The Commanders

by Robert M. Utley

  Crook’s service in this department, beginning in 1875, was marked by almost continuous Indian difficulties, including active field operations, difficult negotiations, and oversight of contentious issues. By contrast, Howard inherited a benign department. The Sioux had been conquered and the Northern Cheyenne troubles suppressed. Indian hostilities no longer seemed probable, but Howard held training exercises to ensure that his troops were ready in the event of problems. Mainly he simply administered the department. He began writing and publishing articles and then books and as always immersed himself in church work. He lectured and traveled, once to Europe and once with his family to Yellowstone National Park. Howard University continued to require his attention and financial support.

  MAJOR GENERAL

  In late 1885 the approaching retirement of Major General John Pope set off the usual scramble among brigadiers for presidential appointment to the major general’s vacancy. Howard was the senior brigadier, but Alfred Terry sought the promotion as well. When the death of General Winfield S. Hancock early in February 1886 created a second vacancy, Terry won the first opening and Howard the second, to rank from March 19, 1886.

  As a major general, Howard now rated a division command. He received the Military Division of the Pacific, with headquarters at San Francisco. Howard’s new assignment was as routine as the Department of the Platte, although General Nelson Miles often ignored him in conducting the Geronimo campaign in Arizona and dealt directly with General Sheridan in Washington. The assignment in San Francisco lasted only two years, when Sheridan’s death and Terry’s retirement opened the way for Howard’s final transfer. Howard was ranked only by General Schofield, who took command of the army, leaving the most prestigious post to Howard. On December 12, 1888, Howard assumed command of the Division of the Atlantic, with headquarters on Governor’s Island in New York Harbor. A pleasant six years passed before his retirement on November 8, 1894.

  Settling in Burlington, Vermont, Howard continued to write and publish, including a book setting forth his version of the Nez Perce War. He also lectured extensively throughout the country and involved himself in the Spanish-American War with the Christian Commission.

  Howard died in Burlington on October 26, 1909, at the age of seventy-six and was buried there.

  Both in the Civil War and in the Indian Wars, Oliver Otis Howard had a checkered career. Despite mitigating circumstances, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg represented low points of his Civil War service, while Atlanta and the March to the Sea represented high points. The Nez Perce War, representing the high point of his postwar career, was only a qualified success. He made military mistakes and erroneous judgment calls. Another officer rightly claimed the victory, but Howard’s sometime tenacity made that victory possible. The following year he conducted a near-flawless operation against Bannocks, Paiutes, and Shoshones.

  When Howard stepped out of a purely military role, as in the long ordeal of the Freedmen’s Bureau, he fell victim to forces beyond his control and even somewhat beyond his understanding. General Sherman plainly saw the traps that Howard set for himself and bluntly advised, then reproached him. His career would have been more successful had he heeded Sherman’s sage advice to adhere strictly to the military profession.

  Throughout his long career Howard’s major drawback lay in his devout Christianity, aggravated by a conspicuous public display. It governed at least three of his appointments (the Freedmen’s Bureau, Apache peace-making, and West Point) and held him up to the ridicule of less pious senior officers. It did not interfere with his military duties, but it did influence his relations with fellow officers.

  By the standards of his time in the East and the West, Oliver Otis Howard’s army service may be judged slightly above mediocre.

  Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles, commanding Department of the Columbia, 1881–1885; Department of the Missouri, 1885–1886; Department of Arizona, 1886–1888.

  U.S. Army Military History Institute.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  NELSON A. MILES

  Vain, arrogant, ambitious, egotistical, dogmatic, obstinate, duplicitous, abrasive, petulant, quarrelsome, scheming: Nelson A. Miles was perhaps the frontier army’s most detestable officer. As he verged on retirement, President Theodore Roosevelt labeled him “brave peacock,” an apt description.1 Yet Miles was the frontier army’s most successful field officer. He triumphed not as a general but as a colonel of infantry. These successes entitle him to being recognized as superior to all other Indian fighters.

