Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  15. Testimony before the House Military Committee, April 26, 1878, House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, pp. 269–70.

  16. House Reports, 43d Cong., 1st sess., No. 384, p. 283.

  17. Philippe Regis de Trobriand, Military Life in Dakota: The Journal of Philippe Regis de Trobriand, trans. Lucille M. Kane (St. Paul, 1951), p. 64.

  18. Bourke, On the Border with Crook, p. 182. Bourke, An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre (New York, 1958), p. 85.

  19. Utley, The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, chap. 12.

  20. De Trobriand, Military Life in Dakota, p. 65.

  21. See, for example, SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 59–60 (Augur), 79 (Steele), 73–74 (Halleck), 126–27 (McDowell).

  22. George Bird Grinnell, Two Great Scouts and Their Pawnee Battalion (Cleveland, Ohio, 1928). Robert Bruce, The Fighting Norths and Pawnee Scouts (New York, 1932). Donald F. Danker, ed., Man of the Plains: Recollections of Luther North, 1856—1882 (Lincoln, Neb., 1961).

  23. Charles F. Lummis, General Crook and the Apache Wars (Flagstaff, Ariz., 1966), p. 17. This is a series of articles correspondent Lummis wrote for the Los Angeles Times during the Geronimo campaign of 1886. See also Crook’s similar thoughts regarding the Sioux operations in “The Apache Problem,” Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 27 (1886), 260. Crook set forth his views at considerable length in his annual report for 1883 in SW, Annual Report (1883), pp. 164–69.

  24. Frederic Remington, “How an Apache War Was Won,” in McCracken, ed., Frederic Remington’s Own West, p. 49.

  25. Crook, “The Apache Problem,” p. 267.

  26. Foner, The United States Soldier Between Two Wars, pp. 129–31.

  27. For a history of reservation police, see William T. Hagan, Indian Police and Judges (New Haven, Conn., 1966).

  28. SW, Annual Report (1878), p. 37. House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 64, p. 24. Army and Navy Journal, 14 (July 14, 1877), 784. For the Canadian experience, see C. P. Stacey, “The Military Aspect of Canada’s Winning of the West, 1870–1885,” Canadian Historical Review, 21 (1940), 1–24; Douglas Hill, The Opening of the Canadian West (New York, 1967); and John Peter Turner, The North-West Mounted Police, 1873–1893 (2 vols., Ottawa, 1950). A comparative study of Canadian and American Indian policy and experience is badly needed.

  29. CIA, Annual Report (1878), pp. x-xii.

  The Army, Congress, and the People

  SHERMAN’S FRONTIER REGULARS endured not only the physical isolation of service at remote border posts; increasingly in the postwar years they found themselves isolated in attitudes, interests, and spirit from other institutions of government and society and, indeed, from the American people themselves. The Civil War had cemented powerful bonds between the people and their army. Postwar developments loosened, then almost entirely severed these bonds. Reconstruction plunged the army into tempestuous partisan politics. Then frontier service removed it largely from physical proximity to population and, except for an occasional Indian conflict, from public awareness and interest. Besides public and congressional indifference and even hostility, the army found its Indian attitudes and policies condemned and opposed by the civilian officials concerned with Indian affairs and by the nation’s humanitarian community. One author has called the postwar decades “the Army’s Dark Ages.”1 Truly did the Regulars feel that they contended with a host of enemies in the rear.

  Although the army counted many staunch defenders among the national legislators, the Congress as an institution seemed chronically hostile. The hostility sprang from motives both old and new. Economy, ever a special concern of legislators, remained as vital an imperative as before the war. “If we continue to make these appropriations of the people’s money to keep up this great army,” warned a House member in 1869, “our constituents will run every one of us into the Potomac.”2 The familiar argument that standing armies menace democratic institutions continued to find its way into debates. The army, declared New York’s veteran congressman Fernando Wood in 1876, “performs none of the legitimate functions of our Government in time of peace. It is inappropriate to such a period, having no uses, no duties, no affinity, or sympathy with the workings of a political institution founded on free opinion.” Wood favored abolishing the War Department altogether and vesting its peacetime functions in the Interior Department.3

  To these traditional sources of congressional antimilitarism the postwar years added fresh cause for hostility as Reconstruction drew the army increasingly into partisan politics. “The employment of the army in a service so closely related to political action,” wrote Congressman James A. Garfield in 1878, “produced not a little prejudice against the entire military establishment.”4 Given the extreme passions Reconstruction engendered, the army’s actions were bound to be too harsh for some and too mild for others.

