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Historiographical Essay

Continuity in Civil-Military Relations and Expertise: The U.S. Army during the Decade before the Civil War*I

Samuel Watson

ong-neglected apart from students of the Indian wars and the West, the history of the United States Army during the decade before the Civil Warhas gained significant scholarly attention during the last generation. Indeed, no less than three books that directly address this topic appeared in 2009, and at least three others have appeared since 2000. As the nation enters the Civil War sesquicentennial, a brief look at this literature and its conclusions may be useful to assess the army’s missions, expertise, force structure, and relations with civil society on the eve of secession. Doing so also can help us better understand the1850s in America—a decade understudied apart from the sectional conflict—and the army’s preparation, or lack of preparation, for the war that began in 1861. This essay examines both the history and historiography of the Regular Army— the national standing army—during the 1850s, largely through monographspublished since 1990, to assess institutional developments and capabilities and the influence of partisanship and sectionalism. On the whole, the army of the 1850s was not substantially different from that which had matured since the War of 1812: insulated but not isolated from many civilian phenomena, a professionally autonomous but accountable force, generally non- or anti-partisan, and neutral in the sectional conflict prior to secession. The army conducted peacekeeping or constabulary missions and small-scale expeditions against Indians but preferred to imagine itself fighting European enemies in large- scale conventional operations. It improved its ability to do so incrementally but not decisively, remaining much more skilled in logistics, administration, and tactical troop training (linear drill) than grand tactical or operational maneuver.

Prior to 1990, scholarship on the army during the 1850s was almost completely confined to histories of individual frontier campaigns, or to portions of larger biographies, surveys, and works on individual forts, usually set in the Trans- Mississippi West. Indeed, the army of the 1850s was studied almost entirely within the context of the western frontier, largely by western

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historians, as a “multi-purpose” force, a tendency that drew valuable attention to the army’s crucial nation-building efforts in exploration, surveying, and road-building.1 In 1990 George T. Ness, Jr., published The Regular Army on the Eve of the Civil War, the first and most detailed work focusing on the army as an institution during the 1850s, but Ness offers limited analysis and interpretation. Two years later, William B. Skelton provided the first holistic, comprehensively researched monograph on the officer corps in the antebellum period, in An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784-1861. Indeed, given the limitations of Samuel Huntington’s evidence and social science approach in The Soldier and the State, Marcus Cunliffe’s sometimes anecdotal reportage in Soldiers and Civilians, and given that Edward M. Coffman and Russell F. Weigley only treated the period within more comprehensive narratives, it may well be argued, as surprising as it may seem, that Skelton effectively inaugurated detailed modern scholarship on the antebellum officer corps. (Studies of enlisted soldiers have tended toward social histories with limited significance for the analysis of missions, force structure, and capability.) Skelton did not treat the 1850s as a distinct period, but advanced the thesis that the army officer corps had become more committed, cohesive, and expert, and thus more professional, than Huntington and Coffman had allowed.

The first scholarly works to treat the 1850s as a distinct period appeared at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In 2000, Army officer Matthew Moten followed in the footsteps of Huntington with his monograph The Delafield Commission and the American Military Profession, arguing that “by 1855, military expertise in the U.S. Army, largely a product of West Point and West Pointers, was moribund,” because of its tendency toward narrow technical detail rather than higher analysis. The following year Durwood Ball, a western historian, published Army Regulars on the Western Frontier, a work that appears to challenge much of Skelton’s portrait of the Army’s growing professionalism, in particular its supposed anti-partisanship and distance from the sectional conflict.3

However, Ball and Moten were coming from very different perspectives, and raising challenges to very different dimensions of Skelton’s interpretation. In 2004, Air Force officer Tony Mullis presented alternatives to both Ball and Moten in his monograph Peacekeeping on the Plains: Army Operations in Bleeding Kansas. Mullis demonstrated that the army was more evenhanded, less sectional and partisan, than Ball’s language often suggests. On the other hand, the focus on constabulary operations that Mullis shares with Ball, in contrast to Moten’s implicit orientation toward the Civil War and conventional warfighting, hints at the growing debate in our own time over the military’s missions in the aftermath of the Cold War, as many of the Army’s operations during the 1990s were essentially constabulary in nature (peacekeeping, peace enforcement, “military operations other than war,” “stability and support operations,” etc.), which had its officers worrying about the decline of conventional skills. In effect, Mullis argued that Skelton was right and Ball wrong about officer subordination and accountability, but that Ball was right to concentrate on peacekeeping and the west—the coercive dimensions of the “The Multi-Purpose Army on the Frontier” as Michael Tate has described it—rather than preparation for conventional conflict as the army’s actual mission during the 1850s.

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Three works published in 2009 elaborate on these dichotomies. Unlike Ball and Mullis, Wayne Hsieh (West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace) and Mark Smith (Engineering Security: The Corps of Engineers and Third System Defense Policy, 1815-1861) emphasize the army’s preparation for conventional warfare; unlike Moten, they applaud its professional development, however conservative and incremental, during the 1850s. Indeed, Smith extols the intellectual conservatism of the Corps of Engineers as an indice of professional responsibility: wise engineers are cautious engineers. Brian Linn occupies a middle position, identifying a “continental” strategy of coastal defense fortification, advanced primarily by the engineers, as the mid-nineteenth century army’s principal mode of strategic thought, in The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War (2007). Nevertheless, Robert Wooster reminds us in The American Military Frontiers (2009) that the army’s operational focus was toward the west, not the Atlantic, and follows Mullis and Skelton in depicting the army as a reliable, and reasonably effective, instrument of national policy. This essay will begin by addressing the army’s missions, turning to examine several dimensions of civil- military relations, before concluding with assessments of the character and extent of American military expertise and hinting at postbellum implications.5

Context is essential for assessing trajectories of change and continuity in the army’s development during this decade. To begin with, the decade is only “antebellum” in retrospect: it is essential to remember that the army’s operations were unconventional or constabulary in nature, that few wanted civil war and that the army could not plan for it. Nevertheless, America was a violent place during the 1850s—a decade of rioting, lynching, filibustering (privately organized expeditions against foreign nations, in violation of federal neutrality laws), and vigilantism, as well as wars against Indians, with the growing sectional conflict as a backdrop influencing politics and policies. As the North, and especially the South, prepared for potential conflicts with revived state militia and volunteer forces,6 the national army, lauded for victory in Mexico, found itself pulled between divergent attitudes and missions. While some dimensions of the army’s milieu became more sectional and “southern” during the 1850s, on the whole regular officers preferred to avoid entanglement in disputes between citizens, which might endanger their long sought-after autonomy from the uncertainties of partisan and sectional politics. While officers of the engineers, ordnance, and artillery prepared to engage in conventional European-style conflicts, and a small military intelligentsia slowly developed new technologies and tactics to suit them, the vast majority of the army was deployed west of the Mississippi against Indians. Thus, the principal drift in the army’s everyday focus was decidedly “western.”7