  Miles’s other major distinction, both in the Civil War and on the frontier, lay in his civilian origins. He did not attend West Point. He and Alfred Terry were the only two western department commanders who could not claim a West Point education. It seems not to have marred their careers, although the army contained officers who believed that West Point was essential to the military profession. In forty-three years Nelson A. Miles rose from first lieutenant to lieutenant general, the last commanding general in the history of the U.S. Army.

  Born on August 6, 1839, on a farm near Westminster, Massachusetts, fifty-five miles west of Boston, Nelson Appleton Miles grew into a robust country lad with a scattering of formal education. As an adult occupation, however, farming did not appeal to him. He yearned for a more satisfying and prosperous life. For a farm youth of eighteen, Boston seemed to offer a path to prosperity. In 1857 Miles was working in a Boston fruit market and a year later in a crockery store. At the same time, recognizing his educational limitations, he enrolled in a commercial college.

  CIVIL WAR

  But commerce did not lie in Miles’s future. He and a group of patriotic friends formed a drill club and persuaded a former French army colonel to instruct them. Their fervor intensified as the secession crisis split the nation in 1860 and 1861. After the Union’s disastrous defeat at Bull Run in July 1861, Miles used family loans to recruit and equip a company of volunteers. By September seventy men had responded and elected him as their captain. Captain Miles offered his company’s service to Governor John A. Andrew. The unit became Company E of the Twenty-Second Massachusetts Infantry, but not with Miles its captain. The governor judged him not mature enough at twenty-two and commissioned him a first lieutenant, to date from October 7, 1861.

  The regiment camped across the Potomac from Washington and took its place as part of General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. Dull routine prompted Lieutenant Miles to scout the army for more promising opportunities. He attracted the attention of brigade commander Brigadier General Oliver O. Howard and early in November won appointment as aide on the general’s staff. Howard, called the “Christian General” because of his deep piety, grew fond of the young officer and granted him the flexibility to observe the workings of the army.

  When General McClellan moved the Army of the Potomac by ship to the Virginia peninsula with the objective of seizing Richmond from the southeast, the ensuing Seven Days Battle gave Miles his first exposure to combat. At the Battle of Fair Oaks, on May 31, 1862, Howard dispatched his aide to try to rally a crumbling regiment that had lost its field officers. Although wounded in the foot, Miles zealously and courageously carried out his assignment. Howard and other ranking officers praised his conduct. Fair Oaks also brought Miles close to General Howard, who sustained a wound that required the amputation of his right arm. In the field hospital Miles held up his general’s arm while a surgeon sawed it off.

  Such was the untrained youth’s baptism of fire. With Howard out of action, Miles fought in the remaining battles of the peninsular campaign as an aide to Brigadier General John C. Caldwell. He made up for his lack of formal training by demonstrating that he could excel in combat. In each battle he earned commendations for bravery and leadership. A newfound friend, Lieutenant Colonel (and future general) Francis Barlow, had observed Miles’s battlefield conduct and urged the governor of New York to commission him in a New York regiment. With rank backdated to May 31, 1862, Lieutenant Miles became Lieutenant Colonel Miles
of the Sixty-First New York. Boasting a brief but sterling combat record and acutely aware of the importance of influential friends, Nelson Miles began his climb up the chain of command.

  On September 17, 1862, the Sixty-First New York, combined with another New York regiment, entered the Battle of Antietam, Maryland, under the command of General Francis Barlow. In an assault on Confederate lines, Barlow was wounded. Command of the two regiments fell to Lieutenant Colonel Miles. Once again he acquitted himself so handsomely that superiors showered him with praise. He emerged a full colonel one year after he had been commissioned first lieutenant.

  At Fredericksburg on December 10, 1862, Colonel Miles and his New Yorkers were in the thick of the fight when storming Mayre’s Heights proved a futile, bloody catastrophe. A bullet struck him in the throat but did not disable him. Miles pleaded for authority to continue the advance, but his superiors wisely ordered withdrawal. Fulsome acclaim followed the colonel into convalescence with his family in Massachusetts.

