Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  Grant had seemingly resolved the issue the day after taking office as President. The order of March 5, 1869, naming Sherman to the top command also specified that the chiefs of the staff bureaus would report to and serve under the commanding general and that all orders of the President and Secretary of War to the army, line and staff alike, would be transmitted through the commanding general. But Grant’s Secretary, his wartime comrade and chief of staff, John A. Rawlins, insisted that the order be rescinded. He was sick and soon to die. Grant yielded. On March 26 another order restored the direct relationship of the staff chiefs with the Secretary. Stunned and badly hurt, Sherman accepted the defeat, but he never forgave Grant.92

  Rawlins allowed Sherman in practice what was withheld in theory. But Rawlins lived to hold the office only six months. His successor, William W. Belknap, proved less charitable. Belknap and the staff denied Sherman even the vaguely defined “discipline and military control” of the army. They consulted him occasionally, but for the most part left him to learn from the newspapers of developments in the War Department. Belknap made personnel assignments and ordered troop movements through Adj. Gen. Edward D. Townsend or simply left Townsend to attend to such matters in the Secretary’s name. So frustrated and humiliated did Sherman become that in 1874, following the example of Winfield Scott two decades earlier, he abdicated all pretense at command and moved his headquarters to St. Louis.93

  In the spring of 1876, a scandal broke over Belknap. Ironically, it sprang from one of the issues over which he and Sherman had clashed—the power to appoint post traders (or sutlers). Belknap gained this power by statute in 1870. He or his wife, or both, used it improperly for profit. Their exposure in 1876 prompted Belknap’s hasty resignation and protracted impeachment proceedings in Congress.94 The new Secretary, Alfonso Taft, lured Sherman back to Washington by promising that all orders to the army would go through him, and by placing him over the Adjutant General and Inspector General, the staff chiefs most intimately concerned with “discipline and military control.” The others, more fiscal, administrative, and civil in character, continued to report to the Secretary.95 This arrangement still denied Sherman control of the supply, ordnance, and medical services so vital to line operations, but, together with a series of considerate Secretaries, it made his last years of active service personally tolerable and officially productive.

  The relationship between the commanding general and the Secretary of War was but part of the larger and more fundamental problem of the relationship between staff and line. As Col. John Gibbon stated it, the staff was “completely separated in sympathy from the Army proper, and with the single exception of the Medical Corps, almost completely so in fact.”96 For four decades after the Civil War, the resulting hostility between staff and line deeply troubled the army.

  Life tenure and the near autonomy of their bureaus gave staff officers in Washington great power. Few Secretaries of War possessed the background or interest or stayed long enough in office to gain more than nominal control of these potentates. Moreover, long residence in Washington and the favors at their command encouraged staff chiefs to cultivate key members of Congress and thus to influence legislation favorable to the staff while diverting the impact of congressional economy moves from staff to line. “The result,” noted a disgruntled field officer, “is that nearly every chief of bureau in the War Department has a little army of his own, apparently independent of all superior authority except Congress.”97

  The independence reached even into the divisions and departments, where staff officers theoretically served the generals to whom they were assigned. But these officers usually owed their appointments to Washington, and they looked as much for guidance and support to their bureau heads as to the general on whose staff they served.98 Backed by their chiefs in Washington and a mammoth complexity of regulations, the division and department staffs crippled the ability of operational commanders to control their own logistics. The staff decided what was needed where, and how and when to get it there. If the responsible commander had different ideas, he might persuade, but not compel, the staff to modify the decision.99

  Stationed almost entirely in the cities, staff officers enjoyed privileges and comforts unknown to officers at remote border posts. Compared with the line, moreover, the staff seemed swollen with personnel and high rank. It claimed almost half the army’s colonels and lieutenant colonels and more than half its brigadier generals and majors. For the line, a bitter truth lurked in a capital correspondent’s quip that “there are generals enough to officer the Turkish Army playing billiard every afternoon at Geary’s opposite Military headquarters…. Like good soldiers, they are found where the balls fly thickest.”100