Nevertheless, the officer’s preferred vision, of warfare and of himself, remained at least as much European and conventional as western, unconventional, or Indian- fighting. The great majority of officers continued to earn their commissions through the Military Academy at West Point, after four years’ socialization in authoritarian hierarchy and nationalism, embodied in the nation-state that provided officers secure employment and status. Indians and the frontier had no place in this vision, or in the Military Academy curriculum.8 Regular Army careers remained safe from the Jacksonian principle of “rotation in office”—the partisan spoils system—and promotions remained a matter of seniority, free from personal or partisan patronage, unless entirely new regiments were raised (as occurred in 1855). In other words, the Regular Army as an institution, and its officers as a group, were and remained more autonomous, from social, political, and sectional pressures—less sectional, less partisan,

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and more international in orientation—than most institutions or occupations, public or private, in the racialist democracy of mid-nineteenth-century America.The national standing army was not isolated from society, as historians once tended to argue. Yet it was quite distinct, and to a very significant extent insulated, through Military Academy socialization and the seniority system of promotion, from the principal currents and pressures—individualism, egalitarianism, populist majoritarianism, suspicion of institutions as potential monopolies, and thus relatively unstructured competition among white men—of civilian life.10

Historian David Grimsted has explored the civil violence of the 1850s in great detail in American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War (1998). He demonstrates convincingly that American violence was increasingly sectional, increasingly southern, and increasingly driven by the desire to sustain or extend slavery. Under these circumstances, one of the army’s primary missions during the1850s was maintaining civil order, peacekeeping among white citizens, above all in Bleeding Kansas. At the beginning of the decade, this meant providing the fist in the glove of federal diplomacy to ward off Texan claims to the eastern half of New Mexico, a crisis in which former general Zachary Taylor sounded very much like Andrew Jackson threatening Nullifiers a generation before. In the North, this sometimes meant subduing resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, and repressing John Brown’s attempt to begin a revolution against slavery at Harpers Ferry.11

These operations were hardly the norm. A significantly larger force was marched to Utah, to repress Mormon resistance to national authority in 1857 and1858, than was ever employed in Bleeding Kansas. Apart from Kansas and Utah national military forces were rarely deployed, and then only on a very small scale, in domestic conflicts between citizens. Perhaps fifty Marines drawn from the Philadelphia Navy Yard helped the federal marshal arrest those involved in armed resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law at Christiana, Pennsylvania, in 1851, and a similar number from Washington, led by Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart, both on leave, assaulted the firehouse at Harpers Ferry to seize John Brown. About a hundred artillerymen drawn from nearby coastal fortifications aided in the forcible rendition of Anthony Burns under the Fugitive Slave Law in Boston in 1854.

Otherwise—in the vast majority of Fugitive Slave Law cases, as well as those where citizens battled citizens over politics, ethnicity, or culture, without reference to slavery, race, or national law—federal military forces are absent from the record of civil violence during this riot-torn decade. There is no record of federal forces deployed against striking workers, as they were in 1877 and after, and state militia, rather than the national standing army, were used to restrain the rioting so common in northern cities, during the 1850s as well as the preceding Jacksonian decades. American politics precluded the use of deadly force, presumably the army’s trump card, except against John Brown’s revolutionaries and Indians. Soldiers and free- soil guerrillas exchanged fire in Kansas on several occasions during the spring of1858, and there were frequent incidents between individual soldiers and Mormon militants, but I have found only one case in which federal troops killed a citizen in the line of duty during the decade, involving Marines in a Know-Nothing election riot in Baltimore in 1857. Nor did the officers of the national standing army seek out opportunities to intervene in disputes among citizens, which were more likely to create political trouble than benefit for the institution.13

Unwilling and unable to intervene effectively in civil disputes, what did most of the army do most of the time during the 1850s? As Robert Wooster has pointed out in The American

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Military Frontiers, the Regular Army remained “the federal government’s most visible instrument in the borderlands” of the expanding West. The widest-ranging and most deeply researched examination of the army’s operations during the 1850s is Durwood Ball, Army Regulars on the Western Frontier, which explores peacekeeping and law enforcement operations directed at filibusters along the international borders of the United States, similar operations in support of civil authority in Kansas, and more repressive ones aimed at Mormons and Indians. In California, U.S. troops were employed on several occasions to aid the civil authorities against filibusters aimed at Mexico and Hawaii. Along the Rio Grande, troops initially aided, and then detained, Texas Rangers and Mexican émigrés, as those groups engaged in a murky mix of banditry and its repression, slave raiding, and efforts to create a northern Mexican republic. After a couple years of calm, Juan Cortina’s raid from Mexico against Brownsville, Texas, led to more active operations defending U.S. sovereignty in 1859 and 1860, though no significant federal forces crossed the border. Also in 1859, a boundary dispute with Britain over the straits of San Juan de la Fuca, in Vancouver Sound, escalated when Lieutenant George Pickett landed on territory claimed by the British, a clash rooted in the claims of an American hog farmer. President James Buchanan dispatched commanding general Winfield Scott to calm the waters. Wise and experienced in diplomacy with Britain, from the Aroostook Crisis in Maine and the more general Canadian boundary crisis of the late 1830s, Scott succeeded and Pickett returned to garrison duty.14

Thus one of the national army’s principal duties, and successes, during the 1850s was to prevent American citizens from starting wars with international neighbors, often despite strong support for expansion from local public opinion and politicians. Given the ease with which these situations became politicized, and the consequent danger of damage to the army in public opinion and Congress, few officers enjoyed peacekeeping operations.15 Their other principal operational mission was to repress Indian resistance, and it is during this decade that we see the most frequent wars against Indians in British North American history to that point. Only in the period1754-1783, as Anglo-Americans pressed west of the Appalachians, had there been a similar level of conflict, but over a far smaller area. An incomplete list for the 1850s includes campaigns in the newly annexed southwest against the Navajo in 1849 and 1850 and the Yuma in Arizona in 1851. The violence escalated during the second half of the decade, with expeditions against the Brulé Sioux on the Central Plains in1854 and 1855; the Third Seminole War in southern Florida between 1855 and 1858; and campaigns on the central and southern plains against the southern Cheyenne in 1857 and 1858, the Comanches in Texas in 1858 and 1859, and the Kiowa in1860. War followed white settlement to the Pacific Northwest and the Great Basin, with the Rogue River War in western Oregon in 1855 and 1856, expeditions against the Shoshone, Coeur d’Alene, and Yakima of the Columbia Plateau in 1858, and a campaign in Nevada against the Bannocks, Shoshones, and Paiutes in 1860. The United States fought various bands of Apaches, sometimes supported by Utes, in1854, 1857, 1859, and 1860. All told, there were nearly three times as many combat engagements between the Regular Army and Indians during the 1850s as in the preceding decade; most are narrated in memoirs and campaign histories of varying quality. For the army, there was little peace during this decade.16

These wars meant a greater dispersal of national military force—not substantially increased between the drawdown of 1848 and the creation of four new regiments in 1855—than ever before, and a greater need for cavalry to catch the mounted

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Indians of the Plains and the Columbia Plateau. As a result of these responsibilities, the Regiment of Mounted Riflemen, created in 1846 to protect emigrants on the Oregon Trail, was retained in service after the war with Mexico, the only permanent force increase left after that conflict. Three regiments of mounted troops (including the two dragoon regiments formed in 1833 and1836) proved insufficient to meet the army’s growing responsibilities, so in 1855Congress authorized two new cavalry regiments, along with two infantry ones.The standing army ended the decade with a total of nineteen regiments—fourartillery, five mounted, and ten infantry—on the eve of the Civil War—potentiallyaround 20,000 soldiers, although in reality only about half that number actuallywere present for duty at any given time. During the same period, 183 of 198companies were deployed west of the Mississippi River, dispersed in 79 posts,averaging a little over a hundred soldiers apiece.

