My Comments on:

Chris Bray, Posts on Comparative Military Policy

HNN Cliopatria [pseudonym],

History That Isn't,  Nov 23, 2007

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/44918.html (now) https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/44918

  "Not so Large as to be Dangerous" , Nov 13, 2008


http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/56973.html#comment (now) https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/56973
 
 "All Agree That we Must Keep a Peace Establishment," Nov 17, 2008


http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/57117.html#comment (now ) https://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/57117

(and)

https://web.archive.org/web/20090816063819/http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/57117.html

Andrew D. Todd

 a_d_todd@rowboats-sd-ca.com 

http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/

My Responses:

(11/25/2007 04:24 PM)

Comparison With England.

The obvious comparison would be  that  of early America with England. Early English population figures (pre-census) are notoriously tricky, of course. Gregory King's numbers were guesstimates derived from tax returns. Still, at the time of the American revolution, a defensible figure for the British Isles, including Ireland, might be somewhere in the  ballpark of ten million. The British Army had a peacetime strength of 50,000 men (I believe 8000 of them in North America), and the British  Navy, the main force, had more than a hundred ships of the line, and about two  hundred frigates. They  weren't all mobilized, of course, but still, they would have been sufficient ships for  about 100,000 men. The peacetime standing navy amounted to something like 15-20,000 men, and sailors were quite often taken ashore in ports, and the major cities were mostly ports. At that date, sailors were,  ipso facto, what we would call marines. In round numbers, England's peacetime military mobilization,  per capita, was about ten times that  of the United States.

During the wars with France, there were French-sponsored Celtic rebellions, at first Jacobite (1714, 1745), and later, Jacobin (1798). At mid-century, a government report put the strength of the Scottish clans at 30,000 swords. In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie managed to recruit 5-6000 of them, and was eventually beaten  by the Duke of Cumberland with nearly 10,000 troops, mostly regulars (twenty-year career soldiers), and a handful of Campbells. Relative to  population, this was approximately on the same scale as the  First  Battle of Bull Run. The British Army then  conducted a campaign of counter-insurgency ("The Harrying of the Glens") aimed at starving the Highlanders  into submission. The British military was sufficiently large that it was regularly  employed to enforce the law. This, of course, had the effect of politicizing it.

The United States Army was mostly deployed on the frontier, often in small units. The military presence in a settled area was likely to be something of the order of a coastal fort, an arsenal, or an old soldiers' hospital.

Circa 1860, the British Army had an authorized strength of about 200,000 men, about ten times the size of the United States Army, at a time when the population of the United States was surpassing that of Great Britain. Read about the operations in Texas and New Mexico in 1861-62 to get a feel for the actual limits on the power of the United States Army. The potential fighting strength of Texas must have been at least twenty thousand men. They compelled the surrender of the one regular army regiment in Texas (the 1st Infantry),  commenced an attack on  New Mexico with four regiments, and obtained the surrender of the major portion of the  7th Infantry.  The  Texans were eventually contained by a force consisting of the odds and tatters of the regular army in the area, and a solid core of New Mexico militia.


(11/14/2008 06:42 AM)

Don't Lump the English With the Continentals.

About two hundred thousand men fought  at Gettysburg in 1863. In fact, Gettysburg bears a striking similarity to Waterloo. One can construct  parallels between Richard Ewell and Marshal Ney, between Little  Round Top and Houguemont, between Seminary Ridge and Quatre Bras/Ligny, etc.  Both battles were  characterized by  a relatively high degree of involvement  of citizen soldiers on both sides. Both of them are very different from, say, the Battle of the  Frontiers in 1914. New Orleans was rather like some peripheral battles  of the Napoleonic Wars, say in  Spain and Portugal (perhaps  the  defense of the Line of Torres Vedras outside  Lisbon would qualify).

Another point-- you seem to conflate Britain with Continental Europe, with the armies and military systems of Frederick and Napoleon. This is dubious, to say the least. England was much less organized for land warfare than, say, France. Wellington's army at Waterloo was not predominantly British--  it was mostly German and Dutch-Belgian. Interestingly, on the eve of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was desperately attempting to retrieve twenty-five thousand English-officered Portuguese troops, Marshal Beresford's  "Cacadores," who  had been battle-hardened in Spain, but who had  since been demobilized. In the Iberian context, they were approximately the equivalent  of Montagnards. At Waterloo, Wellington had about seven thousand experienced British troops, some of them back from New Orleans, and another twenty thousand raw British troops. His position was  rather that of Eisenhower, holding a precarious alliance together. Yet  another note: Wellington had apparently discovered pretty quickly that King Louis  XVIII of France was useless, and was trying to persuade Whitehall to switch its sponsorship to the Duke of Orleans,  the future King Louis Phillipe.

