It is a bit presumptuous to discuss expeditionary warfare over the course of a full century, especially the 19th century, a period in which the United States physically changed from a cluster of states along the eastern seaboard into a continental power, in which its naval vessels changed from sailing frigates to steam-powered armored cruisers, in which American policy changed from “leave us alone” to “get out of our way,” in which the iconic policy maker changed from Thomas Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt. The character and impact of these dramatic changes can perhaps best be perceived by concentrating on a few case studies of expeditionary warfare from Jefferson to the first Roosevelt. These studies are useful milestones for examining and evaluating the changes that occurred not only in technology and doctrine, but also—and more importantly—in America’s changing conception of the role it should play in the world.
Considerations of policy and technology are not mutually exclusive. If policy dictates what you want to do, technology in many cases delimits what you can do. And this cuts both ways: Just as the absence of power limits the range of a country’s possible options in response to a crisis, so too does the possession of power encourage the consideration of policy options that would never have been on the table in the first place but for the fact that the capability existed. In the 19th century, the range of U.S. policy options expanded dramatically as the nation grew in power and capability, and this had an impact not only on what we did as a nation, but also on who we became.
The Barbary War Experience
When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated as America’s third president in March 1801, the country’s difficulties with the so-called Barbary pirates were already two decades old. The corsairs that operated from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—all of them loosely affiliated with the far-flung Ottoman Empire—had made a practice of seizing the merchant vessels of “infidel” nations and holding the passengers and crews for ransom, actions that today might be described as state-sponsored terrorism. Terror, of course, was not the goal. They did not object to other countries’ policies; they did it for the money.1
When, during the first decade of its national existence, the United States confronted the Barbary threat, its first reaction was to do what everybody else did and pay the annual fee. Though some Americans found it distasteful, even dishonorable, to pay an annual fee—called a tribute by those who sought to disparage the practice as unworthy of a great nation—most saw it less as a matter of national pride than of simple economics. The fact was that the United States in 1783 had no Navy, and building one would be expensive—significantly more expensive than paying an annual tribute.
Jefferson, however, made a different calculation. He noted that expenditures for a Navy could be amortized over the lifetime of the ships whereas tribute payments could be increased at any time. In the long run, therefore, building a naval force could prove less expensive than paying an annual tribute. Jefferson’s argument was not a product of outraged national honor; he simply believed that a policy of suppression was more efficient and economical than tribute.
Ironically, Jefferson, who is historically associated with opposition to a standing navy, was the first advocate of sending an American expeditionary naval force overseas. The distinction he made, one often overlooked by his critics, is that his opposition to a standing navy was directed at the construction of an offensive navy that was likely to attract the attention of the European powers and drag America into their interminable wars. He did not oppose building a small defensive navy, one that could meet the practical day-to-day needs of a small republic. Consistent with this view, only days after he became president, Jefferson sent what he called a “Squadron of Observation” to the Mediterranean to keep an eye on the Barbary States.2
The squadron arrived to find that Yusuf Karamanli, the bashaw of Tripoli, had already declared war on the United States. In terms of expeditionary warfare, the most noteworthy aspect of the subsequent conflict was the curious—indeed almost bizarre—expedition conjured up by American diplomatic agent William Eaton to bring about in Tripoli what today might easily be called a regime change. Since Karamanli proved resistant to American diplomatic overtures, Eaton dug up Yusuf’s older brother Hamet in Egypt and talked him into laying claim to the throne—making him an early prototype of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, or perhaps Ahmad Chalabi. Eaton, now styled “General Eaton,” then assembled a ragtag army of Arab and Egyptian opportunists bolstered by a squad of nine Marines from the brig USS Argus and began an 800-mile march along the north coast of Africa toward Tripoli.
The force covered only about a third of the distance to Tripoli before halting at Derna, which it had captured, but the army’s march led Yusuf to reconsider his position. His income had been significantly reduced by the ongoing American blockade, his subjects were complaining about the resulting hardships, and Hamet was coming to lay claim to the throne. Yusuf’s determination to retain power trumped his reluctance to give in to American demands. He decided to seek a deal.
