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"All Agree That we Must Keep a Peace Establishment"
by Cliopatria
Adding to my recent post on the topic, here's a glorious example of the degree to which, in the early republic, rhetorical opposition to the idea of a standing army didn't actually add up to opposition to the thing itself.
Speaking on Friday, February 2, 1816, in the House of Representatives, Richard Johnson of Kentucky warned that a standing army"would be, in time of peace, inconsistent with the Constitution and our free institutions." Looking to history and to contemporary Europe, Johnson offered examples of standing armies that had destroyed the freedom of their countrymen."A standing army is dangerous to liberty," he argued; it had been so in ancient Rome, and the standing army"has been the most powerful instrument in the hands of power and usurpation" in the present day."All the governments of Europe and all the tyrants of the day are supported by this means," he concluded.
Then, in nearly the same breath, Johnson gave it all back without appearing to notice:
"What has been said does not presuppose that we can dispense with all of our forces. All agree that we must keep a Peace Establishment, a small force, commensurate with certain objects and views, which will be mentioned."
Focusing on the modesty of his proposal, Johnson proposed more specifically what that"small force" might look like, offering a partial list of places to be garrisoned by the regular army:"Castine, Wicasset, Portland, Portsmouth, Boston, New Bedford, Newport, New London, New York, Fort Mifflin, Fort McHenry, Fort Washington, Norfolk, Fort Johnson, in North Carolina, Charleston, Savannah, Fort Hawkins, Mobile, Fort St. Philippe, New Orleans, Natchez, St. Louis, Fort Clark, Fort Wayne, Chicago, Greenbay, Mackinac, Detroit, Fort Niagara, Sackett's Harbor, Plattsburg, Greenbush, and others about to be erected in such places as the late war has pointed out." He proposed to post a hundred men in each place, concluding that the army would then"have for this object alone a demand for five thousand."
That's a hundred men in each garrison, for a total of five thousand men. In other words, fifty garrisons scattered around the country. But not, mind you, a standing army.
It gets better, though, because these small garrisons would have limited power. Johnson proposed to support them with larger forces concentrated at critical points:"One thousand men should be placed somewhere on the Niagara or Northern frontier; one thousand in some healthy situation in Louisiana or the Mobile; one thousand in the neighborhood of Detroit, and one thousand in some eligible place on the Mississippi."
And Johnson still hadn't gotten around to placing artillerymen on the map -- this is just the infantry.
Fiercely opposed to a standing army, which would destroy liberty, Richard Johnson wanted to station regular troops in no more than fifty-four places, plus the artillery garrisons, with no more than four large, regional concentrations of force. And all agreed, he concluded, that the nation must keep this tiny little army in place.
This is what opponents of the standing army sounded like.
You're accusing me of conjecture. I am telling you explicitly that I am engaged in conjecture. Go look at the other comments to this post, and the prior post to which it refers, and you'll notice that commenters 1.) offer reading lists for an ongoing project, and 2.) say that they'll be interested in seeing how future posts on the topic develop. Somehow, everybody else noticed my declared purpose: "I hope to suggest answers to these questions in the next few weeks."
You're aggressively obtuse on this point, but again, a blog is not a book. It is not a medium for "here are the conclusions to my years of research"; it's a medium for, "here are some things I'm thinking about -- what do you think?" It's a discussion, not a lecture.
You're standing in a forum for conjecture, shouting, "Aha! This is merely conjecture!"
Yeah, okay.
Chris Bray -
11/21/2008
Put it this way: I think the notional opponents of the standing army took the position that I fiercely oppose the very existence of this thing, so I propose that we have somewhat less of it. I would love to see evidence of some serious efforts in the early republic to actually eliminate the standing army.
Chris Bray -
11/21/2008
The warmongering statists and the opponents of the warmongering statists said largely the same things and voted largely the same way. The dramatic anti-standing army event was that the army was reduced by minor amounts, but left in place. Richard Johnson was a warmongering statist who sounded just like everybody else in his loud opposition to militarism and statism.
And effort to -- your words -- "reduce the size of the army" first assumes that the army is to remain. It proceeds from an acceptance of the principle, then introduces an argument about how far the principle should carried.
"Once a state is in place, it becomes the center of gravity for statists." The tragedy is that it becomes the center of gravity for everyone. I oppose armed institutions of the state, so let's only have a little bit. Once the notional opponents of the standing army made the sie of the standing army their topic, the discussion was over.
Tad Toll -
11/21/2008
My comment is that you make a sweeping conclusion based on conjecture and a thin set of evidence. Blog or book is immaterial.
Have you given any thought to the notion that the real opponents of a standing army were likely minding their own business, running their farms, raising their children, and not speaking on a Friday in the House of Representatives?
I call bullshit on your assertion that Richard Johnson is in any way representative of "what opponents of the standing army sounded like." It hardly takes any effort to learn that Richard Johnson is a glorious example of a war mongering statist. For God's sake, Chris, he was a charter member of the 12th Congress "War Hawkes" that favored starting a war with Britain in 1812.
