The American Military - A Narrative History

by Brad D. Lookingbill

  Immediately after the fateful day, Miles angrily relieved Forsyth of his command. With 25 soldiers killed in action and 39 wounded, the Battle of Wounded Knee marked the most controversial engagement of the campaign. In 1891, the War Department conducted an investigation that eventually exonerated the regulars. Congress awarded Medals of Honor to 20 of them, though several lacked merit. As a legal matter, a federal court declared that a state of war existed during the outbreak of 1890.

  For the remainder of his career, Miles continued to call for recompense to the families of those killed at Wounded Knee. Thanks to a distinguished record of military service, he eventually became the Commanding General of the Army. By the time he retired in 1903, no Indian lived freely in North America.

  Conclusion

  What had been labeled as the “permanent Indian frontier” in North America was transformed by the armed forces into an archipelago of communities, territories, and states. As the federal government reconstructed the defeated South, the regular Army confronted a series of Indian insurgencies west of the Mississippi River. Mounted warriors posed a formidable challenge to American troops, especially during the centennial campaign of 1876. The wide range of military operations strained the War Department, which tried to promote professionalism throughout the ranks. While pressuring Indians to remain on the reservations, U.S. soldiers campaigned in the coldest winters. They also crisscrossed treacherous borderlands in hot pursuit of wily guerrillas. Though sporadic and localized, the fighting exacted a heavy toll upon noncombatants. Non-state actors struggled to survive on ever-shrinking islands of space surrounded by rushing waves of migrants. The Indian wars ended by 1890 with countless resistance leaders imprisoned, exiled, or dead.

  Americans remembered the Indian wars as the finale of an epic to conquer the North American continent. The close encounters in the Trans-Mississippi West contributed to the frontier myth, which inverted historical narratives by frequently depicting the aggressors as the victims of the violence. An expanded railway system enabled the American people to occupy the region, but new technology did not always give one side a decisive advantage over the other. The buffalo herds that sustained many Indians vanished, as starving men, women, and children grew dependent upon the federal government for subsistence. Seeking support for the American military, savvy officers persuaded a handful of young warriors to join their forays. Indian scouts in uniform wore an insignia of crossed arrows, which the first commando units of the Army later appropriated for themselves. Although sectional tensions subsided during the Gilded Age, there was no road map for peace that provided a homeland for Indians.

  The dispossession of the Indians in the American West reflected a process similar to colonization in other regions of the world at the time, whereby settlers moved inland in the effort to occupy territories. With the proliferation of settler societies, they quickly outnumbered and displaced the original inhabitants of the land. The meeting of cultures produced conflict and bloodshed, but the prolonged struggle rarely impacted military doctrines, organization, and planning. During the last half of the nineteenth century, the Army engaged in over 1,200 battles, large and small. Accordingly, more than 1,300 officers and enlisted men were killed or wounded while fighting the Indians. At the same time, more than 2,000 Indians died at the hands of Americans. The lesson of the Indian wars was that military action seldom spread good will, because the Army possessed the means to put down but not to win over foes.

  While ensuring compliance with the writs of Washington D.C., the Army operated in threat environments attuned to experimental tactics and advancing technologies. Although troops expressed misgivings about major offensives, they diligently carried out their orders in deserts, mountains, valleys, and plains. Whatever good deeds they performed, the most publicized – and sometimes exaggerated – mistakes tended to overshadow them. All too often, their efforts to pacify and to control Indian people ended in tragedy. Despite the miscalculations and the misunderstandings, they conducted challenging missions deemed essential to the nation's attainment of security and power. As a brotherhood of arms, they developed military bearings appropriate for small units serving cohesively together in difficult circumstances. The constabulary experiences of the American military prepared a cadre of veterans to face the next theater of operations beyond the continental U.S.

  Essential Questions

  1 How did the Indian wars of the American West resemble a civil war?

  2 What was the Army's attitude toward Indian people in the region?

  3 Who was most responsible for Wounded Knee? Why?

  Suggested Readings

  Adams, Kevin. Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West, 1870–1890. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009.

  Ambrose, Stephen E. Upton and the Army. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964.

  Coffman, Edward M. The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

  Dunlay, Thomas W. Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860–1890. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

  Hutton, Paul Andrew. Phil Sheridan and His Army. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

  Leckie, William H. Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967.

  Lookingbill, Brad D. War Dance at Fort Marion: Plains Indian War Prisoners. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006.

  Marshall III, Joseph M. The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn: A Lakota History. New York: Penguin, 2007.

  Nacy, Michele J. Members of the Regiment: Army Officers' Wives on the Western Frontier, 1865–1890. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

  Rickey, Don. Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay: The Enlisted Soldier Fighting the Indian Wars. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963.

  Roberts, David. Once They Moved Like the Wind: Cochise, Geronimo, and the Apache Wars. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.

  Sefton, James E. The United States Army and Reconstruction, 1865–1877. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967.

  Smith, Sherry L. The View from Officers' Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990.

