American Rifle - Alexander Rose [110]
The army’s newfound devotion to marksmanship and its shift to Uptonian doctrine was not without its critics. (So fierce were their attacks on Upton and his thinking that they may well have contributed to his suicide on March 15, 1881.)49 Congress and leading businessmen were in the forefront of the assault upon Upton. Having learned his trade during the Civil War and learning from the Europeans, he had originally designed his expansible force for fighting army-on-army battles. It was a flaw that his civilian critics were quick to exploit. If the army were intended for major strategic operations against a Great Power rival, they asked, then where were all those enemies?
None were on the horizon, so what was the point of his mooted army of up to 150,000 men? Congress instead cut back the defense budget. (Ordnance alone had its funds slashed from $31 million in 1865 to $700,000 a year later.) In 1866 it had limited the size of the army to 54,000 men, and three years later it further reduced the number of infantry regiments from 45 to 25, instantly slashing the number of troops to 37,313. In 1870 it abolished the ranks of general and lieutenant general and instituted a further decline to 30,000 effectives. In 1874, about the time Upton began promoting his ideas, a proviso stated that the government was to maintain no more than 25,000 troops. In less than a decade Washington had more than halved the size of the U.S. Army.50 The policy had bipartisan support: northern Republicans abolished regiments that were no longer needed for policing duty during Reconstruction; southern Democrats vengefully targeted regiments that had policed them during Reconstruction.
Businessmen, for their part, found the very concept of a huge army alarming. For them, and for settlers intending to go west, the army’s job was to provide domestic security by acting as a national police force to catch outlaws, keep the flags flying atop the forts, and put down the occasional bit of Indian troublemaking. In the absence of a genuine threat from abroad, the temper of the times clamored for “business pacifism.”51 The Civil War had drained the blood and treasure of the nation, and Lincoln’s assassination seemed to signal the end of an era of barbaric ferocity. When George Wingate of the NRA pleaded with New York governor Alonzo Cornell to restore the organization’s state funding, Cornell had high-handedly replied that “there would never be any war in my time or in the time of my children,” and that all the army needed to do was “to march a little through the streets” during parades. Rifle training, the governor added, was a foolish waste of time.52 Cornell was by no means alone in holding optimistic views of the peaceful utopia to come in the twentieth century. In 1886 an Iowa congressman asked, “What is the necessity of having any fighting men now?” to which his colleague Representative Foney of Alabama countered, “‘In time of peace prepare for war’: that is the only reason I know.” The classical allusion garnered Foney only mocking laughter.53
Unsurprisingly, within the army morale plummeted. Officers stationed on the frontier found themselves condemned back east as exterminationist Indian-killers. (“I only know the names of three savages upon the plains,” announced the former abolitionist Wendell Phillips in