Physical dispersion compounded the existing tension between the eastern and western institutional and professional orientations. Though we tend to think of the nineteenth-century army as frontiersmen and Indian-fighters, a view epitomized in the thorough works of Robert Utley and Robert Wooster, the professional attention of the officer corps remained focused eastward, facing Europe, in anticipation of large-scale conventional warfare.18 Nevertheless, the physical shift westward did reshape the self- and external image of many officers, who had tended to model themselves after eastern and English gentlemen rather than frontiersmen prior to the war with Mexico. In Frontier Regulars, Ball shows that this shift was accompanied by something of an emotional hardening, even brutalization, as actual Indian-fighting, rare during the 1820s and 30s apart from the Seminole War, increased. During the 1850s we see not just the destruction of food stocks, crops, and vacant villages by the army, as was common in the Second Seminole War, but attacks on villages full of women and children and a willingness to accept and publicly justify the civilian casualties these tactics produced. In several cases army commanders executed captured Indians without any sort of trial, which had only happened twice between 1815 and 1846. Although regular officers appear to have made some efforts to restrain the genocide of the California Indians during the 1850s, their behavior does anticipate the ruthless strategies and tactics of attacks on villages during winter after the Civil War, as, for example, at the Washita in 1868.19

Ball sometimes employs language and quotations that suggest a comprehensive, undifferentiated violence, almost without regard to the army’s institutional culture or the political circumstances of specific deployments. Yet the officer’s self- image remained as much that of a gentleman as a frontiersman, ultimately as much eastern as western, still substantially distinct from the individualist, anti- institutional mainstream of late Jacksonian America (though much less so from the nascent Victorianism represented in politics by the Whigs). To understand and assess causation, during the 1850s

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or the Civil War, we must distinguish between military brutality toward Indians, rooted in both racism and the growing frequency of combat; the army’s treatment of politically potent citizens, not subject to that racism or that violence; and the violence of American civil society, both internally and toward racial-ethnic outsiders.Despite the distaste most officers continued to feel for civilian frontiersmen— an important component, and reflection, of their genteel eastern cultural orientation, their hierarchical authoritarianism, and their distinctiveness and autonomy as a professional group—the army was deployed to intimidate international borders, against filibusters in cases where national sovereignty was clear and war or peace might be at stake, or against racial and religious outsiders— fugitives slaves, slave rebels, and Mormons. Indeed, though many army officers used remarkably vicious language toward the Mormons, most of their violence was projected onto Indians, and within the everyday army onto enlisted soldiers, disdained for their subordinate position (and sometimes their immigrant origins) by many frontiersmen and small-town Americans as well as the cosmopolitan middle classes and elites with whom officers identified. The army’s violence was a classically American violence, against outsiders, not the new American violence of the mid-nineteenth century, so often directed at fellow citizens, which regular officers sought to avoid lest politicization damage

the army or their careers.20The ramifications of this cultural shift—the dimensions and character of violence in mid-nineteenth-century America, the growing legitimacy of the frontiersman as cultural model—are vast in scope and implication, particularly for American civil-military relations and the character of the Civil War. It is clear that the United States became an increasingly violent society in the decades before the Civil War, which encouraged the escalation of violence during that conflict. Yet perspective and the ability to differentiate remain crucial; students should consult Mark Neely’s The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (2009) for some instructive caveats, both for the Civil War and

the years surrounding it.21Regular officers certainly shared the ethnocentrism and white supremacist outlook of the civilian society from which they came, but it was tempered by biases of class and culture, gentility, and proto-Victorian restraint. Professing responsibility to the nation as a whole, a responsibility conveyed through subordination and accountability to constitutional processes that transcended the rule of local majorities, officers did not share the extreme individualism, egalitarianism, or populist suspicion of institutions and disrespect for law so widespread in antebellum civil society. Frustrated by the greed, disorder, and belligerence of frontier civilians, which drew officers into conflicts many considered politically dangerous, morally dubious, personally and institutionally disruptive, thankless, and trivial in comparison to preparation for European-style warfare, officers continued to blame white citizens for most conflict with the

Indians.22

These distinctive biases, fostered and preserved in large part by officers’ institutional insulation, their distinctive socialization and missions, gave the army’s leaders a critical distance, and perhaps some degree of objectivity, in borderlands conflicts, even those directed at Indians. Perhaps as a result, Regular Army atrocities against Indians, during the 1850s and after the Civil War, pale beside the virtual genocide of the California Indians, primarily at the hands of essentially vigilante volunteer forces, or the massacres perpetrated by volunteer troops (Sand Creek, the Bear River Massacre) in the

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West during the Civil War. Among the possible sources of violence or brutality against civilians during the Civil War, the antebellum experience of Regular Army commanders seems a lesser candidate, far less significant than the surge in violence among citizens during the antebellum and Jacksonian decades, or the military dynamics of the Civil War itself.The civil-military relations of the 1850s also bear close examination, but we must again be on guard against anachronism rooted in anticipations of civil war. Leaving aside the persistent but intermittent tensions of local civil-military relations and command relationships in Washington, the principal issues army historians have identified are partisanship and sectionalism. These are two different questions, for political historians have long sought to disaggregate long-term trends in nineteenth- century American politics from divisions related to the Civil War. They have done so by arguing that the years between the appearance of the mature Second Party System (Whigs and Democrats), circa 1838, and the depression of the 1890s and the beginnings of Progressivism constitute a distinct “party period,” characterized by historically high voter participation and partisan loyalty and reliance on party organizations for the distribution of government patronage. Though he does not explicitly follow this interpretation,Durwood Ball depicts an officer corps increasingly partisan in attitude as well as source of appointment. (We know virtually nothing about the partisan allegiances of enlisted soldiers, who were commonly unable to vote due to residency or citizenship requirements.) With a serving general winning the presidency in 1848, and the serving commanding general running for that office as a major party candidate in 1852, the senior leaders of the officer corps did not set a positive professional example of political neutrality. Though there is no focused study available, it seems likely that many officers supported Zachary Taylor for the presidency in 1848, and Winfield Scott in 1852, whether from personal acquaintance (in an officer corps of less than a thousand men), whiggish social values (much more pervasive among officers than Whig party affiliations), or bad memories of Polk administration partisanship.political activity in studies of these elections or in state-level monographs (the most common mode of analysis in nineteenth-century American political historiography) examining the period, so it seems that military support for the generals was expressed privately, and had no significant influence on the outcomes. Indeed, given the frequent stringency of nineteenth-century residency requirements, and the lack of an absentee ballot, it is unlikely that many officers could vote, and their papers rarely refer to doing so. Nor do political historians attribute the outcome in 1852 to anti- military or anti-standing army sentiment: state-level monographs show no evidence that Scott came under attack as a military officer in that contest, nor do any of the monographs on antebellum political ideology identify the army as an issue in the politics of the era. Indeed, the Whigs chose the generals due to their martial success and their potential as unifying figures, a strategy that worked in 1848, while the

