A Legacy of Insubordination

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/17/a-legacy-of-insubordination/

 

May 17, 2011, 9:00 pm

A Legacy of Insubordination

By JONATHAN STEVENSON

 

When he took office, Abraham Lincoln faced the greatest strategic challenge of any American president before or since: that of holding the country together as political and moral tensions that had risen steadily over the course of nearly 100 years strained mightily to tear it apart. But he also confronted a standard of civil-military relations that internalized domestic political intrigue and countenanced soldierly insubordination. Epitomized by Gen. George B. McClellan, this organizational problem was a crippling impediment for Lincoln early in the Civil War that required all of his political and psychological acumen to overcome. It was substantially a product of the Mexican War of 1846-48.

 

There were good historical reasons for the conflation of military and political power through the first half-century of the republic. George Washington’s singular legitimacy as the nation’s first president was based on his performance as a general. But the framers were also more fearful of military power in the hands of political leaders, which they associated with the British monarchy and European despotism, than political power in those of military leaders. Thus, the constitution embodied a republican preference for militias of loyal citizen-soldiers over standing armies that discouraged politically neutral military professionalism.

Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy reinforced these biases by championing the military capability and disposition of the common man, and the latter encouraged the officer corps’ active involvement in politics as an antidote to social stratification. The relative absence of major conflict and America’s natural defenses also kept the perceived need for greater military professionalism low.

Although a conservative form of it had begun to emerge in the increasingly separate South before the Mexican War, its broader influence was limited. With no clear distinction drawn between political and military competence or institutionalized emphasis on professional military education — West Point, established under Jefferson, was essentially an engineering school before the Civil War — there was ample room for the president, by virtue of his power to nominate high-ranking officers, and Congress, with the Senate’s confirmation authority, to exert political influence over military affairs through the appointment process. And in the 1840s, the momentum of Manifest Destiny combined with increasingly acrimonious debate over slavery to make the Mexican War an extraordinarily political one.

Impelled by Democratic President James K. Polk’s irrepressible drive to continental hegemony, that war was one of thinly veiled aggrandizement, orchestrated by goading vain Mexican leaders into contesting recently annexed Texas’ border to gain a pretext for seizing California. Among American politicians, the war was highly controversial. Whig opponents of slavery — including Lincoln, as a one-term congressman — saw the Democratic administration’s robust expansion of U.S. territory as a brutal and illegal vehicle for extending the “peculiar institution.”

Yet Whig generals of high military competence dominated the army’s officer corps. Polk, a suspicious Machiavellian, endeavored to use them to military effect without enwreathing them in too much political glory, and to check their appeal by securing new appointments of Democratic generals. But it was never lost on the Whig generals that their successful prosecution of a Democratic war would fuel their own subsequent political advancement at the expense of the Democrats. Furthermore, the Democratic officers that Polk did elevate — in particular, Brig. Gen. Gideon Pillow, Polk’s personal friend, and Maj. Gen. Robert Patterson – turned out to be military mediocrities. (Pillow would later be remembered for losing the Battle of Fort Donelson for the Confederacy, Patterson for losing the First Battle of Bull Run for the Union.)

As war loomed, Gen. Winfield Scott, commander of the U.S. Army, looked like the Democrats’ strongest prospective political challenger. When he blanched at hastening the initiation of war for the sake of full preparation, Polk took the opportunity to make Gen. Zachary Taylor, who seemed a less prepossessing Whig, field commander for the Mexican campaign. But in autumn 1846, Taylor too defied Polk’s eagerness, refusing to advance after crossing the Rio Grande until reinforced and resupplied. When he did move, though, he captured Monterrey in an audacious three-day battle — exceeding Polk’s expectations to his considerable chagrin. His troops depleted, Taylor then agreed to an eight-week armistice, further infuriating Polk, who believed, rather simplistically, that the army’s job was simply to “kill the enemy” and that only the chief executive possessed the authority to make battlefield compromises.

