Staff Officers

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Staff Officers

STAFF OFFICERS. Over the course of the war, the American concept of the military staff was influenced by three traditions of how the administration and management of armies ought to be organized and ought to function. Not surprisingly, at the start of the war the Congress and General Washington adopted the British model, the fundamentals of which had been laid down by the duke of Marlborough during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713) and with which the colonists had become familiar during the French and Indian War (1754–1763). In each army, British and American, the principal staff officers involved in preparing the army for operations were the adjutant general, the quartermaster general, and the commissary general. The adjutant general recorded and transmitted orders from the commander in chief to the army, maintained the records of musters that told the commander how many soldiers were ready to fight, and handled all the paperwork on personnel matters. The quartermaster general organized the acquisition and transportation to camp of all the material goods the army needed to fight effectively, established and managed the camps that sheltered the soldiers, and oversaw just about everything else connected with operations. The commissary general was responsible for all matters involving food and forage.

THE CONTINENTAL STAFF

Congress began the long process of evolving the staff of the Continental Army on 16 June 1775, when it created five senior staff positions at the same time that it appointed the army's first general officers, but it did not fill all the slots immediately. It appointed Horatio Gates as adjutant general on 17 June and continued Richard Gridley, the officer Massachusetts had appointed as its chief engineer. It waited until 19 July to appoint Joseph Trumbull as commissary general, the same day it authorized, at Washington's request, a wagon master and a commissary of artillery stores; Washington appointed John Goddard and Ezekiel Cheever to fill these positions. The last days of July saw a spate of appointments. Congress named Benjamin Church as director general and chief of the medical department on 25 July, and on 27 July it appointed James Warren as paymaster general and Robert Erskine as geographer and surveyor to the army. Two days later it created the office of judge advocate and named William Tudor to the post; in 1776 the title was changed to judge advocate general. (Tudor was succeeded by John Laurance on 11 April 1777; Laurance served until 3 June 1782, when Colonel Thomas Edwards was appointed to the office.) Stephen Moylan was named commissary general of musters on 11 August, and finally, on 14 August, Washington appointed Thomas Mifflin as quartermaster general.

Most of the army's high-level administrative work was accomplished by these staff officers, who oversaw the implementation of orders from Washington and the Congress by their deputies and assistant deputies. During the first years of the war, the army was administered through its regiments, which were also its principal combat organizations. Regimental staff typically included an adjutant, a quartermaster, a commissary, a paymaster, a surgeon and surgeon's mate, and a chaplain. The first four of these positions were generally filled by line officers, who thus bore dual responsibilities in their regiments. (On 29 July 1775, Congress made provision to pay chaplains, turning volunteer clergymen into formal members of regimental and brigade staffs.) Regiments were always brigaded together under a brigadier general, but these groupings were initially ad hoc formations whose composition could change rapidly. Beginning with the enlistment of men into the army for three years or the duration of the war (1 January 1777), brigade composition became more stable, and more staff work was accomplished at the brigade level, under the supervision of the brigade major. Eighteenth-century armies did not have standing corps and divisions; these additional layers of operational control were institutionalized in the much larger armies that European states fielded around the turn of the nineteenth century.

OTHER INFLUENCES

As the war continued, the American understanding of the military staff was influenced by aspects of the French staff system, especially the concept of an inspector general that was brought to America by the many French volunteers who served in the American army. By 1777 the Continental army was maturing as an institution, and both Congress and General Washington saw the need to improve the competence and professionalism of a force that was clearly going to exist for several more years. Congress appointed Colonel Augustin Mottin de la Balme as inspector general of cavalry on 8 July 1777, and on 11 August named Philippe Tronson de Coudray a "major general of the staff" and inspector general of ordnance and military stores, more to quiet this troublesome Frenchman than out of respect for his abilities.

On 26 October 1777, as he contemplated how to dislodge the British from Philadelphia, Washington sent a circular letter to his generals, asking them for, among other things, a recommendation on whether an inspector general should be appointed to establish uniformity in drill, troop training, and command procedure, "as the time of the Adjutant General seems to be totally engaged with other business." Washington wanted the office to be filled by an acceptable, professionally trained foreign officer who would act as an overall inspector general, and he later indicated that the idea of an inspector general had originated with Henry, Baron d'Arendt. The generals concurred with Washington's proposal on 29 October, but before Washington could find time from the press of field duties to get congressional approval, the delegates acted. On 13 December 1777 Congress created the post of inspector general, directed that this officer report directly to it, and appointed Brigadier General Thomas Conway as "Inspector General of the Army," which some delegates meant as criticism of Washington's leadership. The commander in chief deftly parried this insult, and the French-Irish troublemaker never functioned as inspector general.

The Continental army's first actual inspector general was Friedrich Steuben, whom Congress appointed on 5 May 1778. Steuben had already acted as a de facto inspector general during the winter encampment at Valley Forge, where his modesty, sincerity, and earnest attention to training soldiers in an adaptation of Prussian drill fulfilled the requirements set out by Washington and his generals in October 1777. Aspects of the Prussian staff model, which was becoming highly influential as armies digested the success of Frederick the Great in the Seven Years' War, were adapted by Steuben for the Continental army after he became inspector general. His efforts to standardize the equipment and training of the army was intended to produce more uniform regiments that would be under greater central control and approach interchangeability on the battlefield. A formal complaint against "the progressive encroachment of a new-fangled power" was submitted by Brigadier General James M. Varnum, a Rhode Islander who was "filled with horror" when Steuben's inspectors called for reports on men fit for duty (Hittle, pp. 179-180).

The northern and southern military departments had staff officers corresponding to those in Washington's main army or those answerable directly to Congress. Each department had, for example, a deputy quartermaster general, and each brigade an assistant deputy quartermaster general. The same nomenclature applied generally to the adjutant general, the inspector general, and other staff positions. Although Edward Carrington was technically a deputy quartermaster general, as the quartermaster general of Major General Nathanael Greene's Southern Department in 1780–1781, he can sensibly be referred to as "Greene's quartermaster general."

Another category of staff officer contributed significantly to the administration and operation of the Continental army. It had long been a tradition in the British army for senior officers to rely heavily on their aides-de-camp and military secretaries to help them conduct business and operate their command. When he was appointed commander in chief, Washington requested and Congress approved the appointment of three aides-de-camp and a secretary. It was only with the help of these men, a total of thirty-two over the course of the war, that Washington was able to transmit orders, manage an enormous correspondence (some twelve thousand letters and orders went out at his direction or over his signature during eight years of war, the vast majority produced by his secretaries), and keep himself informed of the daily activities of the forces under his command as well as understand what was going on in theaters far removed. Not formally vested with specific responsibilities, the men who served as aides-de-camp to general officers had to have the intelligence, talent, and experience to deal with whatever task needed to be accomplished. Washington generally chose his aides well; they tended to leave his military family, as the close-knit group of trusted aides around the general was called, only when they needed respite from the burden of work or wanted to serve more actively in a line command. Washington's military family, with the general acting in the role of pater familias, was the operational heart of the main Continental army.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chase, Philander D., et al., eds. The Papers of George Washington. Vols. 12 and 13. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002–2003.

Hittle, James. The Military Staff: Its History and Development. 3rd ed. Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Book, 1961.

Lefkowitz, Arthur S. George Washington's Indispensable Men: The 32 Aides-de-Camp Who Helped Win American Independence. Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2003.

Risch, Erna. Supplying Washington's Army. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1981.

revised by Harold E. Selesky

Encyclopedia of the American Revolution: Library of Military History