1852 election was decided on the same grounds, of sectionalism, economic issues, and ethnocultural tensions, as in other Jacksonian contests. Unlike Taylor, Scott failed to unite anti-Democratic forces, largely due to perceptions that he represented northern Whigs, at a time when the Whig Party was riven by the Compromise of 1850. After the party collapsed, former army topographical engineer John C. Frémont won the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1856. Frémont was the exception that proves the rule, however. Commissioned directly from civilian life and court-martialed for insubordination by Regular Army stalwart Stephen W. Kearny after the American conquest of California, the Pathfinder refused an offer of reinstatement in the army from fellow Democrat James K. Polk, preferring the risks and opportunities of civilian

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politics to the predictability, security, and restraints of military discipline.24While the conservative nationalism of Democratic rhetoric accounts for much of officer partisanship, as an antidote to sectionalism, during the 1850s, we should also remember that Democratic majorities remained as slim (generally 52 to 55 percent across the decade) during that decade as in the preceding generation. Indeed, it is possible that the army officer corps became more Democratic than the populace as a whole, which would appear to be a significant reversal of the whiggism in attitude and affinity (though not partisan affiliation) William Skelton and I have identified as one of the principal characteristics of the antebellum officer corps. Yet conservative nationalism had long been a hallmark of the Whig Party. In other words, it seems unlikely that many officers became Democrats because they had become believers in anti-statist individualism, egalitarian anti-institutionalism, or states’ rights. However one views George McClellan, changing partisan affinities did not fundamentally alter the professional military ethos of nationalism and authoritarian hierarchy, embodied in responsibility, subordination, and accountability to the constitutional state. Army officers remained much less engaged in partisan politics than the “party period” interpretation suggests of most

citizens.25Partisanship and politicization could come from civilian society, however. Military commanders faced significant political pressure, often highly partisan and often from the president himself, in the execution of their duties in the borderlands. This was most evident in Kansas, but also appeared in the Utah expedition and operations against filibusters in California, where the Democratic administrations demanded law enforcement but then hindered the execution of the laws. Yet this was nothing new to the commander in San Francisco, John Wool, who had experienced the same disingenuous contradictions in policy from Andrew Jackson in the Cherokee country twenty years before. Nothing in the 1850s could exceed the political pressure, indeed duplicity, that Wool, Duncan Clinch in Florida, and Edmund Gaines on the Texas border had faced from the Jackson administration in 1836. While it appears that Wool bowed to political realities more easily the second time around, Ball’s own evidence, like that of Tony R. Mullis in Peacekeeping on the

Plains, shows that officers in Kansas, like those commanding peacekeeping and law enforcement operations before the war with Mexico, generally conducted themselves with little partisanship or sectionalism. Despite presidential pressure, the army did not secure Kansas for slavery, and most officers continued to express distaste for overtly partisan missions and objectives, particularly those requiring intervention in disputes between citizens. Indeed, Ball explicitly recognizes the army’s subordination to civilian authority in his conclusion, and it seems probable that his forthcoming biography of Edwin Vose Sumner, one of the army’s principal field commanders during the 1850s, will further affirm the officer corps’ nationalism and autonomy.26

Lastly, it bears repeating that the selection of new officers by partisan or sectional criteria, without Military Academy socialization, for the regiments formed in 1855 did not change the fundamental character of the officer corps, which remained dominated by long-serving professionals commissioned through West Point. The commissioning of lieutenants and captains directly from civilian life in 1855 had been anticipated by a similar process for officering the dragoon regiments during the 1830s and the Regiment of Mounted Rifles in 1846. Indeed, almost every new regiment created between the 1821 drawdown and the Civil War was initially officered by a majority of men drawn directly from civilian life, though a significant proportion had some military experience when commissioned. Nevertheless, virtually all the field-grade officers (colonels and

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majors) for the new regiments were drawn from the ranks of the army.In the dragoon regiments, many of the civilian appointees soon resigned and were replaced by West Pointers. West Point remained the normal source of commissions, and the proportion of Military Academy graduates in the officer corps reached 75.8 percent in 1860, perhaps the highest proportion in history. In 1830,

63.8 percent of the army’s officers had been graduates: thus the creation of eight new regiments, officered largely by men commissioned directly from civilian life, in an army that had eleven regiments in 1833, somehow resulted in an increase of nearly one-fifth in the proportion of West Pointers in the officer corps. This can only mean that officers appointed directly from civilian life resigned more frequently than Military Academy graduates, as we would expect of men commissioned without that socialization in commitment to national service. Notably, the resignation rate in 1856—slightly over 5 percent, the highest since 1837—was nearly double that in 1854 or 1857; the rate between 1858 and 1860 was a percent or less. Since appointments to West Point, distributed roughly in proportion to congressional representation, were not disproportionately dominated by one section or party, the national standing army retained its politically and sectionally neutral character.28

Nor, as political scientist Andrew Polsky has shown, did the Civil War and Republican ascendancy create a partisan officer corps. The Democratic affinities of the McClellanites in the Army of the Potomac, rooted in conservative nationalism during the 1850s, were gradually balanced by the Republicanism of officers who rose during the war. Unlike Congress, in which the departure of southern representatives gave the Republicans an overwhelming majority, the Regular Army officer corps did not become a Republican bastion. It certainly became less Democratic and more Republican, but on the whole returned to the rough partisan balance, further moderated by a great deal of non- or anti-partisanship, of the 1840s, and of the generation before the consolidation of the Jacksonian party system. Thus, army officers remained much more autonomous from partisan influences than the “party period” interpretation would suggest, particularly of an institution dependent on political authorization. Indeed, the army constitutes one of, and perhaps the, principal exception to arguments that the nineteenth-century polity, and the distribution of government aid, was dominated by partisanship. This “state of courts and parties” thesis, almost universally shared among political scientists, has come under growing challenge from historians of the early republic, but even these historians have accepted that the advent of Jacksonian democracy destroyed the autonomy of civilian agencies. Following in William Skelton’s footsteps, Mark Wilson’s The Business of Civil War (2006), devoted to the army quartermaster corps, is the first book to explicitly assert the autonomy of military executive branch officials from the spoils system that pervaded civilian government during the 1850s and ‘60s. In this instance, political scientists and historians, students of “American political development,” could learn a great deal from historians exploring military topics.29

