Devoting only a fraction of the curriculum to military theory and history, West Point could instill only a limited professionalism in officers. A complete professional education required higher military schools. West Point would introduce cadets to military art and science, but graduate schools would give special preparation for service in the three line branches (infantry, cavalry, artillery) and in staff positions. In 1824 Calhoun established the Army’s first postgraduate school, the Artillery School of Practice at Fortress Monroe, and three years later his successor founded an Infantry School of Practice at Jefferson Barracks. But the movement was abortive. The Artillery School closed in 1835, and the Infantry School existed in name only. A permanent postgraduate system emerged only after the Civil War.
The Navy had no West Point equivalent until 1845, when Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, temporarily also serving as secretary of war, transferred Fort Severn, Annapolis, from the Army to the Navy. Bancroft then ordered midshipmen returning from sea, as well as a small instructional and administrative staff, to report there. The new school began to nurture naval professionalization and in 1850 was named the Naval Academy. However, the Navy also lacked postgraduate schools to hone its officer corps’ expertise, responsibility, and corporateness.
Despite savage criticism of West Point (and later the Naval Academy), professionalization continued during the age of Jackson, an era known for its emphasis upon egalitarianism and amateurism. Critics deemed the Academy unnecessary and extolled the natural martial ability of citizen-soldiers—a trait personified by Jackson himself. They denounced the Academy as un-American, claiming it established a military aristocracy that monopolized the officer corps and degraded enlisted men. Critics also charged that West Point was expensive and produced more officers than the Army needed.
The clamor against West Point had little effect, as the proportion of West Point graduates in the officer corps grew from less than 15 percent in 1817 to more than 76 percent in 1860. And because of accelerating professionalization, the officer corps in 1860 was far different from what it had been a generation earlier. Between the 1st American Regiment’s formation in 1784 and the end of the War of 1812, the officer corps had been characterized by administrative instability, amateurism, high turnover (because men considered military service little more than a brief interruption in their civil careers), and internal dissension. Indeed, few armies had ever been led by such an unruly, contentious group of officers; as one general wrote in 1797, the Army was an “Augean stable of anarchy and confusion.”
But after 1815 a distinct military subculture emerged, aided by the comparative political harmony that prevailed immediately after the War of 1812. Military careers became dramatically longer as men increasingly viewed officership as a lifelong commitment; in 1797 the median career length for all officers was only ten years but by 1830 it had extended to twenty-two years. The expanded, permanent General Staff developed formal regulations and methodical procedures that brought stability to military administration, a structure later emulated by private corporations. The nascent educational system socialized aspiring officers into their craft and instilled values that united men from different regions and social classes. Professional officers believed that the Army should avoid strident political partisanship and instead be a neutral instrument of government policy. Perceiving themselves as distinct from the civilian world, they developed a near-unanimous contempt for citizen-soldiers and collectively wallowed in self-pity, convinced that the public showed little appreciation (but much apathy) for the Army’s difficult and dangerous task of policing the Indian frontier.
After the War of 1812 military planners realized that no matter how often politicians glorified citizen-soldiers or how severely Congress cut the Army, regulars would provide the first line of land defense. They also knew that reliance on the common militia to reinforce the regular Army was chimerical. In 1808 Congressman Jabez Upham had argued that the notion of prosecuting a war with militia “will do very well on paper; it sounds well in the war speeches on this floor. To talk about every soldier being a citizen, and every citizen being a soldier, and to declaim that the militia of our country is the bulwark of our liberty is very captivating. All this will figure to advantage in history. But it will not do at all in practice.” The War of 1812 proved Upham a prophet. Aside from Baltimore and New Orleans, the militia performed badly, and after the war it lived on only in Fourth of July oratory. Presidents stopped urging, and Congress ceased debating, militia reform, and the number of states submitting militia returns to the War Department declined precipitously.
Volunteer militia units partially filled the void left by the common militia’s demise. To preserve the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company and other traditional volunteer units, a section of the Uniform Militia Act permitted states to incorporate volunteer companies. Under this clause a volunteer militia movement swept the country after 1815, providing an outlet for men who still took citizen-soldiering seriously. Despite the myth of a “militant south,” the volunteer phenomenon was particularly strong in the north, with earnest amateurs in New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut representing a substantial military force.
In his second annual message President Franklin Pierce praised “the valuable services constantly rendered by the Army and its inestimable importance as the nucleus around which the volunteer force of the nation can promptly gather in the hour of danger.” Perhaps unknowingly the president acknowledged that a crucial change in military policy had occurred since the War of 1812. Militia no longer figured in the commander in chief’s calculations, an admission no president would have made just a generation earlier. Professionalized regulars reinforced by enthusiastic volunteers had replaced the common militia as the foundation for national defense.
