West Pointers and the Civil War

The Old Army in War and Peace

Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781469621937, 9780807832783
• eBook ISBN: 9780807898567
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Most Civil War generals were graduates of West Point, and many of them helped transform the U.S. Army from what was little better than an armed mob that performed poorly during the War of 1812 into the competent fighting force that won the Mexican War. Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh demonstrates how the "old army" transformed itself into a professional military force after 1814, and, more important, how "old army" methods profoundly shaped the conduct of the Civil War.

Chapter One: Colonials, Continentals, and Federals

The Origins of American Military Professionalism

The crucial formative years of the antebellum old army occurred in the twenty or so years after the end of the War of 1812 in 1815—when Sylvanus Thayer carved into the high cliffs of West Point a military academy for posterity, when a then nationalist John C. Calhoun pushed through organizational forms that persisted for nearly a century, and when a cluster of professionally minded officers hardened by the War of 1812 used their senior command positions to preserve and advance the cause of “military science.” These reformers set out to prevent a recurrence of the poor showing American arms exhibited during the first campaigns of the War of 1812. They had to struggle against a strong streak of antimilitarism in Anglo-American political culture and decades of precedent. In the end, their efforts would have to face the practical test of battle during the Mexican War.¹ That conflict would vindicate the virtues of military professionalism and give the old army the institutional strength and monopoly of expertise it would carry into the Civil War.

The brilliant military successes of American arms in the Mexican War, whatever one thinks of the war’s moral significance, testifies most powerfully to the martial achievements of the old army’s fathers. While the United States had floundered in the first years of the War of 1812, American troops won brilliant victories in the war with Mexico from the moment of its outbreak and conquered a continent-wide dominion in the process. The American victory had many causes, of course, but the presence of a hard core of regulars able and willing to convert the mere potential of military success into substantive fact played an important role.

Nevertheless, the old army that won the Mexican War and provided the institutional bedrock for both American armies during the Civil War could make no claims to perfection: its major flaws included an absence of large-unit training; a sometimes overly provincial attitude toward European, especially French, practice; and a conception of staff work so focused on logistics and financial accountability that it neglected those vital areas of military organization which allow the different pieces of an army to maneuver and fight together in situations of extreme stress. A sometimes self-serving satisfaction with this organizational status quo and the unwillingness of Congress to provide larger amounts of material support caused the old army to bear these flaws throughout the rest of the antebellum period and thus into the Civil War. If we compare its competence to previous American armies and its contemporary rivals, however, the old army proved more than adequate.

This achievement impresses us all the more because there was nothing predetermined about the army’s post–War of 1812 reforms. Although the militia continued to decline into decrepitude, the citizen-soldier ideal of Anglo-American republicanism had ancient roots in even more ancient hills, irrespective of the War of 1812. Most Americans saw Jackson’s victory at New Orleans where militiamen defeated British regulars as yet another vindication of the citizen-soldier ideal (ignoring the early campaigns on the northern frontier and the capture of the national capital), and few would have comprehended their professional soldiery’s preoccupation with European practice and method. Some remained openly hostile to professionalism—West Point in this period had to weather periodic charges of aristocratic privilege. In this sometimes-hostile environment, Congress restricted the army’s size, so that in 1845, on the eve of the Mexican War, the old army numbered barely 8,509 men (826 officers and 7,683 enlisted men). Poor pay and difficult conditions resulted in severe rates of desertion, reaching as high as more than half of the year’s enlistments in 1826. It is something of a wonder that Calhoun and the first generation of American military professionals had as much as success as they did.²

Their achievements did not spring self-begotten out of the humiliations of Bladensburg and Washington’s fall to the British in 1814, however. The founders of the Continental army also had to contend with the powerful strain of antimilitarism in Anglo-American culture, which had frustrated earlier attempts at reform. The precedents the revolutionary generation set had a special and disproportionate influence because of the prestige they later held in American political culture and practice. Indeed, George Washington and Alexander Hamilton had established in their lifetimes the basic parameters for American military policy and thought throughout the nineteenth century: the primacy of civilian control, a dual military system based on a small core of regulars and a larger reserve of citizen-soldiers organized under federal supervision, a well-articulated system of military education, and an officer-heavy regular army designed to expand quickly in wartime. Not all of these ideas always found fruition, but among the nineteenth-century makers of American military policy, these ideas had tremendous influence, whatever specific measures different individuals endorsed or condemned.³