The chief American negotiator, Tobias Lear, was willing enough. Lear was dubious of the scheme to replace Yusuf with Hamet, since Hamet was more mercurial, and hence probably less reliable, than his brother. The diplomat therefore negotiated a settlement with Yusuf that called for the release of all American hostages and an end to the tribute system. In exchange, the United States agreed to make a one-time payment of $60,000. As for Hamet, he was given $200 for his trouble and abandoned.3
This early experiment in American expeditionary warfare suggested that if buying a peace in the Mediterranean was unreliable, so was conducting open-ended warfare. It was the combination of military pressure, political isolation, and financial inducement that led to the war’s satisfactory termination. The outcome was not marked by a triumphant military victory or the overthrow of the enemy regime—Yusuf Karamanli remained the bashaw of Tripoli. But the American hostages came home and U.S. trade returned to the Mediterranean.
Of course, the other Barbary States still had to be convinced of the folly of maintaining the tribute system, and in 1815 Stephen Decatur led a U.S. expedition to Algiers to secure satisfactory terms from the potentate of that city. A decade after that, the major European powers finally ended the system once and for all by the use of military force and the French occupation of Algeria. On the whole, however, this first exercise of American expeditionary warfare can fairly be considered to have been a success, and the key elements of that success were Jefferson’s decision to focus U.S. naval power on a specific and limited objective and Lear’s willingness to seek a pragmatic settlement rather than insist on a military victory.
Mid-Century Expeditions
Over the ensuing 100 years, the United States focused more on internal issues than external adventures. To be sure, U.S. naval vessels fought the British in the War of 1812, but that conflict was provoked as much by concern over the security of the western frontier as by international events. On the whole, 19th-century Americans worried much more about domestic issues than foreign policy.
This is riot to say that the country had no experience with expeditionary warfare during these decades. There was, for example, the large-scale amphibious landing of General Winfield Scott’s army at Veracruz during the Mexican War. This was certainly a milestone in the development of American military doctrine because for the first time a full-scale expeditionary army—not just a landing force of sailors and Marines—debarked on a hostile shore for the purpose of conducting an extended military campaign. All the massive logistical problems of transporting and maintaining such an army had to be mastered. Indeed, to effect that landing, the Navy constructed the first specially designed landing craft for amphibious warfare. They were simply surfboats built in three sizes so that they could snugly nest inside one another and be carried on the decks of the troop transports. Once alongside, the soldiers scrambled down into the boats and then approached the shore in an extended line abreast, hitting the beach nearly simultaneously so that they could wade through the surf to plant the American flag on Mexican soil.4 But if the Veracruz landing was a doctrinal and logistical triumph, it did not yet mark a milestone in the emergence of the United States as a world power. It was more closely connected to continental expansion and consolidation than to international politics.
Similarly, the greatest of all 19th-century American military expeditions—the transportation by sea of the 120,000 men of Major General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac from Washington to the Virginia Peninsula in the spring of 1862—was also a consequence of an internal national trauma. Like Veracruz, this operation marked a milestone in the technical and logistical capability of the U.S. military. In just three weeks, Union transport and cargo vessels, escorted by Navy warships, carried 121,500 men, 14,592 animals, 1,224 wagons, 44 batteries of artillery, and all the other impedimenta of a modern army to the peninsula. Grand as it was, the expedition did not mark a turning point in defining America’s place in the world.
What it did demonstrate, of course, was the dramatic, even historic, increase in American military capability. In the 15 years between Veracruz and the Peninsula campaign, the scale of U.S. expeditionary operations grew more than tenfold. In 1847 Scott had conquered a country with 10,000 men; in 1862 McClellan led twelve times that many in an attempt to capture Richmond. That he failed to do so says a lot more about George McClellan than it does about either doctrine or capability.5
Much more could be said about the impact of the American Civil War on the evolution of expeditionary warfare. The cooperation necessary to conduct expeditions against Roanoke Island, North Carolina, or Port Royal Sound, South Carolina, involved not only extensive planning and logistical innovation but also the development of new command protocols. Likewise the cooperation necessary to conquer the Mississippi River and its major tributaries, from Forts Henry and Donelson to Vicksburg, all testified to the maturing of the American military as well as the emergence of new, and often ad hoc, practices for conducting joint operations even if formal doctrine did not keep pace with those practices. Nevertheless, these expeditions did not constitute expeditionary warfare in the classic sense of that term, for they were part of an internal civil war rather than the projection of force overseas.6
By the end of the Civil War, the United States had become a nation with the capacity of a world power, but after such an appalling bloodbath few Americans showed much interest in exercising U.S. strength on the world stage. Moreover, the country was focused on the painful process of Reconstruction and the westward expansion. There were, however, some straws in the wind that suggested the moment of America’s debut as a world power was not far off.
