The Soldier and the State
Page 26
The coordinate organization established by the Jacksonians was the first attempt to reconcile the constitutional provisions making the President Commander in Chief with the existence of a specialized profession devoted to military command and planning. Its history demonstrates the virtual impossibility of achieving objective civilian control through this form of organization. The prolonged War Department experience with the coordinate pattern is probably unique in the history of American public administration. Other major departments and agencies have virtually always been headed by a single individual or a board or commission acting as a single individual. The War Department, however, for sixty-five years operated under a system of dual control, the peculiar result of constitutional forms and of initial Jacksonian unwillingness to permit a balanced pattern of executive civil-military relations.
PROFESSIONALISM
SOUTHERN SOURCES: THE TRADITION OF MILITARY INTEREST.The South gave military professionalism its only significant support in the pre-Civil War years. A “Southern military tradition” existed in a way in which there was never a New England, Middle Western, or Rocky Mountain military tradition. The sources of Southern interest in military affairs were varied. First, the South had peculiar sectional needs for military force. On the western frontier the Indian threat was ever moving westward with the advancing line of settlements. No locality felt the need of military protection for more than a few decades, and there was no basis for a continuing promilitary group. In the South, however, the frontier was more static. Three generations of Southerners were troubled by the depredations of the Seminoles and Creeks, and the threat was not finally removed until the end of the exhausting six-year Florida War in 1842. The active Indian threat was also supplemented by the potential danger of a slave revolt, the two not being entirely unrelated since escaped slaves often teamed up with the Indian tribes. As a result of these two threats, strong military forces and the widespread dissemination of military knowledge and skill were held necessary to the security of the plantation system. A second source of Southern militarism was the romantic cult which infused antebellum Southern culture. This stemmed in large part from the agricultural nature of the South, the admiration of Southerners for the English ideal of the “gentleman,” and the desire, fanned by the novels of Scott, to ape the manners and customs of medieval knighthood. All these contributed to the glorification of violence, chivalry, and the martial ideal.23 Thirdly, the agrarian character of the section and the relative absence of commercial and industrial opportunities present in other parts of the country naturally stimulated Southern interest in the military career.
Sectional self-interest, an atavic allegiance to feudal romanticism, and an agrarian economy — all nurtured Southern militarism. These sources, however, were not in themselves sufficient to lead to an appreciation of military professionalism. In fact, in many respects they reflected motivations incompatible with professional ideals. Transcending these sources, however, was the conservative cast of Southern society and Southern thinking, the product of the South’s defensive position as an illiberal island in a liberal society. This conservatism furnished a sympathetic environment for the growth of the professional ideal and channeled the military concern aroused by the other aspects of Southern life into an active recognition of the nature of the military profession and a preference for that profession as a career. The attraction of this conservative environment was manifest at the outbreak of the Civil War. The Southern professional officer in 1861 was confronted with a cruel choice symbolized in Lee’s anguished pacing at Arlington. On the one hand, the Southern officer’s political allegiances drew him to the Confederacy; on the other, his professional responsibility was to the Union. The decision, however, was not simply a clear cut one between political and professional values. For the South itself was more sympathetic to the military profession than the North. As one Northern officer declared during the war, “For many years previous to secession, the profession of arms had, at the North fallen from disrepute to contempt . . . To be an officer of the Regular Army was, popularly, to be an idle gentleman, well paid for doing nothing, scarcely worthy of respect, and assuredly not of esteem.” A Southern Marine captain exclaimed to Alfred Mahan that of course Mahan’s father, a Virginian and a professor at West Point, would come South: “All your father’s antecedents are military; there is no military spirit in the North; he must come to us.”24 Thus, setting aside political considerations, the Southern officer faced a strange paradox: his professional duty demanded that he support the society which rejected his profession and fight the society which had given it birth. Fortunately for the Southern officers, the policies of the Union government in 1860 and 1861 permitted them to resign their commissions 'without violating their professional trust. Even so, 40 to 50 per cent of the Southern West Point graduates on active duty in 1860 held to their posts and remained loyal to the Union. The course of the conflict, however, revealed even more strongly the different attitudes of the two sections. Professional officers were pushed aside and passed over in the Union, the higher commissions going, in the first stages of the war at least, to officers called back into service or directly appointed from civil life, many of them “political” appointees. In contrast, the South welcomed its professionals and capitalized upon their talents. Sixty-four per cent of the Regular Army officers who went South became generals; less than 30 per cent of those who stayed with the Union achieved that rank.25
