In 1865 Sherman predicted that “no matter what change we may desire in the feelings and thoughts of people [in the] South, we cannot accomplish it by force. Nor can we afford to maintain there an army large enough to hold them in subjugation.” He was right. Force failed to transform southerners. But northern public opinion never permitted the use of much force. A massive, sustained intervention might have produced more favorable results. But budgetary restraints, fear of standing armies, and concern for the consent of the governed (as long as they were white) prevented a significant commitment of indefinite duration. By 1877 the north was so anxious for sectional reconciliation that it gave up the effort to preserve the gains of 1865. It had won the conventional war but lost the unconventional war of 1867–1877. White supremacy prevailed, and the south’s wartime leaders dominated a distinct section within the United States. As one man wrote in 1877, “Status quo ante bellum or things as they were before Lincoln, slavery excepted: such is the tendency everywhere.” True, formal slavery died, but whites imposed informal servitude on blacks, making them the most cruelly deceived of all by Appomattox. The north got peace in 1877, but the peace lacked justice.
The Army’s duty in the south was onerous. Subjected to political crossfires, it turned in a performance that seemingly pleased no one, north or south. Radicals argued that it did too little to support the congressional program, while Conservatives complained that it did too much. As the Army redeployed, most men were probably glad to leave the south. Avenging Custer or chasing the Nez Perce would surely be more satisfying (if also more deadly) than playing a thankless political and civil role. But the Army was about to march into another civil-military cauldron, for in 1877 a nationwide labor strike rocked the government, which ordered the Army to undertake another untraditional task: policing labor strikes.
The Army and Strikebreaking
In the last half of the century American society underwent rapid change. Immigration threatened its identity, urban growth compromised its agrarian past, and the rise of corporate capitalism altered the relationship between management and labor. Hard hit by recurrent depressions and stressing the rights and needs of individuals, laborers went on strike, raising the specter of class warfare. Capitalists demanded that the government intervene to preserve order, and presidents responded by ordering the Army to enforce the law. Essentially middle class by birth, Army officers shared the capitalists’ ideology. Both groups were concerned about social stability and the sanctity of private property but little understood the conditions that drove workers to strike.
The 1877 strike began with railroad workers, but coal miners and the urban unemployed soon made common cause with them. Local law enforcement agencies and private industrial police were unable to restore order. Management appealed to governors for National Guard (militia) assistance, but some states found they had no militia, and those that did discovered their Guardsmen often sympathized with the strikers. Worried state officials and capitalists called for federal aid, and President Rutherford B. Hayes sent about 2,000 regulars to troubled areas, some arriving after forced marches from Indian country, “all tanned and grizzled, and with unwashed faces and unkempt hair, and their clothes covered with dust an inch thick in some places.”
Military intervention in labor disputes was not unprecedented (in 1834 President Jackson used troops in a labor disturbance), and Reconstruction familiarized Americans with using regulars upon a governor’s application. Still, Hayes’s action marked the beginning of a wrenching experience for the Army. During the next twenty years it participated in several other shattering labor upheavals and several minor ones. Three characteristics marked the Army’s role in labor troubles. First, in each situation the government and Army responded on an ad hoc basis. The government devised no policy, and the Army no contingency plans, for strike duty. Second, despite this handicap, the Army was effective. It not only restored order but also broke strikes, to the dismay of workers and the delight of capitalists. Third, the Army acted with restraint. Although sometimes met with abuse and rocks, regulars refused to respond with violence. In 1877, for instance, local police, hired guards, and National Guardsmen killed 100 strikers, but regulars did not kill a single man.
“In reality, the Army is now a gendarmery—a national police,” wrote a colonel in 1895. The Army’s participation in labor strife apparently convinced a few officers that this was true. Arguing that the nation needed an enlarged Army to restrain the industrial proletariat, they requested increased appropriations and manpower. Actually, such appeals may have been consciously spurious. By 1890 the thrust of professionalization was toward creating a modern Army prepared for war, and the money and men allegedly needed to control “white savages” could be used for this primary mission. Strikebreaking was no more edifying than Reconstruction duty: One alienated southerners and the other antagonized labor, which trumpeted the old arguments against a standing army. In any event, the officers’ appeals did not work. Southern congressmen, remembering the army’s “tyranny,” obstructed Army legislation, and many other Americans were receptive to labor’s warning about despotism. Moreover, state officials no longer needed to rely on regulars. After an inept start in 1877, National Guard units became more efficient and assumed a greater role in quelling labor strife.
The need for a police force for strike duty was only one stimulus that revived the volunteer militia, which almost universally assumed the name National Guard in the postwar era. After the war southern militias, first Democratic and then Republican, reformed immediately, but northern units briefly deteriorated. The exhaustion with war and the sense of security that led to the Army’s reduction also sapped militia vitality. But by the early 1870s the traditional attractions of militia service began to resuscitate the institution. Spontaneous martial enthusiasm, the social prestige of belonging to an elite group, and the appeal to physical fitness, discipline, and duty sparked the renaissance.
