that have flared over the inextricably related questions of how to attain maximum military security for the United States and how to form an army that will be appropriate to and not subversive of American democratic society.

These questions obviously have never been more relevant than they are now, and an examination of past efforts to solve them, even though in eras much simpler than ours, may aid us in approaching them today. The past perhaps never offers sure answers to questions of present policy, and the past never answered the above questions satisfactorily, even for itself. But the experience of the century and three-quarters of American history reviewed here in exploring the dimensions of the questions and the limits of possible solutions should nevertheless offer valuable guide markers to the present.

There are further suggestions for today that a study of the search for an effective American army may offer. This book examines the ideas of men in various positions who considered the problems of American military policy during the period 1776-1951. Since most of that period constituted the long epoch when civilian Americans considered military issues remote, perforce most of the men whose ideas are discussed herein were military men. A study of American ideas of military policy cannot help but be a study mainly of the ideas on military policy expressed by professional soldiers.

Therefore the book offers some measure of information on the attitudes and thought processes that have been traditional and habitual among American professional soldiers. Especially, it reveals something of their customary approach to issues of military policy where such issues merge with those of national policy in general. And to know something about the customary approach of military men to the broadest issues of military and national policy is also of manifest value to the present.

The United States has closed the most recent of its experimental inquiries into the presidential qualifications of the professional military man. But the new intimacy between military issues and every other area of national life suggests that similar experiments in the professional soldier’s exercise of non-military responsibilities are not ending, but are merely beginning. With professional soldiers offering leadership beyond the traditional limits of their calling, and with their calling itself now closely bound up in the most important national activities, it behooves the American citizen to study every possible indication of the sort of leadership he can expect from the professional soldier, within and beyond that soldier’s professional sphere. Since the professional soldier, like the initiate of any profession, is in part the product of the history and traditions of his profession, a historical approach to our questions may again reveal their general dimensions.

How competent have the judgments of professional soldiers been in the past when issues of military and national policy have merged? What traditional attitudes of their profession have shaped their judgments on such issues? What effect may such attitudes, if they have persisted, exert upon the judgments of military men today? This book also seeks to offer the reader suggestions towards answering such questions.

During most of their history the American people faced no serious external military threat. Most Americans and even their government could afford to devote to the pursuits of peace most of the thought and energies that other nations gave over to wars and preparation for wars. But the United States won its independence in the course of a global war, found its security threatened for several decades thereafter by other global wars, and then, following the long interval of safety, discovered itself caught up in the global wars of the twentieth century. Even during the long nineteenth-century era of safety, many thoughtful Americans were sure that a country so rich and potentially powerful as theirs could not remain forever aloof from international politics and thus be forever secure, especially in a world where technology was rapidly narrowing distances. There has been no period when Americans gave no thought whatever to their military security. There has always been some concern, if not for the present, then for the future.

In a country of ocean frontiers concern for military security implied an interest in naval power, and such an interest appeared early and persisted. But the United States is a continental as well as an oceanic state, and American concern for defense has turned also on the building of an American army.

From the beginning of the national history, there was controversy as to the sort of force that would constitute an appropriate American army. Europe in that day was a continent of professional standing armies, but the English legacy and the United States colonial as well as revolutionary experience had created in America a tradition of the nonprofessional soldier, of the armed citizenry. Since the United States was embarking on an experiment in popular government, a popular army raised from the armed citizenry seemed to many Americans appropriate to their country’s condition. But to seek national defense through a nonprofessional, citizen army was to run the risk that such a force might not be able to cope with the professional armies of Europe, one or more of which it presumably would have to face in any major war in the future, and the British example of which it faced at the outset. An army of armed citizens offered the advantage of vast numbers, but its numbers might be offset by the superior skill of professional adversaries.

From the beginning of American history, therefore, part of the concern for national security took the form of this controversy: should the American army be a professional force modeled on the armies of Europe or a nonprofessional force reflecting the ability of a popular government to entrust arms to its citizens. This controversy persisted unresolved when in the World Wars the United States did at last have to pit its army on a large scale against European armies, when arguments were put to the test of performance. Indeed in new forms controversy over the proper roles of professional and nonprofessional soldiers still exists. The controversy of amateur versus professional soldiers has endured as a major theme of all except exclusively naval thought about American defense. The history of American ideas on naval defense and sea power has largely been told elsewhere. This book will review the debates of those who sought to create an American army effective as a military force and appropriate to American life.

