The American Military

by Brad D. Lookingbill

  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. Because 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.

  Though Cleveland withdrew a treaty that annexed Hawaii, the next president, William McKinley, contemplated territorial expansion beyond the continental U.S. The last Civil War veteran to occupy the White House, the commander-in-chief appraised the value of the Pacific Ocean for national security. “We need Hawaii,” he observed, “just as much and a good deal more than we did California.” Japan dispatched warships to the Pacific islands the next year, which prompted McKinley to offer another treaty for annexation. Unable to find the votes in the Senate, he obtained a joint resolution to achieve his aims in 1898. “It is Manifest Destiny,” concluded the president with satisfaction.

  Remember the Maine

  Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Cuban struggle for independence attracted American attention. While an expatriate living in New York, José Martí became a symbol of the movement to free Cuba from Spanish dominion. He organized the Junta to coordinate a campaign under the banner of Cuba Libre. Recruiting revolutionaries from Key West to Santo Domingo, he joined filibustering expeditions to liberate what the Spanish called the “ever faithful isle.” After landing in Cuba, he died in his first battle on May 19, 1895.

  The insurrection of 1895 spurred the governor general, Valeriano Weyler, to institute punitive measures against the civilian population of Cuba. While rebels struck plantations and trains, Spanish soldiers assaulted villages in retaliation. To suppress the widespread unrest, the reconcentrado policy involved the herding of men, women, and children to areas controlled by the Spanish Army. As a result of the devastation, disease, and starvation, thousands perished in the Cuban countryside. The “yellow journalists” of the U.S. circulated sensational stories about the military atrocities, denouncing the Spanish commander in Cuba as a “butcher.”

  With Cuba only 90 miles off the coast of Florida, pressure for the U.S. to stop the mayhem continued to mount. American “jingoists” called upon the federal government to safeguard national interests with military action. In 1897, John D. Long, the Secretary of the Navy, directed senior officers to develop a war plan based upon the previous work of the Naval War College and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Their planning drew from a key document by Lieutenant William W. Kimball, which he titled “War with Spain.” Acknowledging the fact that American trade with Cubans actually surpassed Spanish commerce with them, a congressional resolution recognized the rebel cau
se. Unable to crush the rebellion against the empire, the Spanish government eventually replaced the “butcher” with the more humane General Ramón Blanco. Spain offered autonomy to the island but refused to grant independence.

  The McKinley administration expressed no animosity toward Spain, although the Republican platform in the presidential election of 1896 included a plank on behalf of Cuban independence. When anti-American riots erupted in Havana, he ordered the U.S.S Maine to the harbor in early 1898 as a sign of resolve. Spanish ambassador Dupuy de Lôme made disparaging remarks about the U.S. president in a letter reprinted in the New York Journal, which editorialized that it amounted to the “worst insult to the United States in its history.” Having seen “the dead pile up” as a private during the American Civil War, McKinley remained reluctant to push for war against Spain.

  While anchored in Havana, the presence of the Maine troubled Spain but sparked no immediate reaction from officials. Captain Charles D. Sigsbee, the commander of the U.S. battleship, went ashore with the American consul, Fitzhugh Lee. Taking precautions against “injury or treachery,” he stationed the marines on guard while ordering the sailors to remain on board. He attended a bullfight at Regla without incident.

  Figure 9.2 Ship's company, U.S.S. Maine, 1896. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

  At 9:40 p.m. on February 15, 1898, Sigsbee sat in his cabin while writing a letter home. Several officers gathered by the port-side turret to enjoy excellent cigars. Most of the crew climbed into their bunks. A marine bugler played taps, which reverberated in the night air. Suddenly, the captain heard what sounded like a rifle shot. A tremendous “bursting, rending, and crashing” separated the forecastle from the rest of the vessel and bent the keel upward through the armored deck. As the smoke rose into the heavens, the wreck sank to the harbor bottom. Of the 355 men on board, 255 died immediately. Another eight perished from their injuries. Only 16 escaped without any harm, including Sigsbee. Noting that Spanish officials expressed sympathy, he cabled the Navy Department: “Public opinion should be suspended until further report.”