U.S. Army: 1866 – 99

This entry is a subentry of U.S. Army.

In the post–Civil War era, the 1‐million‐man Union army was reduced by 1871 to a U.S. Army of 29,000, remaining around that level until the Spanish‐American War in 1898, when the wartime force grew to nearly 200,000 regulars and U.S. Volunteers. It fell to about 80,000 by the end of 1899. From 1866 to 1898, the small regular army fulfilled its traditional primary task as a constabulary force on the Indian frontier, but it also took on new duties of military occupation during Reconstruction and of suppressing labor strife in industrial areas.

No other agency had the personnel to carry out federal Reconstruction policies in the South. In addition to peacekeeping there, the army performed such civil functions as opening schools, operating railroads, rebuilding bridges, supervising banks, and holding courts of law. When President Andrew Johnson and the Republican majority in Congress disagreed, Congress in 1867 passed Military Reconstruction Acts over Johnson's vetoes. The acts divided the former Confederate states into five military districts, each governed by a major general, and initiated the process for new state constitutions that declared slavery illegal, disavowed secession, and enfranchised African American men. The process was completed between 1868 and 1870. Thereafter, Southern Republican governors called on the army as a posse comitatus to protect freed blacks and others loyal to the Union, by guarding polling places and controlling paramilitary organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Thus, the U.S. Army was involved in postwar politics in the South until the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

During Reconstruction, Congress for the first time authorized permanent units of black soldiers (albeit with white officers) for the army. In 1866, six such regiments were recruited, later reduced to four. Separate black regiments continued to exist until the Korean War in the 1950s. In the 1870s, black soldiers patrolled the frontier and participated in campaigns against the Indians, who called them “Buffalo” Soldiers. Some Indian scouts were employed. The majority of enlisted ranks were white soldiers, many of them recent immigrants.

The Indian‐fighting army of the Plains Indians Wars later became legendary in fiction and film, but its service was controversial. The federal government ordered the army to restrain or fight Indian tribes in order to open the West. Desire for the Indians' lands meant that conflict was inevitable. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and Gen. Philip H. Sheridan supervised campaigns that inflicted defeats on the Indians. Indian noncombatants were killed in some campaigns. The Indians won a few battles, most notably the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876), but were never victorious in a campaign. The tribes were forced to sign treaties restricting them to reservations.

Historians debate whether the army was isolated from society in the Gilded Age. Senior officers hobnobbed in the East with political and economic leaders, while the majority of enlisted men and line officers served at isolated frontier posts. Several times between 1877 and 1899, the government sent army units to quell labor strikes in northern cities, along railroad routes, and in western mining camps. By 1890, several of the army's posts were located near large cities. The debate over the army's alleged “isolation” begs the questions of when, where, and which portions of the army may have been isolated from society.

In part reacting to European developments after the Franco‐Prussian War of 1870–71, army officers sought modernization and reforms. In 1881, General Sherman established the Command and General Staff School at Leavenworth, Kansas. Sherman's protégé, Col. Emory Upton, studied armies in other nations. Upton's classic, Military Policy of the United States, unfinished when he committed suicide in 1881, was not published until 1904. Upton's criticism of the traditional civilian control of the military and of the citizen‐soldier, and his desire for pre‐trained, European‐style reserves, meant that he gained little influence outside the regular army.

The Ordnance Department, showing its inherent conservatism, was reluctant to acquire repeating rifles, like the lever action Winchester, that would rapidly consume ammunition. Ordnance adopted the breech‐loading Springfield Model 1873 rifle to replace the Union army's muzzleloader, but both were single‐shot weapons using black powder. Not until 1892 did Ordnance adopt a smokeless powder rifle, the bolt action Krag‐Jorgensen, based on a Danish design; but it was still less effective than European clip‐fed rifles. In 1898, due to shortages of ammunition and cleaning kits, Krags were not issued to the U.S. Volunteers at the beginning of the Spanish‐American War; consequently, most of them carried the obsolete Model 1873 into battle.

The army was not well prepared when Congress declared war against Spain, and the lawmakers bypassed the regulars plans by authorizing massive numbers of U.S. Volunteers. Pushed to act by President William McKinley, the War Department cobbled together expeditions to the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands. Combining aggressiveness and luck, the Americans (regulars supplemented with U.S. Volunteers) won campaigns against larger if demoralized Spanish garrisons in all of the contested colonies. The Treaty of Paris (1898) ending the war awarded the United States possession of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and temporary control of Cuba. The army administered military governments in Cuba and the Philippines and continued to fight in the Philippine War (1899–1902) against Filipino insurgents who sought independence. Responsibilities for garrisoning a new island empire, acting as the constabulary on a new overseas frontier, would occupy an expanded U.S. Army in the early twentieth century, even as the army sought to modernize and prepare for wars against other expanding world powers.

[See also African Americans in the Military; Army Combat Branches; Ethnicity and Race in the Military; Side Arms, Standard Infantry; Weaponry, Army.]

Bibliography

• Stephen E. Ambrose, Upton and the Army, 1964.
• William H. Leckie, The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Negro Cavalry in the West, 1967.
• James E. Sefton, The United States Army and Reconstruction, 1865–1877, 1967.
• Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1890, 1973.
• Jerry M. Cooper, The Army and Civil Disorder, 1980.
• David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898, 1981.
• Joseph G. Dawson III, Army Generals and Reconstruction: Louisiana, 1862–1877, 1982.
• Paul A. Hutton, Phil Sheridan and His Army, 1985.
• Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army, 1986