A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought
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A Scientific Way of War: Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803277168 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2015 |
| Series: | Studies in War, Society, and the Military |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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A Scientific Way of War
Antebellum Military Science, West Point, and the Origins of American Military Thought
By Ian C. Hope
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Ian C. HopeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7716-8
CHAPTER 1
Colonial and Early National Military Science
When fighting began in earnest during the American Revolution, military and political leaders realized that the methods of la petite guerre were not sufficient to beat the might of England, and they sought to acquire European engineering, administration, and artillery expertise to instruct the Continental Army. However, attempts to institutionalize military science ceased with the end of hostilities. Lack of clear threat and changing political and economic circumstances, together with Whig traditions and an accepted narrative of the militia's effectiveness, beclouded the need for professional military forces or education. Appreciation for military science stagnated. Change came with the renewed threats of war after 1790, when a system of coastal fortifications was attempted. It was not until the establishment of the military academy in 1802, however, that military science began to influence thinking in the small regular army and the states' militias alike.
Colonial Military Science
Minutemen at Lexington-Concord in April 1775 needed no military science. However, militiamen around Boston Harbor just weeks later began to suffer from a lack of artillery and engineering expertise and from want of a system of supply and administration. Upon assumption of command of the army at Cambridge in July, Gen. George Washington advised the Continental Congress to correct these deficiencies.1 American leaders at this time were facing problems inherent to their colonial heritage.
The plantations at Jamestown and Plymouth had been established before the emergence of l'esprit géométrique and before Vauban and les Lumières attempted to perfect state-run warfare. For their first eighty years of existence, these colonies and those that followed had maintained limited military establishments. While seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europeans lived under constant threat of invasion from large standing armies never more than a few marches away, European threats to the English colonists remained occasional and distant. Moreover, while threat of invasion in Europe produced sophisticated militarized frontiers and spurred advancements in military science, the lack of such a threat in North America gave no equivalent impetus for military education in the colonies.
However, the first plantations were sufficiently militarized to produce a legacy. All male colonists brought armor and weapons over the ocean, which they then carried constantly and hung on the walls of their makeshift homes as they slept. Military practices were part of everyday life. Edward Winslow described the exercise of arms in front of Native guests during the first Thanksgiving Day in 1620. At all times the colonists relied on armed guards, wooden fortifications, and defensive musters when threats emerged. This is not to suggest that the colonial plantations were military exercises. The carriage of arms and the performance of drill during village muster were defensive measures to counter the threat of raids by European foes and Indians. But to expand their territories colonists preferred the planted seed to "Swords, Rapiers, and ... other piercing weapons." In the Christian idea of their day, appropriations of new farming and grazing land and subjugation of the Indians, even by the use of armed force, were natural and correct and did not warrant the name war. That was reserved for monarchs, the sovereign being "the real author of war" and colonial subjects being "only instruments in his hands." Without sovereignty of their own, "war" was not the English colonists' to make. Forced subjugation of the Indian was viewed as a constabulary measure to suppress rebellion and not a martial endeavor. Besides, the Indian possessed no artillery, and elementary military knowledge sufficed to deal with this threat. It was not until the late seventeenth century, when imperial wars became incessant, that colonists felt the need for even a small measure of European military science.
For much of this period there was no English army presence in North America and no corresponding need for military schools. Education for the colonial militia remained limited; they trained under veterans of wars in the "Low Countries," the English Civil War, or the suppression of rebellion in Ireland. They used Richard Elton's The Compleat Body of the Art Military (1650) and William Barriffe's Military Discipline; or, The Young Artilleryman (1635), drill manuals that also formed the basis for numerous laws written to govern the training of colonial militias until 1750.5 Militia officers also acquired knowledge from personal libraries and in the eighteenth century from service with British regulars periodically deployed to the colonies. However, most military books came from England, where they favored revised Greek and Roman texts. English-language works that incorporated elements of modern military science only became available to colonial militia officers in the mid-eighteenth century and included Benjamin Robins's New Principles of Gunnery (1742), Humphrey Bland's A Treatise of Military Discipline (1743), John Muller's A Treatise Containing the Elementary Part of Fortification (1766), and Roger Stevenson's Military Instructions for Officers Detached in the Field: Containing, a Scheme for Forming a Corps of a Partisan (1775). However, because there were no schools requiring the reading of such literature, these works were used only for personal study or in scientific societies. The evolution of military thought and education in colonial America therefore differed substantially from that in continental Europe, and the colonists' military knowledge remained rudimentary until the Revolution.
