Air University Review, May-June 1969
Of all the civilized states of Christendom, we are perhaps the least military, though not behind the foremost as a warlike one.
Dennis Hart Mahan
Marcus Cunliffe’s Soldiers and Civilians* can be regarded as an extended commentary upon this well-known quotation from the elder Mahan, tending to confirm the accuracy of Mahan’s perception of America. Cunliffe believes that in spite of popular suspicion of anything professionally military, a martial spirit was a strong force in early American life. Whether an observation similar to Mahan’s would be as true of America after the Civil War is an interesting speculation which Cunliffe’s book suggests but does not answer, since its analysis for the most part stops short at 1865.
The book itself has much of the early nineteenth century about it: it is a very large, very diffuse history, literary and impressionistic rather than scientific and rigorously argued in its approach. Perhaps these qualities also reflect the British origin and approach of its author. If so, although in part they are shortcomings, they also suggest one of the book’s principal virtues. Somehow Cunliffe’s outsider perspective gives cogency to his arguments even when otherwise they are more intuitive and less precise than we might want them to be. He can say things about us that we would not trust if we said them about ourselves. For an American to emphasize the distinctly military qualities of American society as much as he does would seem either too much a boast or too much a mea culpa, depending on the point of view. But explored by a discriminatingly observant foreigner, the Strong military tendencies of early America seem assuredly real.
Diffuse, sprawling, and meandering the book certainly is. Its loose, rambling organization is so conspicuous a quality—and so likely to infuriate some readers—that it seems best to mention and dispose of the point here at the beginning. To cite a notable example, about two-thirds of the way through his discussion of the national martial spirit Cunliffe interrupts himself to engage in a 50-page debate with historians such as Willard Thorp (A Southern Reader), Rollin G. Osterweis (Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South), and John Hope Franklin (The Militant South, 1800-1861), who have claimed there existed a distinctively Southern military tradition. The impatient reader will go through much of this chapter wishing that Cunliffe had printed it as a separate article in some such appropriate organ as the Journal of Southern History and that he would return to the job at hand, exploring the national martial spirit. Only by the exercise of persistence and patience can the reader come to acknowledge that the apparent digression is not so much a digression after all; that what Cunliffe is saying is that John Hope Franklin and the rest are correct in asserting there was a strongly militant tradition in the pre-Civil War South but that they are wrong in believing that the South was unique in that regard. All pre-Civil War America, says Cunliffe, possessed a strongly militant tradition.
More precisely, Cunliffe finds in pre-Civil War America three principal approaches to issues of war, peace, and the military. These are the approaches of the antimilitarist; of the antiprofessional, who shared the historic distrust of standing armies but nonetheless was often warlike or militant; and of the professional military man. These three approaches were embodied in three stereotypical figures of American history: the Quaker, the Rifleman, and the Chevalier. The Quaker “represents one enduring aspect of the American outlook. He stands for simplicity, shrewdness, ingenuity, diligence, decency, piety. A good citizen, he is nevertheless indifferent to the state and resists its demands—especially the demand that he shoulder a musket in its service.” The Rifleman is a still more representative American: associated with the individualism of the frontier, undisciplined, so democratic and equalitarian that he is reluctant to obey anybody, impatient of long-term military service but certainly often a warlike figure-the Virginian who marched with Braddock, the Massachusetts Minuteman of 1775, the Kentuckian or Tennessean who fought with Jackson at New Orleans (a rifleman literally as well as archetypically), the soldier of Jeff Davis’s Mississippi Rifles in the Mexican War, Johnny Reb and Billy Yank of the 1860s. At the same time, notwithstanding the traditional American dislike of standing armies, the Chevalier, the lifelong soldier, also became a prominent figure of the nineteenth century American scene, epitomized by such soldiers as Stephen Watts Keamy and Philip Keamy in the North and Robert E. Lee in the South.
Cunliffe suggests that virtually all Americans before the Civil War could be more or less fairly represented by one of the three figures—the Quaker, the Rifleman, or the Chevalier—and, significantly, that all three types embody a fascination for war and the military. With the Quaker, the fascination to be sure is of a negative type, but it is fascination nevertheless, hardly mere indifference—Cunlife cites the war poems of the Quakerish Walt Whitman. Cunliffe argues that furthermore American pacifism has not been so unambiguously pacifist as it might like to seem. He points to Charles Sumner’s famous pacifist oration “The True Grandeur of Nations,” quotes the passage in which Sumner poured scorn upon the so-called “honor” of the Chevalier Bayard—Sumner lingering all too lovingly over the warlike details—and then reminds the reader that Sumner had once sought a nomination to West Point. Cunliffe also recalls the passage in Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore in which he suggested the ambiguity of young Abraham Lincoln, in a speech of 1838 asking how men of “ambition and talents” could be content with mere elective office. Lincoln ostensibly was inveighing against military kinds of ambition, but he did so with a curious relish that suggests his casting himself in the very role he deplored:
What! think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored . . . . It thirsts and burns for distinction . . . . Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up amongst us?
