Emory Upton: Misunderstood Reformer by David J. Fitzpatrick (review)

This is the first full scholarly biography of Emory Upton, the US Army's leading intellectual in the immediate post–Civil War period, since the 1960s. David Fitzpatrick has been working on Upton for nearly three decades; he intervenes accurately and decisively in some of the most crucial debates in American military history.

Emory Upton has many specific strengths: its attention to Upton's personal life; his restlessness and ambition; and the details of his time at West Point; his international trips; and the controversies over his writings, particularly his tactical manuals, which were perhaps the most advanced of the day. Although the volume's focus is on Upton the professional reformer, two chapters examine Upton in the Civil War, especially his command of the 121st New York Volunteers and his efforts to win promotion. These experiences were crucial to Upton's two most strongly felt principles about American military force structure: that patronage politics produced a less capable officer corps, thus threatening national security, and that volunteer citizen-soldiers made excellent soldiers, under the right commanders.

Thus, Upton was antipolitical, but he was not anti–citizen-soldier. Fitzpatrick defends him against the scholarly biographers of the 1960s, Russell F. Weigley and the young Stephen Ambrose. Upton was and has been misunderstood by these historians more than by contemporaries. They condemned Upton as anti–citizen-soldier and antidemocratic, the latter in part because of his supposed disdain for citizen-soldiers and generals appointed through political patronage. Weigley and Ambrose argued that the Regular Army Upton sought, on which they believed he intended to rely in time of war, would be too large for American democracy but too small for the world wars of the twentieth century. But Fitzpatrick shows convincingly that Upton valued citizen-soldiers. He knew that the Regular Army was too small to fight major wars without mobilizing citizen-soldiers. Like most Americans in 1865, he preferred volunteers to militia or to conscripts.

In many ways, then, Fitzpatrick shows that Upton was part of the American mainstream. As a military intellectual writing when Prussia had swiftly defeated two of Europe's great powers, he advocated a general staff and improved military education and made an "effort to adapt the German system [of trained reserves] to American realities," to "serve and preserve democratic-republican institutions" (182). These were indeed innovations in American military affairs, and they involved the greater centralization of military education and citizen-soldier training, but they were not intrinsically authoritarian, and those concerned with military preparation had been advocating them in some form since George Washington.

Fitzpatrick does not say it, but much of the great Russell Weigley's perspective appears to have been rooted in his concern with the militarization of American life during the Cold War. In this, although a path-breaking historian, Weigley presents the liberal flipside to Samuel P. Huntington, whose 1957 Soldier and the State advocated military autonomy from civilian direction of operations, and indeed applauded the sort of isolation from civilian society and mores that Weigley lamented. Yet both Huntington and Weigley worked from an immature historiography and limited archival bases. While much of Weigley's History of the U.S. Army (1967) and The American Way of War (1973) remains of great value, his themes and theses (like Huntington's) have to be taken with large grains of salt.

Like most Regular Army officers, Upton sought to retain the Regular Army monopoly on higher command that had developed since the War of 1812 (and was in fact true for most corps, army, and higher commands during the Civil War). This led him to very intemperate screeds against politics and politicians, and here Fitzpatrick should have made more of a distinction between democracy and republicanism. Upton firmly believed in republican government, but his vision was a conservative one, in which a meritocracy guided the citizenry. We would not want military officers using Upton's language about politics and politicians today...