When the new government assembled in 1789, it had to translate the Constitution’s military provisions into actual policy. Action was necessary in three areas: The government needed an agency to administer military affairs, implement its militia responsibilities, and decide whether to create an army and, if so, how large it should be. The legislature acted upon the first issue expeditiously. Under the Confederation, a War Department headed by a “secretary at war” (Henry Knox since 1785) administered military matters. In August 1789 Congress maintained continuity by creating a Department of War, and in September it confirmed Washington’s nomination of Knox as the first secretary of war.
In regard to the militia, Congress foiled nationalist aspirations. Washington and Knox urged Congress to reorganize the militia into an effective force under national control, but militia legislation was a touchy political question. It struck at the root of state versus federal power and had a direct impact on every citizen. Congress delayed acting until the spring of 1792, when it passed the Calling Forth Act and the Uniform Militia Act. The former implemented the constitutional provision allowing Congress to call forth the militia by delegating that authority to the president. In case of invasion, Congress gave the executive a relatively free hand, since both nationalists and antinationalists feared foreign invasion. However, antinationalist fears of a despotic central government hedged the president’s authority to summon the militia to execute the laws or suppress insurrections. Before he could do so, a federal judge had to certify that civil authority was powerless to meet the crisis, and then the president formally had to order the insurgents to disperse and give them an opportunity to disband. In no case could a militiaman be mobilized for more than three months in any one year.
The Uniform Militia Act, which remained the basic militia law until the twentieth century, enshrined the concept of universal military service, requiring the enrollment of all able-bodied white men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. It contained an exemption list (to which the states could add), required men to arm and equip themselves, and outlined a tactical organization that states were to adopt only if “convenient.” From a nationalist perspective, the law had severe shortcomings. It did not provide for a select corps in each state or for federal control over officership and training, and it imposed no penalties on either the states or individuals for noncompliance, thus representing little more than a recommendation to the states. The government virtually abdicated responsibility over the militia; the states were free to respond to the law according to their diverse impulses—which they did. The Uniform Militia Act killed the nationalized militia concept by failing to establish uniform, interchangeable units, a prerequisite for a national reserve force. What little vitality the militia retained reposed in volunteer units forming a de facto elite corps; this was far from what Washington visualized, because the units were neither standardized nor nationalized.
The failure to forge reliable state militias made a standing army imperative, and Congress slowly moved toward that goal. In September 1789 it adopted the 1st American Regiment and the artillery battalion raised during Shays’ Rebellion. Six months later Congress added four companies to the regiment, bringing the total authorized force to 1,216 men, but this minuscule Army proved inadequate to the challenge of an Indian war. In Indian relations the administration preferred diplomacy over war. The government secured a precarious formal peace south of the Ohio River through the Treaty of New York (1790), and Secretary of War Knox worked diligently to restrain Tennessee frontiersmen who opposed the peace policy. Although Tennesseans occasionally ignored his pleas and conducted unauthorized campaigns, the intermittent fighting between settlers and Indians fortunately never escalated into genuine war. Neither militarily nor monetarily could the nation afford confrontations on two fronts, and north of the Ohio the situation had reached a crisis.
In the Northwest the Indians, determined to make the Ohio the boundary between the races, tried to form a confederacy to stop white migration across the river. In these efforts they received British support. By 1790 the violence between settlers and Native Americans assumed near-war proportions, and westerners cried for federal assistance. In June 1790 Knox ordered Harmar and Arthur St. Clair, the governor of the Northwest Territory, to organize an expedition into hostile territory along the Wabash and Maumee Rivers. The two-pronged campaign was a disaster. One wing departed Fort Knox and headed for the upper Wabash but turned back far short of its objective. The other, led by Harmar and consisting of 320 regulars and 1,133 militiamen, managed to reach its objective. Harmar’s force destroyed a few villages along the Maumee, but the Indians ambushed two substantial detachments, and the column retreated in disorder. The regulars fought well, but the militiamen acted disgracefully. Most of them were substitutes who were at best disobedient, at worst mutinous, and in battle they followed the principle of fleeing before fighting.
Having failed to chastise the Indians with one understrength expedition, the government organized another—with even worse results. Congress added another regiment to the Army, authorized the president to call out militiamen, and allowed him to enlist 2,000 “levies” for six months. The levies were an innovation, a method of manpower mobilization halfway between regulars and militia. They were federal volunteers raised and officered by the national government, but like militia, they served only a short term. In the nineteenth century federal volunteers became the normal method of utilizing citizen-soldiers.
Washington appointed St. Clair to command the mixed force of militia and levies that assembled near Fort Washington (now Cincinnati, Ohio) during the summer. The militia again consisted mostly of substitutes, and the levies were little better. Neither type of citizen-soldier got along with the regulars. The composite “army” was little more than a rabble, and St. Clair had no time to train it properly because Washington had urged him by “every principle that is sacred” to march as soon as possible. When the horde moved northward, one veteran prayed that “the Enemy may not be disposed to give us battle,” but his prayers were not answered. On November 3 the army camped along the Wabash. As the 1,400 men began their morning routine on the 4th, 1,000 Indians attacked and inflicted over 900 casualties—the worst defeat ever suffered by an American Army against Native Americans.
