Modernizing the American War Department

Change and Continuity in a Turbulent Era, 1885-1920

Daniel Beaver

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781631010200
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

An important study of the evolution of the U.S. War Department

Not a simple, linear administrative history, Modernizing the American War Department is a unique study of the adjustment of nineteenth-century military organizations to the managerial, technological, and policy challenges of a new era.

The story unfolds against a backdrop of massive industrial and technological changes, as the country moved from a traditional agricultural and market-based commercial system toward a modern organization utilizing twentieth-century managerial structures and concepts. Although the overview ranges from 1820, when John C. Calhoun established the foundations of the American military system, to the coming of the Second World War, it concentrates on the critical, fulcrum years from 1885 to 1920 when the army faced the challenges of the Progressive Era and the First World War. Distinguished military historian Daniel R. Beaver uses primary and secondary sources to demonstrate how the changes affected military institutions and the soldiers and civilians who shaped and were shaped by them.

Students and scholars of military history will find Modernizing the American War Department to be an important addition to the study of the professionalization of the armed services.

CHAPTER 1

SEPARATE SPHERES AND PARALLEL PATHS

THE WAR DEPARTMENT AND THE ARMY, 1820–1885

On July 5, 1814, Brigadier General Winfield Scott’s brigade attacked the British at the little Canadian junction of Chippewa. The roads in northern New York state were atrocious, and during the previous months Scott had been plagued by shortages of quartermaster and ordnance supplies. Horses, mules, and oxen were in short supply. Hurriedly ordered transport wagons fell apart. The food was rotten. The troops carried muskets of various makes and calibers. Not only did they have to conserve scarce small arms and artillery ammunition, but they also had to wear nonregulation gray wool uniforms in the hottest season of the year. The troops proved effective, but their support was dreadful. Command and control also left much to be desired. During the previous year and a half, President James Madison, Secretary of War John Armstrong, and Secretary of State James Monroe had applied themselves to military affairs without much effect. The president and the secretary of state even appeared on the field themselves at Blandensburg. After Monroe took over at the War Department, despite his reorganizations in 1813 and in 1814, conditions did not improve much. Postwar investigations revealed dishonesty bordering on treason and inefficiency in military management and leadership of unsurpassed magnitude. Difficulties ranged from cynical exploitation of the government by fraudulent contract merchants to Eli Whitney’s failure to fulfill his infamous musket contract with the War Department. The abominable transportation and communications conditions accounted for many of the failures of military command, but they only highlighted the poor performance of those who should have taken such difficulties into account. The events of the war exposed a dark, bankrupt side of American military affairs.¹

Congressional investigations in 1815 and 1816 revealed the inadequacy of the connections between the War Department and the army and brought substantial bureaucratic reorganization. The chief architect was John C. Calhoun, one of America’s great nineteenth-century administrators. Appointed secretary of war on October 10, 1817, to succeed William Crawford of Georgia, Calhoun, who was both reformer and modernizer, struck at the organizational residue of the eighteenth century. The original system, based on the tradition of “no standing army” and characterized by a citizen militia and civilian control of the military at every level from the periphery to the center, had been transferred to the federal government virtually intact after the Revolutionary War. At command levels it had its roots in earlier political and administrative practices. At supply and logistical levels it was dominated by civilian contractors who operated beyond military control under the oversight of local, politically appointed intendants who considered a public office a species of property to be exploited for personal or family advantage. Their contracting and purchasing methods brought corruption and mismanagement in administration, finance, logistics, general supply, and procurement.²

Calhoun was convinced that wartime failures had been caused by both poor organization and poor executive management. He argued for an expansible peacetime regular army to enhance and possibly replace the citizen militia. He recommended that dependence on civilian contractors in the field should be ended and that the finance, subsistence, supply, production, and procurement agencies of the War Department should be militarized and made clearly accountable. He advised that the War Department should be so organized and connected that nothing need be changed or improvised in an emergency. The secretary of war appointed to positions of leadership young reform-minded officers who were committed to improving command and control and establishing accountability. The Calhoun reforms reflected the administrative modernization that reshaped the capacity of the state in Europe and America to meet new organizational and technological challenges during the nineteenth century and endured, with minor changes, until the first decade of the twentieth century. Their institutional and professional cultures had to be reckoned with far longer.³

During the years before the Civil War, the secretary of war, assisted by a small civilian staff, commanded the army in the name of the president and ensured the revolutionary tradition of civilian supremacy over the military. The power of the Office of Commanding General, established in 1821 in part to remedy wartime deficiencies, was intentionally made ambiguous and nonstatutory. The position, first filled almost inadvertently by Jacob Brown (1821–1828) and then, before the Civil War, by Alexander McComb (1828–1841) and Winfield Scott (1841–1861), represented the warrior tradition—honor, duty, obedience, courage—as well as commitment to a single, hierarchical chain of command. Officers of the combat arms asserted that the only purpose of an army was achieved on the field of battle and that their special training and virtue required that they command the whole army, including the War Department staff. Aside from McComb, an astute and sensitive military politician, every commanding general argued that he reported directly to the president of the United States, that he commanded all the army, including the bureau chiefs, and that he was coequal with the secretary of war, whose task was merely to coordinate the War Department bureaucracy.⁴