The informal nature of military instruction did not mean that colonists were totally ignorant of emerging aspects of military science. Fortifications were a part of colonial life, and militias understood how to mount and employ single cannon. But it took a series of imperial wars to introduce more advanced elements of military science. European powers contested colonial frontiers during King William's War (1689–97), Queen Anne's War (1702–13), King George's War (1744–48), and the French and Indian War (1754–63). These involved raids and expeditions and the construction and sieges of scattered forts, conducted in the deliberate manner of period European warfare but on a much smaller and more dispersed scale. In each, French and British engineers introduced European military techniques and permanently altered the colonial landscape by building durable stone fortifications and military roads and bridges. However, it was regular French and British engineers and artillerymen, trained at Mezieres and the Royal Artillery Depot at Woolwich, who provided this skill. No indigenous colonial expertise emerged during this period, and at the commencement of the Revolution there was only one commissioned American engineer officer and no school teaching military architecture or artillery techniques.
Americans were also reluctant to accept military education because of its association with the maintenance of standing armies, defined as units of soldiers permanently established and maintained as part of society. The idea of a substantial standing army was problematic to the colonial psyche, which perpetuated Radical Whig sentiments that vigorously opposed permanent military establishments, preferring instead the Elizabethan system of universal military service. None of the early colonies maintained permanent bodies of troops. The wooden defenses of the first settlements were instead manned by a "watch" consisting of a number of male citizens who stood guard at village entrances and atop the fortified blockhouse that became a feature in most new plantations. The watch came from the "trainband" of the settlement, consisting of every able-bodied male, regardless of color or religious affiliation. The trainbands were the original militia, formed into companies within each town, officered by elected men. Their mandate was purely protective, to watch and to defend the commons in the event of an attack. They were a direct transplantation of the Tudor militia tradition. Their duties were mostly sedentary, but they sometimes performed constabulary tasks outside of the plantation. Military knowledge in the trainbands never rose above the elementary practice of company musket, pike, and sword drill and the use of a cannon.
Most colonies wrote this ideal of universal military service into early colonial charters. However, along the populated east coast, once the immediate threat of Indian war diminished in the mid-eighteenth century, militia training atrophied into token practice, continuing as a social venue more than a military function. To a degree, volunteer companies and regiments compensated for this neglect.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, affluent colonists who wished to secure commissions without election began to raise and equip volunteer companies, providing an offensive capability for ventures beyond the county limits. Together with trainbands these two parts of the military establishment precluded need for a standing army. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the companies in some colonies combined in emergencies to form provincial regiments, composed of sufficient manpower and equipage to mount long expeditions. These forces provided auxiliary military capability to the British regulars periodically garrisoned in the colonies during conflicts against France and Spain. The volunteer provincial regiments of the French and Indian War became indispensable and were prototypes for Washington's Continentals during the Revolution.
Volunteer companies also served as associations for transmission of knowledge, including subjects of military science such as casting cannon, storing gunpowder, building local fortifications, and mounting artillery pieces. Perhaps more important, volunteer companies served to pass on knowledge of la petite guerre. Historian John Grenier suggests that this colonial practice became the first "American way of war," distinct in its preference for attacking Indian noncombatants and its tendency toward extremes of violence. Grenier traces the evolution of this way of war from 1622 to 1815, highlighting its predilection for punitive patrolling tactics used to destroy enemy crops, food stores, and villages and for scalping and extirpative warfare. Generation after generation of colonists learned such techniques, forming a paradigm of warfare that, according to Grenier, helped construct an American identity characterized by admiration of the American frontiersman as a killer.
While somewhat problematic in its insistence that small unit "ranging" tactics constituted the entirety of early American military thought, Grenier's interpretation is nonetheless valuable, as it allows us to see that adoption of European military science for la grand guerre was not inevitable and that alternatives were always readily at hand. During the Revolution Washington was acutely conscious of this. He found Gen. Charles Lee quick to argue for "partisan" warfare, an alternative to the conventional approach that Washington preferred. Successful irregular operations in the Mohawk and Ohio valleys and in the Carolinas reinforced the argument. Indeed, widespread use of Patriot militias to neutralize Tory elements and to limit the freedom of movement of British regulars and Loyalist militia was creating faith in the militia's ability in la petite guerre, laying the foundation of a narrative of the innate military power of militiamen fighting as partisans or ranging against Indians. Postrevolutionary campaigns by Generals Anthony Wayne and Andrew Jackson would add to the narrative and provide a clear alternative to the European military science that Washington was desperate for during and after the Revolution.
