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CHAPTER 1
Of Arms and Men, Bad Roads and Short Rations
This is no field for a military man above the rank of a Colonel of Riflemen.
— General Frederick P. Robinson
THE UNITED STATES SWAGGERED INTO the War of 1812 like a Kansas farm boy entering his first saloon. And, like that same innocent, wretchedly gagging down his first drink, the new nation was totally unprepared for the raw impact of all-out war.
Beginning with President Thomas Jefferson's inauguration in 1801, the armed forces of the United States had been the object of not-so-benign neglect. Jefferson and the leading figures of his Republican party — from scholarly James Madison to poker-playing Henry Clay — were gentlemen and patriots, willing to expend their time and fortunes in the service of the United States. They were not pacifists: they would squelch the Barbary pirate states, commandeer West Florida from a prostrate Spain in 1810, and plan to ingest the rest of Florida and as much of Canada as possible. But they were lawyers, scholars, and politicians — men of words and theories, and too often impractical. Very few had served in the Revolution, and those few had learned little from that service. The rest were blissfully ignorant of everything military, and thoroughly content with their ignorance. Also, most of them were careless, sloven administrators.
Jefferson found an Army of approximately 4,000 officers and men; he promptly cut it to 3,200, leaving two regiments of infantry, one of "artillerists," and a "corps of engineers" consisting of seven officers and ten cadets. This last was to be stationed at West Point "and shall constitute a military academy." Almost a third of the Army's officers were dismissed; the one general retained was James Wilkinson, confidence man in uniform and traitor extraordinaire, who called himself "a scientific soldier."
Having so reduced the Army, Jefferson paid little attention to what remained of it except to employ it on various explorations. Pay remained low, medical supplies ran short, rations and clothing frequently were skimpy. By 1807 the Army's strength had fallen below 2,400 men. When the Leopard-Chesapeake incident in June that year caused an explosion of anti-British sentiment, Jefferson did secure authorization from Congress for five new regiments of infantry and one each of riflemen, light dragoons, and light artillery to serve for five years, unless sooner released by Congress. More money was appropriated for coastal defenses, and an annual appropriation of $200,000 was authorized for distribution among the states to arm and equip their militia.
Recruiting these additional regiments went slowly. By 1812 the Army could muster only some 6,750 men out of an intended 10,000. Jefferson and his successor Madison took little interest in them, except to make certain that they were officered by deserving Republicans. On the whole, these appointees deserved the famous condemnation that Winfield Scott (one of them, until trouble brought out his basic good sense) loosed upon them: "swaggerers, dependents, decayed gentlemen and others fit for nothing else" who always turned out to be utterly "unfit for any military purpose whatever." Everything else was done equally on the cheap — in part because Abraham Gallatin, secretary of the treasury and the one truly able cabinet member in both administrations, was insistent on paying off the national debt and did not like soldiers. Though cavalry required the longest time of any arm to train and equip, the light dragoon regiment was never completely organized and had to serve dismounted as light infantry. The Regiment of Light Artillery did not get a lieutenant colonel until 1811, or a colonel until 1812; meanwhile — like the Regiment of Artillerists — it too served as infantry.
Jefferson's secretary of war was Henry Dearborn, who had fought his way up to colonel during the Revolution by good and gallant service. Since then he had turned Republican politician, a somewhat rare thing in his native Massachusetts. He did much to modernize American ordnance, and made an honest effort to get the Light Artillery Regiment properly equipped as horse artillery — succeeding to the extent of one company, which Captain George Peter organized in 1808–9. However, he was too unquestioningly loyal to Jefferson to champion the Army against the President's indifference. Also, he supported the government's cheese-paring stinginess. No post or unit commander could make an expenditure of over $50 without first obtaining Dearborn's consent. An officer in an isolated frontier station, needing medicines and proper food for sick soldiers, could either wait for the several months that such correspondence might require or make the necessary purchases and hunch his shoulders against Dearborn's wrath.
When Madison succeeded Jefferson in 1809, things went from bad to worse. Dearborn's replacement was one William Eustis, who had served faithfully as a surgeon through the Revolution, but now was a miserly detail chaser with neither administrative ability nor foresight. He promptly sold the Army's few horses to save the cost of their feed. When Wilkinson held a large portion of the Army in the pesthole swamp of Terre aux Boeufs, south of New Orleans, from June 9 to September 10, 1809 — while he courted a Creole belle and cheated his men out of their proper rations — Eustis would not allow the purchase of mosquito nets or chickens, eggs, and wine for the hospital. Out of some 2,000 soldiers there, approximately 900 died and 166 deserted; 40 officers died or resigned. The Army's morale was badly dented.