The book is not, however, a history of the official military policy of the United States. That history also has been written by others. The focus here is on the reasoning and conclusions of certain men who gave sustained thought to the issues connected with creating an American army. They were mainly, because of the nature of the period, military men. Sometimes the book will touch on general topics of American military thought, such as the nature of war or the merits of offensive or defensive warfare. Such discussion is necessary because the type of war that a writer envisions the United States as fighting obviously must influence his conception of the appropriate form of the American army. There will be a discussion of the American contribution, through William T. Sherman and his contemporaries and followers, to the appearance of total war, since a totalization of war often came to imply not only total destruction and ruthlessness but also warfare waged by mass citizen armies. But the main theme of the book is the effort of American students of war and military affairs to weigh the requirements of national security and of the American order of society so as to move toward the shaping of an American army.

Among the many persons and institutions to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for their assistance in my preparation of this work, I must mention especially the American Philosophical Society, whose Penrose Fund grant made possible the completion of the research; Dean Roy F. Nichols of the University of Pennsylvania, who graciously read and criticized the entire manuscript; and Professor Robert W. Rhoads, chairman of the department of social science of the Drexel Institute of Technology, who has always sought to be helpful in keeping time and opportunities open for research. Much of the material in chapter 6 appeared in somewhat different form in my article Civil War: Forerunner of Total Warfare in Civil War Times, I (December, 1959), and much of chapter 10 appeared in modified form as The Military Thought of John M. Schofield in Military Affairs, XXIII (1959). To the editors of those journals I wish to express my appreciation for permission to reprint that material here.

I wish also to acknowledge permission from Appleton-Century-Crofts to quote from R. M. Johnston’s Arms and the Race, copyright 1915 by the Century Company; from Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., to quote from Johnston’s Leading American Soldiers, copyright 1907 by Henry Holt; from The Twentieth Century, to quote from Johnston’s article What Could Napoleon Accomplish To-Day?, which appeared in The Nineteenth Century, LXXVI (1914), 127-182, before being reprinted in part in Arms and the Race; from Henry Regnery Co., to quote from Leonard Wood’s Our Military History, copyright 1916 by Reilly and Britton.

June, 1962

RUSSELL F. WEIGLEY

Drexel Institute of Technology

Philadelphia

I—THE DUAL MILITARY LEGACY OF THE REVOLUTION

A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.—The Constitution of the United States

The Jealousies of a standing Army, and the Evils to be apprehended from one, are remote; and in my judgment, situated and circumstanced as we are, not at all to be dreaded; but the consequence of wanting one, according to my Ideas, is certain, and inevitable Ruin.—GEORGE WASHINGTON

ON March 15, 1781, the militiamen of General Nathanael Greene’s first and second defensive lines had broken before the disciplined onslaught of British regulars, and a raw Continental regiment in the third and main American line had broken also. At this critical moment in the battle of Guilford Court House, when the American army in the South seemed on the verge of final ruin, the Continental regulars of the 1st Maryland Regiment with their attached Delaware Continentals attacked in flank the British assault column consisting of the 2nd Battalion and the Grenadiers of the Guards. The Americans halted them, and stood up to them and supporting British troops so stoutly in an open field fight that General Cornwallis in desperation ordered his artillery to fire indiscriminately on the mixed mass of his own troops and the Americans. Even then, the Maryland and Delaware Continentals did not break. They held their positions until Greene withdrew them from the field so that with better support they might fight another day.{1}

This action is much different from the popular American conception which has the War of the Revolution fought on the American side by an armed and aroused citizenry. The British Guards were stopped at Guilford Court House by American regular soldiers who had become as professional in the art of war as were their adversaries. And whatever the popular American prejudices of the Revolutionary era against professional soldiers, the commanding general of the Continental Army had long since come to believe that it was on such thorough professionals, cut from the same military mold as the troops of the European powers, that the United States had to rely for its security. The combat of the Maryland and Delaware lines at Guilford Court House confirmed George Washington’s judgment of what only regulars could do, and it helped establish proudly beside the American tradition of the citizen army a rival tradition of the prowess in arms of the American regular army.

The American Revolution was probably the most conservative of the great revolutions of the modern world. Many of the American revolutionists fought to preserve the values of a cherished past rather than to force the coming of an uncertain future. This was as true of the American revolutionists’ approach to war as of their approach to other things. At first, the American approach to war was remarkably conservative, considering that it was an approach born in a new world and in revolution.