The nascent professionalism of Washington and Hamilton survived an ingrained Anglo-American suspicion of standing armies because of the inherent inadequacies of the militia system. First of all, the militia ideal of a citizen-soldier who would throw back any and all sorts of enemies in order to return immediately to the bosom of civilian society could not obtain the state-oriented objectives of American military policy from the Revolution onward. The political goals of all American wars between the Revolution and the Civil War included the vindication of one combatant’s sovereign state control. That control took various forms, including but not limited to the founding of an independent American nation, the protection of national authority against foreign and domestic enemies, the conquest of large portions of Mexico, the Confederacy’s vindication of its own existence, and the pacification of sometimes-hostile Indian peoples. In all these different circumstances, a professional military’s institutional solidity proved indispensable. American governments wished to govern and control their conquests; the tendency of guerrillas and insurgents to slip out of the control of political elites and their inability to challenge directly massed regular forces made them inadequate tools for American nation-states.⁴

The militia’s continuous decline also made the presence of some sort of standing army all but compulsory. In the more settled areas of British North America, citizens became increasingly reluctant to attend the muster days that kept the militia’s training and competence at acceptable levels. Even aside from this organizational decline, the militia had always proved unsuitable for dealing with campaigns waged at any appreciable distance from the yeomanry’s home communities, a problem with citizen-soldiers since at least the time of ancient Greece and Rome. The militia might still suffice for local defense forces, but in large-scale conflicts like the great North American wars for empire of the eighteenth century, British regulars had proved indispensable. In any conflict that might require a siege, expertise in artillery, or even the simple ability to maintain troops in the field over a long period of time, regulars would have to be available.

Various problems with the militia became self-evident as early as Washington’s siege of British-held Boston in 1775 and 1776. After their success at Lexington and Concord, New Englanders had flocked to Boston to invest the city. Unfortunately, sieges take time, and militiamen have homes to return to and cannot stay in the field indefinitely, so Washington found his army slowly melting away. In order to restore the situation, the Continental Congress created a Continental army in 1775, which served as an ersatz regular army. Both the militia and the Continentals played their part in defeating the British. Irregulars had their days of glory at Saratoga and in the much more partisan-driven southern campaigns, but even in the southern colonies, the war’s final decisive blow came at the hands of a force composed of Continentals, French regulars, and a substantial French fleet during a siege operation at Yorktown.⁵

Conscious, perhaps overly so, of their own expertise, the officers of the Continental army became increasingly disenchanted during the war with both the failings of the militia and the perpetual suspicion they labored under from a political leadership openly hostile to standing armies. In fact, one of the many grievances of those Americans who revolted against the crown was the increasing use of British regulars in North America. Instead of the hated regulars, self-described “patriots” put their trust in a militia of citizen-soldiers—sturdy yeomen who would leave their plows, defeat overdrilled professionals with the flexible virtue of free men, and return to their farms after the danger had passed.⁶ Resentful of civilian suspicions, the first American professionals in the Continental army and their later heirs defined themselves as much in opposition to the American militiaman as in concordance with European models of officership.

Furthermore, Continental army officers had substantive material grievances with the mismanagement of the Continental Congress. The Job-like winters of 1777–78 at Valley Forge and 1779–80 at Jockey Hollow near Morristown, where civilian ineptitude and indifference caused much of the suffering, alienated both officers and enlisted men. The gentlemen-officers of the Continentals possessed too many social airs to make common cause with their men in opposition to the Congress, but the rank and file of several state lines did participate in a few short-lived mutinies. In early 1783 some officers staged a pseudo-revolt of their own, the “Newburgh Conspiracy,” in which they hoped to use scarcely veiled threats of coercion to compel Congress to approve the half-pay pensions most Continental officers saw as their just reward. Washington, by the sheer force of his personality and influence, quashed the movement and set a long-lived American precedent for civilian control of the military.⁷

With the advent of peace in 1783, and the Newburgh crisis resolved, the new nation also needed a new peacetime military policy. Washington, in perhaps the most important early state paper on American military policy, the famous “Sentiments on a Peace Establishment,” laid out in 1783 many of the driving themes of American military policy and practice until the Civil War. Washington called for a small regular army to guard the frontiers against both the Indians and European powers, a well-organized and reformed militia to be used in time of war, a system of arsenals, and some provision for military education, especially with regard to engineering and artillery. Washington’s conception of “a well organized Militia” never achieved fruition, although the federalized volunteers of the Mexican and Civil wars kept the citizen-soldier tradition alive.⁸ The other three elements of Washington’s proposals did eventually become a part of American military practice, however.