In response to this new calamity, the administration followed a dual policy. It reopened Indian negotiations to appease easterners, who believed aggressive frontiersmen caused the violence, and to save the country from bankruptcy. But the government also began building a capable Army. Congress authorized three more regiments, and Knox reorganized the expanded Army into the Legion of the United States, composed of 5,280 officers and men divided into four equal sublegions. The president pondered over a commander, finally selecting Anthony Wayne, who had a reputation for being courageous and offensive-minded. For two years, while negotiations continued, Wayne drilled the Legion, molding it into a disciplined force. In September 1793, after the diplomatic effort failed to dissuade the Indians from their insistence on the Ohio River boundary, Knox ordered Wayne to use the Legion “to make those audacious savages feel our superiority in Arms.”
Wayne’s campaign was an enormous success. He built Fort Greenville, where most of his Army overwintered, and Fort Recovery, which was on the site of St. Clair’s defeat. In response to Wayne’s presence the British established Fort Miami at the Maumee rapids, and by June 1794 some 2,000 Indians gathered nearby, confidently expecting British aid. On June 30 and July 1 the Indians, reinforced by some Canadians, attacked Fort Recovery, but the defenders (outnumbered ten to one) repulsed them. Meanwhile, deploring the government’s inability to recruit the Legion to full strength, Wayne called on Kentucky for mounted volunteers. When 1,500 of them arrived in late July, the reinforced Legion moved out. Wayne expected to meet “a Heterogeneous Army composed of British troops the Militia of Detroit & all the Hostile Indians N W of the Ohio,” but at the Battle of Fallen Timbers he fought a mere 500 Indians. The Legion routed the India
ns, who fled toward Fort Miami, where, to their chagrin, the British refused to help them. Indian losses in the battle were small, but the psychological shock of England’s broken promises was great. Defeated and dismayed, the Indians had no hope of maintaining the Ohio boundary, and in the Treaty of Greenville they ceded most of Ohio and a sliver of Indiana. The victory also lessened British influence in the Northwest and convinced the English to relinquish the posts they had garrisoned since 1783. Finally, the Legion had demonstrated the government’s ability to maintain an Army that could “provide for the common defense,” at least to the extent of waging a successful Indian campaign.
Simultaneously with the Indians’ defeat, the government also proved it could “insure domestic tranquility.” The Whiskey Rebellion erupted in western Pennsylvania as a protest against an excise tax on distilled spirits. Discontent also flared in western Maryland, Kentucky, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Washington initially acted cautiously. He feared the use of force without an effort at conciliation might precipitate rebellion throughout the west, and with the Legion committed against the Indians, he would have to rely on the militia, which might not mobilize to suppress the tumults. But when negotiations with the whiskey rebels broke down and they defied a presidential proclamation to disperse, the administration believed that “the crisis was arrived when it must be determined whether the Government can maintain itself.” Washington sent orders to the governors of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia for 12,500 militiamen, and to his gratification the states’ forces assembled. Never before had the militia functioned as a national, rather than a local, institution. Rebel leaders swore they would resist, but as the massive posse comitatus crossed the mountains, the rebellion evaporated.
By applying two kinds of force—regulars and militia—in two different situations—against Indians and domestic insurrection—Federalists (formerly “nationalists) believed the government had demonstrated it deserved respect. However, the Federalist utilization of force showed how thoroughly military policy had been politicized. The coercive power that comforted Federalists frightened Republicans, the newly emerged opposition political party. While Federalists applauded the Whiskey Rebellion’s demise, Republicans viewed the episode as an example of a strong government’s armed tyranny. Republicans also cast an anxious eye toward the Legion, believing it should be drastically reduced. The Treaty of Greenville and England’s promise to evacuate the western forts, they argued, made such a substantial Army unnecessary. An armed populace could provide frontier defense more cheaply than regulars and with less danger to liberty. Republicans especially feared that Federalists might use the Legion for despotic domestic purposes. Administration spokesmen asserted that any reduction was inadvisable. The nation needed the regular Army to garrison western posts, deter aggression, and preserve “a model and school for an army, and experienced officers to form it, in case of war.” Furthermore, the militia’s deplorable condition made the Legion doubly necessary.
In 1796 Republicans apparently won the argument when Congress abolished the Legion and reorganized the Army into a reduced force of two light dragoon companies and four infantry regiments. Yet, in a sense, Federalists had also won. A peacetime standing Army did survive, and ever since Washington presented his “Sentiments” to Hamilton’s committee, this had been a major objective of Federalist military policy. The 1796 legislation irrevocably committed the nation to the maintenance of a frontier constabulary that spearheaded western expansion for the next century.
