The presence of slavery strongly influenced U.S. military actions in the seven decades prior to the Civil War. Extending the insights of comparative sociologists who have studied the pivotal role wars played in making states in early-modern Europe, several American political development (APD) scholars, including Max Edling, Ira Katznelson, David Mayhew, and Sheldon Pollack, have situated the military at the epicenter of early-American state development.Footnote 1 They, however, have not investigated the significant impact slavery had on military deployments before the Civil War. Nor have they explored how those deployments contributed to state development by bolstering the governing authority, institutional autonomy, political legitimacy, state capacities, and coercive powers of the federal government.Footnote 2
In examining the connection between the presence of slavery and U.S. military actions, this study rebuts a well-rehearsed trope in the APD literature that the institution of slavery depressed state development in the early republic because of Southern slaveholders' fears that a powerful central state would abolish the institution.Footnote 3 By excavating this largely unexplored terrain of state-building, it also adds a critical piece to the growing body of revisionist literature demonstrating that the early-American state was much more developed than it has been depicted in the works of such prominent APD scholars as Richard Bensel, Daniel Carpenter, Theda Skocpol, and Stephen Skowronek.Footnote 4
THE MILITARY AND STATE DEVELOPMENT
The U.S. military was the principal agent of state development in the seven decades between 1791 and 1861.Footnote 5 It fought wars, removed Native Americans, built internal improvements, expedited frontier settlement, and protected existing property relations. These activities promoted state development along multiple axes. They expanded the authority of executive officials to govern particular policy areas, the autonomy they enjoyed in making policies relative to exogenous pressures on their decision-making processes, the legitimacy other actors conferred on the policies they made, their capacity to implement those policies, and their ability to coerce other actors who might resist the implementation process.Footnote 6 State-building, of course, critically depends on resources. Most of the early-American state's resources flowed to the military. Of the $1.797 billion aggregate expenditures of the federal government during the pre–Civil War period, $983 million (54.7 percent) were direct military expenditures, and another $88 million (4.4 percent) paid for military pensions and other benefits. From 1816 to 1851, military employment ranged from 77.6 percent (1816) to 44.1 percent (1851) of total federal employment.Footnote 7
The immediate purpose of American state actors in deploying the military to, for instance, remove the southeastern Native American nations across the Mississippi River was not to build a stronger state. They generally shared the anti-statist attitudes of the American public.Footnote 8 Thus in extolling the virtues of Indian removal, President Andrew Jackson referred to a long list of supposed advantages of the policy to Native Americans, state governments, and European American settlers, while discounting “the pecuniary advantages which it provides to the [federal] Government” as “the least of its recommendations.”Footnote 9 He never intimated that he might have to use the army to execute the policy, nor that it would permit the expansion of the institution of slavery into new territories, much less create a more powerful state. In the end, however, Jackson and other executive officials deployed military forces to remove the southeastern Native American nations and the effects, whether intended or not, included slavery expansion and state development.
As Brian Balogh and Elisabeth Clemens have suggested, the United States offers an early example of state-building “out of sight” or “by indirection,” where state development largely occurred on the periphery and was often the product of public–private partnerships or the by-product of decisions state actors made to pursue other purposes and solve more immediate problems.Footnote 10 The question is, what were those other purposes and problems? In some cases, such as the development of a national postal service or establishment of public-land offices, they bore little or no relation to the presence of slavery.Footnote 11 But in other cases, such as the Second Seminole War, southeastern Native American removals, the Mexican-American War, and suppressing slave revolts, the primary purpose, or at least one of the primary purposes, was to protect the institution or expand its geographic presence. In still other cases, such as fugitive-slave renditions and “Bleeding Kansas,” the presence of slavery posed serious political difficulties executive officials needed to address expeditiously.Footnote 12
The multiple instances where the presence of slavery influenced, either directly or indirectly, U.S. military actions demonstrate that the institution did not act only to retard state development. The “slavery meant a weak state” trope remains prominent in the APD literature. Robin Einhorn has strongly reasserted it in her work on slaveholder resistance to internal taxation.Footnote 13 Many scholars have advanced similar arguments with respect to internal improvements. The presence of slavery was undoubtedly one source of anti-statist attitudes in the United States, but it was not the only source, and even the internal-taxation and internal-improvement cases were more complicated than simply a matter of Southern slaveholders' fears of a powerful central state. Other factors would include the general opposition to direct taxes and an ideological bias toward private enterprise as well as intransigencies in the log-rolling process.Footnote 14 In any case, we should also consider the instances where the institution had the reverse effect and promoted state development. If the early-American state was exceptional, it was as a “house divided,” buffeted by competing sectional demands to perform or refrain from performing particular activities. During the pre–Civil War period, Southern slaveholders were highly successful in pressing their demands on the American state, certainly more successful than any comparable Northern antislavery group. In the cases where they lobbied state actors to engage in particular activities, their immediate economic interests trumped whatever anti-statist ideology they may have shared, therefore making their own specific contribution to a general pattern of state-building by indirection that remained largely outside congressional control. As Don Fehrenbacher has shown, the demands of Southern slaveholders disproportionately dictated the nature and extent of state development, restraining state action when it seemed to threaten the existence of slavery and unleashing it when it appeared necessary to protect the institution.Footnote 15 In the absence of slavery, early-American state development would have taken a very different path than it actually did. More controversially, the federal government might well have been weaker rather than stronger on the eve of the Civil War.Footnote 16
Sectional and partisan differences emerged in Congress over several slavery-related military actions during the pre–Civil War period. In responding to the scathing attacks that Horace Everett (W-VT), Joshua Giddings (W-OH), and other Northern Whig representatives directed at the Van Buren administration for its conduct of the Second Seminole War, Southern Democratic representatives, such as Edward Junius Black (D-GA), William O. Butler (D-KY), and Mark Alexander Cooper (D-GA), became the most vocal defenders of the war effort.Footnote 17 The Indian Removal Act of 1830 had exposed a sectional and partisan division on Indian policy. Northern and, to a lesser extent, Southern Whigs held onto the vision of a voluntary, negotiated migration of Native American nations westward. Senators Henry Clay (W-KY) and Theodore Frelinghuysen (W-NJ) objected, in particular, to the coercive nature of the Jackson administration's removal policies.Footnote 18 The Mexican-American War precipitated protracted sectional and partisan disputes over both its origins and conduct, with Abraham Lincoln (W-IL) first gaining notoriety for the spot resolutions he introduced during his single term in the House to discredit the Polk administration's public justifications of the war.Footnote 19 The congressional vote on the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was another highly divisive vote. Northern antislavery Senators William Seward (W-NY) and Charles Sumner (FS-MA) then opposed the deployment of army soldiers to enforce the new law during the Pierce administration.Footnote 20