Facing the prospects of a long siege at Boston in 1775, Washington felt an acute need to break away from the militia mind-set and to secure proper quartering, cannon, and skill in siege entrenchments. In July Congress responded in part by approving foundries and depots for most colonies, allowing the casting of cannon and the stockpiling of supplies. They also approved the establishment of an artillery cantonment at Pluckemin, New Jersey, where Chief of Artillery Henry Knox could teach and experiment. However, the need for engineers was harder to address, made even more so when colonies, desperate to fortify areas open to British invasion, solicited any officers who possessed knowledge of civil engineering to take off the uniform and come under their employ.
In December Congress resolved to secure the services of trained engineers from abroad and in April 1776 sent an agent to France for this purpose. France was an obvious choice: not only was it a traditional enemy of England but it was also the center of scientific education, with the École du Corps Royale du Genie producing Europe's best military engineers. American agent Silas Deane recruited several Frenchmen who arrived in Philadelphia in spring 1777, the first of a steady trickle of individually sponsored European engineers who came to America over the next three years, the most famous being Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette. At the same time, Benjamin Franklin — in Paris to promote a treaty of alliance with France — gained King Louis's approval for the dispatch of four Royal French Army engineers to support the American war effort. Led by Louis Lebègue Duportail, these officers presented themselves to Congress in July 1777 and began their work later that month.
At any given time, the Continental army employed a dozen foreign engineers, while Richard Gridley and Rufus Putnam served as the only American engineers. Washington also received congressional permission to employ Robert Erskine as the army's first geographer, and Erskine sought out assistants with "Mathematical genius ... acquainted with the principles of Geometry" to survey roads and to prepare maps. Congress also approved the employment of Prussian Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben as inspector general of the Continental Army. Von Steuben, seeing the want of military science, enforced common standards in basic tactical evolutions and weapons drill, and instituted a system of military administration and field discipline, including orders of battle and rules for marches and encampments. His 1779 Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States, known as the Blue Book, served the Continental Army and the U.S. Army for over forty years.
Washington was not so quick to gain congressional support to create an American corps of engineers. He wanted three companies of sappers and miners able to organize and employ fatigue parties in the preparation of fortifications. Although he made his proposal in 1776, it only received political support in 1778, with the unit forming in 1780. The establishment of this organization marked recognition by military and political leaders of the need for indigenous capability in field fortifications and siege craft, to compensate for "deficiency in the practice of manoeuvres" by the Continental Army.
Training and educating the new engineer corps was a special undertaking. Although instructors in mathematics were attached to each company, it was fieldwork itself under experienced French officers that allowed the rank and file to learn their trade. There was much opportunity for this. Field and permanent fortifications and sieges became commonplace in the American Revolution. Fighting at Boston, Quebec, Fort Washington, New York, Ticonderoga, Bennington, Freeman Farm, and Saratoga involved fortifications, and the bases of operations at Valley Forge on the Delaware River and throughout the Highlands on the Hudson River were heavily fortified. In the South, sieges at Savannah and Charleston preceded the decisive siege at Yorktown in 1781, all conducted using standard Vauban methods involving siege parallels and the use of grand batteries.
Military science also emerged in army ordnance and logistics. The Continental Army acquired depots at West Point, New York, and at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Continental Congress also authorized the establishment of a Quartermaster Department, a Commissariat, a Clothing Department, an Ordnance Department, and a Hospital Department. However, there existed no militia staff system to coordinate logistics, ordnance, and other duties, and knowledge was confined to those few militia officers who had read books or had experience in service with British regulars. Humphrey Bland's A Treatise of Military Discipline was helpful, but Quartermaster Generals Thomas Pickering and Nathanael Green and Chief of Artillery Henry Knox also learned their craft from French texts by Marshal de Saxe and Turpin de Crisse. This limited military knowledge was combined with diverse experiences in mercantile capitalism to provide a basic degree of expertise in procuring and distributing supplies through contracted storekeepers, conductors, artificers, and laborers. However, the staff departments were organized and worked according to the talents of the men who led them, and problems of decentralization and lack of standardization plagued the ordnance, supply, and transportation efforts of the army until war's end. Another major problem was lack of continuity. The Quartermaster General's office, for instance, changed hands four times in its first three years, with each incumbent growing weary at the effort required to procure and supply the army and of the complete lack of glory associated with his duties. Congress had shut down most staff departments by July 1785.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Scientific Way of War by Ian C. Hope. Copyright © 2015 Ian C. Hope. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. Colonial and Early National Military Science,
2. Army Reforms, 1815–1820,
3. West Point's Scientific Curriculum,
4. Internal Improvements,
5. Jacksonian Military Science,
6. Military Science during and after the Mexican War,
7. Antebellum Military Science,
8. Military Science in the Civil War,
Conclusion,
Appendix of Tables,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,