One of those straws dated back to the decade before the Civil War, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry led a naval expedition to Japan in 1852-53. Here was an expeditionary undertaking of a quite different sort. Perry conquered Japan not with force but with diplomacy. It was an assignment requiring tact and cultural sensitivity rather than firepower. Aware of Japan’s attitude toward foreign “devils” and the reverence they bore toward the person of the emperor, Perry played a patient game. Once his ships steamed uninvited into Edo Bay, he refused to show himself, remaining in his cabin and allowing his flag captain, Franklin Buchanan, to be his spokesman.
Buchanan explained that the great and powerful Commodore Perry could not show himself to mere mortals; only a personal emissary from the emperor was sufficiently exalted to greet the great commodore in person. When, after many delays, such an emissary at last appeared, Perry had the ship’s carpenter build an elaborate sedan chair in which he was carried ashore amid much fanfare by the four tallest and most impressive African-Americans on board the flagship—men of such an impressive and alien character that the Japanese were awestruck. Then, after delivering the president’s letter—in a rosewood box with gold hinges— Perry returned to his ship . . . and he left. He did not press the Japanese for an answer; they would make up their minds in due course, and he wanted them to have the time to think about it.7
In the end, of course, Perry’s expedition succeeded magnificently and, though it was achieved without firing a single shot, it was arguably the most successful example of American expeditionary warfare in the 19th century. Moreover, unlike the much larger amphibious expeditions to Veracruz and the peninsula, this one did mark a turning point in the history of America’s role in world affairs. By convincing Japan to open its ports for American coaling stations, and eventually to trade as well, the United States took its first tentative steps into the western Pacific.
Toward an American Empire
The real milestone in this transformation, however, came near the end of the century when Commodore George Dewey’s squadron of cruisers steamed into Manila Bay. At its inception, this operation was not intended to be an exercise in expeditionary warfare at all. The purpose of the Spanish-American War was the liberation of Cuba from Spain. The only reason for Dewey’s expedition to Manila was to neutralize the offensive potential of the Spanish naval squadron of Don Patricio Montojo y Pasaron in accordance with Mahanian doctrine. Montojo’s little squadron was hardly a fleet-in-being even in the most generous application of that term, and geographically it was about as far from the putative scene of war as it was possible to get and still be on the same planet. Still, naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan had argued that the sea was a seamless cloth, so that the existence of an enemy fleet anywhere on its surface posed at least a theoretical threat to friendly operations. Consequently, when Congress passed the declaration of war against Spain, the first operational order sent out by the Navy Department went to the commander of the Asiatic Squadron—Dewey.8
The commodore’s victory in Manila Bay was easy and complete; Montojo’s squadron never had a chance. Within a few hours, all the Spanish ships were sunk or burning. Then the law of unintended consequences came into play. Technically, Dewey had fulfilled his responsibilities when the last Spanish vessel struck its flag. But he then anchored in front of Manila and sent word back to America for an army of occupation. Of course, President William McKinley did not have to accede to Dewey’s request. The president later claimed, “When the Philippines dropped into our laps, 1 confess I did not know what to do with them.” He even said, “I could not have told where those darned islands were within 2000 miles.” 9
Still, once McKinley received Dewey’s request for an army of occupation, it seemed to him, as it did to Dewey, that America had a responsibility to fill the power vacuum that the U.S. victory had created. Without a great deal of thought about the long-term consequences, McKinley ordered 4,000 soldiers under the command of Brigadier General Wesley Merritt to Manila. It was a historic decision with enormous consequences for the future of the United States.
Once the army arrived, it found that the real enemy in the Philippines was not the Spanish, who were willing— even eager—to turn the responsibility over to their American conquerors, but rather the Filipinos, or at least those represented by rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo, who desired and expected what the Americans had promised to the Cubans: independence.