  The intimate relations with Congress fostered by Reconstruction in turn encouraged officers to participate rather freely in political campaigns and to lobby with members of Congress in behalf of both institutional and personal interests. Sherman deprecated such activity and studiously avoided it himself—too much so, in Sheridan’s opinion.5 Sherman viewed the army as “sheriffs of the nation.” Sheriffs execute the law, he pointed out. They neither make nor interpret it and should not go into court to discuss it with judge or jury.6 Few subordinates followed Sherman’s example, and one irate House Democrat pointed out that some day the opposition party might gain control of the White House and conclude that officers doing double duty as soldier and politician deserved a rest—“that it will be but just to permit them to retire temporarily, at least, to some cool and invigorating climate like that of Alaska.”7 A War Department order of 1873 prohibited officers from coming to Washington without permission of the Secretary of War,8 but this had little effect, especially since Washington-based staff officers were the worst offenders.

  During the years of Republican domination, before southern Democrats began returning in strength, the principal threat in Congress came from economizers determined to abolish regiments no loneer needed for Reconstruction rather than permit their employment on the frontier. This motive largely dictated the army reductions of 1869, 1870, and 1874. Also constantly menacing was the personal antipathy of Sen. John A. Logan, sometime chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, former volunteer general, and founder of the Grand Army of the Republic. Contemptuous of military professionalism, spokesman for the militia tradition, and embittered at Sherman for a fancied wartime injury,9 Logan caused the army acute discomfort for two decades.

  A combination of developments intensified the army’s congressional troubles in the middle 1870s. In 1875 the Democrats captured the House of Representatives and held control, with one two-year interlude, until 1889. In the chaotic and bitterly contested presidential election of 1876, the Grant administration stationed troops at southern polling places and, especially in Louisiana, roused the fury of southern Democrats. The following year the Hayes administration used troops to suppress labor disorders in the big manufacturing centers of the East, thereby antagonizing northern Democrats representing these urban constituencies. For four years, 1 875–79, House Democrats went after the army with a vengeance. Only by the most diligent effort did the Republican-controlled Senate save the army from emasculation.

  Strategists for the campaign were the Democrats of the House Committee on Military Affairs, especially Chairman Henry B. Banning of Ohio and his energetic lieutenant, Edward S. Bragg of Wisconsin. Although northerners and former Union volunteer generals, they drew their support in the committee from southern congressmen who had but recently worn gray uniforms. Sherman regarded Banning and Bragg as tools of these southerners, and he discerned in their efforts nothing less than a plot to destroy the army altogether or to reconstitute it under former Confederate generals such as P. G. T. Beauregard and Cadmus Wilcox. “The Rebs whom we beat in the War will conquer us in politics,” he predicted gloomily.10

 
Banning opened his offensive in February 1876 with an exhaustive investigation of military affairs, and by June the House had passsed two measures reducing and reorganizing the army and cutting officers’ pay. Senator Logan bottled up both bills in the Senate military committee. The House built the reductions into the army appropriation bill, and the Senate appropriations committee as promptly cut them out. By July, when the conference committee met to resolve the differences between the House and Senate bills, word of the Custer disaster had broken, and the House conferees receded in exchange for a provision authorizing a joint commission to consider reform and reorganization and to report to the next session of Congress. Indeed, instead of a decrease the army received a 2,500-man increase to meet the emergency dramatized by Custer’s death.11

  The joint commission called for by the army appropriation act drew members from the House, the Senate, and the army, including Banning and Sherman. Secretary of War Don Cameron presided. Despite frequent meetings during the autumn and winter of 1876, the Cameron Commission failed to report to Congress as directed. According to Sherman, Banning frustrated its deliberations by rarely attending meetings and studiously avoiding a position on any issue. Since no bill lacking his endorsement could clear the House military committee, none emerged from the commission.12