Even though the commitment of members of Congress to the use of the U.S. military to protect the institution of slavery seemed to waver depending on their sectional and partisan affiliations, the pattern among executive officials was more consistently proslavery. One explanation of this pattern is that Southern slaveholders controlled the executive departments of government through their dominance of the Democratic–Republican and Democratic coalitions that ruled the nation for most of the pre–Civil War period. A Southern slaveholder was president of the United States for forty-seven of the seventy years from 1791 to 1861. Southern states enjoyed parity with Northern states in major cabinet and diplomatic appointments. They also held a two-to-one advantage in the appointment of federal clerks, auditors, and controllers, despite the fact that their percentage of the total European American population of the country dipped further below 50 percent with each census.Footnote 21
Southern Democratic officials were, however, not the only ones who were committed to protecting the institution of slavery. Two Northern Whigs—President Millard Fillmore and Secretary of State Daniel Webster—first decided to deploy soldiers to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Two Northern Democrats—President Franklin Pierce and Attorney General Caleb Cushing—then continued that policy.Footnote 22 Many executive officials were, of course, personally committed to the continued existence of slavery. Prominent examples include John C. Calhoun and John H. Eaton, two Southern Democrats who as Secretaries of War ordered troop deployments in response to slave conspiracies, actual or merely rumored. Yet, Eaton's Northern Democratic successor, Lewis Cass, authorized deployments in response to the Southampton (Nat Turner) slave revolt.Footnote 23 Cass also oversaw the military buildup during the initial years of the Second Seminole War, while New York Democrat William L. Marcy served capably as Secretary of War throughout the Mexican-American War.Footnote 24 One reason Northern executive officials remained committed to protecting slavery was because their political survival depended on it in a way the survival of Northern congressmen did not. As exiting Southern congressmen correctly perceived in the secession winter of 1860–61, the Lincoln administration promised to be the first that was “soft” in its commitment to protecting the institution precisely because its survival did not depend on such a stance.Footnote 25
Prior to the Civil War, the reality was not so much a slave-power conspiracy as the norms of behavior for federal officials navigating a “house divided.” The contrast between John Quincy Adams's executive and congressional careers perfectly illustrates the disjunction between the two roles in a geographically divided state. While Congressman Adams accused a Southern slave-power conspiracy of subverting the cause of American freedom throughout the 1830s and 1840s, treaty negotiator, Secretary of State, and President Adams had consistently acted to protect the interests of Southern slaveholders during the preceding two decades, as in ensuring that Great Britain paid them for their War of 1812 slave losses.Footnote 26
Although members of Congress frequently criticized military deployments during the pre–Civil War period, executive officials could move unilaterally to make them. Again, Adams's career is instructive. He heavily criticized the military deployments in both the Second Seminole War and the Mexican-American War.Footnote 27 Yet, Presidents Jackson and James K. Polk ordered the initial deployments without congressional authorization and, despite Adams's opposition, Congress continued to fund them. Skowronek's image of a “courts and parties” state overlooks the ways that executive officials built the early-American state indirectly, as through a succession of military deployments.Footnote 28 As we will see, the presence of slavery often stood behind those deployments.
THE MILITARY, NATIVE AMERICANS, AND SLAVERY
The U.S. military actively attempted to protect European American slaveholders from Native American depredations in the southeastern United States. One of the primary motives for the army's removal of the five major Native American nations in the region across the Mississippi River was local complaints of slave losses to members of those nations. European American slaveholders in Florida and the surrounding states also exerted political pressure on local army officers to conduct military operations against the Seminole in the territory. Together, the Florida wars and southeastern removals had significant effects on multiple measures of state development.
The Florida Wars
Before the United States acquired Florida from Spain in 1819, four American incursions contested Spanish control of the territory. These incursions had various motives and trajectories. What they shared was their unofficial character, both as military-assisted filibusters and slavery-protection missions.
The first incursion, the so-called Patriot War (1812–14), began when a group of 125 Georgia volunteers invaded Spanish East Florida on March 12, 1812. The group enjoyed the official endorsement of Georgia Governor David B. Mitchell and unofficial assistance of the Madison administration, which had been stymied in its efforts to acquire the territory by diplomatic means. One of the primary motives of the filibusterers in attempting to wrest it from Spanish control was to minimize local slave losses. The threat was twofold, from Seminole slave-raiding parties crossing the Florida–Georgia border and from slaves in Georgia fleeing to the protection of Spanish colonial officials and Seminole maroon communities in Florida.Footnote 29
The U.S. military played an ambiguous role in this incursion, as local army officers initially refused to assist the filibusterers and then agreed to take only defensive actions on their behalf. The navy took a more active role in helping the filibusterers capture Amelia Island, though the local navy commander had also ordered his gunboat captains to engage in only defensive actions on their behalf. The most active role the army played in the incursion was to cover the retreat of the main body of filibusterers back to Georgia after they had been repulsed by the combined Spanish and Seminole forces defending the colonial capital at Saint Augustine. A small core group remained in Florida for more than a year thereafter, unsuccessfully attempting to incite a general rebellion against Spanish rule.Footnote 30
The army played a more active role in the second incursion (1814), which was seemingly a legitimate War of 1812 operation against the British forces occupying northwestern Florida. Nevertheless, General Jackson's forces, which included regulars, volunteers, and militia, as well as Creek and Choctaw warriors, skirmished with the Seminole who were allied with the British and seized the Black Seminole on the pretext they belonged to European American settlers.Footnote 31 This incursion was not only a prelude to the Battle of New Orleans but also to a third Florida incursion (1816), whose primary purpose was to destroy a Seminole maroon community that had occupied an abandoned British fort on the Apalachicola River. Georgia officials demanded the destruction of this “Negro Fort” because they contended it served as a magnet for slave runaways. Acting under Jackson's orders, Colonel Duncan L. Clinch laid siege to the fort with a force that, again, included regulars, volunteers, militia, Creek, and, this time, a navy cruiser. During the siege, a cannonball from the cruiser struck the ammunition depot. The resulting explosion destroyed the fort, killing most of the blacks who remained inside.Footnote 32
The next year Jackson once again marched his forces into Florida in response to Georgia complaints of continuing problems with Seminole slave raids and slave runaways to their lands. During the ensuing First Seminole War (1817–18), his forces compelled the Seminole and their African American allies to evacuate northern Florida for points further south to create a buffer zone along the Georgia–Florida border. Jackson himself described the conflict as “this savage and negro war.” This time Congress nearly censured him for his filibustering in Florida.Footnote 33
Soon after the First Seminole War ended, Spanish officials decided to sell Florida to the United States. Secretary of State Adams agreed during treaty negotiations that the federal government would reimburse Florida residents for their property losses, including slave losses, from the war as well as the earlier incursions into the territory. The federal government eventually paid $1,199,669 to cover such claims.Footnote 34