Why not instead seek the words of his contemporary, John Randolf, who opposed Johnson and Clay?
In House debate on January 10, 1800, defending a resolution to reduce the size of the army, Randolf said, "I say that the people of the United States out not to depend for their safety on the soldiers enlisted under the laws . . . , and that standing, or mercenary armies, were inconsistent with the spirit of our Constitution, or the genius of a free people." There was no "other shoe" for him, Chris. Randolf is the fair representative of what opponents to a standing army sounded like. He stuck by it, and opposed Johnson's and Clay's effort to make war in 1812, and he coined the term "War Hawk" to describe them! How is it you missed this in your pursuit of your thesis?
You say, ". . . anti-standing army ideology had remarkably little real effect on the development of American military institutions."
I say, the anti-standing army ideology in republican Rome had little effect on the development of imperial Roman military institutions.
Nothing new here, Chris.
Once a state is in place, it becomes the center of gravity for statists. And, just as we are witnessing today, those who proclaim most loudly their devotion to a virtuous idea are likely engaged most assuredly in the destruction of it.
Chris Bray -
11/21/2008
Non-criticism, Tad. Your comment is that I haven't performed a comprehensive historiographic intervention in a blog post. My answer, and bless your little heart, is that no shit, Sherlock. Blog posts offer short running commentary -- like this one, which starts by saying explicitly that it offers another example of something already discussed earlier in another post. Saying that my short post offering a single example of something is only a short post offering a single example of something? What am I supposed to say to that?
Three years ago, somebody posted an angry comment denouncing one of my posts for not being properly footnoted for scholarly work. I file your comment in the same round file.
Tad Toll -
11/21/2008
Non-answer, Chris.
Andrew D. Todd -
11/20/2008
Of course, one has to make a distinction between coastal forts, which were for defense against the British Navy, and forts on the frontier.
The obvious precedent for the American Frontier was England's dealings with the "Celtic Fringe," in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. England spent centuries subjugating the farther and wilder Celts. It built forts and military roads, employed scorched-earth tactics, all the usual things, and repeated the process a few times, so that when John Smith arrived in Virginia, there was already a settled policy to apply. By the end of the fifteenth century, Wales had been pacified, but the Gaelic-speaking fringes of Scotland and Ireland remained in a savage state until the end of the eighteenth century.
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Donald Harman Akenson, God's Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster, 1992
Parallel instances of frontier culture. In 1608, the definitive "plantation," or settlement, of Lowland Scots in Ulster took place. There had been a whole series of previous attempts at settlement, going back to the 1150's, mostly around Dublin, but these had either gone native, or been wiped out, or been contained in the Dublin area.
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John Prebble, Culloden, 1967
In 1745, the exiled Stuart pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, returned from France with about a thousand men, drawn from the "wild geese," the exiled Catholic Irish (and Scottish) troops serving in the French army. He managed to raise several thousand Scots Highlanders, especially McDonalds, and they penetrated as far south as Derby in central England, before they could be contained. With equal rapidity, they fell back to Culloden Moor, outside of Inverness, where they were decisively defeated. The book covers not just the battle, but also the campaign of counterinsurgency which followed.
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Richard Lomas, County of Conflict: Northumberland From Conquest to Civil War.
Describes the whole culture of border-reiving which ensured when two adjoining kingdoms adopted the principle of "my frontiersmen, right or wrong."
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Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, 1962
The Irish Potato Famine, 1845-49, which eventually produced not only mass emigration, but also a highly ineffectual rebellion of half-starved men.
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Roger Chavire, _A Short History of Ireland_, 1956.
J. D. Mackie, A History of Scotland, 1964.
General background.
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Frank O'Connor, _A Book of Ireland_, 1959.
A different kind of background. A smorgasbrod of everything from eight century epics to modern sociology, and everything in between.
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Thomas Flanagan, _The Year of the French_, 1979.
A modern historical novel, but well-regarded, and I understand the author put in his time at the Irish National Library. In 1798, the French general Humbert and a thousand French troops came to the west of Ireland, the Gaelic-speaking area, and formed nucleus for a native uprising, along with elements of Theobald Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen. This rising eventually failed.
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Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy, 1817.
______, The Heart of Midlothian, 1818.
Scott was born in 1771, so he was at about two generations remove of hearsay from the events, about the same distance that Margaret Mitchel (Gone With The Wind) was from the Civil War, or Tomasi de Lampedusa (_The Leopard_) from the unification of Italy. Rob Roy McGregor was the chief of Clan McGregor, the most notorious clan in the Scottish Highlands. They happened to occupy the hills above Glasgow, and consequently, the normal savage cattle-raiding extended into civilized country, and came up against civilized notions of private property. The clan was outlawed early and often.
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Chris Bray -
11/20/2008
Tad,
Blog posts are not books.
Tad Toll -
11/20/2008
"This is what opponents of the standing army sounded like."
That is what one person sounded like.
Is the historical point to be drawn from your three posts that people have a tendency to speak from both sides of their mouths?