Following the 1877 debacle the pace of the National Guard’s revival quickened. Between 1881 and 1892 every state revised its militia code, and in 1879 militia leaders formed the National Guard Association to lobby Congress for favorable legislation. However, the association’s only success came in 1887, when Congress doubled the annual appropriation begun in 1808 to $400,000. By the early 1890s the Guard contained more than 100,000 men, predominantly from the middle class. Its foremost activity was preserving order in industrial disputes. Between 1877 and 1903 governors called out the Guard more than 700 times, and about half of the calls were for the Guard to perform strike police duty. Since many working people viewed the Guard as a capitalist tool and disliked it intensely, serving as strike police was no more rewarding for Guardsmen than for regulars. Indeed, when the National Guard Association asked for federal aid, it emphasized the Guard’s role as a reserve force, not as policemen. Thus neither regulars nor citizen-soldiers avidly pursued strike duty as a primary mission. But both groups sought other missions that armed forces modernization and professionalization offered.
Imperialism and Naval Modernization
Stimulated by America’s emerging imperialist impulse, technological developments, and officers’ career concerns, the armed forces started to modernize during the 1880s. A steam and steel “new navy” eased down the slips and onto the seas, and Congress appropriated funds to commence a new coastal fortifications program. To build ordnance and armor for the modern ships and coastal defenses, linkages developed among the military, government, and industry. During the century’s last two decades, America shifted from isolation to imperialism, its outward thrust combining idealism, cultural arrogance, and economic expediency. A resurgent Manifest Destiny proclaimed the white man’s moral responsibility to spread civilization, and Social Darwinists gave Manifest Destiny a “scientific” veneer, arguing that nations behaved like biological organisms. Only the fittest survived, so strong nations inevitably extended their power over weaker ones. And since Darwin described a struggle for survival, a nation must be prepa
red to fight. Some civil and military leaders actually glorified war. One congressman announced that “there are no great nations of Quakers,” and a naval officer wrote an essay in the North American Review extolling “The Benefits of War.”
The fusion of destiny, Darwinism, and a glorification of war was not the only cause of American imperialism. Some people thought the closing of the frontier, industrial overproduction, and labor unrest portended a crisis. They believed that America’s history was one of expansion, the frontier (in theory) providing a “safety valve” for the discontented, raw materials, and a market for manufactured goods. With the frontier gone, was it coincidence that the nation suffered from excess production, depressions, and labor unrest? Policymakers sought a new frontier, primarily commercial rather than territorial, by channeling expansionist energies into an aggressive search for overseas markets to absorb the industrial glut, restore prosperity, and preserve domestic tranquility. The United States, however, did not have unfettered access to foreign markets. European empires controlled much of Asia and Africa, and some Europeans cast covetous eyes upon Latin America. President Chester A. Arthur had defined America as the “chief Pacific power” and the U.S. considered the Caribbean its private lake, but if the country did not enter the imperial quest, the great powers might foreclose its opportunities to sell exports in either region. Thus policymakers urged a strategy of preemptive imperialism: The United States should seize or dominate desirable areas before rivals gobbled them up.
Two imperatives flowed from the search for foreign markets. First, America must acquire more bases as trading and naval way stations to protect its interests and encourage commerce. Between 1867 and 1889 the United States purchased Alaska, occupied Midway, and acquired the right to build naval bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and Pago Pago, Samoa. (Few expansionists thought this was enough.) Second, the country must strengthen its coastal defenses and Navy, and broaden its definition of national security. Since the U.S. was becoming part of an interdependent world economic and political system, a commercial struggle might flash into an outright war, necessitating the protection of the continental domain and its overseas interests.
Rearmament advocates initially stressed traditional defensive strategies. An expanded Navy and modern fortifications would prevent an enemy from raiding the coast, bombarding wealthy port cities, and effecting a close blockade. By the mid-1880s the increased capabilities of European steam fleets made these prospects seem frightening. The Navy would also engage in single-ship operations, defending the merchant marine and foreign bases and destroying enemy commerce. However, a growing number of strategists questioned the viability of the traditional maritime strategies. They perceived that the telegraph and fast steam cruisers would make commerce raiding difficult. Moreover, instead of sailing singly or hovering near the coast to defend important harbors, the ships of a modern Navy might be massed for offensive fleet actions at sea. As one congressman said in 1887, we want a Navy “with which we may meet the foe away from our coast when he comes.”
Technology joined imperialism as a spur to modernization. For twenty years Americans congratulated themselves for not following European nations that built the costly experimental weapons that soon became outmoded. But the technological advances had been tremendous. Delaying modernization much longer might mean falling irretrievably behind in the technological race. More important, European naval architects had eliminated much technical confusion, blending steam, armor, and improved guns into acceptable ship standards. Navies could dispense with full sail rigging, since better engines increased speed and range. Steel was superior to iron for hulls and armor, and hull compartmentalization would keep a damaged ship afloat. Guns came to be breechloading rifles using slow-burning powder that enhanced velocity. Compound barrels permitted lighter yet stronger guns, which hydraulic recoil mechanisms automatically returned to their firing position. In 1883 a naval commander summed up an increasingly universal feeling: “The present time is very favorable; it is possible after twenty years of experiments, mainly by foreign nations, the results of which are known to us, to build a fine fleet, of such numbers as may be judged necessary, and equal to performance and wants now well understood; a fleet that shall be superior ship for ship to the same kind of vessels elsewhere.”