The acquisition of Florida transformed Seminole–settler conflicts from international disputes into domestic ones. Even though Jackson's forces had driven the Seminole onto lands further from European American settlements, territorial residents continued to clash with the Seminole over both land and slaves. In 1823, the Seminole signed the Treaty of Moultrie Creek, which required the nation to reside on a reservation in central Florida.Footnote 35 Neither the Seminole nor territorial residents remained satisfied with this arrangement for long. For their part, local settlers petitioned federal officials to remove the Seminole from Florida in order to protect their real property and slaveholdings. As one petition to Acting Governor James D. Westcott concluded, “the presence of the Indians … opens a door for the slave population to carry on a system of depredation which unless stopped must inevitably lead to the impoverishment of your petitioners, render the country unsafe, and not only the property but the lives of your petitioners will be in continual jeopardy.”Footnote 36
Following the passage of the Indian Removal Act, federal officials negotiated removal treaties with the Seminole as well as the other Native American nations in the region. The Seminole signed the Treaty of Payne's Landing in 1832, which required the nation to move west of the Mississippi River within a three-year period.Footnote 37 The treaty designated a settlement site on western Creek lands, where the Seminole were very reluctant to settle because of their past conflicts with the Creek, especially the Black Seminole, who feared Creek would either seize them as their own slaves or sell them to local slave traders.Footnote 38 In addition, the treaty set aside $7,000 for settling slave disputes between the Seminole and European Americans prior to removal—a process the Seminole suspected would cost them their slaves, and the Black Seminole, their freedom. Both these factors delayed the removal process. With the treaty deadline looming, the army deployed more soldiers to Florida in early 1835 and prepared to use force to remove the Seminole from the territory. The ensuing Second Seminole War far exceeded the earlier military engagements in Florida in the level of violence on both sides. In fact, it was the nation's longest conflict of the nineteenth century, lasting nearly seven years.
The war began when the Seminole surprised an army detachment under the command of Major Francis L. Dade on December 28, 1835, near Bushnell, Florida, killing Dade and 105 of the 108 men under his command. During the initial years of the war, the Black Seminole formed the backbone of the resistance to the army's efforts to remove them and the other Seminole from Florida. Two years into the war, the new commanding general, Thomas S. Jesup, signed a treaty of capitulation with most of the Seminole leaders, whereby they agreed to remove to Indian Territory as long as their African American allies could leave Florida as free persons, notwithstanding any European American claims to them. Territorial officials vehemently protested this agreement, compelling Jesup to formally withdraw his offer. Nonetheless, he continued to evacuate the Black Seminole to New Orleans whenever they were captured by or surrendered to army personnel. By the end of 1838, the army had removed most of the Black Seminole from Florida. Thereafter, the war slowly wound down to a rather indecisive conclusion. On August 14, 1842, the then-commanding officer, Colonel William J. Worth, simply declared it over, despite the ongoing hostilities.Footnote 39
Many factors caused the Seminole to resist their removal from Florida and European American settlers to insist on it. But several special slavery-related factors explain why they were the only Native American nation to violently resist removal for any length of time and also why European American settlers refused to accept anything less than a very costly campaign to expel them.Footnote 40 Those factors included the continuing disputes over slaves between the Seminole and European Americans living in Florida and the adjoining states, the relatively large number of free blacks residing among the Seminole whom European Americans considered a powerful inducement to slave runaways, and the determination with which those Black Seminole resisted removal because they equated it with enslavement to European Americans or, perhaps worse, Creek. In the absence of these slavery-related factors, the federal government would have eventually removed the Seminole west of the Mississippi River, just as it had already moved or was in the process of moving other Native American nations across the river. However, it had to exert such force in the case of the Seminole because European Americans in Florida and the adjoining states were so determined to enslave the Black Seminole and because the latter were so vigilant against that possibility. Furthermore, the fact that the Seminole had already been driven southward onto less desirable lands in Florida meant that seizing their lands was a less immediate concern than in the case of the other Native American nations targeted by the Indian Removal Act. In the absence of slavery, Seminole removal would have been a less pressing issue and it would certainly have been less costly.Footnote 41
One year into the conflict, Jesup wrote Department of War officials that it was a “negro war,” not an “Indian war.” He also warned them that if the Seminole “insurgency” was “not speedily put down, the South will feel the effect of it on their slave population before the end of the next season.”Footnote 42 The Second Seminole War was at least as much a “negro war” as an “Indian war” because of the role that the resistant Black Seminole and insistent European American slaveholders played in the conflict.Footnote 43
Unlike the earlier Florida incursions, the Department of War documented many of the costs of the Second Seminole War because it was an official military operation. Documented costs totaled $19,594,828, including $18,948,183 in army expenses from October 1, 1835, to September 30, 1840; $504,489 in navy expenses from 1838 through 1842; and $144,226 in removal expenditures as of June 6, 1842.Footnote 44
Most of the indirect costs of the Second Seminole War were, however, undocumented. During the war, the federal government salaried a large civilian workforce in Florida, paid one year's living expenses of territorial residents who were dislocated by the conflict, and offered land grants to entice European Americans to settle in Florida to act as a buffer against the Seminole who remained in the southern part of the peninsula.Footnote 45 In his firsthand account of the conflict, Major John T. Sprague even intimated that Florida residents had sabotaged the war effort to keep federal money flowing into their pockets.Footnote 46 The estimates of the total costs of the war range from $20 to $40 million—with a median of $30 million—to remove approximately 3,000 Seminole from Florida.Footnote 47 At $30 million, it would have absorbed 13.5 percent of total federal expenditures from 1835 through 1842.Footnote 48
The Second Seminole War was also costly in terms of lives. The U.S. military lost 1,555 men in the war, though only 328 of the total were battle deaths.Footnote 49 At the height of the conflict in 1837, the Department of War had deployed more than three-fifths of the authorized force of the army—4,552 of 7,130 men—to Florida, as well as another 4,046 volunteers and militia. As a direct result of the conflict, Congress approved an increase in the authorized force of the army to 11,800 men in November 1837, which was the only such increase between the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War. Approximately 40,000 soldiers saw action during the conflict. Army regulars accounted for an increasing proportion of the military force in Florida, climbing from 48 percent of the total in 1836 to 100 percent in 1840.Footnote 50
In his narrative of the war, Sprague had two “axes to grind.” The first “ax” targeted the civilian chain of command, which, he thought, had foisted an unnecessary guerrilla war on the army because it was too responsive to the demands of territorial officials and residents. The second “ax” was directed at the volunteer and militia units, which, he believed, were grossly overpaid and more of a handicap than an asset to the war effort.Footnote 51 An 1840 Treasury audit documented $1,827,536 in regular army pay and $3,070,024 in volunteer and militia pay during the first five years of the war.Footnote 52 Sprague applauded the Department of War decision to deploy only regulars in the later stages of the conflict. He also recounted how territorial officials protested that decision because it meant less money for local residents who served in militia units, just as they had objected to Jesup's decision to offer the Black Seminole their freedom in the West because it meant fewer slaves for those who were intent on enslaving them.Footnote 53
