West Pointers and the Civil War: The Old Army in War and Peace

CHAPTER FOUR: Tactical Continuity in the Decade before the Civil War

chapter฀four Tactical Continuity in the Decade before the Civil War ฀฀ Although it by no means rested on its laurels, the regular army did not depart from its comfortable professional tracks in the interlude between the Mexican Cession and the Civil War. Professional soldiers supervised gradual changes in weapons and tactics, while Jefferson Davis’s reformist tenure as secretary of war (1853–57) looked much like Poinsett’s stewardship of the War Department in the late-1830s. Both Poinsett and Davis built on and further elaborated Calhoun’s legacy, rather than institute any drastic change in American military policy. Two different wars and more than a generation’s worth of experience had supported a military policy built on the foundation of a small but reasonably well-trained force of regulars. In times of “peace,” the regulars guarded the restive Indian frontier in dispersed posts; in “war,” they served as the veteran core of a mixed regular and volunteer army capable of defeating whatever modest nation-state army the United States might face from either European or hemispheric rivals. The striking military success of the Mexican War vindicated this system, and its basic premises would structure the old army’s activities throughout the 1850s. American policymakers had never intended the old army to serve as a training cadre for volunteer citizen-soldier armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Nevertheless, with the militia system in decrepit disrepair, both the Union and Confederate armies in 1861 possessed no alternative models of organization. Furthermore, the regulars needed no apologies for adopting the training-intensive military system that had proved so useful in Mexico. In any conflict with a European power, the old army would face an expeditionary force severely constrained in size by distance, while the less than overwhelming size of Mexican field armies during the previous war showed that no hemispheric power could 76  tactical฀continuity swamp the small regular army with sheer numbers. Furthermore, even if old army officers had predicted the size and scale of the Civil War, few American officers and administrators would ever have countenanced a military establishment explicitly designed to crush a sectional rebellion. Indeed, sharp controversies in the North over the military’s role in civil government during both the Civil War and Reconstruction showed that the strong Anglo-American animus against military intervention in civil affairs went far beyond specific debates over the fate of slavery as a social institution.1 During the interregnum between the Mexican War and the Civil War, the old army’s officer corps proved active and vibrant, but even its most reformist officers continued to operate within a professional context that Calhoun would have recognized. The regular army developed and manufactured a new rifle-musket in line with contemporary trends in smallarms technology; it adopted a tactical system derived from the French chasseurs to correspond with the new weapons; it extended the course of instruction at West Point to increase the quality of military education; it continued to adapt and adjust the already excellent American artillery arm to match the European state of the art; it sent an observer mission to Europe to learn lessons from the Crimean War; and it even constituted true cavalry regiments, which better fit European practice. Every one of these reforms reflected the regular army’s emphasis on training, discipline , and European-style professionalism, which it then bequeathed to the Union and Confederate armies. The high level of professionalism demanded by the chasseurs’ methods reflected well on the old army’s desire to improve its service, while the regular army’s reaction to the new rifle-musket also reflected a healthy willingness to blend the new with the old. American professionals had long experience with light infantry tactics and methods before the Mexican War, and they naturally saw the equipping of all infantry formations with the new rifle-musket as a natural extension of the Napoleonic practice of giving all infantry units training in light infantry tactics. Instead of only receiving some training in skirmishing and target practice, now line infantry would also be equipped with rifled weapons as opposed to smoothbore arms. The old army did realize that the invention of the minié ball had accelerated the pace of change in infantry tactics to some extent, and American professionals, in response, moved to adopt the methods of the French Chasseurs à Pied. The chasseurs, an elite light infantry force, emphasized 77  tactical฀continuity...