The literature advocating the “state of courts and parties” thesis is extensive, but concentrates on the Gilded Age—and is flatly wrong if applied to the army and its officer corps, whether before or after the Civil War. Political scientists who have attempted to project this argument backward onto the antebellum army have failed to use archival evidence, and have viewed the army through the lens of aggregate potential national force structure, emphasizing the highly politicized militia rather than the Regular Army that actually dispossessed Indians, conducted constabulary operations in peacetime, and directed the operations of the citizen-soldier armies of the Civil

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War. Not coincidentally, historians and political scientists advocating this thesis also tend to be those who assert the weakness of the nineteenth-century American state (usually in anachronistic contrast to the twentieth century): a state that dispossessed the Indians, seized the Southwest from Mexico, and reunited the nation during the Civil War, to speak only of its military prowess.The partisan affinities of the Regular Army officer corps fluctuated roughly in tune with those of the American electorate as a whole: from some enthusiasm for the new Jacksonian coalition in the late 1820s and the early 1830s, to some disillusionment (over a variety of issues) and a partisan balance from the mid-1830s to the early 1850s, to Democratic predominance (albeit hardly overwhelming) in the mid-1850s as the Whig Party broke up, to Republican revival during the

1860s. Throughout this period, partisan political leaders ultimately chose military commanders on the basis of their rank and institutional positions rather than partisanship, and military commanders returned accountable service to the constitutional civilian authority. Rabid partisans like James K. Polk may have distrusted the Whig affiliations of leading generals, but his infusion of Democrats into the officer corps had little impact after the reduction in force of 1848. Polk did not distrust Taylor or Scott for their military actions or adherence to the president’s strategy, but because their very success could undermine his party’s hold on domestic policy and patronage. Partisanship in civil-military relations ultimately came primarily from partisan politicians, and did not undermine the responsible performance of duty by the national standing army.This balance, moderation, and synchronicity, combined with skill at logistics and their perceived ability, however limited, in tactical and operational maneuver, explains why the senior ranks of the officer corps remained dominated by long- serving professionals, despite the wave of “political generals” commissioned directly from civilian life during the first years of the Civil War. As a result, Regular Army veterans retained their de facto antebellum monopoly on the operational direction of national military force, dominating operational and strategic-level commands, especially in the core armies and theaters, during the war, providing virtually all corps, army, and regional (district, department, theater) commanders by the end of the conflict. West Point graduates commanded both sides in the vast majority of major battles. Despite the politicization of Jacksonian America and the passions of civil war, the application of national military power was directed by career professionals on both sides, confirming the pattern established

in the war with Mexico, which has endured ever since.31

Given the reality of Civil War, sectionalism was perhaps the ultimate test of the character and significance of American civil-military relations during the antebellum decade. Whether the army became more southern and partisan, as Secretary of War Jefferson Davis commissioned a disproportionate number of southerners and Democrats into the four regiments raised in 1855, without graduation from the Military Academy, or became more western in atmosphere, it clearly became less distinct from civil society, more partisan and more sectional, than before. Indeed, in some respects sectionalism replaced Jacksonian egalitarianism as the principle restraint on the growth of the American nation-state and the national standing army. On the other hand, we should recognize both the reasons for and the limits to this convergence with civil society. The officer corps had no more incentive to attract civilian political attack by identifying with sections or the sectional conflict than it had had by identifying with political parties and partisanship. The vast majority of officers continued to come from West Point, with its socialization in statism (an affinity for powerful government),

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nationalism, and professionalism. Each of these worldviews contributed to insulation, distinctiveness, and autonomy. Having endured great frustration (though no serious damage) from Jacksonian populists during the 1830s and ’40s, army leaders had no desire to endure sectional criticism during the 1850s.Nor was the army dominated by southern officers, as Radical Republicans would charge during the Civil War. William Skelton and James L. Morrison, Jr., have shown that the disproportionate number of southern officers, compared to the general population, was almost entirely due to the three-fifths clause in the Constitution, which gave southern states a disproportionate number of representatives in Congress. Since the great majority of nominations to West Point were made by congressmen, 43 percent of officers on the 1860 Army Register came from the slaveholding states, which had only 31 percent of the white population, but 39 percent of the House of Representatives. Jefferson Davis had aggravated that disproportion with the 1855 commissions, but the composition of the officer corps does not demonstrate a remarkably greater southern propensity to military service, or a fundamental change in the leadership of the army. Enlisted soldiers, driven largely by insecure civilian employment, came overwhelmingly

from northern seaports.33The officer corps (and West Point) did become more “southern” in tone during the 1850s, but this was a conservative, nationalist reaction more than a radical sectional one (as Radical Republicans charged). In other words, most northern officers rejected antislavery politics as a threat to Union and the nation-state that employed them. This reaction also accounts for the shift toward Democratic political affiliations, in response to the collapse of the conservative, bisectional Whig Party and the rise of the overtly sectional Republican Party, widely perceived as more radical than it was. In the process, cadets and officers, like civilian Democrats, overlooked the more militant attitudes of some of their southern colleagues. Nevertheless, for every southern bully in the cadet barracks at the Military Academy we have Abner Doubleday, a captain at Fortress Monroe, writing to John C. Frémont in 1856 that he would defend the post in case of

rumored secessionist assault.34The proof, of course, was in the pudding. Resignations to join the Confederacy presented the greatest challenge to the national army, its accountability to constitutionally elected civilian authorities and constitutional process, and to historians who must reconcile these resignations with the growth of the army’s nationalism and subordination to civilian authority since the early nineteenth century. What explains these resignations? First by recognizing that secession and the Civil War were the great crisis of nineteenth-century America—there was no challenge so comprehensive, so pervasive, so critical until the Great Depression, and the secession winter telescoped all the emotion and intensity of the crisis into a period of about six months. The army was not immune from so severe a trial of cohesion; no American institution proved immune. As William Skelton suggests, human loyalties, to family and community, probably account for the majority of officers’ decisions to join the Confederacy. The army stood out at the time, and stands out in American historical memory, precisely because it was the most national—perhaps the only truly national—institution in the

United States in 1860.35Nevertheless, this crisis demonstrates both the fundamental values that American professional military officers shared with their parent society and the distinctive ethos through which these values were filtered. Skelton has also observed that officers who resigned did so not to join state armies, or for reasons of states’ rights, but to join another national army, that of the Confederacy. These national military officers saw the

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Confederacy not as “the essence of anarchy,”as Lincoln said of secession, but as a second American nation, with a constitutional state, that their individual communities had chosen to create. At that level, the most fundamental political principles of majoritarian democracy and popular sovereignty, which officers accepted despite their professionally rooted authoritarianism, meshed with their statism and constitutionalism. To officers from the southern states, the Confederacy seemed an ordered political structure more representative, and thus more legitimate, than the United States; responsible service appeared to dictate transferring their allegiances to the regime that best represented their communities (as those defined as citizens defined them). A sense of subjective responsibility trumped the legal and putatively objective accountability of the officer’s oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Yet the now-Confederate officer’s secession was a revolution in favor of government, rather than one against it, a distinction that contributed to endemic civil-military conflict (albeit at the local rather than the national level) as Confederate military officers attempted to forge a nation-state capable of winning its independence through war.36

