"Confidence": Private Correspondence in Daniel Parker's War Department, 1811–1846

This essay uses almost three decades of Daniel Parker's private letters as a window into the conceits and personal disclosures of members of the War Department, revealing how gendered reputation, loyalty, and friendship facilitated the Department's evasion of democratic limits to its power and its establishment of bureaucratic autonomy. As chief clerk, adjutant and inspector general, and paymaster general, Parker served as a principal node in the information flows among men of different ranks and political leanings, including generals, army contractors, and secretaries of war, as they collapsed the divisions between macho congeniality and martial duty. Although private letters were ubiquitous in the early republic, most letter writers did not have the power to shape state-sanctioned violence the way War Department officials did. For these men, there was little distinction between masculine entitlement and wartime decisions, and at a time when Americans were learning how to wield political and military power at home and abroad, they relied on confidentially to build relationships, carry out policies, and hide mistakes. The consistency in the use of confidentiality in War Department correspondence, from the War of 1812 until the Mexican–American War, suggests an endurance to the ways in which cruelty and overconfidence pervaded the private and public operations of the War Department, and fueled its determination to shore up the national state's ability to wage war.