Even though the Second Seminole War was not a success as a military operation, it was an organizational success for the U.S. Army. By the end of the war, Jesup and his successors, Zachary Taylor, Walker K. Armistead, and Worth, had prioritized the institutional interests of the army over settler demands both in shedding auxiliary forces and removing the Black Seminole as free persons. Worth then brought the conflict to a “premature” conclusion—”premature” from the perspective of territorial officials and residents who wanted the Seminole totally removed from Florida—in order to stop the drain on military resources. Overall, the U.S. Army exited the war as a more autonomous organization with a greater capacity to resist exogenous demands on the deployment of its forces. In October 1841, Secretary of War John C. Spencer thus rejected territorial Delegate David Levy's call to muster the Florida militia into the army and place it under its own independent command. In response, Spencer wrote that “it is not perceived that any advantage can be reasonably expected from a division of the command in Florida. … The government has entire confidence in the disposition and ability of Colonel Worth, not only to conduct the offensive operations against the Indians but also … to afford all requisite protection to the frontier inhabitants.”Footnote 54
The U.S. Army also exited the Second Seminole War a larger organization. While troop levels fell after the war, they remained higher than they had been before the conflict. In 1835, 7,337 men served in the army. That figure rose rapidly to a 12,330 peak in 1837. After the conflict concluded, it gradually fell to 8,509 in 1845 until the Mexican-American War brought another upsurge. The over-time increase was 16 percent. The trend was similar on the fiscal side. Total federal spending was $17.6 million in 1835, $37.2 million in 1837, and $22.9 million in 1845; an over-time increase of 30.5 percent.Footnote 55 Even this largely forgotten Indian war had its “ratchet effect.”Footnote 56
American state actors were determined to remove the Seminole from Florida, if necessary with military forces, because both the authority and legitimacy of the federal government were at stake in the territory. When the House of Representatives debated a supplemental $1 million appropriations bill in 1836 to prosecute the Second Seminole War, the Florida territorial delegate, Joseph M. White, stated bluntly that the question before the body was “whether we shall take part with the Indians, or with our Government and people.”Footnote 57 For seven long years of intermittent warfare, the Jackson, Van Buren, and Tyler administrations remained steadfastly committed to Florida's “government and people,” prosecuting a costly conflict that not only enhanced the authority and legitimacy of the federal government in the territory but also expanded its institutional autonomy, state capacities, and coercive powers through the increasing competence of its armed forces.
The Southeastern Removals
In the case of the other four major Native American nations in the southeastern United States, the removal process was less violent and costly, and the demands of local European American slaveholders were less central to the process. The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek confronted a more generalized pressure for removal because they occupied lands more on major paths of European American settlement. These differences did not mean, however, that their removals were not violent or costly, or that the demands of local European American slaveholders were not an important factor in the process. Nor, did it mean that the U.S. Army played no role. Military personnel deterred indigenous resistance to the removal process throughout the Southern states and territories. In the Cherokee case, the army confined Native Americans in internment camps to ensure that they would move westward at the appointed time.Footnote 58 Military detachments even accompanied the Creek to their new lands after a group of dissident warriors organized a series of forays against isolated European American settlements along the Georgia–Alabama border in an attempt to forestall their scheduled removal to Indian Territory. As a result, the Department of War had to temporarily divert soldiers from Florida to the Georgia–Alabama border to launch the removal process. Although the Creek leadership quickly moved to contain the violence, the federal government still spent an estimated $250,000 on the Creek War of 1836.Footnote 59
Similar to the situation in territorial Florida, European American slaveholders in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee wished to expand their slaveholdings onto Native American lands. They also wanted to secure their holdings against the possibility of slaves fleeing to Indian lands or Native American raiding parties seizing them. Native American removal solved multiple problems for European American slaveholders in many Southern localities. In the congressional vote on the Indian Removal Act, the larger the percentage of slaveholders in a congressional district, the more likely the member of Congress from that district was to vote for the act. Southwest expansion was slavery expansion, and Native American removal was necessary to both processes.Footnote 60
Each of the five major Native American nations in the southeastern United States was a slaveholding nation situated in the midst of a dominant European American slaveholding culture. This factor distinguished them from the Native American nations north of the Ohio River, as did the fact that they were still relatively large nations and retained extensive lands at the time of their removals.Footnote 61 Unlike the Native American nations in the southeastern United States, the nations in the upper Midwest were not targets of systematic removal campaigns. Their removals began earlier and were also more piecemeal, with less federal control and military involvement. The Black Hawk War (1832), which might seem analogous to the Second Seminole War as a war of removal, was actually a testament to the distinctive nature of the process in the region. Black Hawk's band of approximately 500 Sauk was the only one that had not already moved west of the Mississippi River. The “war” to remove the band essentially consisted of one engagement, when a combined force of army regulars, militia, and Sioux warriors caught it unawares as it encamped along the banks of the Mississippi, killing 165 Sauk and compelling the rest to flee across the river.Footnote 62 Moreover, the presence of slavery within both European American and Native American communities in the southeastern United States complicated the removal process even when it did not generate armed conflict, because it required local Indian agents and army officers to arbitrate slave disputes between members of the two communities prior to removal. The institution also increased the costs because the federal government paid for the transportation and sustenance of the slaves as well as Native Americans who were removed to Indian Territory with their respective nations.Footnote 63
In the twelve years following the passage of the Indian Removal Act, the federal government spent an estimated $34.2 million to remove approximately 55,000 members of the five major Native American nations in the southeastern United States across the Mississippi River, including an estimated $360,000 to relocate roughly 3,300 slaves of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations.Footnote 64 The total would represent 11.5 percent of aggregate federal spending ($297 million) from the first effective year of the act (1831) through the final official year of the Second Seminole War (1842).Footnote 65 Most of the total was spent on that war, which was the removal process in the case of the Seminole. The other removals, though, were not inexpensive, either in terms of their human or financial costs. Perhaps not surprisingly, the federal government kept no records of the costs to the Native Americans, in terms of lives lost and properties abandoned, stolen, or sold at bargain prices to local settlers prior to removal. During the removal process and in their initial years in Indian Territory, the Seminole nation lost approximately one-half of its population, and the other four major Native American nations in the region lost as much as one-third of their populations.Footnote 66 The presence of slavery was not the sole cause of the southeastern Native American removals, but it was an important cause, especially in the case of the Seminole, and it significantly increased their costs.