In the short term, Washington’s ideas came to naught, despite similar proposals from Frederick William, Baron von Steuben, and Alexander Hamilton. The Indians on the frontier remained relatively quiescent, and the early Confederation government disbanded the Continental army in 1784, leaving eighty men at West Point to guard military stores.⁹ The specter of impending anarchy raised by Shays’s Rebellion in 1786 then helped spur on the movement that would result in the creation of the federal constitution. This new constitution increased the power of the central national government, and Congress received explicit authority to establish a navy and standing army, with the president as commander in chief. Furthermore, the federal government also had the authority to suppress some internal dissent.

Nevertheless, the new federal Congress showed no urgency in using its new constitutional powers to raise a standing army, and Secretary of War Henry Knox’s attempt to institute a program of militia regularization and training under federal supervision and control proved almost wholly futile. Congress authorized a standing army of 1,216 men in 1790, but the measures proved inadequate, and in 1791 a small force of American troops on the Northwest frontier suffered a humiliating defeat (900 casualties out of 1,400 men) at the hands of Indians. The catastrophe compelled Congress to increase the army’s size under Anthony Wayne, whom Washington recalled from civilian life to restore the young nation’s military fortunes. Wayne proved up to the task and vindicated his regulars with the victory at Fallen Timbers in the summer of 1794.¹⁰

Increasing tensions with France during the Quasi-War of the late 1790s gave a further impetus to the military ambitions of the new Federalist Party. Many of the Federalist reforms proved stillborn in the end, but Hamilton developed two ideas that would be influential among American professionals until the Civil War and beyond: the expansible army concept and a system of military education that included both a basic school for all officers and specialized schools of application for individual branches.¹¹ The expansible army called for a top-heavy organization of officers and sergeants that would allow an army to “expand” in wartime by simply adding enlisted men to existing companies. Its advocates believed that the new wartime recruits could be quickly and efficiently integrated into the existing units under the command of already-seasoned leaders.

Hamilton’s ideas on military education went hand in hand with this cadre system: “Since it is agreed, that we are not to keep on foot numerous forces instructed and disciplined, military science in its various branches ought to be cultivated, with peculiar care, in proper Nurseries; So that there may Always exist a sufficient body of it ready to be imparted and diffused, and a competent number of persons qualified to act as instructors to the additional troops, which events may successively require to be raised.” Hamilton proposed a two-year fundamental school, which all officers were to attend, and separate artillery-engineering, infantry, cavalry, and naval branch schools.¹² The curriculum Thayer later established at West Point ended up making most officers go through what was essentially a four-year engineering school, but at times throughout the antebellum period the War Department would attempt to constitute branch schools of practice for artillery, infantry, and cavalry.

Hamilton’s belief that “an army is in many respect a machine; of which the displacement of any of the organs, if permitted to continue, injures its symmetry and energy and leads to disorder and weakness” represented in brief the organizational ideal of so many of these early American professionals.¹³ This professional aspiration, with its appeals to regularity, standardization, and a conception of military science grounded in the technical skills of engineering and artillery, would survive the deaths of Washington, Hamilton, and the Federalist Party. Their legacy lived on, because, whatever its flaws, only a regular army could defend the American nation-state. Indeed, in spite of their hostility toward standing armies, the Jeffersonians allowed a small regular army to survive their electoral triumph in 1800 and even authorized the establishment of a military academy at West Point in 1802.

Washington had commented in his “Sentiments on Peace Establishment” that a military academy was needed to preserve military and engineering expertise, “unless we intend to let the Science become extinct [in the new republic], and to depend entirely upon the Foreigners for their friendly aid, if ever we should again be involved in Hostility.” The Continentals themselves had made a feeble start at military education during the Revolution. The garrison at the strategic post of West Point on the Hudson River had begun in 1778 as an informal military engineering school under the direction of French or French-trained officers, in conjunction with a Corps of Invalids (soldiers unfit for field service) responsible for training duties. Like so many of the other measures first proposed by Washington, and later championed by Hamilton, Congress proved unenthusiastic about military education even during the high tide of Federalist power. It did, however, authorize in effect a school for artillerists and engineers in 1794 at West Point as tensions with E...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Colonials, Continentals, and Federals
• Chapter Two: Tactical Expertise and the U.S. Army before the War with Mexico
• Chapter Three: The Old Army’s Vindication
• Chapter Four: Tactical Continuity in the Decade before the Civil War
• Chapter Five: The Beginning of the End
• Chapter Six: War in Earnest
• Chapter Seven: The Peninsula
• Chapter Eight: Morale, Cohesion, and Competence from Second Bull Run to Missionary Ridge
• Chapter Nine: Decisions East and West
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index