Operationally agitated and politically threatened by Taylor, Polk now marginalized him, decimating the forces at his disposal and transferring command of the decisive campaign from Veracruz to Mexico City to Gen. Scott, who by then was less of a political threat than the newly heroic Taylor. Taylor, in the meantime, ignored Polk’s orders to stay put and in the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847 forced Mexican Gen. Santa Anna to retreat from northeastern Mexico into Scott’s clutches. Scott, who would achieve military victory with only half the troops he requested from Polk against a force more than double the size of his own, also granted Mexico an armistice six months later after victorious battles at Contreras and Churubusco, outside the capital.

His rationale was strategic: to give the increasingly desperate Mexican leadership a chance to surrender, ending the war without further bloodshed. While this posture was in line with the designs of Nicholas Trist, Polk’s erratic envoy, it ran counter to the ruthless and manipulative Polk’s clear if implicit wishes. When it became plain that Santa Anna had no intention of capitulating, Scott’s forces decisively defeated him and occupied Mexico City. But despite Scott’s historic victory, Polk indulged the partisan machinations of fellow Democrats and unceremoniously relieved him.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the United States’ military victory in the Mexican War was secured by insubordination. Neither Taylor nor Scott suffered any political or professional detriment for their disobedience in the field. Both men had political ambitions. Taylor, primarily on the basis of his martial reputation as “Old Rough and Ready,” was elected president in 1848. Scott — “Old Fuss and Feathers” — remained a crusty, foppish figure of less intrinsic popular appeal, and failed in his own presidential bid in 1852. But he was still the Union’s highest-ranking general at the start of the Civil War.

In the second year of the Civil War, the Mexican War habit of insubordination would find its most egregious expression in Lincoln’s bemused dealings with the arrogant and Napoleonic, yet exasperatingly able and popular McClellan, a pro-slavery Democrat who disdainfully flouted Lincoln’s strategic directives to move against the Confederate army on the pretext of the need for further preparation. McClellan also privately likened Lincoln to “a well-meaning baboon” and declared that he was an “idiot” who was “unworthy“ of his position, and was only marginally less insulting in his direct communications with the president.

Lincoln, musing that he might like to “borrow” the army that McClellan wasn’t using, demoted him from general-in-chief in March 1862 and removed him from command altogether the following November. A century-and-a-half later, Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s reported perception of President Barack Obama as “uncomfortable and intimidated” and confession to being “disappointed” in him in light of a “painful” strategy review — which would get him fired — paled in comparison.

McClellan fought with distinction in the Mexican War under Scott as a junior officer at Veracruz, and witnessed two great generals exercise largely independent judgment to consistently defeat an enemy with superior numbers. From McClellan’s vantage point, cynical political calculations were behind Polk’s tolerance for both Pillow’s and Patterson’s incompetence, acquiescence to Pillow’s libelous attempt to enhance his military reputation at Scott’s expense, and gratuitously relieving Scott of command in 1848.

This experience plus McClellan’s native superciliousness translated into contempt for civilian management of war. Small wonder that once a general he assumed the operational autonomy that Scott and Taylor had arrogated to themselves. But there were fewer excuses for it when the main theater of war was only a day’s ride from Washington rather than half a continent away, and when the establishment of a national telegraph network and a dedicated military one allowed the president and the War Department tighter command and control through more frequent communications with field generals.

Even so, historians have treated McClellan quite charitably; he has rarely been judged a traitor or derelict of duty, merely insubordinate and strategically misguided. This may be because, in retrospect, his reluctance to spill American blood seems virtuous against the backdrop of the Civil War’s tragically gory eventuality, and because his conservation of military resources for a decisive campaign arguably yielded a successful strategy of attrition, albeit unwittingly.

Furthermore, as the conduct of the Mexican War showed, civilian control of the military — like other constitutional aspirations — had not taken root during the first 80 years of the republic. Before the Civil War, both the president’s role as commander-in-chief — even though it was enshrined in the constitution — and the military’s functional relationship to the president were ill-defined and tainted by political intrigue. It would take a great president driven by a great conflict to produce an enduring and workable model for civil-military relations.

Jonathan Stevenson is a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College.

·                                 Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company

© 2011 The New York Times Company

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