  Angry Democrats, now further incensed by the use of troops in the South during the election of 1876, assailed the army again in the second session of the forty-fourth Congress. Charging that the Republican administration had trumped up an Indian scare to win an increase in the cavalry so that the infantry could be used for political purposes in the South, they loaded down the army appropriation bill with provisions for reducing enlisted strength (to 17,000) and the pay of generals. They also included a section enjoining the army from supporting the claim of either of the state governments contending for legitimacy in Louisiana. This last provision proved fatal to the bill, for Republicans viewed it as an unconstitutional invasion of the President’s powers as commander in chief. Throughout the final day of the session, March 3, 1877, House and Senate conferees strove desperately to find a compromise. A last-minute effort to appropriate temporary funding aborted when midnight interrupted a roll-call vote and automatically ended the forty-fourth Congress.13

  The failure of the appropriation bill did not seriously interfere with the army’s supply services because suppliers could look forward to recompense when a bill was eventually enacted. But with the close of the fiscal year on June 30, 1877, army ceased to receive pay. Issue of rations, clothing, and other provisions to enlisted men was not affected, but officers, dependent upon their pay for these necessities, endured severe hardship. Most of them had to resort to credit or loans, frequently at usurious rates. Finally, in October 1877, President Hayes called a special session of Congress. Although the familiar controversies threatened for a time to produce still another stalemate, Congress at length heeded the President’s plea to defer debate on these questions to the regular session and on November 17 gave the army an appropriation act.14

  Having sabotaged the Cameron commission, Banning in January 1878 brought forth his own bill. Besides reducing the size of the army, it called for automatic abolition of the army upon the failure of Congress, as in 1877, to pass an appropriation bill. Even his own committee balked at this. Another bill in this session aimed at abolishing West Point Military Academy and another at dramatizing the size of the officer corps by requiring officers in Washington to wear their uniforms at all times. Although these proposals failed, a measure for cutting enlisted and commissioned strength, and for barring use of the army in civil disturbances, gained House approval on May 28—again as part of the army appropriation bill rather than as substantive legislation. Again Senate Republicans pronounced the bill unacceptable. Again the issue was resolved by adopting the Senate version and setting up still another joint committee to consider the whole question of army reform.15

  The new joint committee mounted the most ambitious effort of all to settle the vexing questions of size, organization, and administration of the army. Chaired by Sen. Ambrose E. Burnside of Rhode Island, ill-starred but nonetheless highly respected Civil War general, the committee drew its members from the two houses of the Congress. Their report, unveiled on December 12, 1878, recommended a comprehensive bill of 724 sections, including one containing the Articles of War and another updating the 1863 Army Regulations. The bill provided for a 25,000-man army, reduction of infantry regiments to eighteen and cavalry regiments to eight, consolidation of the Adjutant General’s and Inspector General’s departments into a general staff, and a limited mobility between line and staff. The grades of general and lieutenant general were to be abolished when vacated by Sherman and Sheridan.16

  The Burnside bill offered the first really well-reasoned plan since the Civil War for giving the Regular Army a stable, politically acceptable organization. Sherman, Schofield, Hancock, and other generals extended warm endorsements. Banning supported it. But staff officers, their privileges threatened, lobbied furiously against it. So did economizers and foes of a regular army of any size or composition, who sponsored amendments to lower the ceiling to twenty, seventeen, and even fifteen thousand. Nor did the bill contain the so-called posse comitatus clause, the restraint on executive use of the army against citizens that Democrats viewed as beyond compromise. Finally, as Sherman noted, “the bill is so infernal long that it offers a vast surface for attack.”17 Despite vigorous support, the legislation failed in both House and Senate. Predictably, parts of it became attached to the annual appropriation bill. Tests showed that all differences between House and Senate could be reconciled save one—the posse comitatus issue. Again, as with its predecessor in 1877, the final session of the forty-fifth Congress expired on March 3, 1879, without an appropriation of funds for the army.18

  With the angry debates on the Burnside measures, congressional concern with the army reached a climax. A special session in the spring of 1879 quietly enacted an appropriation bill.19 Thereafter, as sectional passions cooled and, for one term at least, Republicans captured both Houses, congressional efforts to destroy or weaken the army diminished, as did efforts at needed reform. Not until the Spanish-American War reawakened some of the old controversies was the army again given intense congressional scrutiny.

