'Fascinating glimpse' of Garrison life and an ambitious frontier officer

Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army. Robert Wooster. Bison Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. 391 pages; notes; bibliographical essay; index; $18, paper.

By John H. Williams

The author has written a solid, thoroughly researched work dealing with a subject and epoch too often ignored. There is drama (the Civil, Indian and Spanish-American Wars); a virtual hagiography of U.S. Army heroes (Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Custer, Terry, Crook, Geronimo, Sitting Bull and many more); and, in some ways more important, a fascinating glimpse of day-to-day garrison life on the advancing frontier.

Nelson Miles traced his path through truly notable times, rising from officer of volunteers to corps command in the Civil War, then paying his dues in a series of frontier posts and finally achieving the Army's highest rank.

The picture of Miles that emerges from these pages is badly blurred and, perhaps like the man himself, one-dimensional and shallow. Noting that Miles was "rarely willing or able to confide his true feelings," Wooster is unable to flesh his subject out as a person, and we learn little of his family as well.

What we do learn is that Nelson Miles was an egotistical, scheming, paranoid politician. Following a meteoric rise to general of volunteers in the Civil War and transfer to the Regular Army with a lower rank following that conflict, Miles married Mary Hoyt Sherman, niece of both Gen. William T. Sherman and Senator John Sherman.

Over the coming years Miles constantly badgered the general and the senator (and others) for prime assignments and promotions. Even his benefactor, Gen. Sherman, grew exasperated with his pushiness, writing that he "constantly implies that because he married my niece whom I love very much that I approve his ambitious views."

A random sampling of Wooster's description of his subject is telling: "ever alert to a bit of publicity"; "eager to cultivate political ties"; "vigilant quest for promotion"; "Miles turned to army intrigue"; "an ambitious climber who would advance his own interests at any cost"; "chronically addicted to machinations"; "insatiable quest for publicity and power"; "colossal appetite for power."

Miles was an unpleasant man, and as he grew older and moved higher in rank his demands increased. He pressed for revival of the rank of lieutenant general, and lobbied for the positions of commanding general, secretary of war and even president.

Miles achieved the first two of his major goals, but while he served as commanding general he revealed a startling lack of perception. The U.S. Army on the eve of war with Spainthree years into Miles' tenure-was still tiny, horrendously outfitted and bereft of doctrine. (For instance, there was not even a rudimentary contingency plan for the war with Spain, which was clearly imminent.) More damning is the fact that the commanding general "saw little need for military reform," and after the war fought against the attempts of President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of War Elihu Root to modernize the Army. During the conflict with Spain, Miles was so little respected that President "McKinley never sought his advice and never gave it any weight when offered."

Forced out of uniform the moment he reached retirement age, he found his attempts to offer his services during World War I were coldly rebuffed. A man forged and then frozen in l9thcentury warfare and frontier duty was not a man to direct modern warfare.

As the last sentence of the text admits, "Courage and military success alone were not enough to equip Nelson Miles, or the old army for the twentieth century."

The maps and illustrations are firstrate, the notes are copious and informative, and the bibliographic essay attests to the work that has gone into this volume.

JOHN H. WILLIAMS, PH.D., is a professor of history at Indiana State University.

Copyright Association of the United States Army Jul 1997
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