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30 chapter two “I Can Do As Well As Anyone in Both My Studies and My Military Duties” By the time the ink was dry on his first letter home from West Point on June 28, 1842, 15-year-old conditional cadet George Brinton McClellan had already learned that gaining admission to the United States Military Academy was but the first hurdle he had to clear in order to obtain a commission in the U.S. Army. As he started his letter, thirty prospective members of the class of 1846 had already been rejected by surgeons, and, although homesickness and a pair of sore feet that had rendered him awkward at drill did not make the prospect all that unappealing at the time, McClellan was concerned he might be “‘found’ on account of my age” and sent back home. He was not, and, four years later, after an intensive experience of professional and personal socialization , he obtained his commission and with it formal entrance into the subculture of the Army officer corps.1 During the Early National Period, the structure of the U.S. Army and its place in American society reflected the popular suspicion of centralized power and formal institutions that characterized the agrarian republic of loosely connected rural communities. For land defense, the country relied primarily upon state militias composed of citizen-soldiers, whose patriotism and natural common sense were presumed to be all the qualities needed to defend the country, led by untrained officers who owed their positions to political influence. Few perceived a need for a systematic process for recruiting “i can do as well as anyone” 31 and training officers for the regular army, and popular fear of the threat a standing army could pose to political liberty precluded providing it with the infrastructure necessary for it to be an efficient institution.2 However, in the aftermath of the War of 1812, an army reform movement laid the foundation for the emergence of an officer corps that possessed the qualities political scientist Samuel P. Huntington identified as distinguishing a profession : unique, specialized expertise in a “significant field of human endeavor . . . acquired only by prolonged education and experience”; exclusive responsibility for performing a particular service to society that is essential to its functioning; and a conscious corporate sense of “organic unity” and membership in “a group apart from layman.” The first factor driving the movement for reform was the poor performance of American arms during War of 1812. Although they by no means shattered the Americans people’s faith in the citizen-soldier ideal, embarrassing defeats at the hands of the British did foster in influential circles a desire to improve the regular army. At the same time a new generation of officers came to prominence who looked to make the military a career and wanted to make the Army an efficient and respectable institution.3 The reform movement that laid the foundation for a professional officer corps was also a manifestation of developments that were reshaping warfare and society as a whole. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the scale and complexity of warfare were dramatically increasing due to new technologies— such as steamboats, railroads, rifled weaponry, and the telegraph—that made it possible to sustain and coordinate the operations of large armies in the field. As armies grew in size they presented new organizational, administrative, and technical challenges that, as in civilian life, spurred the development of occupational specialization and formal, bureaucratically organized institutions. Not coincidentally the post-1815 push for army reform came from the same members of the Republican coalition who embraced the nationalistic spirit of the Era of Good Feelings and looked to strengthen and restructure institutions to promote economic modernization and national development. The direction army reform took reflected their viewpoints to no small degree.4 The most important civilian associated with army reform was John C. Calhoun , one of the most enthusiastic champions of the National Republican program . During his tenure as secretary of war, Calhoun implemented important institutional reforms that fostered the eventual development of a well-organized and professionally officered regular army. He reorganized the army’s staff structure to bring about greater uniformity in all areas of administration, and he developed the “expansible army” concept, which would reduce the number of enlisted men but maintain a disproportionately large officer corps around which the army could expand. Although not formally adopted by Congress, this concept became the basis for U.S. military policy, marking a...

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