  Back with the army in time for the Battle of Chancellorsville, on May 2, 1863, Miles led his regiment in combat with his accustomed competence. Astride his horse, he presented a good target for a Georgia sharpshooter, who put a round in Miles’s stomach. The bullet buried itself in his hip. Miles fell from his horse paralyzed from the waist down. Once more he convalesced at his Massachusetts home.

  Miles remained away from the front for almost a year, largely to accommodate the slow healing process. He accepted other assignments to pass the time but early in 1864 took command of a five-regiment brigade in General Barlow’s First Division of General Winfield Scott Hancock’s Second Corps. The Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, leading to the deadly conflict at Spotsylvania Courthouse, left the division and brigade with heavy casualties but afforded Miles further opportunity to distinguish himself. Impressed, Generals Barlow, Hancock, and George G. Meade all urged that Miles be promoted to brigadier general of Volunteers. The Senate agreed, again with a backdated rank of May 12, 1864.

  On June 3 General Miles’s brigade advanced in the forefront of the assault on Lee’s entrenched lines at Cold Harbor. The terrible casualties of Cold Harbor prompted General Grant to abandon frontal attacks and instead lead his army in a circling movement east around Richmond to the rail junction of Petersburg. Siege lines wrapped around Petersburg on the south. With the rest of the Army of the Potomac, Miles and his men fortified positions for a long siege.

  In July Pennsylvania coal miners in General Burnside’s Ninth Corps conceived a plan of tunneling under the Confederate lines and blowing them up. While the digging progressed, Hancock joined his corps with others to stage a diversion north of the James River. At Deep Bottom on July 27 the Union forces attacked Confederate entrenchments. As had become customary, Miles’s brigade took the lead. The assault failed but achieved the intended diversionary effect.

  On July 30, from their positions on the Petersburg line, Miles and his men observed the huge explosion that blew up part of the Confederate defenses and created a deep crater. Union troops rushed into the crater and became disorganized. Confederates rallied on the rim and swept the bottom with heavy rifle fire, turning the Battle of the Crater into a deadly fiasco. Miles’s brigade played no part in this battle, but the general sat on a board to fix blame for the disaster.

  On August 14 Hancock launched another effort at Deep Bottom. It failed, and Miles’s brigade suffered 274 casualties in the fruitless attack.

  On August 17 General Barlow, suffering from exhaustion and wounds received at Antietam and Gettysburg, relinquished command of his division to Brigadier General Miles and returned to his New York home for recuperation. Burdened by a large infusion of inexperienced recruits, Miles’s division did little to distinguish itself in occasional skirmishes that followed second Deep Bottom. Nonetheless, his division participated in the Battle of Reim’s Station on August 25, part of an operation to tear up a railroad link essential to the Confederates in Petersburg. When a furious Southern attack on Miles’s position punctured his lines, only the vigorous efforts of Hancock and Miles rallied enough troops to plug the gap. Despite the poor performance of the Second Corps, Miles was brevetted major general of volunteers for Reim’s Station.

  The final campaign of the Army of the Potomac opened in spring 1865 with Grant’s attempt to breech the Petersburg defenses. Hancock had departed the Second Corps, which was now commanded by Major General Andrew J. Humphreys. Miles’s First Division fought in the Battle of Five Forks, on April 1–2, which led to General Lee’s evacuation of Petersburg. On the second day Miles threw his division at the critical rail junction of Sutherland’s Station. Twice the division was repulsed, but the third attack overwhelmed the defenders and earned Miles further distinction and commendation from both Generals Meade and Grant.

  The First Division played a prominent part in the series of battles that traced the flight of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia up the Appomattox River to the denouement at Appomattox Courthouse.

  The young Boston crockery clerk emerged from the Civil War as an outstanding professional soldier. Miles quickly acquired the skills and insights that made him a military success. Brave and prudent under fire, bold in executing battlefield maneuvers, solicitous for the welfare of his men, he evolved into an ideal combat commander. His exploits gained the acclamation of superiors from Generals Barlow through Hancock, Meade, Humphreys, and finally Grant. The army recognized his merit the following October with appointment as major general of volunteers. By then he had resolved to make the army his career.2

  General Miles led his division in the march back to Washington but was not permitted to lead it in the grand parade up Pennsylvania Avenue on May 24. Five days earlier he had been called to report at once to General Grant’s headquarters. The general-in-chief informed him that he had been selected to command the Military District of Fort Monroe, Virginia, and that he should depart at once. The assignment, however, was far more than a district command. Miles was also to serve as Jefferson Davis’s jailer. The Confederate president had been seized on May 10 and now was aboard a steamer anchored off the fort awaiting transfer to his imprisonment. Miles conducted him and a former Southern senator to their cell, one of the fort’s gun casements.