Lincoln, of course, did go on to become, though not a Napoleon, nevertheless a great war President, even as more explicitly pacifist Americans went on to take up the sword during the war in which Lincoln commanded.
While thus suggesting that the American antimilitary tradition was not unequivocally unwarlike and unmilitary after all, Cunliffe also argues that much less were the two other American approaches to war, the antiprofessional and the professional, so opposed to each other as they have sometimes seemed. Or perhaps more accurately, he argues that they did not have to oppose each other so much as they sometimes came to do.
Here, interestingly, Cunliffe pursues his argument by taking up the cudgels for Alden Partridge against Sylvanus Thayer. Hardly anything in a book on American military history could be more surprising. Of these two early superintendents of West Point who became such bitter enemies, Partridge grew so obviously paranoid and so badly deteriorated into a mere pest, while Thayer became so securely enshrined as “Father of the Military Academy” and patron of all that is best in the American professional military tradition, that to reopen the case for Partridge against Thayer seems bizarre and quixotic. Yet Cunliffe manages at least to show that there were two sides to the famous Partridge-Thayer argument. Thayer, for one thing, was an autocrat, who while accomplishing much that was good at West Point also gave it an atmosphere combining some of the worst features of a nineteenth century English boarding school and a monastery. Sound military discipline is one thing while arbitrary tyranny is another, and Cunliffe shows that Thayer often verged towards the latter. More than that, Thayer’s autocratic methods were symptomatic of his view of the military profession as a caste set rigidly and exclusively apart. Partridge, on the other hand, wrongheaded though he often was, retained much of Thomas Jefferson’s original and noble, albeit vague, notion of West Point as becoming a center for the dissemination of military knowledge not merely through a small regular army but throughout the nation.
The military knowledge of the early nineteenth century, as Cunliffe stresses, was not extremely arcane. If a measure of that military knowledge could have been disseminated widely, as Jefferson and Partridge wanted to do, among a population whose abiding military interests and inclinations are the theme of Cunliffe’s book, then the potential for enhancement of American military power should have been great.
The volunteer militia companies of early America were the principal keepers of the popular martial spirit before the Civil War. Cunliffe, unlike Emory Upton and other critics of popular military institutions before and since, does not confuse the volunteer companies with the unorganized militia—the armed masses which were supposed to exist under ancient obligations of universal military service and the Militia Act of 1792 but which actually consisted of little more than muster rolls. Instead, Cunliffe demonstrates that notwithstanding an occasional politician’s ritualistic apostrophes to the tradition of Lexington and Concord, the unorganized militia were consistently regarded as a joke from the 1790s onward, not only by professional soldiers but by almost everybody. Cunliffe recognizes that the volunteer militia companies were also often funny. They were ridiculously romantic, as he amply establishes by printing a wealth of contemporary sheet-music covers and verses about them. “There is a thread of make -believe running through the whole affair. The huge warriors, bold as brass, seem only halfsize when they are in their drab usual clothes. The people gazing on them from the sidewalk are never quite sure whether to cheer or to guffaw.”
Yet in the years before the Civil War, Cunliffe argues, the Regular Army was not so different from the volunteer militia companies. There was plenty of romantic posturing among the American professional soldiers of the early nineteenth century as well as among the volunteer militia, as reference to the careers of such professionals as Winfield Scott and P. G. T. Beauregard so clearly demonstrates. If much of the activity of the volunteer militia companies was political rather than military, Cunliffe shows that the same was true of the officers of the contemporary Regular Army. And because the professionals of the day remained “insufferably” arrogant in their attitudes towards any military enthusiasms or pretensions not sanctioned by West Point, they committed a more grievous error than any of which the volunteers were guilty: they blinded themselves to the very foundation of America’s potential military strength and deprived themselves of the full utilization of that strength. The reservoir of potential American military strength lay in the martial spirit embodied in the volunteer militia companies. Despite romanticism, posturing, and undoubted amateurishness, the volunteer militia companies represented the warlike quality referred to by Dennis Mahan, a quality which at last asserted itself with overwhelming force in the Civil War. In that war the amateur soldiers showed an impressive military character, not only bravery and endurance but even admirable military leadership:
If a number of volunteer generals displayed mediocre talent, so did the majority of West Pointers, especially those who had hung on in the regular army on obscure or purely technological assignments. Volunteer or regular, the problem was to find men who would fight, and who could control large-scale operations. The capacity of an officer to profit from experience was the vital factor. There was no arcane body of doctrine revealed only to regulars as the reward of a lifetime of study. As [the volunteer Major General Jacob D.] Cox remarked, the principles of war were in essence so brief and simple that they could be printed on the back of a visiting card.