  If for all these reasons the line resented the staff, so, for the same reasons, the line envied the staff. Line officers competed so strenuously for appointments to the staff that they demeaned their arms and widened the gulf between line and staff all the more. Maj. William R. Price lamented the tendency of the line officer “to look to the staff as the highest object of his ambition, … the only outlet whereby he can ever come in contact with his countrymen, relatives, and friends.”101 This greatly disturbed Sherman, who declared in 1876: “It is now too much the fashion for officers of the line themselves to belittle their military calling, and to exalt ‘into staff duty’ the commonest duties outside their regiment and company, such as Centennial, fancy boards, wig-wag, etc., and to seek details through their sisters, mothers, friends, and members of Congress; a cause that has and will continue to degrade us as a profession, and finally result in ruin unless checked.”102

  Successive congressional committees investigated the staff system to exhaustion.103 Line officers repeatedly advanced standard remedies: subordinate the staff bureaus to the commanding general; reduce them and deprive them of their top-heavy superstructure; consolidate similar bureaus, such as Adjutant General with Inspector General and Quartermaster with Commissary and Pay; abolish permanent appointments and interchange officers between staff and line, thus promoting understanding and harmony. The staff met these proposals with vague legalisms about the prerogatives and responsibilities of the President, the Secretary of War, and the Congress, and with ridicule of the notion of tinkering with machinery that had performed so splendidly in the greatest war of all time. Indeed, so politically well connected were the bureaus that public defense was rarely necessary. Legislation to curb them usually failed in Congress. As Sherman noted, they “will not be brought into the Army for discipline if human cunning and lobbying can prevent it.”104

  None of the line generals brought greater clarity and objectivity of analysis to the question than John M. Schofield. He did not think the staff ought to be reduced, he testified in 1878. Staff needs depended less on the size of the army than on the extent of territory it occupied. An army that manned some two hundred posts scattered across the continent needed the same staff whether fifteen or fifty thousand strong. Nor was organization the true issue; organization of the bureaus was good enough. “Any possible question of their consolidation or reorganization anyway is utterly insignificant as compared with that of their union with the line as part of one whole under one head.”105 “Here is the whole question in a nut shell,” he wrote Sherman. “Shall due subordination be enforced throughout the Army? or, shall every chief of staff in Washington have a separate command, and that extending even within the limits of Division and Departments?”106 As early as the 1870s General Schofield advocated the solution ultimately adopted after the Spanish-American War dramatized the urgency of reform: a general staff united under a chief of staff and wedded to the line by a system of rotation. And this organization, Schofield came to recognize, left no place for a commanding general.107

  Theoretically, the commanding general commanded the division and department commanders, and through them the army line. Actually, beneath the line generals so many communications channels, formal and informal, ran to the ten staff chiefs in Washington that, as Sherman oft
en complained, he commanded nothing more than his personal staff of six colonels. Nevertheless, he enjoyed a close and influential relationship with the line generals. He supported, counseled, and encouraged them and, most importantly in his view, defended their prerogatives against the aggressions of the staff.108 In the management of field operations, however, he played little part. This responsibility fell mainly on the department commanders, sometimes closely directed by the division commander, but more often with only nominal oversight from above.

  This handful of officers—the lieutenant general, three major generals, and six brigadiers—formed an exclusive club whose composition underwent few changes throughout Sherman’s regime. They owed their rank to wartime services rather than seniority and were comparatively young when Sherman went to Washington. They served long enough to become highly experienced, if not always inspired, department or division commanders. When they transferred, they simply exchanged places with a colleague doing similar service.

