By the end of 1866 the Regular Army authorized by the act of July 28 had been largely created and had been posted to the South and West to relieve the Volunteers. In a sense this new Regular Army became two armies, one serving the Congress in the Reconstruction South, the other serving the Executive in the frontier West. Although personnel and units moved easily between the two armies, only in Texas, where frontier and South merged, did they overlap. But for a decade the fortunes of each of these armies importantly influenced the fate of the other.
The act of 1866 laid the foundation for the postwar Regular Army. The forces assembled under this law fought the plains wars of 1866–69, fanned out to guard the Texas frontier, contended ineffectually with Apaches in the Southwest, and defeated the Paiutes of Oregon and Idaho. Then, in 1869, the accession of Ulysses S. Grant to the Presidency and still another army act gave the Regular Army a new leadership and a new and leaner shape.
For General Sherman, the election of Grant to the Presidency meant “the dreaded banishment to Washington.”15 Dutifully but unhappily he moved from St. Louis to his new residence and affixed to his uniform the four-starred shoulder straps shed by his friend. Sherman hated Washington politics and bureaucracy. Tactless, uncompromising, impatient, he never became accommodated to the terms of official life in the capital. His failure to adjust cost the army badly needed political support during a period of declining fortunes and made his term of office, 1869–83, a constant personal frustration. At the same time, as Russell Weigley has noted, Sherman was “one of the most cerebral and innovative” commanding generals in the army’s history.16 Through his dedication to professionalism, his fierce rejection of political entanglements, his forceful personality, and his hold on the affections of rank and file alike, he stamped the army with his character and made it peculiarly his own. Even beyond his own time, through Philip H. Sheridan (1883–88) and John Schofield (1888–95), in spirit and tone the U.S. Army remained distinctively “Sherman’s Army.”17
Sherman’s arrival in Washington coincided with the first of a succession of cutbacks that severely weakened the army line. The reductions came as part of a broader attack in Congress on the army that persisted for a decade and that was motivated by economy, political partisanship, and hostility to such domestic uses of the Regulars as policing elections and quelling labor riots (see Chapter Four).
The army appropriation act of March 3, 1869, cut the number of infantry regiments from forty-five to twenty-five and limited the line brigadiers to eight instead of ten. The act reduced the army from the 54,000 maintained under the act of 1866 to 37,313.18 Again the following year, in July 1870, the army appropriation act emerged from Congress laden with provisions of sweeping scope. Included were abolition of the grades of general and lieutenant general when they were vacated by Sherman and Sheridan, a reduction of major generals to three and brigadiers to six, and a limit on enlisted men of 30,000.19 Finally, beginning in 1874, the annual army appropriation acts carried a proviso that prohibited expenditure of funds to recruit the army beyond 25,000 enlisted men—an army that with officers numbered just over 27,000.20
In five years Congress had cut the army by half. The enlisted complement was reduced mainly by stopping enlistments until attrition produced the result enjoined by law. But attrition could not relieve the army of nearly 900 officers made surplus by the series of laws. Although some officers resigned of their own volition, retiring boards and “Benzine Boards,” the latter to identify substandard officers, eliminated most of the surplus. For many thus separated with a year’s pay, the cuts worked great hardship and sometimes injustice. But the Benzine Boards also rid the officer corps of many who were unfit to wear shoulder straps.21
The series of reductions imposed severe handicaps on the army line. Engineers, ordnance, commissary, medical, quartermaster, the Fort Leavenworth Prison guard, the West Point detachment, and recruiting details absorbed three to four thousand men. Ten cavalry regiments, five artillery regiments, and twenty-five infantry regiments shared the balance. But because of the lag of casualties—discharge, death, desertion—behind replacement, actual strength always fell at least ten percent below authorized strength. Rarely, under the ceiling of 25,000, did the regimental rolls bear the names of more than 19,000 soldiers.22
The true measure of the cuts manifested itself at the company level. With 430 companies to man some 200 posts, the company and troop, rather than the regiment, was the basic tactical unit. Except for the reorganization of 1869, the reductions affected the number of men, not the number of units. Accordingly, with each reduction, the company shrank in numbers and efficiency. In the typical year of 1881, actual enlisted strength of the 120 cavalry troops averaged 58 (46 privates); of the 60 artillery companies and batteries, 40 (28 privates); and of the 250 infantry companies, 41 (29 privates). But the sick, imprisoned, detached, and detailed to daily and extra duty made further inroads. Fortunate was the company commander who could actually muster three-fourths of the men carried on his rolls.23
