In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 : Engineering War R esponsibility for fortifications in the pre–Civil War army rested with the Corps of Engineers, the elite of the military establishment. Created initially by the Second Continental Congress in 1779 and renewed in different form by the Congress of the new government in 1794, the corps was institutionalized in its current form in 1802. A separate group of topographical engineers, responsible for mapmaking, was created in the War of 1812 and given its own institutional status in 1838 as the Corps of Topographical Engineers. The U.S. Engineer Department was created immediately after the War of 1812 to serve the administrative needs of the corps. It was headed by the chief engineer.∞ The Corps of Engineers owed its status to its role as keeper of a body of technical knowledge and its tight connection with the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Created in 1802, the academy had a curriculum that was heavily oriented toward engineering. Political support for it stemmed largely from the assumption that West Point could produce a number of well-trained engineers who would eventually return to civilian life with their technical skills. The Corps of Engineers controlled the academy. Only engineer officers were appointed as superintendents, and most of the faculty were former or current members of the corps. Beginning in 1842, the assistant professor of engineering was required to participate in postgraduate training in military engineering under the academy’s most famous faculty member, Dennis Hart Mahan, the acknowledged expert on fortifications in the United States. Mahan put his students through a rigorous pace in this course, requiring each one to design a fortification for a particular site and plan an attack against it. Cadets also were exposed to practical experience in field fortification. In his third year at the academy, Cyrus B. Comstock took a course called Practical Engineering. He and his classmates spent two hours every day making fascines, gabions, and sap rollers. The class regularly visited Washington Valley, where the only company of engineers in the army maintained a demonstration site. Here the cadets watched as saps and parallels were made, inspected ‘‘a small lunette with palisaded gorge,’’ or looked at the effects of 2 Engineering War 10-inch Columbiad fire on ‘‘different materials for embrasures.’’ They used sticks to profile the shape of a parapet and studied examples of several different types of obstructions, from abatis to chevaux-de-frise. Civil engineering was a large component of the academy curriculum as well. The top graduates of the academy, roughly 12 percent, were commissioned directly into the engineers, the topographical engineers, or as ordnance officers.≤ The prestige of the Corps of Engineers, as well as its connection to the academy, was the basis of its elevated status within the army, a status jealously guarded by the officers who headed the corps. The corps liked to throw its weight around during intramural conflicts, and it also was the most politically active branch of the army. Corps heads often fought with politicians over West Point and the other major aspect of the corps’ existence, its responsibility for building and maintaining an ambitious and very expensive system of coastal forts. Approved in the wake of the army’s dismal performance in the War of 1812, the Third System consisted of about twenty-five masonry forts of various sizes and designs strung out along the coastline of the United States. Costing millions of dollars and mostly complete by the time of the Civil War, it was ‘‘the centerpiece of national defense,’’ in the words of historian William B. Skelton.≥ The emphasis on coastal forts helped to justify the maintenance of the Coast Survey, created in 1807 to map the long coastline of the country. It operated under a limited budget and relied heavily on navy and army engineers for survey duties. The Coast Survey also hired promising civilians and gave them valuable topographical engineering experience. It provided another pipeline, besides West Point, for the training of engineers experienced in government-sponsored projects.∂ As the primary repository of technical expertise in engineering, the corps had a heavy influence on the many U.S. military missions sent to observe European armies. American officers traveled to Europe more than 150 times from the end of the War of 1812 until the outbreak of the Civil War. While more than half of those trips were undertaken as private travel by officers on...

Share