  Philip H. Sheridan inherited Sherman’s three stars and succeeded to the command of the Military Division of the Missouri. His fourteen-year tenure spanned the period of the most intense Indian conflicts on the Great Plains. From his Chicago headquarters Sheridan monitored and gave direction to operations from Dakota and Montana to Texas and New Mexico. Veteran brigadiers headed his four departments. Verbose and contentious John Pope commanded the Department of the Missouri for thirteen years. The wealthy bachelor, Alfred H. Terry, whose cultural and professional attainments earned him wide respect, presided over the Department of Dakota from 1866 to 1868 and 1873 to 1886. Quietly competent Christopher C. Augur managed the Department of the Platte for four years and Texas for three. Honest, impulsive Edward O. C. Ord—“a rough diamond,” said Sherman, “always at work on the most distant frontier”109—followed Augur at both headquarters. George Crook commanded the Platte for seven years, from 1875 to 1882.

  Sheridan proved less able than Sherman to hold the loyalty and affection of subordinates. His relations with some department commanders—notably Pope, Crook, and Ord—fluctuated between frigidity and hostility. His preferential treatment of favored young colonels such as Custer, Mackenzie, and Miles angered many. Those who had incurred his displeasure, such as Colonels Grierson and Hazen, suffered petty indignities and prolonged discrimination. Shortly after Sheridan’s death, Crook pronounced a stinging judgment that, while reflecting no credit on its author, reveals the extreme antipathy Sheridan could arouse in associates: “The adulations heaped on him by a grateful nation for his supposed genius turned his head, which, added to his natural disposition, caused him to bloat his little carcass with debauchery and dissipation, which carried him off prematurely.”110

  The Military Division of the Pacific fell to one of the three major generals, George H. Thomas, Halleck’s successor, commanded it for only a year, 1869–70, before a fatal heart attack passed it to scholarly John M. Schofield. Portly, bald yet magnificently whiskered, Schofield occupied the division’s San Francisco headquarters from 1870 to 1876 and again in 1882–83. Irvin McDowell held the post from 1876 to 1882. Stiff, formal, tactless, and often querulous in official intercourse, McDowell was still well known for sumptuous hospitality, financed from a personal fortune, and for wide-ranging cultural interests.111

  Neither Schofield nor McDowell managed his department commanders as closely as Sheridan. Since the division commander also commanded the Department of California, there were but two. Oliver O. Howard, the one-armed “praying general,” commanded the Department of the Columbia from 1874 to 1881. He replaced Edward R. S. Canby, slain by Modocs in the Lava Beds in 1873 (see Chapter Twelve). George Crook gained fame for his Apache campaigns while head of the Department of Arizona, 1871 to 1875 and 1882 to 1886.

  The department commander—situated high enough to gain perspective without losing a focus on local conditions—was the key link in the frontier army’s chain of command. He kept in touch with post commanders, set standards and guidelines, and usually provided positive leadership. Some department commanders, such as Crook, Terry, and Howard, exercised personal command of major expeditions. Others, such as Augur, Pope, and Ord, worked through subordinates.

  The large measure of autonomy permitted department commanders was a source of strength in localized Indian troubles. When hostilities flowed across department boundaries, however, division commanders experienced great difficulty in enforcing cooperation and coordination; and when two divisions became involved, the commanding general in Washington encountered even greater difficulty. The pursuit of the Nez Percés in 1877 and the Ute campaign of 1879 afford notable examples. Occasionally boundaries were redrawn to avoid such problems. The addition of Indian territory to Texas in 1871 placed both the source and the objective of Kiowa-Comanche raids under a single commander. The advantages of embracing such persistently troublesome tribes as the Sioux and the Apaches under single commands might have seemed equally obvious. Yet the former remained the responsibility of the commanders of two departments and the latter the commanders of two divisions, three departments, and a district.

  From commanding general to post commander, the frontier army hung from a loose chain of command. In part this weakness was inherent in the continental dimensions of the army’s task, the inadequacy of manpower and other resources allocated to it, the unclear division of responsibility within the Indian Bureau, and the ambiguous character of Indian relations. But also in part the weakness stemmed from a military system that reduced the commanding general to a figurehead, pitted line and staff against each other, and limited a commander’s control of his logistics.

