Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms

Allan Peskin

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612773681
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito militare

Winfield Scott (1786-1866) was arguably the premier soldier of his era. More than any other, he was responsible for the professionalization of the U.S. Army during his long career (1807-61). He served as general in the War of 1812, commander of the U.S. forces it the final campaign of the war with Mexico, and general in chief at the beginning of the Civil War. Scott was known for his boldness and courage during the War of 1812 and wisdom and caution in his direction of the Mexico campaign.

Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms is a balanced and thorough biography of this long-neglected military figure. Scholars and military historians will welcome its significant contributions to the literature.

CHAPTER ONE

HOTSPUR

In 1808, when Winfield Scott first entered the U. S. Army, it numbered less than six thousand soldiers, and its annual budget was less than three million dollars. It had no commanding general nor general staff, no strategic doctrine, and few serviceable manuals. Only a handful of its officers had been trained at the recently established military academy; the rest were either self-taught or relics of the Revolutionary War. Few had ever commanded a unit as large as a regiment.¹

More than fifty years later, when Scott retired in the midst of a great civil war, the army he commanded was heading toward a million-man force with a budget of over a billion dollars. It had been transformed not only in magnitude but also in its very nature. When Scott had begun his career, an officer’s calling was something like a trade, and not an entirely reputable one; by the time he resigned it had become a profession. More than any other individual, Scott, in his life and work, was responsible for the transformation.

Winfield Scott was born June 13, 1786, on a modest farm outside Petersburg, Virginia. His paternal line, as its name implies, came from Scotland. His grandfather, James Scott, had backed the wrong side in the “Bonnie Prince Charlie” uprising of 1745 and was forced to flee to America, settling in Virginia, where he practiced law. His son, William, farmed; served as a Virginia officer in the American Revolution; married a well-connected neighbor, Ann Mason; fathered four children; and died young. Winfield, who was barely six at the time of his father’s death, scarcely mentions him in his Memoirs; most of his childhood memories were of his mother.²

Unlike most young widows of her day, Ann Scott never remarried. Very likely she received some help from her family in raising her children, particularly from her wealthy brother Winfield. Young Winfield was named after this rich uncle and was expected to inherit the estate, but as in so many of the novels of the period, his great expectations were dashed when Winfield Mason married late in life and fathered several children as his heirs.³ The nephew would have to make his own way in the world.

His mother, by all accounts a strong-willed, quick-witted woman of independent spirit, was the great influence on his formative years. In later life, when he made the obligatory tribute that successful men are expected to pay to their mother’s example, his words rang true. “And if,” he said, “I have achieved … anything that my countrymen are likely to honor …, it is from the lessons of that admirable parent that I derived the inspiration.” It was likely the memory of that formidable woman that accounted for Scott’s gallantry, amounting almost to timidity, in his dealings with women. Even in the freewheeling masculine environment of the army, Scott was never known to succumb to temptation. Nor, he insisted, did he ever once stray from his marriage vows.⁴

Scott rebelled only once against his mother’s authority. One Sunday, when he was seven, he refused to go to church. His mother cut off a switch from a poplar tree and prepared to apply it to her refractory son. Thinking quickly, the precocious lad cited the Gospel of St. Matthew to the effect that “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit [should] be cast into the fire.” The delighted mother threw away the rod and spared the child.⁵ Scott would grow up to become one of the great pettifoggers of his day, continually raising farfetched but ingenious arguments to justify his actions. Perhaps the memory of this childhood triumph fortified his belief that he could wriggle out of scrapes by legalistic appeals and that, if he were only clever enough, all transgressions would be forgiven.