In deploying army units to relocate the five major Native American nations in the southeastern United States across the Mississippi River, executive officials were broadly construing their constitutional authority to regulate “commerce” with “Indian tribes” in order to satisfy the demands of local settlers to remove indigenous populations from their states and territories.Footnote 67 In satisfying those demands, the federal government acquired greater legitimacy among European Americans in the region by opening extensive tracts of land to their settlement and substantially reducing their risks of slave losses. It also asserted greater authority over the southeastern Native American nations by removing them from the region and concentrating them on sparsely settled lands west of the Mississippi River under the surveillance of army personnel stationed at Forts Gibson and Washita. At the conclusion of this policy episode, former Georgia congressman, governor, and senator Wilson Lumpkin therefore extolled his own “sternly determined policy never to cease my efforts while an Indian remained in Georgia … [a policy which is] now fully consummated beyond the shadow of doubt.”Footnote 68
Through the implementation of the Indian Removal Act, the federal government asserted its sovereign authority over Indian affairs not only relative to Native American nations but also to state governments. To a significant degree, the southeastern removals were a state-driven process until federal officials seized the initiative in 1830 with the Indian Removal Act.Footnote 69 Despite his rhetorical genuflections to states' rights, Jackson defended the act as a necessary instance of federal preemption since “it put an end to all possible danger of collisions between the authorities of the General and State Governments on account of the Indians.” The whole policy episode seems to belie any notion of a weak American state at the time.Footnote 70
The southeastern Native American removals were also important events in the development of the U.S. Army. The compulsory relocation of more than 50,000 Native Americans over distances ranging hundreds of miles represented a relatively massive administrative undertaking. To coordinate this venture, Congress created the position of Commissioner of Indian Affairs. The first commissioner, Elbert Herring, worked diligently not only to remove Native Americans but also to establish the autonomy of the Office of Indian Affairs within the Department of War, an important step in the institutionalization of what later became the Bureau of Indian Affairs.Footnote 71 Both because the removals took place on the periphery and because the army relied heavily on private contractors, the army's own role in the process escaped widespread scrutiny. The Department of War, nonetheless, deployed military personnel to compel Native Americans to abandon their tribal lands, and the officer corps developed an extensive network of contractors to supply them as they moved westward. In an archetypal public–private enterprise, the Office of Indian Affairs established reimbursement schedules for supplying the removal parties, authorizing local army officers to hire a sufficient number of contractors to work within those schedules to sustain Native Americans en route to Indian Territory. Unfortunately, the parsimonious reimbursement rates, lack of oversight, and venality of many of the contractors combined to expose thousands of Native Americans to the ravages of short rations, spoiled food, contaminated water, inclement weather, and infectious diseases. The southeastern removals provided a tragic lesson in the pitfalls of employing private actors to achieve public purposes. Secretary of War Joel Poinsett thus allowed the Cherokee, the last of the five nations to depart for Indian Territory, to hire a member of their own nation, Lewis Ross, as their removal contractor in a bid to avoid those difficulties. Even if the result was another “Trail of Tears,” the fault lay less with Ross than the inadequate reimbursement rates and harsh conditions that the Cherokee encountered on their more northerly path westward.Footnote 72
The southeastern Native American removals were part of a nationwide expulsion process that would have occurred in the absence of slavery. Nevertheless, the institution transformed the process in the southeastern United States into a state-building episode to a much greater extent than elsewhere in the country. The southeastern removals also constituted a tipping point in the transition from assimilation to reservation policies that made Native American nations dependent wards of the American state under the tutelage of an increasingly authoritative Bureau of Indian Affairs.Footnote 73
The Mexican-American War
The general dynamics of the Mexican-American War were similar to the Second Seminole War but at substantially elevated levels. The Mexican-American War witnessed the same rapid rise in the level of federal spending, from $22.9 million in fiscal year 1845 to $27.8 million in 1846 and $57.3 million in 1847. At an estimated $73 million, the total costs of the conflict would have engrossed 56 percent of federal expenditures during fiscal years 1846–48.Footnote 74 The Mexican-American War also generated the same dramatic increase in the number of army personnel, from 8,509 in 1845 to 27,867 in 1846 and 44,736 in 1847. In total, 78,718 soldiers saw service during the war, with 13,283 causalities; 1,733 in battle.Footnote 75 After peaking in 1847, the level of federal spending gradually declined; yet at $39.5 million in fiscal year 1850, it remained significantly higher than it had been in 1845. The size of the army actually peaked in 1848 at 47,319 men and then dropped precipitously to 10,744 in 1849 and 10,714 in 1850, though it was still measurably higher than it had been in 1845. The ratchet effect of the Mexican-American War was 73.4 percent in federal spending and 25.9 percent in army personnel.Footnote 76
The two wars were also similar in the increasing professionalization of the armed forces. However, unlike in the Second Seminole War, army regulars monopolized combat duties throughout the Mexican-American War, from the initial Battle of Palo Alto on May 8, 1846, to the climactic march into Mexico City eighteen months later. Even before the declaration of war, General Zachary Taylor ordered militia units from the two states closest to the war zone—Louisiana and Texas—mustered into the army for fear of a major Mexican offensive across the Rio Grande. When Taylor's regulars parried that less-than-major offensive, the militia units stayed behind in Texas and never saw combat.Footnote 77 Congress reinforced the army during the war primarily by calling on the state governments to recruit enough troops to fill ten volunteer regiments. In total, twenty-three states supplied the army with 73,260 soldiers, but few of those volunteers were actually deployed to Mexico, and fewer still experienced combat.Footnote 78 Congress also increased the authorized size of the army by one regiment in February 1847, from 8,613 to 11,186 men.Footnote 79 But by the time the new enlistees arrived in Mexico, Nicholas Trist had already initiated peace negotiations with President Santa Anna's tottering government. Army veterans formed the core combat units during the entire Mexican campaign. Given that the Second Seminole War had ended only four years earlier, many of those veterans had seen service in Florida, as had a number of their commanding officers, including Generals Winfield Scott, Persifor F. Smith, Taylor, and Worth. The officer corps applied one of the major lessons of the Florida wars to the Mexican-American War by not relying on auxiliary forces for combat duties. Lieutenant George Gordon Meade was emphatic on this point, writing his wife from Monterrey, Mexico, on December 2, 1846, that volunteer soldiers “are almost useless in an offensive war.” He insisted they were “without discipline,” adding “immensely to the expenses of the war” because of “the utter incapacity of their officers to control them.”Footnote 80
