Inevitably, as the military activities of the Navy became increasingly complicated, the Secretaries became less competent to administer them. This was painfully obvious in war. In the Civil War it was necessary to appoint a former naval captain as assistant secretary to act as professional military head of the Navy and to direct its strategy and operations. This official also dealt directly with Lincoln, and during the war years naval organization thus briefly approximated the coordinate pattern. In 1869, however, the post of assistant secretary was abolished, and the Navy reverted to its prewar preprofessional organization. At various times in the next thirty years, whenever a war threatened, the Navy was forced hastily to establish an ad hoc professional board for military planning. During the Spanish-American War, a Naval Strategy Board was created to direct military operations. In peace, however, these remained the immediate responsibility of the civilian secretary, and the highest military leadership of the Navy was in the technical chiefs of bureaus. Just as the technical emphasis at West Point hampered the emergence of military professionalism in the Army, the technical interests entrenched in naval organization were a major obstacle to the Navy professional reformers at the end of the nineteenth century.
POPULARISM
JACKSONIAN SOURCES: THE PRINCIPLE OF AMALGAMATION. While the absence of a distinctive military science drew the officer, on the one hand, into technical specialization, it could, on the other hand, lead to the conclusion that no specialized competence of any sort was necessary for officership. The lack of professional standards of judgment invited the use of popular standards. Inevitably, the military service, like the civil service, was utilized to serve the ulterior ends, honorable or not, of the political leaders of the government. The division of the officer corps into technical specialities built individual bridges between the segments of the corps and their counterparts in civil activity; the intrusion of popular politics into the corps created a broad connection with the mainstream of American life. This connection reflected what was popular, amateur, democratic, and idealistic in American culture. It was primarily the product of Jacksonian Democracy.
Jacksonian Democracy began the period of liberal indifference to military affairs. After 1815 there were, aside from the Indians, no significant threats to American security. A liberal plan for military defense was no longer necessary. The disappearance of foreign dangers, plus the emerging imperatives of military professionalism, caused a shift from a positive emphasis upon the citizen militia and technical expertise to negative opposition to all military institutions. The Jacksonians repeated the clichés of Jeffersonian policy but made no effort to realize them in practice. Warning of the dangers of a standing army and hailing the militia as the bulwark of liberty, they neither abolished the Regular Army nor made an effective military force out of the militia. During the thirty years before the Civil War, the militia companies degenerated into almost purely social organizations lacking military discipline and military skill.10 Jefferson wished to educate all citizens to be soldiers; the Jacksonians assumed that all citizens could be soldiers without training. Technical competence was required of the good Jeffersonian officer; militant enthusiasm of his Jacksonian counterpart. In contrast to Jeffersonian technicism, the Jacksonian approach to military officership was distinctly anti-intellectual.
The distinguishing aspect of the Jacksonian attitude on military affairs was its opposition to the officer corps as an aristocratic institution. This hostility was rooted both in the security of the nation and in the spirit of the times. The Jacksonian concept of the people — united and homogeneous — was incompatible with social differentiations of any sort. The drive for equality became, as De Tocqueville saw, the drive for uniformity. Yet uniformity was also linked with versatility. All citizens were alike because they all could do everything. While Jefferson looked to an armed people expressed in the slogan “every citizen a soldier,” the Jacksonians looked to a united people expressed in “the principle of amalgamation.” The American nation, as one congressional committee put it, was founded “upon the great principle of amalgamating all orders of society.” All professionalism was viewed with suspicion. The military profession which was just beginning was virtually strangled at birth. “In a free State, it was most impolitic and unsafe for the army to be separated in habits, interests, and feelings from the other orders of society.”11
PERSONNEL: CONGRESSIONAL APPOINTMENT AND LATERAL ENTRANCE. The Jacksonian impact upon the American military tradition was most pronounced with respect to the systems of entry and advancement. West Point was the principal target of Jacksonian hostility, the criticism centering not upon the curriculum and methods of the Academy but rather upon the manner in which cadets were appointed and the extent to which Academy graduates preempted junior officer positions in the Army. In Jacksonian eyes, not only was specialized skill unnecessary for a military officer, but also every man had a natural right to pursue the vocation of his choice. Even Jackson’s Secretary of War denounced the “exclusive privilege of entering the army” and cited the example of revolutionary France as justification for extensive promotions from the ranks. Jackson himself had an undisguised antipathy for the Academy which symbolized such a different conception of officership from that which he himself embodied. During his administration discipline faltered at West Point, and eventually Sylvanus Thayer, the superintendent and molder of the West Point educational methods, resigned in disgust at the intrusion of the spoils system. The Jacksonian attack reached its peak in 1837 when a select congressional committee appointed to investigate West Point recommended its abolition. In the opinion of the committee, the Academy contravened the principles of the founding fathers and monopolized commissions in the Regular Army, which ought to be kept open to “all citizens, like every other department of government.” The basic trouble was the assumption that “education and discipline” were “everything.” The military caste produced by West Point was incapable of leading freeborn American citizens. Success in war came to those “qualified to do so by nature.” Blasting away at the “tinsels of scholarship” the committee restated in eloquent terms the eighteenth-century concept of military genius. The rich were preferred to the poor in the selection of cadets, the committee declared, although it admitted it had no specific evidence on this point. While Congress did not follow up its committee’s suggestions and do away with West Point, the hostility which the committee reflected remained prevalent, state legislatures condemning the “aristocratical institution” in New York as “wholly inconsistent with the spirit and genuis of our liberal institutions.”12