War with England appearing inevitable, Madison called Congress to an early session in November 1811 and recommended some sensible preparations, such as recruiting the Army up to strength. In January, Congress accordingly authorized ten new regiments of infantry, two of artillery, and another of light dragoons. Madison also requested authority to enroll 50,000 "volunteers" (best described as temporary regulars) and $3 million with which to do it; in February, Congress gave him 30,000 and $1 million.
The officers for the new regiments were once again commissioned according to their political purity. With considerable justice they were described as "coarse and ignorant ... . Young men of dissipated habits ... or political brawlers who had recommended themselves to the Government by their noisy patriotism." Few Federalists were accepted, though many were willing to serve, and this had the side effect of dampening the already weak war spirit in New York and New England. Only a few experienced officers could be spared from the older regiments to organize the new ones; in fact, really competent officers were relatively scarce. Repeated reorganizations and reductions since the Revolution had made the Army an unattractive career; aside from a dedicated handful such as Alexander Macomb, Zebulon M. Pike, Edmund P. Gaines, Winfield Scott, and Henry Atkinson, few able men considered it a rewarding profession. Most of the senior officers were relics of the Revolution, often physically unfit but hanging on to their positions because there was no system of retirement for age or length of service. Years of duty in isolated posts had left most of them indifferent, contentious, and ignorant; few had experience in handling a whole regiment or had even seen one.
Once appointed, the new officers had to recruit their units. This proved slow, frustrating work. The new 16th Infantry Regiment was activated in Philadelphia on February 11; recruiting began in May; in September several companies were grouped into a temporary battalion and sent to the northern frontier. The remainder of the regiment was not completely recruited until January, 1813.
The 2d Light Dragoons had a truly woeful history. Their Colonel James Burn was not appointed until April 30; Eustis permitted no recruiting for almost a month, and then initially for only three companies out of twelve. Recruits came in, but no clothing or equipment appeared until September and October; it was December before the regiment (then shivering in northern New York) received all its cloaks. Purchase of horses was ordered in March; it was September before half the regiment was actually mounted — and then many of its mounts proved unfit for service. Eustis proceeded to scatter the regiment from the Ohio River to Vermont; one company simply vanished from the War Department's records.
By 1812 that new military academy at West Point had produced seventy-one graduates, of whom twenty-three had died or resigned. It was a school without definite entrance requirements — until Eustis established some in 1810 — or standard curriculum. Cadets were of all ages and conditions. They learned some artillery and infantry drill and a smattering of military engineering, but this little was far more knowledge than most regular and practically all militia officers possessed. They were useful, but most of them too junior to have much influence. Twelve of them would die in action or of wounds or disease. In 1812 Eustis ordered all military instructors to the field armies. The Academy limped along thereafter, the average cadet being rushed off to the front after a year's hasty instruction by the civilian staff and Captain Alden Partridge, professor of engineering. One of them, Second Lieutenant Thomas Childs, was cited for valor before he was eighteen.
In March, 1812, Congress finally considered the problem of a staff for the Army it had authorized. It refused to enlarge the War Department, where Eustis and eight clerks struggled to handle the Army, Indian affairs, and pensions, but it did authorize a quartermaster general, a commissary general of purchases, and a commissary general of ordnance — and gave them conflicting and overlapping responsibilities. (Some cynic referred to this establishment as "an act for the speedy enrichment of contractors and the periodical starvation of the troops of the United States.") Morgan Lewis, the quartermaster general, was honest but lacked self-confidence and initiative. Somehow Madison did not appoint a commissary general of purchases until two months after war had been declared. His choice, Callender Irvine, was competent but had everything to learn, while Madison's delay left Irvine too little time to provide sufficient winter uniforms. The inspector general was incompetent, the adjutant general a semi-invalid; their mutual inefficiency denied Eustis and Madison reliable information as to the strength of the Army, the progress of recruiting, or even the precise location of some units.
In the matter of appointing general officers, Madison faced the difficult choice of choosing between Revolutionary veterans now in their fifties and sixties, or untrained, untried politicians. None of the veterans had achieved a rank higher than that of colonel, and all were thoroughly out of practice. In the end, Madison achieved a definite consistency: with the possible exception of Brigadier General William H. Harrison, all of his initial appointments were bad.