Chris Bray -
11/19/2008
More about this later, but a quick thought: It seems to me that the transnational comparisons that would be most valid, at least w/r/t Indian wars, would focus on settler colonialism and European armies that fought native people. The comparisons that have most interested me -- not that I'm prepared to make them, yet -- would be something like the Dutch in the East Indies, or Europeans in Africa. England wasn't pushing out settlers into contiguous land; Americans were. Thoughts?
Andrew D. Todd -
11/18/2008
With regard to your previous post, the contemporary European term for British military policy was "Perfide Albion." The idea was that England used its small army, delivered by the formidable British Navy, and large sums of money from its great trading empire, to start land wars which other people were expected to fight, and that the British Navy rendered England impregnable to appropriate retaliation. About half of the British Army was off defending the empire, and could not be brought back to Europe in a reasonable period of time. What England could come up with on short notice was ten or twenty thousand men. By comparison, Napoleon had invaded Russia in 1812 with half a million men. His comparatively low numbers at Waterloo in 1815 reflected, among other things, the fact that he had not had the time to finish remobilizing France.
However, in round numbers, the British military was about ten times larger, per capita, than the American military.
I suggest that you have to talk about dangerousness at two levels. Bonaparte's "18th Brumaire" is the archetypal coup d' etat. In the late 1790's, faced with the need to fight the combined forces of Prussia, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Britain, and sometimes, Spain (in effect, all of Europe), the more or less constitutional government of France (the Directorate) created a military machine which they could not control. Eventually, one of the more successful generals made himself dictator, and then, emperor.
Now, what happened in England was quite different. There was never any danger of a military takeover. The two naval mutinies, The Nore and Spithead, were in essence industrial strikes. In the Spithead petition, the mutineers emphasized that they were King George's loyal subjects, and that they were only too happy to go and fight the French, but they had certain grievances pertaining to their pay and their food (the usual company store system), etc. An obvious parallel in our own time is the petition produced during the Attica Prison Riot.
The system of government in England was a lot less democratic than it was in America (property qualifications, "rotten boroughs," etc.), and the military was used to suppress popular disorders. There were certain large classes of crimes, which a major portion of the population did not accept as crimes. These tended to consist of infringing on Royal revenue, or on certain large property claims. Smuggling (sometimes called "free-trading") was one such crime, because it impaired the customs revenue. Unauthorized gathering up of flotsam from beaches was also a crime. Poaching was another crime, since it was defined in such a way as to make it illegal for a small farmer to do anything about the rabbit which was raiding his garden. A nobleman might own rabbit warrens which effectively lived off of the surrounding farms. And then there were the Tyburn Riots. The populace accepted that thieves should be hanged, but it did not accept that they should be dissected, and fighting ensured over the corporation of surgeons' attempts to claim the bodies. Similarly, when factories got big enough to generate industrial strikes, those were illegal. There were "frame breaking riots" (Ludditism) in which traditional craftsmen destroyed industrial machines which threatened their livelihood. In the big cities, the general level of poverty occasionally yielded events similar to a 1960's race riot, eg. the Gordon Riots in London in1780. The military was called out fairly often to protect the economic interests of, at most, the top ten percent of the population against the bottom fifty percent.
Most of this kind of thing did not carry over to the United States, the "Anti-Patroon" riots in New York being an exception.
Also, I don't know if you will have read Edward Luttwak's Coup d'Etat. He discusses things like where particular units are, whether or not they have the necessary transport to intervene, etc. Applying that to eighteenth century England, I don't have exact figures at hand, but there must have been something like five thousand troops in the London area, starting with the Brigade of Guards. Troops were doing very political things like arresting Members of Parliament.
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Edward Luttwak, _Coup d' Etat, A Practical Handbook_, 1968
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Henry Christman, _Tin Horns and Calico: An Episode in the Emergence of American Democracy_, 1945. A treatment of the Anti-Patroon riots.
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Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E.P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, _Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England_, 1975. A collection of essays dealing with Tyburn Riots, Sussex Smugglers, Cornish Wreckers, Staffordshire Poachers.
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A paper on the military involvement in the Detroit Riots in 1967
http://www.usafa.edu/isme/JSCOPE01/Rauch01.html
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A website with basic order of battle information for Waterloo and related battles.
http://www.britishbattles.com/waterloo/waterloo-june-1815.htm
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This site seems to be down or gone, but it is worth going to the internet archive to retrieve files, because it has detailed year-by-year information about each regiment's whereabouts.
http://www.regiments.org/
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See also, Cecil Woodham-Smith, _The Reason Why_. This book is at one level about the Crimean War, but it is about the Crimean War as the last gasp of Wellington's army. The commanders were the geriatric survivors of Wellington's staff, and the social arrangements had remained unchanged. Woodham-Smith's biography of Florence Nightingale is in a sense about the new British Army, the one which was waiting to emerge.
Chris Bray -
11/18/2008
Yep.
Les Baitzer -
11/18/2008
As others have mentioned, I too am looking forward to your presentation here, Mr. Bray. Forgive me if I'm jumping the gun, but do you plan to address the existence of State Militia forces during this period in the scope of your comments?
