The origins of the Respectable Civil Service: On Effective Bureaucracy
More 'Sinews of War'
This is a brief examination of the matter of military administration in the War for Independence, and how strategy and logistics drove the creation of, if I may borrow from Martin and Lender, a Respectable Civil Service. In doing so, we will see in stark terms why an effective bureaucratic function is not only necessary for good governance, but a critical pillar of Logpower.
The story is set within the crushing requirements to build a military capability that could withstand several years campaigning against the British Army to win American independence. It was a constant concern of the military and political leadership through the first two and half years of war. But strategy is a product of the political culture, and so the Revolutionary leaders were constrained to create a palatable military institution in accord with the social understanding of governance. In their political history of the Continental Army and how the values of that process influenced the foundations of the American constitutional order, Martin and Lender deliver a compelling argument that the contours of the creation of military service during war shaped the image of the nation in its legal creation. Doing so would echo into the foundations of the Republic and down to today.
In micro terms, the same happened in the civil service organized to support the armed forces. Of importance to both these foundations was the respectability accorded to service. In some areas this meant material care in office, others pay, but for all it included explicitly the marks of respectability. This was nowhere truer than in the creation of the agencies to supply and support the Army. Dealing in money and goods in difficult times, the temptations to corruption and dereliction were too high. When military reform came in 1778, great thought was put into the establishment of a respectable military bureaucracy.
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The Americans in rebellion began the war in dire straits across all military capabilities, to include administration. Local militias being short term, small, and local supported forces unless under direct British Army control, there was little in the way of standing administrative and logistics capabilities ready to sustain enduring campaigning. George Washington, the man who had travelled from Virginia to Boston in 1775 to plead his case for Command of the collection of militia formations collected within the city to confront the British in the summer of 1775, had experience in the Administration of War. Perversely, that background was as Quartermaster to Braddock’s brutally, logistically failed expedition during the French and Indian War. [PS – I have always believed that Braddock Road in Alexandria, a traffic nightmare, was a cursed as a thoroughfare by association to the man.] Not only would Washington understand the value of harrying the enemies lines and logistics however possible, but he also knew something of what the privation the American forces would likely face looked like. The constant failures of logistics would bedevil him far more than the tactical setbacks, because he understood their causes – insufficient political power in the Continental Congress, and a lack of structure and process to organize and coordinate logistics. Throughout the first years of the war, he worked every lever of power and angle of attack to maintain the Army in arms, shoes, and food.
By the end of 1777, he is at his wits end and desperate to fix the administration and the training of the Army. Both were needed to weather the long war against the British. There would be no quick, strategic wins. Among the many areas of concern to fix were the civil servants responsible for logistics, the Commissaries.
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“’They wish to have the Army supplied at any rate.’”[1] This, at least, was the hope of the Continental Army military leadership as they went into Winter Quarters at Valley Forge. But it would follow the arc of broader military reform that traded respectability in for quality of service. It would be a well-appointed, sustained, and disciplined force.
In a letter to Richard Henry Lee, 18 Nov 1777, Washington laid out the problems confronting the army. He argues that for the good of the Army “the several departments of it should be filled by Men of Ability, integrity and application.”[2] The job required a sensible, attentive officer, with an impeccable character, and one who was as comfortable in the business of commerce as warfare. Because Congress could not avoid bending to the contemporary standards of civilian commerce and allow commissions for the quartermaster personnel, abuses could only be avoided by “drawing forth men of property, morals, and character,” which course was led with the selection of Greene as Quartermaster General.[3]
Sending Greene to the Quartermaster Department defined the seriousness with which Washington and others took the supply of the Army. Washington knew that correctly tending the troops and the broader scheme of logistics had to be viewed as nothing less than its own decisive military campaign. The commander in chief willing to devote one of his more competent field commanders, and most faithful subordinates, to dealing with it. According to one history of Washington’s generals, Greene was the “only a person with unusual administrative abilities could set matters right again.”[4] With Charles Pettit and John Cox as his deputies Congress had appointed the “men of character and ability” who would sort out the problems as best as they could, given the limitations of 18th century logistics.[5]
Despite his professional despondency that it was a role to be forgotten by history, in every way did Nathanael Greene best fit the description of the ideal candidate to fill the post of Quartermaster General. Not only did he possess the administrative acumen necessary to succeed in the job, but he was held in the highest esteem by his military and political peers. That he was abundantly loyal personally and professionally to George Washington meant that when the commander in chief turned to him to take the job Greene had no recourse but to accept.[6] Passing the responsibility to Greene would unburden Washington of a task and allow him the time and space for the remaining tasks of the army’s Commander in Chief.
The themes which framed the decisions regarding the strategic composition of the army, particularly the societal and political respectability which accrued to property ownership, were similarly applied to these refinements of army operations. It is clear from these efforts that at least from the perspective of political support for logistics and the subsistence doctrine, putting such men in charge proclaimed the earnest intent of the civilian leadership. It expressed, according to contemporary standards, the importance accorded to the logistics task and the subsistence doctrine. Congress would serve ideology by elevating the importance of the job by way of the qualities of the individual; that is, a replication of the Respectable Army writ smaller.
Establishing a respectable service mattered to the colonies prevailing in war. What little resources could be dragged out the parsimonious states (rich in goods, middling in hard currency) to meet the needs of the army. More than perhaps a new nation that paid its bills poorly, the bureaucrats delivered. This “quotidian” service would bulwark the critical contingencies of American defense through WWII and beyond to a new era of Federal operation, in law, space, education, feeding, and so on.
Specifically for logistics, there is no operation without administration, bureaucracy, and civil servants. Rules, processes, definitions must be codified, built into systems of faithful operation, and labored upon by competence. There is no substitute for this capability and capacity in any endeavor of complexity worth doing. And while it is absolutely necessary for the success of Logpower, it remains unassailable that there is no lethality without logistics. So even the dull-witted concepts and doctrines of force and doom previewed by the infant Trump Administration are impotent without the Respectable Civil Service.
Most of the important work of society goes unseen, yet exceeds the terms of banal dramatic heroism. But in their accumulation of a successful society, their mosaic is art. Yet today, we find this institution under attack. The wrecking ball being taken to the operation of federal government is not merely an attack on the function of the departments, though that effect will be as disastrous to us today as the lack of such capability harmed the war effort 250 years ago. Worse, it is an attack on the political culture of the Republic, which left unchecked will unravel the experiment with haste for a lack of a better cohering principle.
Notes
[1] Carp, To Starve the Army, p. 50. To characterize the earnest efforts made in 1778 to improve the material support of the Continental Army, Carp enumerates measures taken by Congress that were strikingly different from the ideologically inspired reforms of the previous year.
[2] The Writings of George Washington, from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office 1931-1944; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1970. [Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library], V. 10.
[3] Letter from the Committee at Valley Forge to the Continental Congress, 25 February 1778, (NARA Online); see also Risch, Supplying Washington’s Army, pp. 42-43. The rate allowed was a 1% commission on all money issued in the department, a rate “commensurate with the importance of the offices and great labor involved.” (Carp, To Starve the Army, p. 46)
[4] Theodore Thayer, “Nathanael Greene: Revolutionary War Strategist,” p. 118, in George Athan Billias, ed., George Washington’s Generals and Opponents: Their Exploits and Leadership, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press (1994).
[5] See, e.g., Carp, To Starve the Army at Pleasure, pp. 49-50.
[6] Carp, pp. 45-6. Risch sustains the description of the Quartermaster General as a critical figure within the army. (Supplying Washington’s Army, p. 29.)