I would like you to develop comparative themes  such as the nature and extent of economic presence, who was recruited into the army, and on what terms, effective presence of the  army in what  regions, extent of military participation  in law enforcement, and compare these  between  early  nineteenth century  England,  Early Republic America, and Modern  America.


(11/18/2008 05:56 PM)

[Further] English Comparison.

With regard to your previous post, the contemporary European term for British  military policy was "Perfide Albion." The idea was that England used its small army, delivered by the  formidable British Navy, and large sums of money from its great trading empire, to start land wars which other  people were expected to  fight, and that the British Navy rendered England impregnable to appropriate retaliation. About half of the British Army was off defending the empire, and could not be brought  back to Europe in a reasonable period of time. What England could come up with on short notice was ten or twenty thousand men. By comparison, Napoleon had invaded Russia in 1812 with half a million men. His comparatively low numbers at Waterloo in 1815 reflected, among other things, the fact that he had not had the time to finish remobilizing  France.

However, in round numbers,  the  British  military was about ten times larger,  per  capita, than the American military.

I suggest that you have to talk about dangerousness at two levels. Bonaparte's "18th Brumaire" is the  archetypal coup d' etat. In the late 1790's, faced with the need to fight the combined forces of Prussia, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Britain, and sometimes, Spain (in effect, all of Europe),  the more or less constitutional government of France (the Directorate) created a military machine which they could not control. Eventually, one of the more successful generals made himself dictator, and then, emperor.

Now, what happened in England was quite different. There was never any danger of a military takeover. The two naval mutinies, The Nore and Spithead, were  in essence industrial strikes.  In the Spithead petition, the  mutineers emphasized that they were King George's loyal subjects, and that they were only too happy  to go and fight the French, but they had certain grievances pertaining to their pay and their food (the usual company store system), etc. An obvious parallel in our own time is the petition produced during the Attica Prison Riot. 

The system of government in England was a lot less democratic than it was in America (property qualifications, "rotten boroughs," etc.), and the military was used to suppress popular disorders. There were certain large classes of crimes, which a major portion of the population did not accept as crimes. These tended to consist of infringing on Royal revenue, or on certain large property claims. Smuggling (sometimes called "free-trading") was one such crime, because it impaired the customs revenue. Unauthorized gathering  up of flotsam from beaches was also a crime. Poaching was another crime, since it was defined in such a way as to make it illegal for a small farmer to do anything about the rabbit  which was raiding his garden. A nobleman might own rabbit warrens which effectively lived off of the surrounding  farms. And then there were the Tyburn Riots. The populace accepted that thieves should be hanged, but it did not accept that they should  be dissected, and fighting ensured over the corporation of surgeons' attempts to claim the  bodies. Similarly, when factories got  big enough to generate industrial strikes, those were illegal. There were "frame breaking riots" (Ludditism) in which traditional craftsmen destroyed industrial machines which threatened their livelihood. In the big cities, the general level of poverty occasionally yielded events similar to a 1960's race riot, eg. the Gordon Riots in  London in 1780. The military was called out fairly often to protect the economic interests of, at most, the  top ten percent of the population against the bottom fifty percent.

Most of this kind of thing did not carry over to the United States, the "Anti-Patroon" riots in New York being an exception.

Also, I don't know if you will have read Edward Luttwak's Coup d'Etat. He discusses things like where particular units are, whether or not they have the necessary transport to intervene, etc. Applying that to eighteenth century England, I don't have exact  figures at hand, but there must have been something like five thousand troops in the London area, starting with the Brigade of Guards. Troops were doing very political things like arresting Members of Parliament.

11/20/2008 06:00 AM


Of course, one has to make a distinction between coastal forts, which were for defense against the British Navy, and forts on the frontier.

