Emory Upton: The misunderstood reformer.

Abstract

Emory Upton distinguished himself during the Civil War as an infantry brigade and cavalry division commander. His legacy to the United States Army goes far beyond these exploits, however. The infantry tactics manual he wrote in the early 1870s was the basis for the army's tactical doctrine for two decades. More importantly, Upton's two great works, The Armies of Asia and Europe (1878) and The Military Policy of the United States (1904), provided intellectual justification for those who desired to reform the army's organization and, in some respects, its relationship with state and federal governments. Many of his proposals were carried out by Elihu Root in the early twentieth-century. Yet today Upton is an enigmatic, if frequently mentioned, almost elusive figure. Though Upton's positive influence is almost universally recognized, many have argued that Upton also was responsible for an Uptonian pessimism that pervaded the United States Army officer corps in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Symptoms of this affliction include a belief that citizen-soldiers are inherently unreliable, the desire for a larger regular army, the maintenance of empty, skeletal organizations in the absence of a large army, and the belief that a democracy is incapable of developing an adequate military policy, a belief that fed an admiration of the German military system and its anti-democratic tendencies. This dissertation argues that such an interpretation of Upton's proposals misunderstands his motives and removes his ideas from the context of his professional and personal experiences, as it does from contemporary intellectual and political currents. Upton never rejected the concept of citizen soldiers; rather, he sought to insure that they were prepared for the exigencies of war. He also sought to develop a military system that would preserve republicanism, and Upton crafted this system to address the lessons he had learned during the Civil War and Reconstruction. This work concludes by arguing that Uptonian pessimism is more due to a misreading of Upton's ideas than it is to anything Upton himself said or did. It is in this context that Upton is The Misunderstood Reformer.