  The task was difficult and controversial. Davis and later his wife hated Miles and stirred up as much opposition as possible. The War Department, fearing an escape attempt but concerned for Davis’s health, bombarded Miles with contradictory instructions. Newspapers ran any condemnations they could find. For fifteen months Miles endured the demands and disputes of the position. He also worried about his future, imploring Secretary Stanton to find him a place suitable for his rank.

  The Army Act of July 28, 1866, brought Miles appointment to the Regular Army. With testimonials from Generals Howard, Hancock, Sheridan, and Meade, he received the colonelcy of the Fortieth Infantry. It was a black regiment, yet to be recruited, and represented a lower rank than Miles believed he deserved.

  Miles and his new regiment drew assignment to Reconstruction duty in North Carolina. It proved as contentious as his watch over Jefferson Davis and lasted longer, nearly three years. As a subordinate in General Howard’s Freedmen’s Bureau, Miles had to deal with North Carolina politicians, the Ku Klux Klan, irate white Southerners, and the bureaucracy of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He survived an angry clash with General Meade and otherwise performed his duty satisfactorily. He also found time to indulge what would become a lifetime habit—seeking support from influential politicians and army officers. Frequent trips to Washington abetted this effort. During one such stay in 1867, he fell in love with Mary Sherman, daughter of a federal judge and niece of Senator John Sherman and General William T. Sherman. Married on June 30, 1868, Miles and his wife exploited the family relationship in an effort to advance his military ambitions throughout his career. Sherman abhorred influence peddling, but that failed to deter his niece’s husband. Mile’s thirst for preferment sustained years of labor, most of which succee
ded only in exasperating the general.

  DEPARTMENT OF THE PLATTE

  On March 4, 1869, Ulysses S. Grant took the oath of president. The day before, Congress had cut the size of the Regular Army from 54,000 to 37,313. The Fortieth Infantry was one of the casualties. The army reduction doomed Miles’s efforts to win a brigadier’s star, but he managed to be transferred to Kansas as colonel of the Fifth Infantry. Most of the balance of his career would center on the West and its Indians. Nothing in his eastern background prepared him for the West, but he adapted quickly and soon amassed a record in Indian warfare overshadowing his Civil War record.

  Miles and his regiment were assigned to the Department of the Platte. His superior at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was Brigadier General John Pope. Miles rarely enjoyed amicable relations with any superior, and Pope proved no exception.

  Like other regiments posted to the West, the Fifth’s companies were scattered among several posts in Kansas to guard the overland emigrant trails and the railroads. Miles established regimental headquarters at Fort Hays, where he became close friends with another Civil War general, Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer of the Seventh Cavalry. They remained friends for the years remaining to the cavalryman. However, Miles moved his headquarters to the more comfortable Fort Harker and then in 1871 to the even more comfortable Fort Leavenworth. Mary quickly adapted to role of the regimental commander’s wife and continued to use her family connections to further her husband’s career.

  For the next three years routine assignments, combined with incessant politicking, occupied Miles. General Sherman in particular felt the brunt of his quests for higher or more active commands. At length, the Red River War of 1874–75 afforded Miles his first opportunity for an Indian campaign.

  The Kiowas and Comanches occupied the Fort Sill Reservation, the Cheyennes and Arapahos the Darlington Reservation on the north. The Kiowas and Comanches continued their long tradition of raiding south into Texas, while the Cheyennes and Arapahos less frequently, but under strong provocation, raided into Kansas. Under President Grant’s “Peace Policy,” the reservations were sacrosanct. The army was barred from pursuing raiders into them.