Military Forces and National Development
The hallmarks of the age were territorial expansion and the westward movement. Florida, Texas, Oregon, the Mexican Cession, and the Gadsden Purchase increased the national domain, and settlement reached the Pacific. In this surge of national development, the Army served as an advance agent of a continental empire. Soldiers explored the west and built, improved, and protected transportation networks. Communities arose in the vicinity of forts where bluecoats provided security and consumed goods and services. The Army was also a law enforcement agency, especially in Indian affairs. West Point graduates were well suited for developmental activities. Under Thayer’s guidance the Academy not only produced officers with professional ideals but also became the nation’s finest scientific and engineering school, and graduates readily utilized their scientific and engineering skills for national development.
Army explorations began before the War of 1812, halted during the war, and then scoured the west after 1815. Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark led the most noteworthy prewar expedition, which departed St. Louis in 1804, crossed the continent to the Pacific, and returned in 1806. The expedition was the first direct federal aid in developing the west, setting a precedent for the future. Perhaps the most famous postwar army explorer was Lieutenant John C. Fremont, whose three long reconnaissances, between 1842 and 1845, won him the nickname “the Pathfinder.” But Fremont was only one of dozens of officers who helped unlock the region’s geographic mysteries. The Army also cooperated with civilians. Scientists, scholars, and artists normally traveled with Army expeditions, and civilian-led parties depended upon Army assistance. Although the trans-Mississippi west was unknown to Americans in 1800, sixty years later people understood its geography and knew much about its geology, flora and fauna, and native peoples. Pioneers did not blindly enter the wilderness.
Army personnel made the west increasingly accessible by assisting with internal improvements. Distinguishing the military from the commercial significance of roads, improved rivers, canals, and railroads was impossible, and in the General Survey Act of 1824 Congress authorized the use of military engineers for transportation improvements of commercial or military impo
rtance. Under this act Army engineers worked on state and private projects as well as federally sponsored improvements. The War of 1812 had demonstrated the handicaps imposed by inadequate transportation, and Army efforts to remedy the situation began immediately after the war. Soldiers began work where the war had shown the greatest need, building, for example, “Jackson’s Military Road” from Tennessee to New Orleans. As the nation expanded, the soldier-roadbuilders followed the moving frontier. In many cases troops did the construction, but in other instances military engineers supervised civilian crews working under War Department contracts. Army engineers improved rivers and harbors and assisted in the construction of canals, such as the Chesapeake and Ohio. They worked with railroad companies, beginning in 1827, when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company asked for and received government engineering aid. By the mid-1830s, between ten and twenty companies were receiving Army engineering assistance every year.
Army posts offered economic opportunity, often making the difference between a stagnant local economy and a prosperous one. Although soldiers spent much of their time farming, building barracks, doing maintenance work, and cutting firewood, few forts achieved self-sufficiency. They depended on the local community for building materials, corn, beef, hay, and firewood. Garrisons employed civilians as clerks, teamsters, and skilled laborers, and soldiers primed the economy by spending their pay in the immediate vicinity.
Troops made the west reasonably safe. Since colonial times forts had been built to control the fur trade, impress the Indians, deter potential foreign enemies, and protect settlers. The fur trade remained profitable and the Indians belligerent, Britain retained Canada, Spain held the southwest, and settlers wanted to keep their hair. Thus the War Department built new forts at strategic locations as the frontier swept westward. In 1817 a loose cordon of forts ran from Fort Mackinac at Lake Michigan’s eastern tip, to Fort Howard on Green Bay, to Forts Crawford, Armstrong, and Edwards on the Mississippi, and to a post at Natchitoches in central Louisiana. By the early 1850s the military frontier ran along the Columbia River, the California coast, and the Rio Grande. Army posts dotted the west, leaving only a handful of troops east of the 1817 perimeter.
One of the Army’s most onerous duties was enforcing the trade and intercourse laws in Indian country. Beginning in 1790 Congress passed a series of acts, codified in 1834, to regulate trade with the Indians and preserve peace by eliminating Indian grievances. The laws forbade settlement on Indian lands, licensed the Indian trade, and prohibited liquor in Indian Territory. Upholding the law’s majesty made the Army unpopular with avaricious settlers, traders, and whiskey vendors. Troops were too few, lawbreakers too numerous, and the frontier too vast for bluecoats to be effective policemen. Violators could not be tried by courts-martial but had to be remanded to civil courts, which rarely convicted alleged offenders. When the Army expelled intruders and seized liquor, aggrieved parties frequently filed civil suits against commanding officers, and the prospect of court actions deterred rigorous enforcement.
The Navy played a vital role in national development by laying the foundations for America’s overseas commercial and territorial empire. Antebellum naval missions presaged a post–Civil War global commitment, especially to the Pacific. Between 1838 and 1861 maritime expeditions combining scientific objectives with commercial and diplomatic purposes explored the Amazon River and the Rio de la Plata, searched the Isthmus of Darien for an interoceanic canal site, reconnoitered the River Jordan and the Dead Sea, sailed the Arctic seas, charted Africa’s west coast, and ranged over the Pacific.