Both conflicts functioned to expand the institutional autonomy of the U.S. military, with the Mexican-American War army benefitting from organizational initiatives undertaken during the later stages of the Second Seminole War. American state actors could now more reliably depend on the military to carry out their directives, thus bolstering their own professional autonomy relative to other elite actors and providing them with sufficient authority, legitimacy, and, when necessary, coercive power to govern the widely dispersed residents of the new southwestern territories.Footnote 81 However in contrast to the Second Seminole War, the Mexican-American War produced a fundamental institutional change that considerably augmented state capacities. In response to the extensive amount of territory the United States had acquired from Mexico as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Congress created the Department of Interior in March 1849.Footnote 82 The new department incorporated the General Land Office from the Department of Treasury, the Patent Office from the Department of State, military pension offices from the Departments of War and Navy, and the Indian Affairs Office from the Department of War; finally extricating the latter office from the army bureaucracy. In its first fiscal year, Interior Department expenditures were $5,403,373, which represented a sizable 12 percent of total federal spending. The department would a play leading role in conquering the “last frontier.”Footnote 83 Secretary of Treasury Robert J. Walker, a stalwart Mississippi Democrat, acted decisively to overcome the long-standing Southern congressional resistance to such a “home” department on states' rights grounds by reframing the issue as one of administrative capacities. In December 1848, Walker had warned Congress that “from the great and continued multiplication of the business of the Treasury Department as now organized, with the rapid increase of our maritime frontiers, our area, our commerce, revenue, and population, there is great danger that … [it] may be broken down by the weight of its labors.”Footnote 84
Finally, the two wars were similar in their relation to slavery, though the connection was much more straightforward in the case of the Second Seminole War than the Mexican-American War. While many of the Northern Whig opponents of the Mexican conflict, such as George Ashmun (W-MA) and Joshua Giddings (W-OH), accused President Polk of subverting Congress's constitutional authority by unilaterally provoking a military confrontation with Mexico in order to expand slavery into new territories, the Southern Democratic proponents of the war, including Howell Cobb (D-GA) and Hugh A. Haralson (D-GA), vehemently denied the charge. Polk himself insisted a long-simmering boundary dispute over whether the Rio Grande or Nueces River formed the southern border of Texas, punctuated by a deadly Mexican cavalry attack on a U.S. Army contingent north of the Rio Grande on April 25, 1846, was the immediate cause of the war. In addition, the congressional divisions over the war did not map neatly onto the prevailing sectional and partisan alignments, as individual congressmen articulated a variety of grounds to justify their positions, ranging from worries over its costs and effects on domestic politics to calls for manifest destiny and indemnification of outstanding American claims against the Mexican government.Footnote 85 Even if we accept the narrowest grounds for the conflict, slavery emerges as a proximate cause. Since a coterie of slaveholders who were originally from the United States had established political hegemony in Texas by the 1830s, just as they had in Florida, their 1835 declaration of independence was at least partially motivated by a desire to protect slavery from threatened Mexican efforts to abolish the institution. The border dispute between the Republic of Texas and Mexico then became a matter of concern for the federal government when Congress approved a joint resolution to annex Texas in February 1845, a process initiated by several prominent Southern executive officials, including President John Tyler, Treasury Secretary Walker, and Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur, who were determined to add one or more slave state to the union.Footnote 86 On the broader level of manifest destiny, Southern demands for territorial expansion were also not divorced from efforts to protect slavery even if, for the sake of argument, we grant the premise that they were dissociated with any commitment to expanding the institution into new territories. Again similar to the situation in territorial Florida, Texas slaveholders feared that as long as the federal government did not control adjacent borderlands, their escaped slaves would continue to find safe refuges; in the one case, on Seminole lands and, in the other, in Mexican territory.Footnote 87
In sum, both wars were engines of state development where slavery was at least a strong background factor. Counterfactually, it is difficult to imagine that either war would have occurred if Southern slaveholders had not established political hegemony in Florida and Texas. Territorial conflicts with Native Americans and Mexicans were, however, not the only instances when slavery-related military actions promoted state development.
OTHER SLAVERY-RELATED MILITARY ACTIONS
During the pre–Civil War period, U.S. Army soldiers also deterred slave revolts, returned fugitive slaves, and suppressed slavery-related territorial violence. In each of these three policy areas, the army became the federal government's principal law-enforcement tool. The presence of slavery functioned to create a state with greater capacities to implement its own policies in the face of third-party resistance.
Slave Revolts
Without officially announcing any such policy, executive officials deployed soldiers in response to slave revolts—actual, rumored, or simply feared—in Southern states and territories. The U.S. Army had two primary duties on the Southern frontier, Indian removal and slave control; responsibilities that overlapped in the case of the southeastern removals. In deterring and suppressing slave revolts, the army directly engaged in slave-control activities.