Army and Navy officers, particularly junior ones, pushed modernization for national security reasons, but also for narrow career interests. Promotion remained slow; larger, modern forces with important missions would break the logjam. With the ending of the Indian wars, the Army had lost its most active mission. Police duty was an unsatisfactory substitute, and no strategists envisioned sending large expeditionary forces abroad. At most the nation might require small Army forces to help the Navy temporarily defend a few points on foreign soil. The Army embraced a new fortifications program, for coastal defense seemed its sole remaining significant function. While reminding the public of the Navy’s role in aiding businessmen abroad, naval officers propagandized for the new Navy among selected groups. They lobbied among shipbuilders, steel firms, and weapons manufacturers who would benefit from naval construction. Navalists also supported an expanded merchant marine, hoping they could convince the business community that more commerce justified more warships.
Ever since the Virginius affair of 1873–1874, navalists had lobbied intensively for a revitalized Navy, but it took a decade for them to achieve even modest results. The Navy’s serious rebuilding effort began in 1882–1883 under Secretary of the Navy William H. Hunt, who persuaded President Chester A. Arthur that new construction was necessary. “Every condition of national safety, economy, and honor demands a thorough rehabilitation of the Navy,” the president told Congress, which responded in 1882 with an act authorizing two steel cruisers, though it failed to appropriate funds to build them. The same law limited repairs on existing ships, which ensured an early retirement for the “old navy,” and authorized the secretary to appoint a Naval Advisory Board, which recommended four steel cruisers and a dispatch boat. Congress eliminated one cruiser and in the Naval Appropriations Act of 1883 authorized and funded the protected (armored) cruisers Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago and the dispatch vessel Dolphin (known as the ABCD ships). The cruisers were transitional vessels, sail-rigged but with steel hulls, compartmentalization, steam engines, screw propellers, electric power plants, and breechloading rifles using slow-burning powder. Between 1884 and 1889 Congress authorized eight more protected cruisers (including Charleston, the first modern U.S. ship without sails), three unprotected cruisers, six steel gunboats, three armored cruisers (two of them, Maine and Texas, were originally classified as second-class battleships), and a few monitors. The new Navy initially remained wedded to the old mission of showing the flag and protecting commerce. The ships still lacked the armor and armaments to engage European fleets, yet they were ideal for intimidating nonindustrialized peoples and could carry out attacks on enemy commerce.
A fundamental change in naval policy occurred in the early 1890s, prompted by Secretary of the Navy Benjamin R. Tracy, who believed that the “sea will be the future seat of empire. And we shall rule it as certainly as the sun doth rise!” To do so, the United States needed bases (perhaps even colonies) and a great Navy, and Tracy was an avid expansionist and an ardent navalist. He cast his imperialist eye on several islands, but all his schemes failed. He had more success with the development of the Navy. His first annual report in November 1889, which reflected increasingly widespread professional naval thought, represented a clear break with past strategy. Instead of emphasizing coastal defense and commerce protection and raiding, he called for a new doctrine of command of the sea based on battleships capable of destroying an enemy’s fleet in midocean. “The country,” he said, “needs a navy that will exempt it from war, but the only navy that will accomplish this is a navy that can wage war.” The present force of cruisers and gunboats did “not constitute a fighting force.” He recommended building eight battleships for the Pacific and twelve for t
he Atlantic, all of them “the best of their class in four leading characteristics: armament, armor, structural strength, and speed.” He also suggested a complementary force of sixty cruisers (thirty-one of which were already built or authorized) and twenty coastal defense vessels. He believed the U.S. could easily afford such a Navy and that its construction would benefit labor.
Tracy’s recommendations for 100 modern warships might have seemed excessive had not the Policy Board’s report of January 1890 been leaked to the press. Appointed by Tracy to study naval requirements and prepare a long-range plan, the board called for more than 200 ships! With the Tracy and Policy Board reports before them, congressmen engaged in an acrimonious debate. Many recognized that battleships marked a radical departure and hesitated to embark on an uncharted voyage. Some wanted only monitors and coastal fortifications, others preferred cruisers and gunboats. The resulting naval bill was a compromise. It authorized three battleships, but designated them “sea-going coastal battleships” and limited them to a 4,500-mile range. Traditionalists could thus consider Oregon, Indiana, and Massachusetts as little more than updated monitors with an enhanced ability to break a blockade. Yet the battleships did mark a departure, the starting point for a new maritime strategy that strove to gain command of the sea. Once begun, Congress did not reverse the trend. In 1892 it funded Iowa, a battleship with no statutory range limit; in 1895 it authorized two more battleships and in 1896 another three.
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