Throughout the half century before the Civil War Southerners preempted the principal positions of leadership in military affairs. While the leadership of the entire government was predominantly Southern in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the military departments had an even more pronounced Southern complexion. The gradual displacement of Southern personnel in the civil side of government which occurred toward the middle of the century also had no counterpart on the military side. Instead, Southern influence tended to become more concentrated in the military departments. Despite the congressional system of appointments, the South furnished a heavily disproportionate share of the cadets at West Point. The ideals and atmosphere of the Military Academy became more markedly Southern toward the middle of the century, and the Naval Academy also was characterized by the “prevalence of a Southern flavor.” On the Army list of 1837, three of the four active generals were from Virginia, and nine of the thirteen colonels of the line were Southern, six of them Virginians. Ten of the twenty-two highest ranking officers of the Army were from the Old Dominion. Many of the officers who held the top posts over long periods of time came from the South. Winfield Scott, Commanding General from 1841 to 1861, Colonel Roger Jones, adjutant general from 1825 to 1852, and Brigadier General T. S. Jessup, quartermaster general from 1818 to 1850, were all Virginians. The geographical center of the naval officer corps also moved South. In the early years of the Republic, New England had predominated in the Navy. Subsequently, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the “naval clans” of the Middle Atlantic seaports were the principal source of naval officers. By 1842, however, 44 per cent of the midshipmen appointments were going to the Maryland-Virginia area. Northern concern about this concentration was one of the factors leading Congress to distribute the midshipmen appointments among the congressional districts. The civilian Secretaries of War — including the two most vigorous, Calhoun and Jefferson Davis — and Secretaries of the Navy, as well as the congressional leaders in military affairs — were frequently Southerners.26
Southern support both aided and obstructed military professionalization. The identification of military institutions and ideals with that portion of American society which was distinctly “different” from the dominant elements in American culture strengthened the tendency in the north and west to view military professionalism as something inherently alien and aristocratic. Southern support was insufficient to enable military professionalism to prevail against the predominant Jeffersonian and Jacksonian attitudes. It was not until the South was defeated in the Ci
vil War that American liberalism, instead of fighting professional development, simply ignored it. But if Southern support was a short-term political liability, it was also a long-term intellectual asset. While the institutions of military organization, education, entry, and advancement were shaped along Jeffersonian and Jacksonian lines, the ideas deriving from Southern sources were capturing the mind of the American military man. Southern interest sparked the emergence of military professionalism as a concept and paved the way for the institutional reforms of the post-Civil War era. The roots of American military professionalism go back to mid-nineteenth-century Southern conservatism.
JOHN C. CALHOUN: THE FRUSTRATIONS OF THE SOUTHERN MILITARY STATESMAN. The problems inherent in the relationship between Southern military professionalism and the rest of American society were well illustrated by John C. Calhoun’s career as Secretary of War under James Monroe from 1817 to 1825. Calhoun was in many respects the model Secretary of War, energetically concerned with both the administrative and military aspects of his responsibilities. He initiated numerous lasting institutional reforms in the administration and management of the War Department. He rationalized the Army supply system and placed procurement upon a responsible and efficient basis. He vitalized the office of the Inspector General as the Secretary’s instrument for checking upon the activities of the military establishment. He created a Medical Department and persuaded Congress to reorganize and strengthen the General Staff departments, laying down the essentials of their organization which were to persist for most of the nineteenth century. He overhauled the Army accounting system and instituted a new centralized method of fiscal responsibility and control. He had the Army Regulations rewritten and codified. He improved the subsistence of the Army and reduced its cost. He appointed able and respected men to head the various staff bureaus and divisions.27 When he left office the Army’s smoothly functioning administrative organization bore little resemblance to the chaos which had prevailed at the close of the War of 1812. Under his direction the War Department became the most efficient agency in the government. For decades afterward, its clerks aspired to handle Army business as “Mr. Calhoun would have done it.”
In the realm of administration and management — the housekeeping functions of the Army — Calhoun was thus a great success. But he was also concerned with the Army as a military organization and with the issues of military policy. His views on these matters reflected an essentially conservative outlook. They were based on a Hamiltonian pessimism with respect to human nature and the inevitability of war. Military preparations were essential, and most important among these was the maintenance of a professional officer corps. More clearly than any other American of his time, Calhoun appreciated the changing character of the military vocation. The “rapid progress of military science,” he argued, had professionalized officership while leaving unchanged the duties of the enlisted man. In words worthy of von Moltke, Calhoun rejected the eighteenth-century and Jacksonian idea that natural military genius would suffice and emphasized the necessity of trained collective competence. The survival of the nation depended upon the extent to which citizens of “talents and character . . . make arms their profession,” and upon the extent to which the armed forces perpetuate “military skill and experience” in peacetime. West Point, Calhoun believed, should be separated from the Corps of Engineers, because the diverse duties of the Corps had “little reference to the existing military establishment.” The Academy should be transformed from a technical institute into a professional school and thus given a “character and importance” which had not “been contemplated in its original institution.” With West Point and possibly an additional academy devoted to the elementary study of the “art of war,” advanced schools of application should then be established for the topographical corps, the artillery, and the engineers. Basically, Calhoun wanted to reorganize American military education from the Jeffersonian to the Hamiltonian pattern. Calhoun’s military policy proposed to organize the Army on a skeleton basis, sufficient to perform its peacetime duties of garrisoning the Atlantic forts and Indian posts, yet by expansion and multiplication capable of rapidly increasing to the size necessary for war. Inherent in this plan for an “expansible standing army” was the premise that those professional officers who commanded the small Regular Army in peace would also command the expanded Army in war: recruits would be siphoned into Regular Army regiments; the militia would play a secondary role.