Executive officials deployed soldiers in response to both of the two largest slave revolts on American soil during the pre–Civil War period. In response to the January 1811 slave revolt in Orleans territory, Brigadier General Wade Hampton deployed an army regiment from the Baton Rouge garrison to the site of the rebellion along the German Coast of the Mississippi River, north of New Orleans, at the request of territorial Governor William C. C. Claiborne. Though local plantation owners suppressed the rebellion before the regiment arrived, army soldiers still marched through the area to deter further unrest.Footnote 88 Orleans territory and then the state of Louisiana was the site of seemingly constant troop movements because of rumored slave insurrections, both before and after the German Coast revolt. The Department of War stationed as much as 30 percent of the army's authorized force in and around New Orleans during the early decades of the nineteenth century, at least in part to control its sizable slave and free black populations.Footnote 89
During the August 1831 Southampton slave revolt in Virginia, Governor John B. Floyd decided not to request federal assistance because he feared it would imply that his state could not control its own slave population. Such concerns did not, however, deter state and local officials elsewhere as they flooded the Department of War with requests for assistance. Departmental staff even generated a plan for a general redeployment of army units from Northern to Southern garrisons. Secretary of War Cass ultimately decided against the plan when it became clear the Southampton revolt was an isolated event. He also had to refuse most of the local requests for assistance because he lacked the manpower to fill them. Cass, nevertheless, ordered the deployment of two army companies from Fort Johnston, North Carolina, to Wilmington and New Bern, near the Virginia border.Footnote 90 The previous Secretary of War, John Eaton, had already authorized the deployment of two companies from Fort Monroe to Wilmington in 1830 because of a rumored Christmas Day slave rebellion in that city.Footnote 91
Executive officials also deployed military forces in two slave-insurrection “scares.” After Charleston officials uncovered evidence of a possible slave-revolt conspiracy in July 1822, South Carolina Governor Thomas Bennett oversaw the executions of Denmark Vesey and thirty-four of his alleged co-conspirators. He also secretly wrote the state's “own” Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, asking him to reinforce the army garrison in Charleston. Not surprisingly, Calhoun complied, ordering the redeployment of an army company from Saint Augustine to Charleston, though he disappointed Bennett by not authorizing a larger troop movement.Footnote 92
Finally, John Brown's October 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry drew a military response. Upon receiving word of the raid, Secretary of War Floyd, the former Virginia governor who had refused to request assistance following the Southampton revolt, now took a quite different view of the federal responsibility for suppressing possible slave insurrections. He immediately dispatched a contingent of marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee to Harpers Ferry. The marines staged the final assault on Brown's party and captured Brown himself. Lee returned to Harpers Ferry six weeks later with four army companies from Fort Monroe to ensure that Brown's execution was not disrupted by any rescue attempt, as had been widely rumored.Footnote 93
In each of these four slave-insurrection cases, executive officials fulfilled their constitutional commitment to suppress domestic violence.Footnote 94 At the Constitutional Convention, Gouverneur Morris had supported banning slave imports on the grounds that the federal government would be responsible for suppressing slave revolts. In his typically acerbic fashion, Morris commented that the Northern states “are to bind themselves to march their militia for the defence of the Southern States … against those very slaves of whom they complain.”Footnote 95 Yet, the possibility the Constitution might require executive officials to deploy military forces to suppress slave revolts was not itself a subject of contention at the convention.
We have no record of the costs of the military deployments in slave-revolt cases, but the deterrent effects were at least self-evident to the Southern officials who requested them. In 1832, General Edmund P. Gaines even recommended to his superiors at the Department of War that only army officers from the South should be stationed in the region because in the event of a slave rebellion, they would know “more intimately than Northern or Eastern men, the characters and peculiar habits of the Southern people of all colors.”Footnote 96
For the most part, Southern officials were unwilling to rely solely on state police powers in slave-insurrection cases. Then when Northern officials began to assert those powers in fugitive-slave cases in ways that seemed inimical to slave control, Southern officials became the champions of federal police powers. In both slave-insurrection and fugitive-slave cases, the result was, at Southern insistence, a shift in governing authority from the state to the federal level as executive officials called on the army to shoulder crucial slave-control functions.
Fugitive Slaves
One important effect of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was to nationalize the army's role in slave control. Executive officials now deployed military forces in Northern states to keep African Americans in slavery.
Shortly after the passage of the law, U.S. Marshal Charles Knox requested and received army assistance in preventing a slave rescue in Detroit in October 1850.Footnote 97 Several months later, a group of free blacks openly defied the law by rescuing a fugitive slave, Shadrach Minkins, from the Boston courthouse in February 1851.Footnote 98 In the wake of this highly publicized event, President Fillmore authorized the use of local army units to prevent future rescues.Footnote 99 Following a deadly slave-rescue “riot” at a farmhouse outside Christiana, Pennsylvania, in September 1851, acting Secretary of State William S. Derrick ordered the deployment of fifty soldiers and marines from Carlisle Barracks and Philadelphia Navy Yard to Christiana to impose martial law and (unsuccessfully) pursue the escaped slaves.Footnote 100
The final fugitive-slave case where executive officials deployed local army units was the Anthony Burns rendition in Boston in June 1854. Initially, an antislavery “mob” tried to rescue Burns, killing a deputy marshal, James Batchelder, in the attempt.Footnote 101 In order to prevent a recurrence, Marshal Watson Freeman ordered three companies of soldiers and marines from Fort Independence and Charlestown Navy Yard to patrol the streets surrounding the Boston courthouse. After U.S. Commissioner Edward G. Loring remanded Burns to the custody of his owner, Charles F. Suttle, an armed force of approximately 1,600 soldiers, marines, militia, deputized marshals, and Boston police “escorted” the two men from the courthouse to the Treasury revenue cutter awaiting to transport them back to Virginia.Footnote 102
In enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, executive officials were fulfilling another one of their constitutional obligations. Stanley Campbell's compilation of fugitive-slave cases from the 1850s indicates that they were relatively successful in accomplishing the task.Footnote 103 Yet, the convention delegates who agreed, through unanimous consent, to add a fugitive-slave clause to the proposed constitution almost certainly did not anticipate executive officials would deploy army soldiers to enforce any subsequent legislation.Footnote 104
During the pre–Civil War period, executive officials also deployed armed forces to suppress domestic violence unrelated to slave control. The Whiskey Rebellion was the first of several such cases. Still, five of the fourteen pre–Civil War cases Robert Coakley discusses in his authoritative monograph on the topic were (possible) slave revolts (Wilmington, Southampton, and Harpers Ferry) or fugitive-slave renditions (the Detroit and Burns cases).Footnote 105 Again, we have no record of the costs of those deployments. Contemporary estimates in the Burns case range as high as $100,000.Footnote 106 But whatever the aggregate costs of the U.S. military's slave-revolt and fugitive-slave deployments, they demonstrated that executive officials were willing to engage in coercive actions in Northern as well as Southern states to protect the interests of Southern elites by interdicting anyone who threatened their slaveholdings, including their own rebellious slaves.