  Tate, Michael. The Frontier Army in the Settlement of the West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

  Utley, Robert M. Cavalier in Buckskin: George Armstrong Custer and the Western Military Frontier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

  Utley, Robert M. Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1891. New York: Macmillan, 1973.

  Wooster, Robert. The Military and United States Indian Policy, 1865–1903. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

  Wooster, Robert. Nelson Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

  9

  A Rising Power (1890–1914)

  Introduction

  “Goodbye, Mother,” wrote 25-year-old Clara Maass from Las Animas Hospital in Havana, Cuba. As a contract nurse for the U.S. Army, she penned her last letter home during the summer of 1901. “I will send you nearly all I earn,” she promised her widowed parent and her eight younger siblings, adding with pride that she was “the man of the family.”

  Hailing from New Jersey, Maass previously attended a training school for nurses in Newark. She overcame personal misfortunes and became the head nurse at the German Hospital that served a robust immigrant community. Her patients received treatment in an antiseptic environment – not considered the norm for medical care during the late nineteenth century. While anticipating marriage to a New York businessman, she earned high marks for hard work and exemplary professionalism.

  At the outset of the Spanish–American War, Maass volunteered for national service with the Army. She joined with VII Corps and VIII Corps, which allowed her to serve in the continental U.S. as well as in the Philippines and in Cuba. Becaus
e infectious diseases took more lives than armed combat, she battled against the spread of dengue, malaria, typhoid, and yellow fever among American troops. Like many other contract nurses, she treated ailing soldiers, war prisoners, and civilian refugees in the makeshift hospitals of the Army.

  Maass learned that the Army's Yellow Fever Commission, which was headed by Dr. Walter Reed, claimed that mosquitoes spread the deadly epidemic amid U.S. forces in Cuba. Summoned by the chief sanitary officer, Dr. William Gorgas, she became a test subject at a civilian facility. She accepted $100 from the Army for consenting to receive mosquito bites. Fighting to gain immunity, she suffered from high fever, joint pain, and blinding headaches. She recovered from a bout in June but writhed in agony that August. In the sultry heat of the tropics, she took her last breath of air on August 24, 1901. Her mother received an Army pension thereafter, since her death overseas involved “a military character.”

  Figure 9.1 The New York nurses, 1898. Photograph of Sternberg General Hospital, Camp Thomas, Chickamauga, Georgia, Army Nurse Corps in the War with Spain, U.S. Army Center of Military History

  “No soldier in the late war placed his life in peril for better reasons,” announced an obituary of Maass in a New York newspaper. She represented the last fatality of the Army's experimentation with mosquitoes and yellow fever in Cuba, thus making her the only woman, nurse, and American among the casualties. The wartime experience with tropical environments spurred desperate efforts to control diseases worldwide, though it came too late for many in uniform. With troops injected into faraway places, the armed forces became involved in efforts to improve welfare and safety outside the borders of the U.S. As people and goods moved freely across international boundaries, Americans took a more active role in solving humanitarian problems around the globe.

  Americans embraced controversial scientific theories, which informed an amalgam of popular beliefs about the “survival of the fittest.” Under the sway of Social Darwinism, a new generation of citizens imagined military action among the most purposeful of all human ventures. In fact, many conceived of war as nature's way of culling the weak from the strong. Throughout the Gilded Age, policymakers in the U.S. based their plans for a strong defense on the military weakness of pre-industrial societies within the western hemisphere. A Harvard graduate named Theodore Roosevelt composed a multivolume work titled The Winning of the West (1889–96), in which he rebuked those “prone to speak of all wars of conquest as necessarily evil.”

  Whereas the U.S. population had surged to 75 million by 1890, Americans such as Roosevelt searched for order in a world that seemed out of control. Even though many reminisced about a frontier heritage, the explosion of international commerce made a “big navy” necessary to safeguard the shipping lanes. Steam-powered ships required bases to replenish supplies of coal and water, which further entangled service members with populations beyond the North American continent. Moreover, an industrial giant needed to acquire overseas territories for access to raw materials and foreign markets. Owing to the nation's considerable anxieties about the future, the armed forces grew more powerful during an age of imperialism.

  Race for Empire

  During the late nineteenth century, the Great Powers of Europe seized territory in Africa and in Asia while eying potential prizes in the western hemisphere. The assumptions of racial superiority bolstered the worldwide scramble for colonies, as did the growth of industrial societies that consumed large quantities of natural resources. Though largely protected by vast oceans from the imperial reach of European rivals, the American people exhibited a willingness to support ventures abroad on strategic, economic, and intellectual grounds.

  Given the imperialistic implications, the American republic took cautious steps to acquire additional territories. The U.S. purchased Alaska for $7.2 million in a diplomatic effort to push Russia away from North America. Naval confrontations from South America to the Caribbean Sea produced saber rattling, but U.S. commanders avoided direct action. Thanks to the tripartite agreement of 1889, the naval base at Pago Pago in Samoa remained securely in American hands. Two years later, the American ambassador in Hawaii summoned marines to support an uprising against Queen Liliuokalani while protecting the naval base at Pearl Harbor. Consequently, the race for empire provided new energy for expansionist policies in Washington D.C.