While theoretically sympathetic to the principle of self- government, McKinley was disinclined to grant it to a people who resisted America’s helping hand. For the next three years, the United States fought a bloody and increasingly vicious war to suppress the Philippine independence movement and secure its outpost in the Far East.10
Some scholars have suggested that American imperialism in the Pacific and the Caribbean at the end of the century was the product of a deliberate conspiracy by industrialists and expansionists who sought to turn the country into an empire. But a more likely explanation is that the Battle of Manila Bay triggered a sequence of events that led all the participants down a road that few had foreseen and for which even fewer were prepared. For most Americans, the rhetoric of 1898 was real enough; to them, liberating Cuba was a noble and unselfish goal. But in the process of achieving it, forces were unleashed that led the United States into an entirely new chapter of its national history. Sympathy for the Cuban rebels led to war; Mahan’s theories of naval supremacy led Dewey to Manila Bay; the destruction of Montojo’s fleet created a vacuum of authority in the Philippines; and America’s decision to fill that vacuum led to a brutal expeditionary war of conquest.
Indeed, as much as any other event, the war in the Philippines marked a kind of national coming of age. Fighting a dark-skinned native population, American soldiers in that racist age routinely referred to their opponents as “niggers” and they coined a term that would be used elsewhere to describe America’s third-world enemies: “gooks.” In the process, the country thus came face to face with the ugly side of empire.11
The United States emerged from the war with Spain as an acknowledged world power. Given America’s economic and physical circumstances at the turn of the century, that moment would have come sooner or later even if Dewey had never steamed into Manila Bay. But as it happened, his victory there was the milestone event that signaled the turning point in American and world history. In addition, the Spanish-American War in general, and the Philippine War in particular, marked not only the advent of an American Empire in territorial terms, but also the first manifestation of U.S. efforts to remake the world in accordance with its notion of what constituted proper government. It was a significant sea change. As the London Times put it four weeks after Dewey’s victory: “This war must in any event effect a profound change in the whole attitude and policy of the United States. In future America will play a part in the general affairs of the world such as she has never played before.”
International Expeditionary Warfare
The United States sought to distinguish itself from other imperial powers in Asia by advocating the famous “open door” policy in China, but even that policy assumed that China’s relationship with the rest of the world was an issue to be resolved by the West rather than by the Chinese. In China, however, the unwillingness or inability of the government to stand up to Western encroachments led to a nationalist movement known as the Righteous and Harmonious Fists or more popularly, the Boxers. Their goal was to end outside influence in China by driving out the foreigners. Initially, the dowager empress opposed them, but as the Boxers grew in strength and popularity, she could see which way the wind was blowing and began to encourage them.12
By the spring of 1900, two years after Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay, the power of the Boxers had grown so great that the American minister to Peking, Edward Conger, felt compelled to request help from the U.S. Asiatic Squadron. Many of the European ministers made similar requests to their governments, and the commanders of the various Western naval squadrons sent landing parties to bolster the foreign legations in Peking—a separate area known as the Legation Quarter, an enclave of Western power in the middle of the Chinese capital. It was guarded by an ad hoc force of about 450 soldiers and sailors from Western naval vessels. The American contingent consisted of 48 Marines and five sailors from the cruiser Newark (C-l). When a mob of armed Boxers numbering in the thousands began to make threatening noises about the “foreign devils” in its midst, the various ministers called for a more substantial force.
The British organized a 2,000-man international relief column that fought its way past the Taku forts guarding the entrance to the Pei-ho River and began moving inland. If it looked like a rescue mission to Westerners, it looked very much like an invasion to the Chinese, and China’s army joined with the Boxers to resist it. As a result, the relief expedition was stopped short of its goal and hunkered down at the city of Tietsin, less than halfway to the capital. To relieve both the ministers barricaded in Peking and the relief force surrounded at Tietsin, the Western powers and Japan assembled what amounted to an international army of nearly 20,000 troops—a coalition of the worried.