  Beyond these deficiencies, however, lay a more fundamental question. Throughout the debates over size, composition, and command of the peacetime army, apparently no one thought to ask whether traditional organization truly fitted the special conditions of the army’s mission in the West. This question in turn formed part of a larger question that received barely any attention from military leaders: how most effectively to constitute and employ the nation’s military resources to subjugate and control the Indians? This was the army’s primary employment for a century. Yet never did its leaders face up to the problem of doctrine.

  NOTES

  1. The debates are in Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st sess., under listings for H.R. 361 and S. 138.

  2. C. Joseph Bernardo and Eugene H. Bacon, American Military Policy: Its Development Since 1775 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1957), p. 236.

  3. Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st sess., p. 1380 (March 14, 1866).

  4. Ibid., p. 366g (July 9, 1866).

  5. Russell F. Weigley, History of the United States Army (New York, 1967), p. 262. Bernardo and Bacon, pp. 235–36.

  6. 14 Stat. 332–38 (July 28, 1866).

  7. The act was not as generous to the infantry as it appears. Actually, only the four black regiments and the four Veteran Reserve Corps regiments were new. The wartime regular infantry had consisted of ten regiments of ten companies each and nine regiments of twenty-four companies each divided into three eight-company battalions. By the addition of two companies, each of these battalions became one of the new regiments, and twenty-seven regiments were formed from nine at a cost of fifty-four instead of two hundred seventy companies. These became the Eleventh through Thirty-seventh Regiments. The colored regiments were the Thirty-eighth through Forty-first, and the VRC regiments were the Forty-second through Forty-fifth.

  8. Cavalry companies officially became troops in 1883, and battalions became squadrons in 1889. Since the new terms enjoyed wide unofficial usage before being officially adopted, and to avoid changing nomenclature in midvolume, I have used troop and squadron throughout. Squadron refers to any grouping of two or more troops of less than regimental strength. Only two of the twelve components of the artillery regiments were equipped with artillery. These were called light batteries. The rest were in all but name infantry companies. A good discussion of army organization in this period is Don Russell, “The Army of the Frontier
, 1865–1891,” The Westerners Brand Book (Chicago), 6 (July 1949), 33–35, 38—40. See also H. R. Hikok, “Our Cavalry Organization as Viewed in the Light of Its History and of Legislation,” Journal of the U.S. Cavalry Association, 22 (1912), 995–1009.

  9. L. D. Ingersoll, A History of the War Department of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1879). Raphael P. Thian, comp., Legislative History of the General Staff of the Army of the United States … from 1775 to 1901 (Washington, D.C., 1901). The titles of the department chiefs were: Adjutant General, Inspector General, Judge Advocate General, Quartermaster General, Commissary General, Surgeon General, Paymaster General, Chief of Engineers, Chief of Ordnance, and Chief Signal Officer.

  10. All original vacancies in the grades of first and second lieutenant were to be filled by volunteer officers who had served creditably for at least two years in the war. In grades above first lieutenant, two-thirds of the original vacancies in the cavalry and half of those in the infantry were to be filled in the same way. The volunteer appointments were to be distributed among the states and territories (excepting California, Oregon, and Nevada) in proportion to the troops they furnished during the war, a stipulation that provided members of Congress with a large patronage reservoir.

  11. 14 Stat. 223 (July 25, 1866).

  12. Secretary of War (hereafter SW), Annual Report (1867), p. 416.

  13. Regarding the award of brevet rank in the closing years of the war and immediately thereafter, the army’s authority on brevets wrote: “The government appeared not to know where to stop in the bestowal of these military honors, and no one who had earned reward, even in the smallest degree, was knowingly overlooked. Brevet shoulder straps were showered down ‘as thick as leaves in Vallambrosa!’” James B. Fry, The History and Legal Effect of Brevets in the Armies of Great Britain and the United States (New York, 1877), p. 224.