His mother died when Winfield was seventeen, leaving him to finish his schooling on his own. That education had been haphazard. Virginia, like most Southern states, had no comprehensive, state-supported public school system. In the fashion of the English gentry, young Virginians of quality were either tutored at home or packed off to boarding schools, usually of indifferent merit. Scott was enrolled in two such schools in nearby Richmond. One, run by a respected Quaker pedagogue, James Hargrove, was more concerned with molding character than with imparting knowledge. The other was operated by James Ogilvie, an eccentric Scottish drug addict who soon gave up the classroom to tour the country, dressed in a toga, declaiming Ciceronian orations of his own devising.⁶

Even in these undemanding institutions, Scott did not stand out for scholastic prowess. As he later admitted, “the charms of idleness or pleasure often prevailed over the pride of acquisition.” Nonetheless, he managed to pick up a smattering of Greek and Roman classics, Scottish metaphysics, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, political economy, and a good reading (though not speaking) facility in French, which would later provide invaluable access to French military manuals and texts.⁷

This education was, as he himself conceded, superficial: “Too much was attempted within a limited time, by republican short cuts to knowledge.” Yet Scott somehow acquired a love of reading that persisted throughout his life (though an aide maliciously hinted that his reading was largely confined to title pages and prefaces rather than complete books). His literary tastes remained fixated on the authors he had studied early in life: Gibbon and Hume among historians; Adam Smith, Locke, and Hobbes among philosophers; the essayist Richard Addison; poets Milton, Dryden, and Shakespeare; Fielding and Goldsmith for fiction. Except for Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper, he scarcely noticed the writers of his own day. But within that narrow compass Winfield Scott could hold his own in literary and philosophical discussions with the likes of Washington Irving or Harvard’s learned Dr. Channing.⁸ His old-fashioned education also equipped Scott with the elaborate courtesies and ponderous prose of an earlier day and helped create that impression of pedantic pomposity that sometimes made him a figure of fun.

In 1805 Scott enrolled at the College of William and Mary but soon discovered that his educational preparation had been inadequate for its demanding curriculum. He spent a year studying natural philosophy and law and then dropped out to read law in the office of Petersburg attorney David Robertson. This sort of apprenticeship, rather than a college law school, was the customary training for lawyers in the nineteenth century, and it was sufficient to prepare Scott for admittance to the Virginia bar in 1806. He went to work in Robertson’s office, along with another aspiring attorney, Thomas Ruffin, whose brother Edmund, later such a rabid secessionist that he reputedly fired the first shot at Fort Sumter, remembered Scott as being, even then, remarkably pompous and vain.⁹ For a while, Scott rode the judicial circuit with other young lawyers, doing clerical chores and picking up odds and ends of business.

A welcome diversion from this weary routine soon presented itself. The treason trial of former U.S. vice president Aaron Burr for some shadowy intrigue he had allegedly plotted opened in Richmond. All other legal business came to a standstill as local lawyers flocked to witness this clash of forensic titans. The trial was held in the chamber of the Virginia House of Delegates, which was so packed with spectators that Scott had to find a perch on the massive bronze lock of the rear door.

From that vantage point he carefully observed the great men: presiding judge John Marshall, jury foreman John Randolph, lawyers William Wirt and Luther Martin, reporter Washington Irving (with whom he struck up a life-long friendship), and witness Andrew Jackson, whose reckless diatribes and unbridled show of temper astonished him. The most interesting witness was the obese and oily senior officer of the U. S. Army, Brig. Gen. James Wilkinson, whose testimony against Burr to cover up his own involvement in the mysterious plot earned Scott’s lasting distrust. The defendant himself, “as immovable as one of Canova’s living marbles,” seemed oblivious to the spectacle around him, but he was actually taking everything in, including the tall young lawyer on the uncomfortable door lock. Years later, when the two were formally introduced, Burr would astonish Scott by recalling every detail of his appearance.¹⁰

It was not surprising that Scott should be so noticed. Over six feet, four inches tall, with oval face, wide eyes, aquiline nose, and dark hair brushed stiffly back from his forehead, he struck Burr as “the most magnificent youth in Virginia.” He was then remarkably slim for his height, weighing less than 150 pounds. In old age, when his body had become bloated from too much hard living and French cooking, he would look back on his early self as wistfully as Falstaff recalling his days as a page for the Duke of Norfolk. “I am thin as a beanpole,” he would sigh. Thin as a beanpole.¹¹

Only a few weeks after Scott had settled in to observe the Burr trial, another sensational event diverted his attention. On June 22, 1807, the American frigate Chesapeake was attacked off the Virginia coast by the British warship Leopard. Over twenty of her crew were killed or wounded, and four others, claiming American citizenship but suspected of being British deserters, were hauled off to be tried in a British court. The great European war, then nearing its final act, now threatened to cross the ocean.