While Congress supported and approved Calhoun’s improvements in War Department administration and efficiency, it frustrated his conservative proposals for military education and military policy. The dominant Jeffersonian-Jacksonian liberals in Congress and the public denounced the Army as a drain on the economy and a threat to republican government. Calhoun fought back. No “arrangement can be called economical,” he warned, “which, in order that our military establishment in peace should be rather less expensive, would . . . render it unfit to meet the dangers incident to a state of war.” The spirit of the Regular Army was indeed, he conceded, different from the spirit of liberalism. But in the United States the danger was not that the military spirit would overwhelm the civil, but rather the reverse: “that both officers and soldiers will lose their military habits and feelings, by sliding gradually into those purely civil.” In this insight, Calhoun described both the fundamental problem of American civil-military relations for a century and a half and the reason for the failure of his own policies. Despite his efforts, the Army was reduced in size. The expansible army plan was rejected. It ran counter to the basic tenet of American liberalism that professional military officers are permissible only when they command small military forces and that large military forces are permissible only when they are commanded by nonprofessional officers. Calhoun’s proposals to develop the Army educational system were ignored, and the technical emphasis at West Point was continued. The one new school which he was able to establish, the Artillery School at Fort Monroe, Virginia, was closed down by the Jacksonians in 1835. His efforts to create a balanced pattern of civil-military relations in the War Department were warped into quite a different system. Even his recommendations to Congress on coastal defense were brushed aside. Thus, while his administrative reforms determined the pattern of War Department operation for half a century, his military policies found life only in a series of masterly state papers. More than any other nineteenth-century Secretary of War, Calhoun understood the requirements of military professionalism. Yet, paradoxically, the unsympathetic atmosphere in which he worked determined that his lasting contributions to the War Department were in the civil-administrative area. The hostile American environment overwhelmed and dissipated the drive and the genius which he brought to the cause of professional military reform.
THE MILITARY ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE SOUTH, 1832–1846. The fifteen years from the end of Jackson’s first administration to the beginning of the Mexican War saw an outpouring of military thought and writing which was, in many respects, unique in American history. Military societies sprang into being; military journals led brief but active lives; military officers published significant — and original — books; the idea of a military profession was expounded and defended. This eruption may be appropriately termed the American Military Enlightenment. Many factors contributed to its appearance, but the intellectual wells from which it was fed were predominantly Southern. Peculiarly enough, the Enlightenment ceased almost as abruptly as it had begun. The 1850’s were as barren of significant military thought as the 1820’s. Moreover, this military flowering was exclusively one of awareness and articulation. It was singularly void of lasting institutional reforms. The ideas of the Enlightenment, however, molded the form which professionalism in practice was to take after the Civil War.
The causes of the Enlightenment were complicated. The natural course of military development induced officers increasingly to recognize a “military science” distinct from technical specialities and civil pursuits. The initial, embryonic institution
s of military professionalism, particularly West Point, also contributed. The Military Academy had only begun to function effectively in 1817; consequently, it did not become capable of reproducing its kind until a couple of decades later. Dennis Hart Mahan, the leading figure of the Enlightenment, for instance, was graduated in 1824 and, returning to teach in 1830, expounded the gospel of professionalism to successive generations of cadets for forty years. The thinking of the Enlightenment was also stimulated by the developing interest in science which spread through Europe and America in the 1830’s and 1840’s. In this respect, the Enlightenment was not entirely divorced from technicism and, unlike the professional movement after the Civil War, was rather closely linked to the intellectual currents of the day. Significantly, both Mahan and Matthew Fontaine Maury, the leading naval figure, made their initial reputations as technical specialists, the former as an engineer and the latter as an oceanographer. The military journals generally had more technical articles than professional ones on the art of war. A military society, such as the United States Naval Lyceum founded by officers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1833, sponsored scientific and technical researches and, at times, seemed more preoccupied with meteorology, zoology, botany, and mineralogy, than with more strictly naval subjects.28 The political conditions of the time also tended to stimulate professional activity. The Jacksonian attack on military institutions forced the officer to produce an apologia pro vita sua. The advanced outpouring of military thought was thus not unrelated to the backward state of military institutions. The same blanket hostility of a liberal society which stimulated Federalists and Southerners to political theory drove the advocates of military professionalism to sophisticated thought and pungent expression.