  The army’s congressional problems in the 1870s sprang chiefly from its employment in the South. Frontier concerns became involved, however, when Democrats charged the Grant and Hayes administrations with exploiting the Indian menace as an excuse for maintaining a large army which could be loosed on the people when the interests of the reigning party dictated. The Indians, in this view, should be dealt with as had earlier generations—by calling out militia in time of war and keeping only so many Regulars as needed to guard the forts in time of peace.20 Frontier concerns also intruded, more fortunately for the army, in the tendency of Texas’ powerful Democratic delegation to vote on military issues as westerners rather than as southerners. Sherman regarded their defection from Democratic ranks as crucial to the army’s interests on more than one occasion.21 Finally, the antagonisms expressed in the Congress and the threat of adverse legislation kept the frontier Regulars constantly unsettled. As General Sheridan put it to a House committee in 1874: “Almost all of you have commanded troops, and know what a panic is. The Army is kept in a condition of constant panic all the time.”22

  Congressional attitudes toward the army reflected attitudes increasingly prevalent among the overwhelming portion of the population that did not reside near Indian country. Now and then the people saw their army employed in such controversial causes as Reconstruction, overseeing elections, and labor disorders. Most of the time it remained effectively hidden from view on the remote frontier. No very strong constituency or interest group in the East depended on it or spoke for its welfare. More fundamental, the burgeoning industrialization of the postwar decades gave rise to a widespread conviction that war had become a thing of the past. Articulated by Herbert Sp
encer and John Fiske, this “business pacifism,” as Samuel P. Huntington has labeled it, held war so irrational and destructive of economic productivity and material well-being as to be unthinkable in the new industrial age. In such an intellectual climate, military institutions of any kind became anachronistic.23 Physically, politically, socially, and intellectually, these factors separated the army from the people. Although less vocal in their antipathy, the people constituted the most dangerous of the army’s critics.

  This isolation from the people did not pass unrecognized by the Regulars. For most, it was simply an acute awareness of the ignorance, disinterest, or hostility of civilians. As an officer’s wife wrote upon returning to a Montana post after furlough: “The winter East was enjoyable and refreshing from first to last, but citizens and army people have so little in common, and this one feels after being with them a while, no matter how near and dear the relationship may be.”24 In less personal terms, the Army and Navy Journal constantly drew attention to the problem, as in an 1877 editorial: “The present trouble with the Army is that it is separated from the knowledge and affections of the people who pay the taxes, and is only seen from year to year in the form of heavy appropriations.”25 Sherman and his generals, most notably John Pope, perceived the problem. “It is essential,” Pope told a congressional committee in 1878, that the army’s “relation to the people and to the government should be made closer and more harmonious. Unless this can be done it always invites and will always provoke criticism and unfriendly action.”26

  Proposed remedies were few and vague. Deploring the American tendency to copy from the French, Sherman declared that a nation’s institutions should “harmonize with the genius and tone of the mass of the people. Our people are not French but American and our army should be organized and maintained upon a model of our own, and not copied after that of the French, who differ from us so essentially.”27 Pope held similar views, and he urged Congress to give the United States a military system “in harmony with the spirit of our government and the feelings and habits of our people.” But other than advocating merit promotion as a means of ending the undemocratic exclusiveness of the officer corps—a cause the Army and Navy Journal also espoused—Pope provided no more specific description of such a system than Sherman.28 Most responsive to the need, although designed for other needs as well, were proposals to localize unit recruiting by tying each regiment to a particular area of the nation. In the roots regiments and brigades traced to home communities, Asst. Insp. Gen. James A. Hardie pointed out in 1874, lay much of the strength of the Civil War volunteer armies.29 Neither this nor any other remedy, however, gained acceptance.