For well over a century, England and France had been locked in a vast conflict for European supremacy. The United States had attempted to steer a middle course between the contending giants, but as their conflict approached its final showdown, neutrality in a world in flames was increasingly difficult to maintain. Both sides regularly violated American rights, but the Chesapeake-Leopard affair was the most flagrant violation, and in its wake, war fever swept the United States.

President Thomas Jefferson deplored war as irrational and expensive. He preferred to employ what he called “peaceable coercion,” or what a later age would term “economic sanctions.” Later that year, he would impose a far-reaching embargo on all overseas trade, but as an immediate response to the Chesapeake provocation, he closed American ports to British warships. Volunteer troops were called up to patrol the coastline and to prevent British ships from obtaining provisions.

On an impulse, Scott bought a horse, borrowed a uniform, and joined one of these volunteer companies. He had no military experience nor, up to that time, any apparent soldierly inclinations. It seems to have been a spur-of-the-moment lark, but it soon took a serious turn.

One evening, while Scott was acting as lance corporal in charge of a small patrol, he heard the sound of muffled oars. Charging across the sand dunes and into the muddy creek, his squad captured a rowboat from the hated Leopard containing two midshipmen (boys, really) and six oarsmen on an illicit provisioning expedition.¹²

Scott was proud “as Hotspur” of this feat of arms, though, as he conceded, it was the more easily done since the British were unarmed and their boat was stuck in the mud. President Jefferson, however, was embarrassed by the incident, which he feared might lead to a war with Great Britain. He ordered Scott’s prisoners to be returned with apologies. Instead of his expected commendation, the young Hotspur was slapped with what he called an “imbecile admonition” not to do it again. The Chesapeake excitement passed, the volunteer companies were dissolved, and Scott returned to the prosaic life of a lawyer. Still, he had tasted military excitement and found it good. “The young soldier had heard the bugle and the drum. It was the music that awoke ambition.”¹³

It was not an ambition that seemed likely to be gratified. At the end of 1807, the entire U. S. Army consisted of fewer than 150 officers commanding less than three thousand men.¹⁴ Americans were uncomfortable with the idea of a standing army, fearing it might be turned against their own liberties. In times of crisis, patriotic volunteers and militiamen were expected to flock to the colors to augment the tiny regular army. Such an army could patrol the borders, guard public property, and make an occasional show of force to awe restless Indians, but it presented few opportunities to satisfy Scott’s dreams of glory. He returned the borrowed uniform and went back to his law books.

Virginia, however, was overstocked with bright young lawyers, so he decided to try his luck in South Carolina. Had he been successful there, who knows but that he might have wound up on the other side in the Civil War; however, he ran afoul of the one-year residency requirement for admission to the state’s bar.¹⁵ While he was marking time in Charleston, word came that, in view of the deteriorating relations with England, Congress was considering a bill to enlarge the regular army. He set sail at once for Washington and arranged to meet with President Jefferson.

On the European continent, the officer class was reserved for the nobility. In England, commissions were bought and sold. In the American meritocracy, military careers were theoretically open to talent, but it did not hurt to have some political pull. Scott wisely brought to the interview a Petersburg neighbor, the influential senator William Branch Giles, to vouch for his political bona fides. A few words convinced the president that the young petitioner was personally presentable, well connected, and politically sound—sufficient qualifications, apparently, to be an officer in the U. S. Army.¹⁶

A few months later, in May 1808, the eagerly awaited commission arrived. Rather than starting at the bottom as an ensign or even a lieutenant, Scott found, to his delight, that he was to be made a captain in command of a company of light artillery. Without a moment’s hesitation, he accepted...