The obvious precedent for the American Frontier was England's dealings with the "Celtic Fringe," in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. England spent centuries subjugating the farther and wilder Celts. It built forts and military roads, employed scorched-earth tactics, all the usual things, and repeated the process a few times, so that when John Smith arrived in Virginia, there was already a settled policy to apply. By the end of the fifteenth century, Wales had been pacified, but the Gaelic-speaking fringes of Scotland and  Ireland remained in a savage state until the end of the eighteenth century.

(12/23/2008 12:31 PM)

European Auxiliaries

The United States Army really does not have anything comparable to the sheer long-term involvement of the British and French armies with their native and auxiliary corps.

The oldest regiment of the Indian army dates from 1751. The Gurkha regiments of the  British-Indian Army  go back to 1817. In the last year or so, a sharp little civil rights campaign was fought to force the  British government to extend full British citizenship to Gurkha  veterans.

The French Foreign Legion dates from 1830. All recruits in the French Foreign Legion take false names upon enlistment, as an expression of solidarity with those of their number who are actually fugitives from justice, and as a means of avoiding invidious social distinctions. "Legio Nostra Patria," as the Legion's motto says, or, to put it in American English, "Ya Found a Home in the Army."  The Legion's great holiday is Camerone Day, the anniversary of a small battle in a small Mexican village on April 30, 1863, in which sixty-two legionnaires fought to the death against two thousand Mexicans.The legion still has, as one of its sacred relics, the wooden hand of their commander, Captain Dangou.  The closest American analogy to Camerone Day might be the United States Marine Corps' Birthday Ball. Camerone was part of a small obscure war whose purpose was to compel the Mexican government to pay debts allegedly owed to French bankers. Does this sound oddly familiar?

Another example would be the [Tirailleurs Senegalais],  dating from 1857, and lasting until the independence of French West Africa, circa 1960. The closest thing I can think of in the American tradition would be the Philippine Scouts, from after 1901.


Bibliography:



It is definitely worth reading John Masters, of course, who might fairly be described as the Kipling of the twentieth century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Masters
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigade_of_Gurkhas
http://landedunderclass.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/disgusting-treatment-of-ghurkas-again/

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Geoffrey Bocca, _La Legion!_, 1964. A journalistic history at the time of the Legion's retreat from Africa.

Two novelists:

Percival Christopher Wren (_Beau Geste_, etc) is problematic from an evidentiary standpoint. There is no credible evidence of his ever having been in the Legion, and  he seems to have relied on a mixture of legionary memoirs and informal interviews. However, his  workmanship seems to have been fairly good. Of course Rudyard Kipling was a newspaper man, and never served in the British Army either. "The onlooker sees most of the game..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._C._Wren

Jean Lartéguy, _The Centurions_ (_Lost Command_), _The Hounds of Hell_ (_Les Chimeres Noires_), etc. World War II service, afterwards, war correspondent, wrote a series of reflective novels about the decline and fall of the French empire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Lart%C3%A9guy
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Tirailleurs Senegalais

http://www.worldwar1.com/france/tseng.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirailleurs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Scouts

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You might also look at Charles Miller,  _Battle for the Bundu_, for the German equivalent  in East Africa. On a more general level, Alfred Vagts, _A History of Militarism_, is a rather problematic book, but you need to address it if you have not already done so.


Elizabeth Longford, _Wellington, The Years of the Sword_, 1969

I take it that  you have read  these books, dealing with the economic impact of  the Army on the frontier:

Francis Paul Prucha, Broadaxe and Bayonet,  1953

Richard Wade, The Urban  Frontier.

See Paddy Griffith's analysis of the Battle of Vimero, _Forward into  Battle_, 1981

Michael  Glover, _A Very Slippery Fellow: The Life of  Sir  Robert Wilson, 1777-1849_, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978

Correlli  Barnett,  Britain and Her Army 1509-1970:  A  Military,  Political, and Social Survey, William Morrow & Company, New York, 1970.

Edward  M.  Spiers,  _The Army and  Society:  1815-1914_,  Longman, London, 1980

Geoffrey Best, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe,

Clive  Emsley, _British Society and the French  Wars,   1793-1815_, Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa, New Jersey, 1979

Skelley, The Victorian Army At Home.