The most spectacular examples of the Navy’s commercial-diplomatic role concerned China and Japan. Although the United States remained neutral during the Opium War in China (1839–1842), a naval squadron commanded by Lawrence Kearny was posted to protect American merchants. Kearny’s astute diplomacy paved the way for the Treaty of Wanghia (1844), which opened five ports to American merchants on a most-favored-nation basis. The treaty placed American economic relations with China under diplomatic protection for the first time and heralded an American entrance into Far Eastern international politics. Equally significant was Matthew C. Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1853–1854. Perry purchased land for a coaling station at Port Lloyd in the Bonin Islands and negotiated the Treaty of Kanagawa (1854), which opened two Japanese ports to American commerce, promised humane treatment to shipwrecked sailors, and permitted an American consul to reside at Shimoda. This treaty was Japan’s first step in a meteoric ascent from feudal isolation to great power status.
The Navy also participated in numerous punitive expeditions to protect American lives and property, suppress piracy, uphold national honor, and enforce treaties. During the antebellum era dozens of landing parties composed of sailors and marines supported American interests in Asia, in the Caribbean and Mediterranean Seas, along both coasts of South America, and along the East African coast. Most of the expeditions were brief and bloodless, but occasionally fighting did occur. For example, the first official American armed intervention in Asia took place in February 1832 at Quallah Battoo, Sumatra, to avenge an attack on a merchant vessel. President Jackson, who feared the incident might presage other attacks on America’s growing Asian commerce, ordered John Downes, commanding the frigate Potomac, to the scene. After a cursory investigation, Downes sent sailors and marines ashore, where they destroyed the town and several forts and probably killed at least 100 Sumatrans.
The unofficial alliance between the Navy and American commercial interests produced astounding results. Between 1790 and 1860 total exports (including reexports) increased from $20 million to $334 million; this helped to transform the United States into one of the world’s foremost economic powers by the end of the nineteenth century. So stupendous was this antebellum maritime commercial expansion that one astute foreign observer, contemplating “the ardor with which the Anglo-Americans prosecute commerce,” predicted that America would “one day become the foremost maritime power of the globe.”
The armed forces played indispensable roles in national development despite acute manpower problems. Conditions in both services were often deplorable, featuring low pay, coarse and monotonous rations, primitive medical facilities, and near-sadistic discipline. Army recruits were predominantly northern laborers or immigrants, many of the latter unable to speak or understand English. In 1840, for example, only four recruits came from the Deep South but 1,444 came from New York alone, and between 1850 and 1859 two-thirds of the enlisted men were foreign born. Economic factors were often foremost in a man’s decision to enlist. Laborers who lost their jobs during economic depressions sometimes turned to the Army in desperation, while immigrants were frequently destitute when they arrived at a seaport. Isolated in small frontier posts, many with fewer than 100 officers and men, soldiers had few opportunities for martial glory and none for becoming officers. Instead, they performed manual labor, building and maintaining forts and roads, farming, caring for livestock, and cutting wood. Since they had enlisted to be soldiers rather than laborers, they found these conditions onerous, often resorting to the bottle and to desertion to escape them. Deserting sometimes reached absurd proportions: In 1830 1,251 out of 5,231 men fled the Army!
Conditions in the Navy were no better. Like soldiers, sailors were isolated, floating on distant stations in tiny, cramped warships where the work was hard, life was boring, and an atmosphere of brutality prevailed. Common punishments included confinement in irons, informal floggings with the end of a rope, and formal lashings with a cat-o’-nine-tails that could leave the flesh “fairly hanging in strips” on a man’s back. Such conditions attracted few high-quality American citizens, and by 1860 the Navy’s foreign-born component approached 50 percent. Those Americans who did enlist, said one naval officer, came from “the most worthless class of our native population.” As in the Army, drunkenness and desertion were frequent occurrences; charges relating to these crimes composed 25 percent of all charges at Navy courts-martial betw
een 1799 and 1861.
Reform movements tried to ameliorate conditions, especially in the Navy. Humanitarians, who often unfavorably compared sailors to slaves, focused on the abolition of flogging and the grog ration. The Army abolished flogging in 1812, though it was reinstated as punishment for desertion in 1833, and ended the daily liquor ration in 1830. The Navy clung to both. Most naval officers and their conservative congressional allies argued against “hyperphilanthropy,” maintaining that the lash held crews in line and the grog ration was healthful. Although reformers eventually achieved success against flogging in 1850 and against liquor in 1862, overall conditions aboard ship improved only slightly.
Officers had to deal with truculent men and endured the same general milieu, but they also had a special problem. Guided only by seniority, promotion was slow. It often took twenty or thirty years for an Army officer to become a major, and fifty-year-old naval lieutenants were commonplace. Shut away in frontier posts or distant ships, scanning the news for deaths or resignations among more senior officers, men became quarrelsome and inordinately sensitive about personal honor. To escape the boredom, low pay, lack of esteem, and pettiness, many officers resigned, especially from the Army, because they could exploit their West Point education in civilian pursuits. Yet some good officers remained, proud of their profession and their role in national development.
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