The most permanent legacy of Jacksonian opposition was the congressional system of appointment to the Academy. In the first decades of the century, cadets were appointed by the military authorities. In the 1820’s and 1830’s, however, as the number of candidates began to exceed the number of appointments, and, as the attacks upon the supposedly aristocratic and plutocratic nature of the Academy mounted, the custom developed of distributing appointments among the congressional districts. By the early 1840’s appointments were made on the recommendation of the Representatives, and congressmen had come to look upon them as a normal part of their patronage. The system was formalized in 1843 when Congress required that cadets be distributed equally among the congressional districts with each cadet actually being a resident of the district from which he received his appointment. Just prior to the establishment of the Naval Academy in 1845, Congress also required that the appointment of midshipmen in the Navy should be distributed among the states and territories in proportion to the number of Representatives and Delegates. As each appointee had to be a resident of the state from which he was appointed, the Navy Department came to rely upon the recommendations of the congressman from the candidate’s district. In 1852, Congress formalized this system requiring congressional nomination as a prerequisite to selection as a midshipman.13 The congressional system of appointment to the military academies was a crude effort at popular subjective civilian contro
l but it was to have a lasting effect on American military institutions.
Lateral entry directly from civilian life into the higher ranks of the officer corps was also a common phenomenon prior to the Civil War. It was in some respects an ancient practice, but it became much more widespread under the Jacksonians. In 1836, for instance, when four additional regiments of dragoons were formed, thirty officers were appointed directly from civil life and four from West Point graduates. Of the Army’s thirty-seven generals from 1802 to 1861, not one was a West Pointer; twenty-three were virtually without military experience and eleven others entered the service at the grade of captain or higher. Army regulations at the time of the Mexican War encouraged the appointment of officers from civil life. Regular officers frequently quit the service, entered civilian occupations, then, in time of war, reëntered the Army as militia or volunteer officers at higher grades than those of the officers who had stayed with the service. Officers were frequently elected in the militia and also in the lower ranks of the Civil War volunteers. Until the last years of the Civil War, politics not merit dictated appointments to the highest Army posts. Influence was equally important in the Navy and Marine Corps, although in these services it was more personal in nature, with nepotism not uncommon. “The most important factor in the selection of midshipmen,” writes Paullin of the years from 1815 to 1842, “was political and personal influence; and many statesmen of the olden times left memorials of their families in the navy list by making midshipmen of sundry sons, grandsons, nephews, and cousins.”14
Many opposed political appointment, but the most generally accepted substitute, the seniority system, was, if anything, a cure worse than the disease. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Congress insisted upon maintaining seniority as the formal system of advancement. The result was that able officers spent decades in the lower ranks, and all officers who had normal or supernormal longevity were assured of reaching the higher ranks. Seniority, like politics, was also attacked by those who wanted rank to reflect merit. Even the British system of purchase, some felt, was superior to the American reliance upon seniority, especially since the latter failed in its ostensible purpose of minimizing politics. “Our army,” one officer complained, “is much more open to this kind of favoritism and political partiality, than that of almost any of the governments of Europe, which we have been accustomed to regard as aristocratic and wholly unfriendly to real merit.”15 Efforts to substitute a more professional system of advancement failed of success in both the Army and the Navy. Lacking generally accepted criteria for judging professional competence, it was impossible to develop standards for promotion by merit. The absence of a retirement system in the Army and the Navy caused officers to hang on to their posts until they died in their boots, holding up the advancement of juniors. The Navy received a limited retirement system in 1855, but the Army had to wait until after the Civil War. In addition, the Navy had hardly a hierarchy of professional grades, there being only the three officer ranks of lieutenant, commander, and captain. With only two promotions in a lifetime, there was little incentive to distinguished effort and professional improvement.
The influence of popularism in the officer corps encouraged the officers to be active in politics. The pattern was set by the Commanding Generals of the Army. Generals Jacob Brown and Scott were active political figures, and the latter campaigned for the Presidency while commanding the Army. The majority of the officers favored military participation in politics. In a discussion of the issue in the Army and Navy Chronicle in 1836, the prevailing opinion was that the Founding Fathers had set the proper example. Every officer in the Revolutionary Army, it was argued, was also a politician. “The feeling and the opinion that an officer should take no part in politics are conceived in the most servile spirit, and inculcated by heartless military aristocrats, whose interest it is to hold the minds of their subordinates in entire subjection to their domineering propensities.”16 The rights of an officer to speak and act politically were no different, it was agreed, than those of any other American citizen.