Statistically, the army’s personnel did not participate in secession to the same degree as members of most civilian institutions, particularly political ones, again suggesting the army’s autonomy, or at least insulation, from many of the principal currents of civilian life. Employing the same devotion to quantification he displays throughout An American Profession of Arms, Skelton demonstrates that a smaller proportion of officers (24.7 percent) resigned than of southern congressmen (virtually all of whom did so), or of civilian executive branch officials from the southern states. That was also the case among southern cadets at West Point, but these men had the shortest socialization in nationalism among army officers. Less than a quarter of the officers who resigned did so before Lincoln’s inauguration, though a better measure might be whether they did so before the attack on Fort Sumter or the president’s call for volunteers.37

Of course, the great majority—three-quarters—of the officer corps, and virtually all enlisted soldiers, remained loyal. In particular, nearly 30 percent of officers commissioned from the Confederate states, and more than 40 percent of officers commissioned from all slaveholding states, remained in U.S. service, including ten of thirteen colonels from slaveholding states and almost half of Virginians. The effectiveness of military socialization in nationalism is evident in the correlation between an officer’s rank and time in service and his remaining in the service of the United States: Winfield Scott, George Thomas, and Phillip St. George Cooke provide three of the best known examples—all Virginians—of long-serving officers from the South who remained in active U.S. service. Only a handful of officers not commissioned from slaveholding states resigned.38

In other words, far more officers from slaveholding and Confederate states remained with the Union than officers from non-slaveholding states joined the Confederacy. Whatever sympathies they may have had for their southern comrades, northern officers with Democratic affinities did not change national loyalties. During the Civil War, the officer corps became largely but not wholly northern— it remained national, not just northern or sectional. Nor did it rush to become Republican, a sign of limited politicization and substantial professional autonomy, whatever we as historians today might prefer. While the Radical Republicans were correct that Old Army officers tended toward a methodical approach to strategy and operations, this was as much because of logistical constraints and professional education as politics. Nor were Democratic preferences for moderation, or those of Democratic officers, merely cover for a white supremacist outlook: any civil war

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presents choices between ruthlessness and moderation, either of which may prove more effective in resolving the conflict. The important thing is that Democratic officers served against the rebels, just as most civilian Democrats supported the war. Few if any officers were Copperheads, and George McClellan repudiated the peace plank in his party’s platform in 1864. The problem—just as true for Fighting Joe Hooker and Ulysses S. Grant as for McClellan—was developing experience at synchronizing large-scale combat power, which the army’s missions prevented before the war.What skills did the army possess or develop during the 1850s, and how well was it prepared for the mass, industrial, popular conflict that began in 1861?The war with Mexico produced little sustained institutional effort to develop professional expertise beyond the experience

gained in the field,39 but the army’s successful employment of conventional warfighting skills in support of territorial expansion did put an end to the Jacksonian attacks on the army (however ineffectual in practice) that had characterized the previous generation. Russell F. Weigley’s History of the United States Army identifies “few innovations” between 1846 and1861, while James L. Morrison shows the limits of strategic and operational- level study in his essay titled “Military Education and Strategic Thought,” in the valuable collection Against All Enemies (1986). Echoing Samuel Huntington’s argument that antebellum American military professionalism was dominated by “technicism,” Morrison observes that Military Academy cadets “were conditioned to think in an unimaginative, mechanistic way.” Matthew Moten follows in the footsteps of these distinguished scholars with a stinging critique of parochialism and “an educational process that was often rigid, unimaginative, and inflexible” in his monograph The Delafield Commission and the American Military Profession.

The evidence bears out much of this critique. Nevertheless, the 1850s were a period of renewed, albeit rather incremental and often individual professional growth, a phenomenon best examined in Wayne Hsieh’s West Pointers and the Old Army. Officers visited Europe, individually and in groups, to study military developments, much as they had done since 1815. In particular, George B. McClellan and two long-time ordnance and engineer officers traveled to observe the Crimean War, while Phil Kearny served as an individual volunteer with the French in their war in Italy against Austria in 1859. Ordnance and artillery officers helped develop the Dahlgren and Parrott guns, and the army adopted the rifle musket and Minié ball. In response to the rifle’s potential accuracy, officers like William J. Hardee and Cadmus Wilcox studied French chasseur and Zouave tactics, hoping to close with the enemy more rapidly, as the French did against the Austrians in Italy in 1859. Even Harry Heth, best-known for his bull-headedness at Gettysburg, wrote a manual on rifle target practice. These efforts lead Skelton to maintain that “officers’ professional activity was extensive,” and their “consideration of tactics and related professional issues intensified during the 1850s,” while Hsieh applauds an “active and vibrant” officer corps.41

Ultimately, no one maintains that these experiences transformed the character or quality of American military expertise. Moten’s criticism of the CrimeanCommission as a group of technical specialists with little vision is certainly on target; Hsieh titles his chapter on the development of professional expertise “Tactical Continuity,”; and Skelton recognizes that “as in most areas of professional thought, regulars’ approach to tactics was conservative and derivative.” In the most potentially significant development of the decade, Hardee, commandant at West Point between 1856 and 1860, published a new tactical manual for infantry in1855, furthering and standardizing the move toward more

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mobile, agile light infantry tactics, which Winfield Scott’s 1835 drill regulations had left optional. Yet Hardee, like most military professionals, European and American, still believed that close-order lines were necessary to maintain command, control, and cohesion and maximize firepower—and they had a point, as Paddy Griffith and Earl Hess have demonstrated in their work on Civil War tactics. The American army had to learn to walk before it could run, and it walked remarkably well.42

Hardee’s time at West Point was also the era of the five-year course, when cadets for the first time ever read Jomini directly. (They had read a synopsis during the mid- and perhaps late 1820s, and there was some Jomini in Dennis Hart Mahan’s books and lectures, but officers like McClellan and Lee encountered Jomini and Napoleon primarily in their individual private reading and study, and as instructors at West Point, where they created a Napoleon Club to study the large-scale battles and campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars.) Cadets appear to have received substantially more military instruction during the era of the five- year course, but only two Academy classes actually completed that course in its entirety, and these were the army’s most junior officers in 1861. Though some, like George Armstrong Custer, rose rapidly, they were commanders of regiments and brigades, rather than divisions, corps, or armies: their opportunity to read Jomini could make little difference to the course of operations or the Civil War as a whole. In any case, Jomini’s prescriptions were largely common-sense principles: the larger problem lay in the absence of substantial institutional mechanisms for the study of military history, theory, and art—for education and reflection, rather than the training of the drill field or the technicism of ordnance development.43