Soldiers of the staff in the technical and supply bureaus did not take such assertions from the line without a rejoinder. Part of the new technological and managerial leadership of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, they designed and made the guns, procured the supplies, built the roads, transported the army, and, in their depots and armories, managed the problems of the early industrial era. Officers of the Ordnance Department in particular were innovative inventors, technocrats, and industrial managers before the Civil War. Their relationships with certain civilian cannon founders, powder makers, and small-arms producers, their open-door policy at federal arsenals, and the free movement they allowed craftsmen from their workshops into private factories made the department a net exporter of technology into American industry. This did not make them any more agreeable to congressmen, whose pleas for favors were rejected, to private entrepreneurs, who considered the bureaus business rivals, or to line officers, who considered them mere tinkerers and mechanics. Accepted as equals by the civilian entrepreneurial, intellectual, and academic communities, they found professional legitimacy in the War Department through the development of special schools and apprenticeships.⁵ They pointed out that they took the same oath to defend the Constitution as officers of the line and were also soldiers of the republic. Children of the age of iron and steam, they seldom achieved command, but they did demand consultation.

The issue of command and control between the secretary of war, the commanding general, and the bureau chiefs disturbed relations in the War Department for generations. Winfield Scott was utterly inflexible, and in the early 1850s his attitude poisoned relations between the president, the commanding general, and the secretary of war. All the secretaries of war insisted that the commanding general reported to them, not, as Scott believed, directly to the president. They argued that too much was made of the alleged powerlessness of the commanding general. If his arrogance or narrowness of view did not blind him, they stated, he could work informally through them as their chief military adviser. In 1857 Secretary of War John B. Floyd, who got along with Scott better than most of his contemporaries, conceded the general’s point and recommended that the commanding general receive statutory power over the bureau chiefs.⁶

Every secretary of war also insisted that he must have personal contact with every element in the organizational hierarchy. The doctrine of equal access generated friction between members of the War Department staff, who insisted they must be at least consulted, and the commanding general, who claimed that they were all under his command. What ultimately developed was a War Department staff consisting of the bureau chiefs, who had direct access to the secretary of war, and a commanding general of the army, also with access to the secretary but with no direct control over the officers in the bureaus. Always somewhat artificial organizationally, it was an ingenious system of divide and rule that maintained civilian control of the military and granted no statutory overall command power to any soldier, bureaucrat, or line officer.⁷ It encouraged cohesion and stability at one level and fostered separatism at another. It ensured that the secretary of war had access to multiple sources of information about departmental matters, but it also increased jurisdictional conflicts. Like members of any traditional community or extended family, to which army officers often compared themselves, soldiers exploited their political connections and knew each other’s strengths, failures, and weaknesses. If occasion demanded, they were prepared to exploit all of them.⁸

Two significant civilian interest groups also played roles in the system. War Department supply experts, logisticians, and weapons technocrats worked closely, though not always harmoniously, with a relatively small number of client firms—civilian mercantile houses, freighting and transport concerns, and arms manufacturers—that formed important political interest groups. A number of officers resigned from the service to accept important jobs in such businesses. It seemed easier for an officer to become a businessman than it was for a businessman, except in wartime, to adjust to the values and procedures of army life. Few businessmen showed any interest in becoming regular army officers.⁹ Individual businessmen and soldiers played significant, often adversarial, roles as they strove for satisfactory outcomes as members of one or more of the interest groups involved, and on several occasions private small-arms makers sought to have public arsenals of production abolished. It was in the House and Senate Appropriations and Military Affairs committees and on the floors of Congress that those questions were resolved. Congressmen and senators involved themselves intimately with the most minute matters of army business and especially during peacetime, when the army was budget driven, their micromanagement required the vast amount of paperwork about which War Department bureaucrats complained. Thus, before the Civil War, a set of “patron-client” relationships between the War Department, members of congressional committees, food, clothing, equipment, forage, and transportation firms, and small-arms and heavy-metals producers comprised a small national defense sector of the economy.¹⁰