ARMY ORGANIZATION: THE COORDINATE PATTERN, 1836–1903. The nineteenth-century pattern of naval organization had been fixed along Jeffersonian lines during Madison’s administration. The system of Army organization which was to prevail until the first years of the twentieth century was formalized in 1836 and reflected distinctly Jacksonian influences. Prior to 1821 the Army, like the Navy, had no single professional head. The Secretary of War administered the Army through generals commanding geographical districts and supervised the operation of the staff agencies in Washington. He could, if he wished and as Secretary Armstrong did in 1813, exercise direct command of the troops in the field. He thus had complete control over his department; the political and military functions were as yet undifferentiated. In 1821, however, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun ordered the sole remaining major general to Washington so as to bring “the military administration of the army, as well as its pecuniary, through the several subordinate branches, under the immediate inspection and control of the Government.”17 Calhoun’s intention was to establish a balanced system of organization. On the one hand, the Secretary would supervise the “General Staff” officers in charge of the technical departments of medicine, subsistence, quartermaster, pay, the adjutant general, and the Corps of Engineers. On the other hand, through the Commanding General, the Secretary would direct the military operations of the Army. Calhoun, however, soon left office, and the system began to function in a manner quite different from that which he had intended. Particularly after Jackson became President, his previous military experience, the constitutional role of the President as Commander in Chief, the personalities of the President, the Commanding General, and the Secretaries, and the pulls of politics and interest, combined to warp Calhoun’s organization into a coordinate pattern. The Commanding General became independent of the Secretary and directly responsible to the President on military matters. The authority of the Secretary was limited to fiscal and administrative affairs including the supervision of the technical bureaus. Lewis Cass, Jackson’s Secretary of War, endorsed this development, declaring that it was the function of the Commanding General “to superintend and direct those parts of the administration of the army which are strictly military in their character, and which, to be properly conducted, require not only the advantage of military experience, but of a military connexion with the army.”18 The coordinate system of dual control by the Secretary and Commanding General was formally written into Army Regulations at the close of Jackson’s administration in 1836:
The military establishment is placed under the orders of the Major-General Commanding-in-Chief, in all that regards its discipline and military control. Its fiscal arrangements properly belong to the administrative departments of the staff, and to the Treasury Department under the direction of the Secretary of War.19
With the exception of a few years before and after the Civil War, this provision remained in the Regulations until Root’s reorganization of the War Department in 1903.
The coordinate Army organization was justified on the grounds that the Commanding General represented the permanent military interests of the Army and that the Secretary of War as an untutored civilian could not interpose himself on military matters between the Commanding General and the constitutional Commander in Chief. Within the military establishment the function of the Commanding General was command, that of the Secretary administration. As a civilian it was impossible for the latter to exercise military command. “In all matters strictly military,” declared James A: Garfield, “the General of the Army is second in command under the President.”20 Nor could the President delegate his command authority over the Army to the Secretary because the latter was not part of the Army and, hence, could not be authorized to direct it. The Army and War Department were distinct agencies.21 The corollary to the responsibility of the Commanding General to the President was the responsibility of the bureau chiefs to the Secretary. After the 1820�
�s the bureau heads reported directly to the Secretary, and all Secretaries insisted upon issuing direct orders to the bureaus without the intervention of the Commanding General. Legislation establishing bureaus virtually always placed them under the “direction” or “supervision” of the Secretary. War Department organization under the coordinate plan was in part a conscious imitation of the similar British system prevailing between 1795 and 1870. The division of responsibilities between the English Secretary of State for War and the Commander in Chief was hailed in American military writing as the wisest form of military organization.
While in theory the Commanding General embodied the professional military interests of the Army and was divorced from politics, in actual practice, quite the reverse was generally true. The direct access of the General to the President and the ill-defined allocation of responsibilities between him and the Secretary kept the Army’s top military officer continually involved in political controversy. The biggest eruption was in 1855 when General Scott and Secretary Davis engaged in one of the most vitriolic exchanges ever to enliven American public administration. This struggle became a continuing characteristic of military affairs. McClellan fought Secretary Stanton during the Civil War; Sherman fought Secretary Belknap during the Grant administration; Sheridan quarreled with Secretary Endicott in the 1880’s; and General Miles and Secretary Alger were openly at swords’ points during the Spanish-American War. Scott moved his headquarters from Washington to New York because he could not get along with the Taylor administration. Sherman shifted his command to St. Louis as a result of his disagreements with the civilian authorities. In addition, just as the Secretary strove to extend his authority over the Commanding General, the latter also attempted to exert control over the bureaus. In 1829 the adjutant general protested to the Secretary that the Commanding General was meddling in affairs which did not properly concern him, and two years later the General in turn complained that the “staff departments hardly seemed to belong to the same service.” Throughout the remainder of the century the political struggle of the bureaus versus the General and the General versus the Secretary successfully prevented the General from functioning as a true professional military leader. “Constant discord” was the inevitable result of the coordinate system.22
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