To The Extent that Cunliffe’s diffuse book presents a central argument, the heart of it is this: that contrary to many historical impressions, a martial spirit permeated American society before the Civil War, expressing itself especially in the volunteer companies though of course also in the Regular Army, and that despite their posturing the volunteer companies had real military worth and could have had more if they had been better used.
Of course, the art of war has become a lot more complex in our day than it was in 1865, and Cox’s remark about the principles of war recalls us to the question of the book’s relevance to subsequent American history and to the present. Even if one acknowledges that a popular martial spirit might retain military utility despite the growing complexities of war, he must wonder how much the “martial” America which Cunliffe describes was a phenomenon of the preindustrial age, declining with the rise of industry about the same time the Civil War was ending. After the Civil War, enlistments in the National Guard failed to keep pace with the growth of population. Other evidence, less tangible than statistics, also suggests that the organized militia never again commanded quite the enthusiasm stirred by many of the volunteer companies before the Civil War.
Perhaps the urban, industrial age simply provided too many competing claims upon the time and energy that once might have gone into the volunteer companies. Cunliffe notes that the pre-Civil War companies expressed local and regional loyalties which later attached themselves to organized athletic competition. On a deeper level, perhaps the disciplines of the new industrial world were incompatible with perpetuating the kind of martial spirit displayed by the hunters of Kentucky or even Elmer Ellsworth’s Zouaves. Cunliffe does touch upon the post-Civil War era enough to suggest that American society became “possibly even more civilian in outlook than before.” But a book carrying Cunliffe’s study into the post-1865 permutations of the martial spirit would now seem something we should have.
Especially it would seem so because, for all the diffuseness of his book, Cunliffe has taken the topic to the end of 1865 so ably, with imaginative use of both well-known sources and neglected ones. At the head of his bibliography he writes that “Fresh vitality has been imparted to the study of military affairs by such scholars as . . . [who] have demonstrated that it might be used to shed light upon American society as a whole.” Certainly Cunliffe himself has admirably carried forward the work of giving fresh vitality to American military history. And however much the years following 1865 may have modified the martial spirit, his book valuably calls attention to a principle that cannot be reiterated too often: If the American military would serve their country to the best of their ability, they must know and understand the country as well as they can. In the years studied by Cunliffe, the professional military became so exclusive in their dedication to themselves as a professional caste that they failed to know and understand the society they served, and their service was hampered accordingly; they failed to exploit as they might have the resources of the popular martial spirit. After the years covered by Cunliffe’s study, Emory Upton, extending the attitudes which Sylvanus Thayer had cultivated, perpetuated the belief that military virtues were absent and military potential limited in American civil society. Let us hope that in this regard, at least, the era of American military history which Cunliffe describes is an era that is wholly past.
All through the reading of Cunliffe’s book, the current debate over the merits of an all volunteer army as a substitute for selective service lay in the back of my thoughts. All that I have said about Cunliffe’s stopping short in 1865 suggests my certainty that circumstances today differ so much from those of the nineteenth century that it would be foolish to attempt to find in Cunliffe’s pages any very explicit guidance for present-day military policy. But in reading Cunliffe I could not help reflecting on the implications for the present debate about selective service that lie in his description of the nineteenth century volunteer army’s growing separation from the military inclinations of the American population at large. In the population at large, Cunliffe is saying, there resided powerful martial impulses that could greatly have enhanced American military strength-yet the nineteenth century volunteer army was so constituted that it was less and less able to tap those impulses, or even to recognize them. The all-volunteer Regular Army was incapable of drawing upon the full military potential of the nation. No one would claim that in our very different circumstances today such a condition would again inevitably follow from a modem all-volunteer army. But I suggest that nineteenth century American military history is at least relevant enough that those involved in the current debate would do well to read and ponder Cunliffe’s history as well as the contemporary polemics.
Temple University
* Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians: The Martial Spirit in America, 1775-1865 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968, $12.50), 499 pp.
Dr. Russell F. Weigley (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is Professor of History and former Chairman of the department, Temple University. He formerly taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel Institute of Technology, and as visitor at Haverford and Albright Colleges. He was visiting professor at Dartmouth College, 1967-68. He has been Trustee of the American Military Institute and an editorial advisor of Military Affairs. His publications include Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of M. C. Meigs (1959), Towards an American Army: Military Thought from Washington to Marshall (1962), History of the United States Army (1967), as well as articles in Encyclopedia Britannica and in historical journals. Professor Weigley is vice-president of the Pennsylvania Historical Association and was editor of its quarterly, Pennsylvania History, 1962-67.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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