  As a matter of coastal defense, policymakers in Washington D.C. began expanding the naval forces. Congress authorized funding during the 1880s for four modern warships, requiring that all armor plating, structural steel, gunnery components, and propulsion equipment derive from domestic manufacturing. The ships of steel were christened the Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Dolphin, or the “ABCD” ships. Two more armored cruisers, the U.S.S. Maine and the U.S.S. Texas, became second-class battleships. Thereafter, the Navy Department commissioned first-class battleships and named them the Indiana, Massachusetts, and Oregon. Displacing more than 11,000 tons, the U.S.S. Iowa eventually surpassed its predecessors in size. They showed the national colors while commanding the waters for thousands of miles from the shores of North America. Ranking third in the world by the turn of the century, the Navy of the U.S. attained considerable stature in a short amount of time.

  Both Republican and Democratic administrations made the Navy a national priority. Recommending that the U.S. build 100 modern warships during the 1890s, Secretary of the Navy Benjamin F. Tracy insisted that the “sea will be the future seat of empire.” To match the technological capabilities of the European navies, every advance in the big guns stimulated a corresponding advance in the strength and the thickness of the heavy armor. Ship construction and coastal fortification proved mutually beneficial to national defense and to big business. Military contracts enabled American corporations to build factories and to hire workers, while the increased expenditures by the federal government maintained employment in defense-related industries even during economic downturns. Over the years, the procurement of steel and ordnance by the Navy mingled private interests with public policies.

  Because “old salts” and “mossbacks” in uniform dominated the officer corps, the Navy established institutions for the advancement of professional military education. Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce helped to establish the U.S. Naval Institute during the 1870s, which published Proceedings that contained articles on naval strategies and tactics. In 1885, he became the first president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. “No less a task is proposed,” stated Luce, “than to apply modern scientific methods to the study and to raise naval warfare from the empirical stage to the dignity of a science.” The faculty escaped from sea duty into the lecture halls, where they attempted to codify navalism for an age of steam and steel.

  While a faculty member at the Naval War College, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan authored a landmark work, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890). In over 450 pages, he maintained that all great civilizations held colonies and protected them with powerful navies. The attainment of both wealth and security amid “organized warfare” required naval bases, safe harbors, and coaling stations beyond the mainland. He emphasized the significance of decisive battles for taking “command of the sea,” which resembled Napoleonic doctrines for land warfare. He posited that a fleet of battleships represented “the arm of offensive power, which alone enables a country to extend its influence outward.” His grand narrative employed historical examples as testimony for the transcendent, universal value of naval forces in winning wars. Hence, any army in the world would capitulate to the blockade of a sea power.

  While striking a resonant chord with audiences in Great Britain, Germany, and Japan, the doctrine of sea power profoundly influenced the U.S. in the years ahead. Mahan formed a lasting friendship with Roosevelt, who soon became a naval enthusiast. Of course, Mahan's argument for “command of the sea” echoed the sentiments of others in search of decisive battles in history. Though flawed in many respects, his dense writings won the acclaim of “big navy”
advocates in Washington D.C. He undermined the traditional notion that the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans provided a buffer from the rest of the world, suggesting instead that they represented a “highway” or “wide common” for seafaring traffic in all directions. Underscoring the benefits of maritime commerce, he recommended annexing the Hawaiian Islands and developing a Central American canal. “Whether they will or no,” he scribed, “Americans must now begin to look outward.” In other words, the U.S. grew too large during the nineteenth century to confine its strategic thought to a military policy of continentalism.

  Despite efforts to promote “Pan-Americanism,” the U.S. perceived Chile as an emerging threat to national interests in the western hemisphere. During 1891, a mob in Valparaiso attacked a group of sailors on shore leave from the U.S.S. Baltimore. Two Americans died, and another 17 were injured. President Benjamin Harrison vowed to take “such action as may be deemed appropriate,” which prompted the Chilean government to apologize for its role in the Baltimore affair as well as to compensate the families of the slain.

  President Grover Cleveland, who both preceded and succeeded Harrison in office, invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify American assertiveness. Owing to a boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana in 1895, he directed the Secretary of State, Richard Olney, to demand that London submit the dispute to international arbitration. In a dispatch to the British Foreign Secretary, he indicated that the U.S. contemplated armed intervention to defend “self-government” in Venezuela. To preempt European imperialists from trying to carve out new colonies in Latin America, the president boasted that the dispatch amounted to a “20-inch gun.” In a message to Congress that triggered a war scare, he fortified the Monroe Doctrine as an international principle while indicating that the U.S. was prepared to intervene to settle the boundary dispute. Eventually, Great Britain accepted arbitration in a way that allowed the Cleveland administration to avoid military action.