The United States contributed 1,000 Marines under the command of Colonel R.W. Meade and 2,000 soldiers under Major General Adna Chafee. Thus in the summer of 1900 the United States not only fielded a substantial expeditionary army, it did so in concert with the major powers of Europe and Japan as part of an international force. It was a circumstance that would have been unimaginable to Thomas Jefferson, whose use of expeditionary warfare in the Mediterranean had been crafted with an eye toward ensuring that America stayed out of the entanglements of European power politics.
Alongside the expeditionary army’s other troops, these 3,000 Americans fought their way more than 100 miles into the heart of China, forced their way into Peking, and relieved the siege of the Legation Quarter, thus reasserting Western domination over the hapless Chinese. If it was business as usual for the British and French, it marked a dramatic departure for the United States, which at last abandoned its traditional insularity.
Less than three months later, McKinley was re-elected to a second term as president, effectively silencing the antiimperialist campaign of William Jennings Bryan. As his running mate, McKinley had dropped his first-term vice president, the colorless Garret Hobart, and replaced him with the all-too-colorful Theodore Roosevelt.
On 6 September 1901, 100 years, almost to the day, after Congress declared war against Tripoli, President McKinley was shaking hands in a receiving line in Buffalo, New York, when anarchist Leon Czolgosz stepped forward and fired two shots into his chest. The mortally wounded president lingered for more than a week before he died, leaving the presidency to the man former McKinley adviser Mark Hanna called “that damned cowboy.” It was Theodore Roosevelt, therefore, who subsequently presided over the globalization of American policy and a dramatic expansion of the Navy to go with it, and it was Roosevelt who dispatched the so- called Great White Fleet on its global circumnavigation four years later, an event that marked as clearly as any that the United States had entered a new era.13
1. Elements of this discussion were extracted from Craig L. Symonds, ‘“A Squadron of Observation’: Thomas Jefferson and America’s First War against Terrorism,” White House Studies, 4 (2004) pp. 125-136. For background on America’s wars with the Barbary powers see Gardner Allen, Our Navy and the Barbary Corsairs (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1905); Glenn Tucker, Dawn Like Thunder: The Barbary Wars and the Birth of the U.S. Navy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963); and A.B.C. Whipple, To the Shores of Tripoli: The Birth of the U.S. Navy and Marines (New York: William Morrow, 1991).
2. Jefferson’s naval policy views are expressed in Jefferson to John Adams, July 11, 1786, Naval Documents of the Barbary Wars, Dudley Knox, ed. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939-1950), 1:10. See also Craig L. Symonds, Navalists and Antinavalists: The Naval Policy Debate in the United States, 1785-1826 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1980).
3. William Eaton to Isaac Hull, January 8, 1805, The Hull-Eaton Correspondence (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1911), p. 21; Whipple, To the Shores of Tripoli, pp. 254-56.
4. K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846H848 (New York: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 232-58.
5. Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992), p. 24.
6. B. Frank Cooling, Forts Henry and Donelson: The Key to the Confederate Heartland (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Michael B. Ballard, Vicksburg: The Campaign that Opened the Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
7. Samuel Eliot Morison, “Old Bruin”: Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), pp. 339-390; Craig L. Symonds, Confederate Admiral: The Life and Wars of Franklin Buchanan (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1999), pp. 99-114.
8. David Trask, The War With Spain in 1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 75- 76. See also John A.S. Grenville, “American Preparations for War with Spain, 1896-1898,” Journal of American Studies (April, 1968), pp. 33-47; quotation is from Long to Dewey, April 24, 1898, in Nathan Sargent, Admiral Dewey and the Manila Campaign (Washington, DC: Naval Historical Foundation, 1947), p. 22n.
9. Ivan Musicant, Empire by Default: The Spanish American War and the Dawn of the American Century (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), p. 591.
10. McKinley is quoted in Louis A. Perez, The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 118.
11. The very name of this conflict shows the shift in attitude toward this war over the past 15 years or so. In the early 20th century it was called the “Philippine Insurrection” as if the people who lived there were in rebellion against their proper masters: the newly arrived and uninvited Americans. More recently scholars have labeled it “The Philippine-American War,” or as Brian Linn calls it in his excellent book, The Philippine War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000).
12. Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy, A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1959, 1975), pp. 372-92.
13. Margaret Leech, In the Days of McKinley (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), pp. 592-601.