Federalists not only established an American Army, but a Navy as well. The Confederation sold the Continental Navy’s last ship in 1785, and the nation had no Navy when trouble at sea loomed on two fronts in 1793. The French Revolution exploded into a world war when France declared war on England, Spain, and Holland. The belligerents, especially England, began interfering with American neutral commerce, which also suffered from Algerine corsairs. The Barbary States—Algiers, Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli—traditionally engaged in piracy, but the European powers bottled up their activities within the Mediterranean Sea. After 1793, with the Europeans preoccupied, corsairs from Algiers, the most powerful of the petty North African nations, entered the Atlantic and preyed upon American shipping.
Washington’s administration thus confronted a major crisis with a formidable enemy and a minor crisis with a weak adversary. It responded to England’s challenge by passive defensive measures and negotiations. In 1794 Congress voted to create four arsenals, to build coastal fortifications protecting important seaports, and to form a Corps of Artillerists and Engineers to garrison the seaboard forts. Americans assumed the forts would prevent an enemy coup de main, giving land forces time to assemble to repel an invasion at a nonvital location. The president also dispatched John Jay to London to resolve Anglo-American differences, resulting in Jay’s Treaty, which temporarily restored amicable relations. To combat the Algerians, Congress passed the Naval Act of 1794, authorizing the construction of six frigates but providing that the act would be suspended if Algiers agreed to peace. In 1796, before completion of any of the frigates, the United States negotiated a treaty with Algiers. Rather than stop construction, Washington asked Congress for further guidance, and it agreed to continue building three of the ships.
Like the Army, the Navy became entangled in partisan politics. Support for a navy came from the commerce-oriented North Atlantic seaboard and parts of the tidewater south, the strongholds of Federalism, while opposition came from agrarian areas and the interior states, the bastions of Republicanism. Believing that preparedness deterred war, Federalists wanted a standing Navy to match the standing Army. A Navy was necessary to protect maritime commerce, the whaling and fishing fleets, and the territorial waters. It would also be a unifying force benefiting the whole country, drawing timber and naval stores from the south, iron from the middle Atlantic states, and shipbuilders and seamen from the north. Even a small fleet, said Hamilton, would allow the United States to “become the arbiter of Europe in America, and be able to incline the balance of European competitions in this part of the world as our interests may dictate.” A squadron capable of decisive intervention in the West Indies would guarantee American neutrality during a European war; no nation would risk its New World interests by alienating the United States. Finally, Federalists envisioned the country as a future world power and were concerned about prestige and diplomatic leverage. A Navy, they asserted, symbolized national strength, ensuring European respect.
Republicans argued that instead of deterring war, a navy might provoke it. The prospect of a growing navy might so alarm a European power that, said one Republican, it “would crush us in our infancy.” A navy might be an invitation to imperialism and adventurism abroad. No European nation would attack the United States, unless provoked by a naval challenge, because of the predatory European balance of power and the difficulty of bridging the Atlantic moat. Far from benefiting all sections of the country, the Navy would primarily aid New England merchants and shippers. Yet a fleet would be expensive, imposing an oppressive tax burden on the entire country and increasing the national debt. Republicans did not relish a role in European affairs, preferring to direct national energies toward developing the west. Thus while Federalists hoped to parlay the small Army and the tiny kernel of a Navy into military greatness, Republicans wanted to limit future armed forces expansion. The debate over military policy soon reached a furious crescendo.
Federalists and Republicans in Peace and at War
When France and England went to war in 1793, the American political elite fractured along party lines. Federalists were pro-British, emphasizing a common heritage and the commercial connections between England and America. Republicans sided with France, stressing the 1778 treaty that bound the two nations in “perpetual friendship and alliance” and the French Revolution’s antimonarchical aspect. Washington decreed, and Congress sanctioned, a neutrality policy, but perfect neutrality in an imperfect warring world was impossible. Jay’s Tre
aty, which prevented war with England, outraged the French, who viewed it as establishing an Anglo-American alliance. In retaliation, France increased its depredations against American shipping and refused to receive a new American minister. In 1797 President John Adams sent a special commission to avert war, but France rebuffed it in the notorious “XYZ affair,” in which the French foreign minister demanded a huge bribe before he would even open negotiations with the commission. The result was the Quasi-War with France.
In the spring of 1798 war hysteria engulfed the nation, especially Federalists, who believed the nation faced both a foreign threat and a domestic menace. They feared French agents were subverting the country from within and that Republicans were eager to foment civil war if the United States and France went to war. Viewing themselves as defenders of constitutional liberty, Federalists considered Republicans disloyal, domestic Jacobins conspiring to convert the country into a French province. To deal with the dual danger of French invasion and French-inspired insurrection, Federalists enacted a preparedness program that Republicans opposed, providing, said Federalists, further proof of their treason.
Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts to suppress internal opposition; to enforce the laws and meet the anticipated invasion, it enacted a welter of Army legislation. It created a 10,000-man Provisional Army to be raised in the event of war and empowered the president to accept volunteer companies into national service. Four months later it authorized the president to raise immediately a New Army of twelve infantry regiments and six troops of dragoons. Congress also provided for a massive Eventual Army that, like the Provisional Army, the president could mobilize only in an actual emergency. Legally the United States had five distinct armies: the “old” Army on the frontier, the Provisional Army, the volunteer corps, the New Army, and the Eventual Army.
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