The War of the American Revolution occurred in an age of marked stability in European military methods. Army organization and tactics had changed little in more than a century. Frederick the Great was the premier military figure of the age, but Frederick’s mode of war consisted of the perfecting of old tactical methods rather than the introduction of new ones. For the better part of two centuries, since the emergence of the modern dynastic state, the armies of Europe had been armies of well-drilled professional soldiers. Much of Frederick’s success lay simply in his carrying the drill and discipline of such professionals to a new intensity.{2} His famous oblique order of battlefield tactics stemmed from an even older source, for it had been a principal reliance of Epaminondas of Thebes. With Frederick’s Prussian forces as their outstanding model, the armies of Europe in the late eighteenth century made war by means of ponderous marches and ritualistic maneuvers. The highest degree of machinelike precision of movement was regarded as the essential of a good army.{3}

Such precision could be attained only by armies of long-term military careerists, preferably of a sort not much addicted to thinking. Since European wars were principally dynastic quarrels, of concern mainly to kings and their advisers, professional armies fought out the disputes of kings without calling forth much interest or participation from the masses of European humanity. Populations did not war against populations. War was a game for the amusement and aggrandizement of kings, played by teams of the kings’ hired men.

Because the European wars of the eighteenth century only slightly touched the affairs of most people, they have won much praise in our time as embodiments of a more civilized approach to intergovernmental politics than the contemporary world has been able to maintain.{4} In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fashionable military thinking tended to regard the wars of Frederick the Great and his contemporaries as absurd in their transformation of a deadly serious business into a ritual and a game. Late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century disciples of the great military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz pointed to his dictum that war, in essence, is violence carried to the utmost, and that to introduce a principle of moderation into the philosophy of war is therefore ridiculous. Thus they viewed the wars of the eighteenth century with amusement.{5} But the middle twentieth century, which has seen war become violence carried to the utmost, must regard the moderate warfare of the age of the Enlightenment with nostalgia.

The French Revolution began the eclipse of the old, restrained, dynastic warfare by inaugurating the wars of national interests and passions, and the principle of the nation in arms. In the wars of the French Revolution, the issues concerned not only kings but also peoples, and the revolutionary governments of France led the other governments of Europe to rally whole peoples to fight over those issues. Lazare Carnot’s levée en masse opened a new age of warfare. The French proved to be the radical revolutionaries of war as well as of politics.{6}

For the most part, the American Revolution was much less radical in politics and in war alike. Within the American revolutionary movement those who would have used the rupture of the British Empire to establish a new order of society in America did struggle continually for control. But the rival group, who desired only independence and self-government, not an upheaval toppling established patterns of life, generally prevailed. In the latter group was George Washington.

As commander of the Continental Army, Washington was usually grateful for any armed men he could get. Amidst the trials of the New Jersey campaign of 1776-1777 and the Valley Forge winter of 1777-1778, Washington and his generals could scarcely have afforded to govern their conduct by the thought that a general armed levy of all the people might create a force which would generate a dangerous social revolution. The Continental officers would have taken such a levy had they been able to raise it. Nevertheless, it is characteristic that Washington and the cautious men who shared military leadership with him placed their principal military reliance not on a mass rising but on the hope of building a professional army comparable to the armies of Great Britain and France. Washington hoped to fight the British and the Hessians in their own manner. In things strictly military, Washington was scarcely a revolutionary. His answer to the redcoats’ invasion of North America was patiently to create a professional army of his own. He did not base his war-making primarily on a departure from orthodoxy; he accepted military orthodoxy and worked within it.{7}

In the end he succeeded. His Continental Army did become a force whose best units were comparable to the British regulars, as the Maryland and Delaware Continentals demonstrated at Guilford Court House and on many other fields. With the French professionals of Rochambeau, Washington’s Continental regulars played a decisive role at Yorktown.{8} For years, it was Washington’s maintenance of a body of Continental regulars that kept the Revolution alive. Finally the Continentals were not only able to preserve their own vitality and thus that of the Revolution, but to capture the British army of Lord Cornwallis and to win the war.

The British forces in America assisted Washington’s strategy by fighting principally in orthodox European style. In effect their task in the American Revolution was to defeat a people, not simply an army. But they were so accustomed to fighting wars in which the enemy’s army was the objective that to wage war on the American people scarcely occurred to them. Indian allies, Tory forces, and certain British detachments struck at people rather than at American troops and lines of communications, but the British never undertook the systematic and ruthless assault against the enemy’s whole society and economy that later soldiers might have used against a popular rebellion. The British confined themselves mainly to the conventional tasks of seizing territory and fighting armies. To do this as the Continental Army grew in effectiveness was to play Washington’s game.