The federal efforts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 propelled an authority shift in this area of law from the state to the federal level, which culminated in the Taney Court's Ableman v. Booth (1859) decision invalidating Wisconsin's personal-liberty law.Footnote 107 Southern congressional leaders had sought such a shift for more than three decades. As the drafter of the 1850 law, Senator John M. Mason (D-VA), had argued in defense of his proposed legislation, “it is putting too grievous a burden upon the people of the slaveholding States to require them to submit to the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly, because the general government either will not or dare not carry into effect the provisions of the Constitution.”Footnote 108
In this area of law, the presence of slavery also had a significant impact on state development in making law enforcement a more prominent federal function. The implementation of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 expedited the transition in the role of U.S. marshals from clerks to lawmen. Congress transferred supervisory authority over marshals from the Department of State to the Attorney General's office in 1853—the same year it finally equalized the Attorney General's salary with that of other cabinet members under the assumption that it was now a full-time position. During the 1850s, Congress then allocated money to more than double the office's central staff, from three to eight employees, in order to oversee the federal government's expanding law-enforcement portfolio.Footnote 109
To implement the new fugitive-slave law, American state actors relied on federal police powers in unprecedented, and highly controversial, ways, not with any preemptive intention but to avert imminent political hazards. This development predated congressional instantiation of those powers in the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Senator Lyman Trumbull (R-IL), who was the principal sponsor of the act, drew the parallel between the two pieces of legislation in lecturing his colleagues that “the act that was passed that time for the purpose of punishing persons who should aid negroes to escape to freedom is now to be applied by the provisions of this bill to the punishment of those who shall undertake to keep them in slavery. Surely we have the authority to enact a law as efficient in the interests of freedom … as we had in the interest of slavery.”Footnote 110
“Bleeding Kansas”
After Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, the most visible result was “Bleeding Kansas,” open warfare between antislavery and proslavery factions in the new Kansas Territory. The “Border Ruffians” fully expected it to become a slave state and were well positioned to force the issue over whatever opposition the “Jayhawkers” might mount. The territorial militia was unable to keep the peace between the two warring factions, in large part because it was closely aligned with the proslavery faction. The pivotal event in restoring the peace was Secretary of War Jefferson Davis's September 1856 decision to authorize the local army commander, Brigadier General Persifor Smith, a veteran of both the Second Seminole and Mexican-American wars, to place the militia under his command. The decision may not have produced Davis's preferred outcome in guiding Kansas toward slave statehood, but it was an organizational success for the army in enabling it to reduce the level of violence in the territory.Footnote 111
Over a two-year period, the Department of War nearly doubled the U.S. Army's own presence in the territory, from 1,000 regulars in 1855 to 1,900 in 1857, which meant it had stationed more than one-seventh of the authorized force of the army in Kansas by the end of 1857. Although the regular army expenses associated with the violence in Kansas were not documented, the federal government paid the territorial militia $8,119 for its peace-keeping duties in 1856.Footnote 112 “Bleeding Kansas” was an important episode in the development of the army to the degree that it asserted its independence from the demands of territorial settlers on both sides of the conflict in order to stanch the bleeding. In praising the army's efforts in Kansas, territorial Governor John W. Geary commended military personnel for being “excellent peace-makers.” As Coakley and Tony Mullis emphasize in their studies of this military deployment, the army proved capable of performing that role because, unlike the territorial militia, it was not beholden to either of the two warring factions and could act autonomously of both in pursuit of a compelling state interest in delegitimizing frontier violence.Footnote 113
The Constitution granted Congress plenary power over U.S. territories in another clause that did not precipitate any discussion at the Constitutional Convention.Footnote 114 The territories clause, however, became fodder for sectional controversy during the 1850s as the issue of slavery in the territories encouraged dueling expansive and cribbed readings of the clause either to keep the institution “out” or to get it “in.” In his Dred Scott opinion, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney offered a cribbed reading, and then went on to rule not even territorial residents could keep slavery out.Footnote 115 Yet even as the Supreme Court was considering the case, army soldiers were performing law-enforcement duties in one territory to quell a deadly dispute over whether territorial residents could, in fact, keep the institution out. Comparable to earlier slave-revolt and fugitive-slave cases, American state actors found themselves limited by a lack of law-enforcement resources in “Bleeding Kansas” but were able to employ military personnel to increase state capacities sufficiently to accomplish their immediate political objectives.
CONCLUSION
In his iconoclastic history of the Florida wars, former Congressman Giddings portrayed the Second Seminole War as an exemplary case of how the federal government deployed its military forces on behalf of slave interests. Giddings famously accused the United States, “which boasts of its justice, its honor, and love of liberty,” of commencing the conflict “with a determination to re-enslave the Exiles [Black Seminole].” After estimating the costs of the war at $40 million, he demurred attaching any monetary value to “the suffering of the Indians and Exiles amidst such prolonged persecution.”Footnote 116
Substantial allocations of federal resources occurred during the pre–Civil War period because of the presence of slavery. Unfortunately, we lack sufficient documentation to even estimate the levels, except in the case of the Second Seminole and Mexican-American wars, where the allocations of both human and financial resources were substantial. We can, however, also assess the U.S. military's slavery-related actions on more qualitative measures of political development to gauge their contributions to state-building in the early republic.
When army officials oversaw a seven years' war to expel the Seminole from Florida while coordinating the removal of another 50,000 Native Americans from the southeastern United States across the Mississippi River, the American state certainly did not appear to be a weak state to the victims of those policies. Both the army and federal government emerged from this extended policy episode as more autonomous institutions with stronger capacities to act in pursuit of their own organizational interests relative to exogenous demands on their limited resources. Surveying the full range of the military's slavery-related actions, American state actors deployed armed forces to coerce a wide variety of “troublesome” groups, from the Black Seminole to rebellious slaves to Border Ruffians. As a result, the federal government acquired greater governing authority over Native American nations, state governments, and a diverse set of social groups who now found army personnel more closely monitoring their activities. Slavery-related military deployments strengthened the political legitimacy of the federal government among the residents of Southern states and territories as executive officials acted to protect the institution against both external and internal threats. Those deployments fortified the executive departments of government, leading to the creation of a new “home” department and Indian affairs bureaucracy as well as a larger and more professionalized Attorney General's office. They also aggrandized executive power as presidents and secretaries of war controlled the deployment process with minimal input from Congress.Footnote 117
Over time, the U.S. Army learned some valuable lessons from its slavery-related engagements. The officer corps was schooled in the imperatives of decreasing the army's dependence on auxiliary forces. Army division heads were taught the value of increasing their own independence from congressional and constituency pressures.Footnote 118 The Florida wars epitomized the growing professionalization of the army as military personnel became increasingly adverse to filibustering activities. The Mexican-American War was essentially a militia-free conflict.Footnote 119
Braxton Bragg, Joseph E. Johnston, George Meade, and William Tecumseh Sherman were among the prominent Civil War generals who applied the lessons they had learned from the Second Seminole and Mexican-American wars to the nation's bloodiest conflict.Footnote 120 The supreme irony of the pre–Civil War period is that “anti-statist” Southern slaveholders helped build a state strong enough to destroy their own institutional sources of power, though, characteristically, President Lincoln had initially “only” intended to save the Union.