Such “companies are almost ridiculous,” commented General Sherman, “compelling commanding officers to group two and even four companies together to perform the work of one.”24 An officer of the black Twenty-fourth Infantry, a perenially understrength regiment, testified in 1876 that the largest company in the regiment mustered seven soldiers fit for duty. “It is rather stupid work for an officer to go out and drill four men,” he said, but he had done it often. Moreover, “I have seen a captain go on parade with only his sergeant, the captain forming the front line and the sergeant the rear.”25 Colonel John Gibbon fought the Battle of the Big Hole in 1877 with six companies of the Seventh Infantry numbering 15 officers and 146 enlisted men, or about 24 men per company, and sustained a costly reverse.26
The infantry suffered acutely. Infantry regiments were allowed but ten companies each, as compared with twelve for cavalry and artillery. In addition, authorized company strength was lower. To compound the inequity, in 1876, because of the Custer disaster and particularly troubled conditions on the Rio Grande frontier, Congress authorized an additional 2,500 enlisted men to bring cavalry troops to 100. The expansion was temporary, until the emergency subsided, but the return to 25,000 was not to be effected at the expense of the cavalry. As a result, a ceiling of 37 soldiers per company was imposed on the infantry, which usually meant less than 25 men for duty.27
Officers, too, despite the political rhetoric about a superabundance, were scarce in the field. Detached service and sick and ordinary leave kept the companies constantly under-officered. “I am captain of Company D,” testified an officer of the Third Cavalry in 1876; “I am absent on sick-leave; my first lieutenant is absent on recruiting service; my second lieutenant is an aide-de-camp to General Crook, and there is not an officer on duty with the company.”28 The following year Col. Wesley Merritt counted only one of his twelve first lieutenants on duty with the Fifth Cavalry.29 The Seventh Cavalry went into the Battle of the Little Bighorn with fifteen of its forty-three officers absent, including the colonel, two majors, and four captains.30
The Army had indeed become a skeleton. And the skeleton, as General Schofield pointed out, was “very expensive in proportion to its effective strength.” When trouble occurred, companies on the scene were too weak to handle it and had to be speedily reinforced from elsewhere.31 Personnel costs dropped, but transportation costs soared. Aside from expense, the system heightened the danger to troops on the scene while awaiting reinforcements, and weakened defenses in areas from which the reinforcements were drawn. “The unavoidable result,” concluded Col. Philippe Regis De Trobriand, “is that finally an excessive reduction of the Army becomes more expensive than would be its maintenance to a normal strength, and that it costs the people more to stop evils and repair damages than it would cost to prevent them.”32
Military leaders countered the congressional injunction in several ways. First, they sought to throw off the arbitrary ceiling altogether and return to the expansible princip
le embedded in the army act of 1866. Under this principle, the army would routinely exist at whatever level Congress desired, but the President would be empowered to increase companies serving on the frontier to 100 men when in his judgment conditions warranted.33 Other efforts centered on removing the annual proviso that kept the maximum level at 25,000 men instead of 30,00034 and on having the limit apply only to the line, with the noncombatant force provided for separately.35 Finally, since Congress remained adamant on the size of the army, most officers were prepared to accept fewer regiments in exchange for larger companies.36 The reduction bills reported by the House military committee provided for fewer regiments, but the legislative maneuverings by which these measures became attached to appropriations bills eliminated this feature.37
The Regular Army officer corps created by the army act of 1866 was a mixture of West Point graduates and veterans of Civil War volunteer service. After the vacancies reserved for former Volunteers by the 1866 act had been filled, however, reduction of the army, combined with the necessity to absorb the annual crop of academy graduates, limited appointments from civil life and gradually raised the ratio of West Pointers to civil appointees. The rising percentage of West Pointers did not imply a rising West Point dominance of the officer corps. Civil appointees under the 1866 act claimed at least two years of wartime service, often in high grades, and as a class they performed fully as well on the frontier as the West Pointers. By the turn of the century, in fact, the army’s top leadership was heavy with generals who owed their regular army commissions to Civil War volunteer service, among them Nelson A. Miles, William R. Shafter, Adna R. Chaffee, and Henry W. Lawton.