To further exacerbate this situation, staffs had to be improvised for the field armies that were gradually forming. The necessary adjutant generals, quartermaster generals, inspectors, engineers, and aides-de-camp could be procured only by commissioning civilians or detailing officers from the already weakly officered regiments. In the latter case, generals naturally took the most competent men available, thus draining combat units of their most-needed officers. Moreover, the American staff organization of that period could only be described as primitive by contemporary Napoleonic standards: it included neither equivalents of the modern G-2 (intelligence) or G-3 (plans and operations) officers to assist the commander in planning and conducting operations, nor a chief of staff to coordinate staff activities. The generals were on their own.
The nation's seacoast defenses — in addition to the Navy and Jefferson's pet gunboat flotillas — consisted of a scattering of twenty-four forts and thirty-two batteries stretching from New Orleans to Maine. Work on them had proceeded in an on-again, off-again manner, construction done at great expense in periods of crisis being allowed to fall into decay in less troubled times. Until 1807 Jefferson too had neglected them. After that, work was pushed, especially once Congress realized that such expenditures made excellent pork-barrel items. These funds, however, were allocated more on a political than a strategic basis; the southern states, being Republican strongholds, were therefore much favored.
The design, construction, and siting of these defenses were often dubious. Fort McHenry, outside Baltimore, was one of the strongest, yet had neither a bombproof magazine nor casements. To fully arm and garrison the existing forts would have required some 750 cannon and 12,610 men. As it was, they were held by skeleton garrisons of regular artillery, manning an assortment of new and antiquated guns. In emergencies they supposedly would be reinforced by the local militia.
The militia was a broken reed. Under the Constitution and the Militia Act of 1792, it was to embody every free, white, able-bodied male citizen between eighteen and forty-five. Militiamen were to provide themselves with weapons and basic individual equipment; the states were to organize them into companies, battalions, regiments, brigades, and divisions "if convenient." Each state was to appoint an adjutant general to generally supervise its militia, assisted by as many "brigade-majors" as it had militia brigades. The federal government could summon the militia to active duty to enforce the laws of the United States, suppress insurrection, or repel invasion, but no militiaman could be required to serve the United States for more than three months in any one year. When in federal service, militia were subject to the same regulations as regulars, but if guilty of any military offense, they must be tried by courts-martial composed only of militia officers.
This "standing" militia was increasingly supplemented by units of "volunteer" militia, made up of citizens with an interest in the military art and the time and money to learn something of it. These formed the militia's elite companies of riflemen, light infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Favoring smart (and sometimes amazing) uniforms, they often functioned as both military units and social clubs. They were better trained and disciplined than the standing militia, but they served under the same restrictions. Their cavalry was valuable as couriers and occasionally as scouts but, lacking the sustained, hard training of man and horse that professional cavalrymen required, they would be incapable of knee-to-knee, all-out charges against British infantry and guns. (For lack of proper officers, few regular light dragoons got such training, either.)
During their presidencies, Washington and John Adams had hoped to develop the amorphous standing militia into an effective force, in part by "classifying" it into age groups, and giving the men between eighteen and twenty-five special training so that they would form a ready reserve under federal control. Jefferson continued this effort, as a means of getting rid of the Regular Army. His vision of the future United States saw every citizen trained, armed, and organized to serve as a soldier in time of crisis — and instant-ready to do so. As it had done before, Congress went into instant opposition: there must be no federal interference in the states' control of their respective militias. Some politicians expressed the fear that allowing the federal government to help arm and equip the militia might subtly weaken its pristine democratic virtue.
In 1802 Dearborn called on the states for returns, as required by law, on the strength and organization of their militia. After eighteen months' correspondence, he acquired reports from all states except Maryland, Delaware, and Tennessee. The aggregate was some 525,000 militiamen, more or less organized into units of amazingly varied strength. (The average governor seems to have been quite hazy about the whole business; North Carolina, Maryland, Delaware, and Tennessee did not even have adjutant generals.) To arm this force there was a total of 249,000 weapons, sabers and spontoons included. The New England states were the best prepared; the Carolinas could arm possibly half their men, but Virginia had weapons only for two men out of ten and Georgia had even fewer. Camp equipment was even scarcer than weapons. Over 94 percent of the militia were infantry, 3.8 percent cavalry, only 1.5 percent artillery. Cavalrymen provided their own horses, but most artillery units had none and so had to rent gun teams for their drills.
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Excerpted from "Amateurs, to Arms!"
by .
Copyright © 1991 John R. Elting.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
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