See:

RECOLLECTIONS OF THE TWIGGS SURRENDER BY MRS. CAROLINE BALDWIN DARROW.

http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/books/battles/vol1/pageview.cfm?page=033

and:

THE CONFEDERATE INVASION OF NEW MEXICO AND ARIZONA, By George H. Pettis, Brevet Capt., U.S.V., Late Lieutenant Commanding Co. K 1st California Infantry, and Lieutenant and Adjutant 1st New Mexico Infantry

http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/books/battles/vol2/pageview.cfm?page=103

in:

Battles and Leaders of the Civil War : being for the most part contributions by Union and Confederate officers., Based on "The Century war series" published from Nov. 1884 to Nov. 1887 in the Century magazine and edited by Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel of the editorial staff of "The Century Magazine,"
New York : The Century Co., 1887-1888.
http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/books/battles/index.cfm

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Edward Luttwak, _Coup d' Etat, A Practical Handbook_, 1968
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Henry Christman, _Tin Horns and Calico: An Episode in the Emergence of American Democracy_, 1945. A treatment of the Anti-Patroon riots. 
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Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E.P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow, _Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century  England_, 1975. A collection of essays dealing with Tyburn Riots, Sussex Smugglers, Cornish Wreckers, Staffordshire  Poachers. 
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A  paper on the military involvement in the  Detroit Riots in 1967

http://www.usafa.edu/isme/JSCOPE01/Rauch01.html
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A website with basic order of battle information for Waterloo and related  battles.

http://www.britishbattles.com/waterloo/waterloo-june-1815.htm
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This site seems to be down or gone, but it is  worth  going to the  internet  archive to retrieve files, because it has  detailed year-by-year information about  each  regiment's whereabouts.

http://www.regiments.org/
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See also,  Cecil Woodham-Smith, _The Reason Why_. This book is at  one level about  the Crimean War, but it is about  the Crimean War as the last gasp  of Wellington's army. The commanders were  the geriatric survivors of  Wellington's staff,  and the social arrangements had remained unchanged. Woodham-Smith's biography of  Florence Nightingale is  in a  sense  about  the  new British Army, the  one which was  waiting to emerge ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Donald Harman Akenson, God's Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster, 1992

Parallel instances of frontier culture. In 1608, the definitive "plantation,"  or settlement, of Lowland Scots in Ulster took place. There had been a whole series of previous attempts at settlement, going  back to the 1150's, mostly around Dublin, but these had either gone native, or  been wiped out, or been contained in the Dublin area.
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John Prebble, Culloden, 1967

In 1745, the exiled Stuart pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, returned from France with about a thousand men, drawn from the "wild geese," the exiled Catholic Irish (and Scottish) troops serving in  the French army. He managed to raise several thousand Scots Highlanders, especially McDonalds, and they  penetrated as far south as Derby in central England,  before they could be contained. With equal rapidity, they fell back to Culloden Moor, outside of Inverness, where  they were decisively defeated. The book covers not just the battle, but also the campaign of counterinsurgency which followed.
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Richard Lomas, County of Conflict: Northumberland From Conquest to Civil War.

Describes the whole culture of border-reiving which ensured when two adjoining kingdoms adopted the principle of "my frontiersmen, right or  wrong."
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Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, 1962

The Irish Potato Famine, 1845-49, which eventually produced not only mass emigration, but also a highly  ineffectual rebellion of half-starved men.
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Roger Chavire, _A Short History of Ireland_, 1956.
J. D. Mackie, A History of Scotland, 1964.

General background.
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Frank O'Connor, _A Book of Ireland_, 1959.

A different kind of background. A smorgasbrod of everything from eight century epics to modern sociology, and everything in between.
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Thomas Flanagan, _The Year of the French_, 1979.

A modern historical novel, but well-regarded, and I understand the author put in his time at the Irish National Library. In 1798, the French general Humbert and a thousand French troops came to the west of Ireland, the Gaelic-speaking area, and formed nucleus for a native uprising, along with elements of Theobald Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen. This rising eventually failed.
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Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy, 1817.
______, The Heart of Midlothian, 1818.

Scott was born  in 1771, so he was at about two generations remove of hearsay from the events, about the same distance that Margaret Mitchel (Gone With The  Wind) was from the Civil War, or Tomasi de Lampedusa (_The Leopard_) from the unification of Italy. Rob Roy McGregor was the chief of Clan McGregor, the most notorious clan in  the Scottish Highlands. They happened to occupy the hills above Glasgow, and consequently, the normal savage cattle-raiding extended into civilized country, and came up against civilized notions of private property. The clan was outlawed early and often.

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