Thus the War of the American Revolution was a remarkably conventional war. Washington’s campaigns were not essentially different in style from European campaigns of the day. Even tactical innovations were slight, despite the experience of the Americans in Indian warfare and a consequent tendency towards increasingly open battle formations. The French were to recognize in armed citizens the possibilities of a military revolution that would sweep the skillful but small professional armies of the Frederician era from the scene, but Washington saw in levies of citizenry simply that militia to depend on which was assuredly, resting upon a broken staff.{9}

Of militia, and thus of levies raised from the citizenry, Washington wrote:

"Men just dragged from the tender Scenes of domestick life; unaccustomed to the din of Arms; totally unacquainted with every kind of Military skill,...when opposed to Troops regularly train’d, disciplined, and appointed, superior in knowledge, and superior in Arms, makes them timid, and ready to fly from their own shadows....Again, Men accustomed to unbounded freedom, and no controul, cannot brook the Restraint which is indispensably necessary to the good order and Government of an Army....To bring Men to a proper degree of Subordination, is not the work of a day, a Month or even a year.{10}"

So great was Washington’s disgust with such armed citizens’ militia as he had had to command by December, 1776, that he hoped then that no reliance, except such as may arise from necessity, should ever be had in them again.{11} For these reasons Washington placed his confidence in regulars:

"The Jealousies of a standing Army, and the Evils to be apprehended from one, are remote; and in my judgment, situated and circumstanced as we are, not at all to be dreaded; but the consequence of wanting one, according to my Ideas, is certain, and inevitable Ruin.{12}"

From early in the Revolutionary War, Washington believed that his cause needed a trained regular army, and that he could build one. He needed good officers for that purpose. Substantially he would have agreed with Nathanael Greene, who wrote: We want nothing but good officers to constitute as good an army as ever marched into the field. Our men are better than the officers.{13} But Washington believed that good officers could be secured only by offering them a permanent career in a regular army, so that again he returned to his original goal. Viewed from any perspective, the creation of a regular army seemed to him essential to the American cause. By the end of 1776 all Washington’s experience as military commander of the Revolution had led him to a single conclusion, in which he persisted thereafter: Let us have a respectable Army, and such as will be competent to every exigency.{14}

Of course, even the most professional regiments of Washington’s Continental Army were not carbon copies of European regiments. The Continental Army was a product of a middle-class society, while the European armies of the era remained largely the products of a feudal age, and this distinction made for profound differences of spirit, discipline, and organization. The American officer corps came from the same general social strata as the American soldiery, while European officer corps were composed overwhelmingly of noblemen, or among the British at least of members of the gentry. The American officers may eventually have developed pretensions toward forming a new nobility, climaxing in the establishment of the Society of the Cincinnati, but they knew that the men they commanded were of the same stuff as themselves, and the comparatively easy-going discipline even of Continental regulars was a result. In Europe holding a commission was virtually a prerogative of noble birth, an almost unbridgeable gulf separated officers and men, and the whiplash discipline of Frederick the Great’s army resulted. But if the Europeans could achieve a severer discipline, in a sense the American officers could become more professional than their European counterparts, for their advancement depended less on connections and more on merit.{15}

Certain qualities of American militiamen were of military value and remained features of the Continental Army, often to become permanent aspects of the American approach to war. Militiamen fought, not in the ordered lines of European regulars but in loose formations and with an eye to any cover afforded by terrain. Such tactics were valuable in skirmishing in advance of a main attack, to reconnoiter and to soften the enemy; the professionalized Continental Army continued to use them. To some extent they may have contributed also to the light infantry tactics of the tirailleurs in Europe. Whether fighting in open order or in formal lines, Americans employed their hunting and Indian-fighting traditions and shot to kill. They had received training in marksmanship, and they aimed their weapons. Europeans, in contrast, fired mechanically in the general direction of the enemy. Thus from the beginning, a special skill in marksmanship became characteristic of the American army. These instances are among the most important of their kind. Together, they demonstrate that the American army remained sui generis. But what is most remarkable is not the Continental Army’s uniqueness, but how little it differed from European armies. When Washington wrote of a respectable Army, he was thinking in European terms, and by 1781 he had largely achieved what he sought.{16}