On the other hand, the revival of the Artillery School at Fortress Monroe (closed since the early 1830s), combined with several camps of instruction for infantry regiments—Abner Doubleday tells us of the new Ninth Infantry camped for training at Monroe—provided officers with opportunities to improve their handling of drill, the building-blocks of nineteenth-century tactics, on a slightly larger scale than before. After years of drill, beginning with literally hundreds of hours during their time at West Point, career officers were usually capable troop trainers. This fact was recognized by state offers of promotions as volunteers in 1861, by which many veteran antebellum lieutenants quickly became majors or colonels, trained and commanded volunteer regiments, and were able to move up into brigade and division command by the later years of the war. Old Army veterans were slow, but they could walk, at a time when most new volunteers could only crawl.44

What else was the army good at? Logistics and administration, artillery and engineering: essential to the mass power projection of the Civil War. In other words, although the army’s commanders were not skilled practitioners of operational art, they proved highly capable at sustaining operations on a scale never before seen in North America. Mark Wilson’s The Business of Civil War, which focuses on the contributions of army quartermasters to the war for reunion, is especially instructive in demonstrating the dominance of Old Army veterans in the Union supply effort, both in production and distribution, after the first year of the war. Without their antebellum experience of long-range logistics—almost unique among Americans, since few businesses operated on a continental scope, or on the scale of the antebellum army (small though that was in comparison to the Civil War)—mobilization and sustainment would have been far more difficult. If the Civil War was a race against political time, one might observe that Regular Army logistical expertise proved decisive to this power projection, and thus to national reunification. However technical, however lacking in glamour, proficiency in tactical training and

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logistics are the springs on which operational art rests: the antebellum army had two-thirds of the solution.What were Old Army veterans not very good at? Synchronizing large-scale operational maneuver, by corps and armies, and large-scale tactical maneuver, or “grand tactics,” by corps and divisions on or in close proximity to the battlefield. In other words, Napoleonic warfare. Why not?Not for mere lack of interest, though the extent of efforts at professional self- development is highly debatable, and the army lacked the professional journals it had had during the 1830s, that European armies had, that would be revived in the United States late in the 1870s. The answer is primarily a matter of scale: an antebellum force of ten infantry regiments (each the size of a battalion today), dispersed across the North American continent, meant that the largest forces the army brought together after the war with Mexico were no more than a brigade in size. The normal frontier expedition or peacekeeping contingent was a battalion of several companies. Thus, in 1861 the army’s last division- or corps- strength force had been Scott’s, of approximately 10,000 soldiers, a small corps at best, in Mexico. No other living American had commanded a truly division-sized force. William Worth (whose Mexican War “division” was really a European or Civil War brigade) and Zachary Taylor (whose army was the size of a division) were dead; David Twiggs, hardly an adept tactician to begin with, had surrendered U.S. forces in Texas to the Confederates and was disgraced. John Wool did command the capture of Norfolk early in 1862, but was well over sixty years old, having entered the army, like Scott, in 1808. Of the army-level commanders in the Civil War, McClellan had never commanded so much as a company in the field; Lee had led a single regiment for several years in Texas. Joseph Johnston, Braxton Bragg, and Don Carlos Buell had never commanded more than a company. Nor had Sherman, Grant, Longstreet, or Jackson. Halleck and P. G. T. Beauregard had been engineers, without troops to command. However much some of them read before the war—and there is little evidence that many of them read much—Civil War generals were novices in the practice of grand tactics and operational

art.45The antebellum standing army was simply too small and too dispersed to provide the actual command opportunities and experience necessary to develop the skills of coordinating large-scale maneuver necessary in the Civil War. Although officers then and now prefer studying and preparing for conventional wars, that was not their mission, whatever we with hindsight might prefer—an anachronistic lens that distorts assessments of

the army’s expertise.46 Nor could senior officers make contingency plans for repressing a rebellion of eleven states. Durwood Ball comes close to implying that the army might have interrupted secession; this was probably possible during the Nullification Crisis in South Carolina in 1833, but not in the national crisis of 1861, though army officers did play major roles in restraining secessionist activity in Missouri and California.47 Thus, Regular Army officers went to war as expert troop-trainers and logisticians, but with virtually no experience of maneuver above the scale of company or battalion drill. (Indeed, the much-maligned Benjamin Butler had more experience with brigade drill, at the Massachusetts militia camps held in the late 1850s.) At the strategic level, they would often clash with their political masters, but had imbibed a sense of non- partisanship and subordination to civilian authority that helped keep these clashes under control. Despite the lack of a general or operational staff, the qualities and skills that American career officers developed before the Civil War enabled them to train, supply, and project power into the Confederacy, in campaigns and a war fully as decisive as those of the Prussians in Europe.

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The battles proved the rub. But the Prussians demonstrated little more tactical proficiency in 1870, when they often launched frontal assaults in linear formations: their victories were as much matters of mobilization, and French deficiencies, as of operational art or tactical prowess. The dilemmas of synchronizing combat power in the Civil War, and in the mid-nineteenth century more generally, were arguably just as much to blame for the indecisiveness of Civil War battles as the inexperience of Civil War generals.The acid test of the antebellum Regular Army lay in its officers’ performance during the Civil War, far too extensive a topic for this review.The works on antebellum army expertise echo the two basic interpretations expressed by contemporaries during the Civil War era. On the one hand, as Morrison and Moten argue with an eye on the operational and strategic levels of war, the Old Army, and the Military Academy that shaped it, fostered rigid thinkers who preferred sieges to maneuver and distrusted politics and politicians. Old Army stalwarts generally did poorly at synchronizing combat power at the grand tactical and operational levels in the early years of the war, and the corps commanders of the Army of the Potomac were gradually replaced with younger men. On the other hand, as Hsieh emphasizes, focusing on tactics, the Military Academy and the Old Army did develop troop trainers and disciplinarians who could imbue volunteers with greater cohesion and tactical effectiveness than they would otherwise have possessed.Much depends on expectations and assessment: given the army’s missions and force structure before the Civil War, it is unreasonable, even anachronistic, to expect great skill in grand tactics and operational art during that conflict. On the other hand, American military officers proved reliable, subordinate instruments of national policy, loyal to national political values, which is not always the case during revolutions and civil wars. As Edward Hagerman, Mark Wilson, and I have suggested, there is an interpretive middle ground in the experience, adaptability, and effectiveness of Old Army logisticians, whose ability underpinned strategy and ultimately decisive operations, however sluggish in execution. As William Skelton and I have demonstrated, the army’s institutional insulation and professional autonomy went hand-in-hand with, indeed reinforced, its subordination and accountability to civilian authority. The tactical and operational preparation and ability of Old Army veterans is only one factor among several—tactically, for example, soldier experience and terrain; operationally, terrain and infrastructure; and culturally, soldier expectations of supply—that have to be analyzed in order to evaluate the combat effectiveness of Civil War armies, especially in comparison with their European contemporaries. Much depends on one’s perspective, and plentiful examples can be presented to support positive or negative interpretations. But the military remained subordinate to democratically developed civilian war aims, and the combination of American economic power and military logistical capability proved sufficient to penetrate and occupy the Confederacy before Union public opinion tired of the

war.48There are remarkably few analyses of the impact of the Civil War on the army as an institution, so we may conclude by briefly examining them, in order to connect antebellum, wartime, and postwar change and continuity. It is common for Civil War historians to argue that the Regular Army should have been dispersed among the volunteers to provide more even training, a reasonable proposition but one that ran counter to most past experience, and to army leaders’ desire to maintain the institution after the war. Not only did they expect a short conflict, they remembered that the volunteers were disbanded after the war with Mexico: they had built up one of the most professional institutions in the nation, and wanted to ensure its preservation for the long term. In the 1986 collection Against All Enemies,