Until 1840 the American organizational landscape was relatively stable. Business and technological enterprises were characterized by either single entrepreneurships or simple partnerships whose members exercised personal control. A representative firm produced a line of products with a local or, at most, a regional clientele. Such traditional business organizations lacked a body of salaried middle managers who supervised the day-to-day activity of the business and were directly accountable to the owners. Ownership and management were directly linked. Some traditional firms reached considerable size and encountered problems of scale and control that, in many cases, accounted for their demise. Before 1840 there was little institutional innovation in private American business. As long as the processes of production and distribution remained dependent on men, animals, and water and wind power, there was little pressure to change. Such sources of energy could not generate the volume of output in production and the number of transactions in distribution large enough to require organizational innovation. The slow rate of production and the slow movement of goods through the system allowed control by small, personally owned and managed enterprises. Although the economy was expanding, the agencies of growth were the myriad small producers, middlemen, merchants, and traders whose numbers increased to meet the needs of the growing population and whose activities were determined by price and market forces. After 1840, important innovations associated with the second industrial revolution—steam-powered machinery, the steamboat, the steam locomotive, and the electric telegraph—substantially began to influence traditional forms of production, transportation and communication and move the country toward a more expansive market economy.¹¹

By modern standards the War Department was a small-scale organization. It appeared to operate hierarchically through army regulations and War Department general orders. Although army officers, bound by the soldier’s oath and dedicated to the defense of the republic, rejected the cash-nexus mentality of the contemporary business community, they still reflected the society they served.¹² The military establishment was a national institution, but its power structure, like that in the country, was diffuse, decentralized, and obstinately, at times frustratingly, plural. Although organized and administered through geographic divisions and departments, the army was inhibited operationally and conceptually by the slow pace of transportation and communication. Command and management involved politically appointed civilians and career officers. Civilians came and went, but military appointments were permanent. Promotion was by seniority within the separate regiments and bureaus, and, until the Civil War, there was no military retirement system. Soldiers considered their bureaus and branches independent domains and interagency communication a privilege, not a requirement. The army and the War Department were separate hierarchical structures, but they could and did interact. When matters arose that transcended a single organization or involved outsiders, they could cross interior and exterior administrative barriers with ease. They were isolated neither from each other nor from the civilian communities with which, on many occasions, they worked. They operated through boards and councils, informal consultation, and personal contact. But in an era of small independent businessmen, loosely connected communities, and prickly personalities, commands, if they were to be heeded, were couched in comradely and conciliatory terms. Connections were personal. Even inside the separate branches and bureaus, careful consultation and negotiation preceded the appearance of regulations and general orders.

The War Department administered the force, produced many of its own supplies and much of its own equipment in its own depots, arsenals, and armories, and, under the Militia act of 1808, supplied a small portion of the arms for the state militias. Although the Act of 1808 provided $200,000 a year in federal money for the arming of the militia, state legislatures in New York and Massachusetts, under pressure from their own private small-arms manufacturers, created “state defense sectors” and equipped their troops with the products of their own factories instead of weapons produced in the national armories. This was perfectly legal, for the Act of 1808 was unclear, retaining a provision from the militia act of 1792 that specified that the only common characteristic of military small arms should be caliber.¹³

Before the Civil War, the topographical engineers explored the country while other engineers, in cooperation with the Quartermaster Bureau, built roads, army posts, and coastal fortifications and improved waterways. Ordnance technicians, through metallurgical experimentation and the development of interchangeable manufacture by machinery, played a role in advancing the industrial revolution in America. Army combat elements were organized into regiments, but they were scattered in penny-packet units along the coast and frontier. Soldiers of the line acted as a buffer between whites and Indians on the frontier and provided rallying points for economic development. Never really at peace, their strength ranged from roughly 6,000 troops in 1825 to a little more than 16,000 men in 1860. With no powerful enemies within striking distance, there was no need for mobilization planning or large federal forces. In war the nation relied on the regular army and United States volunteers, and on the state militias, for local defense and occasional short service in the field. There was time to prepare after hostilities began against any conceivable foreign threat.¹⁴ The nineteenth-century military order was one of separate spheres yet parallel paths. Such a decentralized, consultative system maintained political and organizational equilibrium, but it moved slowly, increased paperwork, and reinforced the prejudices of parochial, narrowly specialized officers in all the branches and bureaus.¹⁵

The Civil War marked the greatest test of the nineteenth-century system as well as its greatest triumph.¹⁶ The story of Abraham Lincoln and his generals is a familiar one. The federal command system during the first two years of the war revealed all the problems that had surfaced during the Scott controversy in the 1850s. Scott, still active and still adamant about his power, was too old to exercise field command, and when George McClellan became commanding general, he left Washington, as Scott had done earlier in the expedition to take Mexico City. McClellan never really escaped the narrow perspectives of the Army of the Potomac and, with troops in action on multiple fronts, a vacuum grew in Washington that Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton attempted to fill by creating a “War Board” headed by Ethan Allen Hitchcock.¹⁷ The war board remained until Lincoln finally found his general in Ulysses S. Grant. It was then absorbed into a special staff headed by Henry Halleck and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs.

The president coordinated the war effort through an informal war council composed of Secretary of War Stanton, other cabinet members, and members of Halleck’s special staff. Grant headed a unified command that coordinated multiple armies on multiple fronts. When he became commanding general in 1864, he moved his headquarters out of Washington into the field where he accompanied George Gordon Meade and the Army of the Potomac until the end of hostilities. As commander in chief, Linco...