Army policy formulated in 1867 called for one-fourth of the vacancies in the grade of second lieutenant to be filled from the enlisted ranks.38 An act of 1878 established machinery to open commissions to more enlisted men. This produced only twenty promotions in two years and by 1890 was pronounced a failure because it left the initial judgment to the company commander rather than providing an examination system.39
Even so, officers elevated from the ranks were fairly common. Most, veterans of Indian service in the 1850s, had won their commissions in the Civil War. Many claimed foreign origins, especially Irish and German. In 1874, for example, the Army Register carried 193 officers commissioned from the ranks, or about thirteen percent of the line leadership. Eighty-seven of these were of foreign birth. They were a tough, experienced, hard-drinking lot. Few rose above captain, and few survived into the 1880s, but while they lasted they imparted a distinctive tone to the frontier companies.
Typifying this class of officer was Capt. Thomas Byrne of the Twelfth Infantry. “Tommy Byrne was a fine old soldier, one who loved his profession and felt a great pride in his position,” recalled an officer who knew him. “His one failing was an over-indulgence in alcohol which he strictly contended he took only as ‘medicine,’ for the ‘neuralgy.’”
Pay and promotion obsessed the officer corps and profoundly affected its attitudes and state of mind. Postwar pay scales fixed in 1870 granted company and field grade officers annual salaries ranging from $3,500 for a colonel to $1,400 for an infantry second lieutenant,40 sums considerably less than those earned by men in comparable civilian positions.41 Furthermore, expenses incurred in frequent changes of station, the high cost of goods on the frontier, and losses (fluctuating between twelve and forty percent) in converting currency into coin, the circulating medium on the frontier, made the pay even more inadequate.42 Yet almost yearly a movement gathered in Congress to effect further reductions. The most serious occurred in 1876. Championing this effort, which would have cut infantry second lieutenants to $1,300, Rep. H. B. Banning gratuitously explained that “small salaries are best for young officers who know little of the real value of money. It teaches them to avoid extravagance and practice economy.”43 Worse than the low pay, testified Gen. Christopher C. Augur, “more wearing and trying—is the annual apprehension, inevitable as fate, which comes upon all, that the meager provisions they have barely been able to make for the comfort of their families and the education of their children may all be broken up by a reduction of their pay.”44
Even more than pay, the promotion system badly damaged the officer corps. Through captain, promotion occurred according to seniority in the regiment, through colonel in the arm (i.e., cavalry, infantry, artillery), and through major general by presidential appointment. The shrinking army and the rigidity of the seniority rule stagnated promotion for three decades. An analysis in 1877 showed that a new second lieutenant could look forward to reaching the grade of major in twenty-four to twenty-six years and colonel in thirty-three to thirty-seven years.45 Moreover, regimental promotion of company officers capriciously favored some and penalized others. In some regiments fortune shone on lieutenants by removing their elders, while in others the oldsters hung on year after year. John W. Summerhayes, whose wife wrote one of the classic accounts of military life on the frontier, fought through four years of the Civil War only to endure twenty-two years as a lieutenant before President Grover Cleveland, seeking to unlock promotion in the Eighth Infantry, appointed him a quartermaster captain.46 Among first lieutenants of artillery, reported General Schofield in 1887, the term of service as second lieutenant varied from nine months to eleven years. Of two officers commissioned the same year, one led the other in seniority by ten years.47