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June I. Gow asserts that the standing army became an “institutional casualty of the political crisis” of secession, but I hope this review has demonstrated the limits to the damage it actually suffered. Gow then looks at the army’s impact on the Confederacy, concluding that antebellum Regular Army experience proved “crucial”: “without professional [military] leadership . . . the [Confederate] struggle for independence would have been swiftly lost.” In Military Necessity: Civil-Military Relations in the Confederacy (2006), on the other hand, Paul Escott suggests that Confederate “society became militarized to a degree unmatched in U.S. history,” aggravating internal tensions to the point of crisis, though he blames the authoritarianism of southern society rather than that of military commanders.49

The antebellum army’s political neutrality, subordination to national authority, and skill in troop training and logistics made a difference for its future. Had southern sectionalism or antebellum Democratic politicization proceeded as far as the Radical Republicans believed, or as historians sometimes imply, had citizen- soldiers possessed sufficient discipline or the innate genius for war they sometimes claimed, the Republicans might have convinced the president and Congress to modify the army’s commissioning and promotion systems far more than was done. Nor did the war alter the established characteristics of the Regular Army officer corps. Although the army’s operations became intensely politicized during Reconstruction, few commanders felt much more taste for military government and embroilment in civil disputes than they had before the war. Meanwhile, many officers commissioned from civilian life as volunteers during the Civil War transferred into the Regular Army in 1865, and some were able to reenter military service in the Regular Army later. Along with some former enlisted soldiers, these men altered the character of the junior officer corps—but they had little impact at the senior field grade and general officer levels, and by 1877 commissioning was virtually monopolized by the Military Academy, without the periodic infusions from civilian life that antebellum force increases had provided.

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In Against All Enemies Craig Symonds observes that the war brought “only tinkering” to the Regular Army as an institution, though I would suggest that this was largely due to the reversion to small scale and frontier dispersion, much as in the antebellum era, after Appomattox. Perhaps most important in the long run, a retirement system was established, potentially opening the senior ranks to promotion, but the massive influx of officers during the war created a backlog of commanders much younger than the colonels and generals of the 1850s, and promotion remained as slow after the war as before. Like Symonds, Russell Weigley identifies few significant changes, in force structure, missions, or capability, in the decade immediately after the Civil War. Indeed, the extreme politicization the army faced during Reconstruction receded afterwards, and the southern-western- Jacksonian critique, associated with John A. Logan and The Volunteer Soldier of America, that produced the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, had little concrete impact on the army during the following generation. Recognizing some of its limitations as a constabulary force, William Tecumseh Sherman, Emory Upton, and other reformers began to create the institutions for sustained professional education that could improve the army’s conventional ability at the grand tactical and operational levels.51

These institutions provide the basis for arguments that the U.S. Army only became professional during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but this interpretation is rooted in a particular conception of professionalism, focused on the need to develop expertise for the complexities of large-scale conventional warfare. But as Samuel Huntington himself observed, there are at least three major dimensions to professionalism: commitment (or cohesion) and responsibility (or subordination), as well as expertise. As Mark R. Grandstaff has suggested, there were at least two waves of professionalization in the nineteenth century army, an antebellum one of commitment, cohesion, and responsibility, demonstrated by William Skelton, and that in conventional expertise delineated by a number of scholars for the postbellum era. I would add a third dimension, that of mission: it is not professionally responsible to concentrate one’s attention on developing expertise that is not in demand by those one serves, to the detriment of the missions they assign.52

This does not mean that the army could not, and should not, have done better at learning to synchronize combat power during the 1850s, particularly given the Napoleonic self-image most officers preferred. But it does mean that the army was dispersed, and difficult to educate or train, and that the skills most important to antebellum officers were force sustainment (logistics, technological development, and administration) and diplomacy (as peacekeepers). The values most important to them were not deep critical reflection, or the creative freedom conducive to operational art, but system, regularity, and order, discipline and hierarchy both

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within the army and in its subordination to civilian authority. These skills and values may not be attractive to historians of conventional warfare, or perhaps to scholars in the liberal arts, but they served the antebellum army, and the United States, very well. And we might conclude by noting the difficulties the American Expeditionary Forces experienced in 1918—or those American tactical units experienced in 1942 and 1943—whether as evidence of limited professional development or, more accurately, as evidence of the inevitable difficulty of conducting large-scale warfare with limited hands-on experience.53

It is instructive that neither William Skelton or Edward M. Coffman distinguished between the 1850s and preceding decades, as they did between the army before and after the War of 1812. Even Marcus Cunliffe, who emphasized the volunteer movement of the 1850s in his study Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, did not identify that decade as a distinct era in the history of the Regular Army or American civil-military relations. This is not to say that the 1850s did not present distinctive characteristics, in civilian life or that of the national standing army. Having observed the last generation’s resurgence in scholarship on the early republic and the Gilded Age, having taught electives in every era of American history, it seems to me that no decade of American history and culture is so much in need of study, on its own merits rather than as prologue to the Civil War, as the 1850s. The army appears far more effective (though rarely decisive given constraints of politics and scale) in its operations as an agent of national policy—helping to keep the peace in Kansas and along the borders, furthering the defeat of Indian resistance to white settlement, to say nothing of more mundane duties in river and harbor clearance, exploration and surveying—than if it is judged as an institution failing to prepare for civil war.

Whether in missions, force structure, political situation, or capabilities, change appears to have been incremental rather than fundamental during the 1850s. The professionalization that Skelton demonstrates in An American Profession of Arms continued, perhaps with a bit more impact in developing conventional capability than in previous decades. The institutional dynamics that had matured during the reforms of the decade after 1815 remained, continuing to insulate the army from many of the political pressures of American life. These dynamics changed temporarily during the Civil War, with the commissioning of so many officers without Military Academy socialization, many of whom were retained, for the first time following a major conflict, in 1865. On the other hand, the Military Academy then reasserted its near-monopoly as a commissioning source, and promotions remained largely insulated from political influence, certainly far more so than in the civil service. The development of conventional warfighting capability accelerated during the 1880s, but fundamental change did not occur until the closure of the continental frontier after 1890. Even then, as Mac Coffman and Brian M. Linn have shown, the long shadow of the frontier continued to shape much of the army’s ethos in the early twentieth century.

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