One military legacy of the War for Independence was an American military professionalism in the European tradition. But if the Americans were moderate revolutionaries, they were revolutionaries nevertheless. On the one hand, Washington fought the campaigns of New York, Brandywine-Germantown, Monmouth, and York-town with a force that was as close an approximation of European regulars as he could muster, and Greene fought at Guilford Court House, Hobkirk’s Hill, and Eutaw Springs with an army whose core was of much the same sort. On the other hand, Burgoyne’s invasion of the rebellious colonies by the Lake Champlain-Hudson River route came to grief largely because the farther he advanced, the more unexpected armed enemies he encountered. The American Revolution was not simply a European dynastic war. On the American side it was a national war. People in large numbers cared about its issues, as they did not care about the quarrels of kings. A logical corollary was for the American leaders to mobilize the concern of the people, to call on them to fight in battles where the stakes were their own. And in part this was done. Burgoyne was defeated by a miniature of the nation in arms. His opponents seemed to him to spring from the very trees.

The repulse of Burgoyne’s supply-hunting detachment at Bennington offered a good example of the deadly work an armed population could do. Burgoyne sent Baron von Riedesel to gather from Bennington stores that he supposed were to be had for the taking. But the armed farmers of Vermont utterly ruined Riedesel’s column and the reinforcements that Burgoyne sent following it. Here, as at Concord earlier and at King’s Mountain later, conventional European professionals met an armed and angry people, and the results to the professionals were murderous.{17}

At Concord, Bennington, King’s Mountain, and a host of similar engagements began a military revolution to go with the political one. The Indian wars already had created an armed citizenry. If the fighting strength of the American population could be properly harnessed, possible results were unlimited. Popular legend came to recognize this fact, and thereafter many Americans long inclined to the belief that their country needed no professional army, because American citizens could whip any professional soldiers on earth. In America there were no kings. American wars would be people’s wars, and in them the people would do their own fighting and win their own triumphs. Out of America would come a new style of war.{18}

But Washington and other more serious military observers remembered not only the occasional spectacular successes of an armed populace but also remembered the more frequent failures. The militia Washington saw break and flee before the British again and again, who did not cross the Delaware to assist in the raid on Trenton, and who failed to carry out their assignment at Germantown also were the nation in arms, and their performance led Washington to hope he would never have to rely on them again.

The result was that the United States drew from the War of the Revolution two different military traditions, a conservative tradition and a revolutionary one. The British had attempted to subdue their rebellious colonies principally by means of an orthodox war in which professional soldiers seized strategic territories and defeated the enemy’s armed forces. The Americans had replied in two ways. Often they had attempted to create an orthodox professional force of their own, but sometimes they had drawn a logical conclusion from the fact that they were fighting a national war, and then they had moved toward raising the nation in arms. The War of the American Revolution had been fought by a mixture of both methods, but those who especially favored one method often saw little merit in the other. Therefore the two military traditions born of the American Revolution came to be regarded as contradictory and rival traditions, and the struggle between their adherents was to become a dominant theme in the history of American military thought.

Which should be regarded as the primary approach to war, Americans came to argue, the conventional approach, with its reliance on regulars and its emphasis on battle with other regulars, or the revolutionary approach, with its reliance on the nation in arms and the still further revolutionary implications which that principle gradually revealed? Should America be an orthodox military power, or a revolutionary one?

II—GEORGE WASHINGTON AND ALEXANDER HAMILTON—Military Professionalism In Early Republican Style

When the perfect order and exact discipline which are essential to regular troops are contemplated, and with what ease and precision they execute the difficult maneuvers indispensable to the success of offensive or defensive operations, the conviction cannot be resisted that such troops will always have a decided advantage over more numerous forces composed of uninstructed militia or undisciplined recruits.—ALEXANDER HAMILTON

IN 1783, with the War of the Revolution won, the Congress of the Confederation undertook to consider a permanent military establishment for the United States. It organized a committee for that purpose under Alexander Hamilton, and the committee solicited the opinions of the leading generals of the war. First among them was Washington, and his response to the committee’s request was his famous Sentiments on a Peace Establishment.{19}

Washington’s wartime views had identified him as a military conservative, a champion of reliance on regulars. But the Sentiments which he now wrote, destined to be virtually forgotten in the nineteenth century and then resurrected by twentieth-century champions of the nation in arms, eventually made him the patron saint of the opposite camp, the military revolutionists. For in his Sentiments, Washington felt compelled by American realities to modify his wartime position and to endorse a popular militia and the principle of the nation in arms.

Washington had relied as much as possible on Continental regulars to win the war, but he recognized that a large regular establishment in peacetime, and especially under the government of the Confederation, was unattainable. Americans had inherited from England a profound fear of a standing army, and the events preceding the Revolution, revolving as they did around the stationing of British garrisons in America, had