One result of sluggish promotion was an aging officer corps. Officers advanced in age much faster than in rank. In 1866, regular army grades from lieutenant to general were filled with comparatively youthful veterans of the war. By 1886 they were twenty years older but not much higher in rank. Despite laws in 1870 and 1882 liberalizing retirement,48 the officer corps grew overage in grade. In another decade, predicted the Army and Navy Journal in 1877, “there will not be one-fourth part of the present field officers in the Army physically capable of supporting the hardships of an active campaign. They will be wornout old men.”49 By 1890 Gen. O. O. Howard could declare that “almost all the captains of infantry and artillery are too old for duty involving marching on foot or even drill requiring continuous quick movements.”50
“Nothing else does so much to dampen military ardor as the sense of hopeless justice in respect to promotion,” declared General Schofield in 1887.51 For years he and other thoughtful officers had advocated reform. Promotions should be by seniority in arm, they contended. Officers should be assigned to rather than commissioned in particular regiments—e.g., Anson Mills would be major, cavalry, rather than major, Ninth Cavalry. And at least in the lower grades, examinations for physical and professional fitness should precede promotion.52 At last, in 1890, Congress enacted these reforms by decreeing promotion by arm and examinations for promotions through major.53
Frustrated in substantive advancement, officers exalted the honorary commissions they had won for Civil War services. But the liberal bestowal of brevet promotions at the close of the war, especially for meritorious staff duty far from the battlefields, cheapened the distinction. More than a thousand officers in 1869 boasted one or more brevets, and 138 of them claimed the brevet of major general.54 Officers wore the uniform of their brevet grade, and in certain circumstances their brevet rank prevailed, even over an officer of superior regular rank. Confusion, uncertainty, and embarrassment resulted.55 In 1869 and 1870 Congress moved to deflate the system by requiring officers to wear the uniform and insignia of their regular rather than brevet rank and to be addressed in orders and communications by their regular rank. All circumstances in which brevet took precedence over regular rank were eliminated except that of special presidential assignment, and even in this circumstance pay was to be according to regular rank. Another act specified that in the future brevets could be awarded only for distinguished conduct in the presence of the enemy.56 Despite the law, military courtesy continued to demand the use of brevet distinctions in social and official intercourse and even in official documents.57
Although many high officers be
lieved that the brevet system should be abolished altogether,58 it was virtually the only means of recognizing battlefield heroism. Efforts to extend the brevet system to Indian warfare, however, encountered the opposition of Sen. John A. Logan, powerful chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. President Grant sent nominations to the Senate for confirmation, but Logan refused to report them from his committee. “I have opposed all the time brevetting men for making assaults on the Indians,” he explained in 1876, “on the ground that the law recognizes brevets only in time of war for gallant conduct in the face of the enemy.” Congress had not declared war on the Indians. “If the Senate will not recognize glory in Indian warfare,” he asserted, “there will not be any glory in Indian warfare.”59 Finally, in 1890, Congress invited brevet nominations for Indian engagements since 1867, and the War Department, after careful study of the records, submitted 144 names for recognition.60
As officers aged without advancement, their initiative, energy, and impulse for self-improvement diminished. Their concerns narrowed. They fragmented into hostile factions—staff and line, infantry and cavalry, young and old, West Point and Volunteer, Civil War veteran and peacetime newcomer. They bickered incessantly over petty issues of precedence, real or imagined insults, and old wartime controversies. They preferred charges on the slightest provocation and consequently had to spend a preposterous share of their time on court-martial duty.61 They exploited every possible political connection in the quest for preferment. It is true that the origins of military professionalism are found in this period. But it is also true that the parade ground of a two or three company post in the West defined the intellectual and professional horizons of most line officers in the postwar decades.
Frontier Regulars Page 3
