Militias

MILITIAS

MILITIAS, a form of citizen-based defense that shaped early American history and created an American tradition of citizen soldiery. Early American colonies faced dangers from Native American and European foes. Colonial governments quickly established universal military obligation for white males. At its simplest, men were armed or ordered to arm themselves, organized into units, and trained.

In practice, the compulsory militia system worked poorly. Participants viewed it at best as an unpleasant obligation and at worse as something to be avoided. Moreover, militia mobilization placed strain on the labor and economic resources of the under populated and under developed colonies. Further, the militia had limited military value: it was ill armed, ill trained, and ill disciplined, able to compete neither with European soldiers nor with Native American guerrilla tactics. Consequently, the militia system tended toward decay, though revived or reformed during slave revolts, Indian conflicts, or colonial wars. The system functioned most effectively as a bureaucratic framework for obtaining military manpower. In Connecticut, for example, colonial authorities often used the militia system to recruit volunteers for military service or to draft colonists when volunteers proved wanting.

The American Revolution gave new life to the militia. As unrest grew, revolutionary governments formed that subverted the militia away from royal governors. The militia formed a major portion of patriot forces, achieving fame at Lexington and Bunker Hill in 1775, and playing important roles in American victories throughout the war, such as Saratoga (1777) and Cowpens (1781). Just as often, however, militias proved unreliable, breaking in battle or leaving before a battle could even be fought. George Washington penned a famous lament about the militia in 1776: "They come in you cannot tell how, go you cannot tell when, and act you cannot tell where, consume your provisions, exhaust your stores, and leave you at last at a critical moment." Yet Washington himself had a shrewd understanding of how to use militias as auxiliary and partisan forces in his campaigns. In addition to strictly military concerns, the militia played an important role in securing the countryside and subduing Loyalist sentiment.

The militia emerged from the Revolution with its military reputation mixed but its symbolic importance enhanced immeasurably. Americans no longer viewed the militia solely as a practical necessity; instead, republican thought imbued the militia with an ideological role as a guarantor of liberty, particularly in opposition to standing armies. The symbolic role of the militia complicated its practical role in the new Republic immensely. Nationalists hoped to rely on the militia for the nation's defense, backed by a small standing army. They sought increased federal control over the militia to increase its effectiveness. Antifederalists, though, feared the federal government would deliberately weaken the militia, leaving states defenseless to tyranny. This debate, manifested in the Constitution and in the first federal militia law passed in 1792, resulted in a system that awkwardly divided control of the militia between federal and state governments and had few teeth for enforcement.

Despite federal-state tensions, the militia system might have remained intact for many years had it not been for increasing social strains with in the institution itself. Although the ideal remained universal compulsory military service, the reality was far different. The burdens of militia service rested primarily on the young and the poorer classes. The wealthy could escape militia service by obtaining exemptions or simply paying fines for nonattendance. Militiamen complained that the militia system was unequal and unfair. After the War of 1812—in which the militia performed poorly—these sentiments increased as foreign threats receded. Unhappiness with the militia was widespread, including on the frontier, where the militia was ineffective and militia service particularly burdensome, because of the distances involved, the low populations, the difficulty in procuring arms, and the undeveloped economies.

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Militia reformers were numerous, but their plans tended to emphasize military effectiveness and ignored the social factors that weakened the existing system. The most commonly advocated plan, "classification," involved changing federal law to divide the militia into classes by age, placing additional burdens of service on the younger classes. Classification thus increased rather than soothed discontent among those younger people dissatisfied with the system. In the face of discontent and lack of federal reform, state governments often responded by creating age-based exemptions from militia service. Yet because such exemptions left those most hostile to militia service—younger men—in the militia, opposition never really ceased. In the 1840s, consequently, many states began dismantling compulsory militia service. Instead, they relied on volunteer militia companies, which had long coexisted with the compulsory militia. In some states, particularly in the South, where the threat of slave revolt made it impolitic to overtly dismantle compulsory militia service, the laws remained on the books but were largely ignored.

The volunteer militia system outlasted strains put on it by the Mexican War, which caused antiwar sentiment to sweep the Northeast, and the California gold rush, which lured many young men westward, but it did not survive the Civil War intact. In the late 1850s, many states began strengthening their militia systems in anticipation of sectional conflict. However, the civil war that broke out was so large in scale that it quickly swallowed up the volunteer militia companies. In the North, for example, Abraham Lincoln called for the mobilization of 75,000 militia to quell the rebellion; 93,000 responded to the call, including most of the volunteer militia. Subsequently, both the Union and the Confederacy relied not on militias but on volunteer regiments organized by states and mustered into national service. Northern and southern states alike had to recreate their militia systems, but these new state militias played only a very limited role in the Civil War.

After the Civil War, states reestablished the volunteer militias, increasingly calling them National Guards. The National Guard Association, a lobbying organization, formed in 1879. The primary role of the National Guard in many states was to quell civil disorder, a task often defined to include strikebreaking. This was, however, a distasteful duty to many in the National Guard who thought of themselves as playing an important role in national defense. Such guardsmen were rudely awakened in 1898, when the U.S. Army successfully excluded the guard from participation (except as individuals) in the Spanish-American War. This exclusion and its political repercussions led to a major reform of the militia with the Dick Act of 1903, which replaced the Uniform Militia Act of 1792. The Dick Act solidified the militia (soon formally renamed the National Guard) with increased federal funds for training and arms, as well as greater federal control. Subsequent laws in 1916 and 1933 further strengthened federal control over the National Guard, establishing it as a reserve component of the army and allowing it to be deployed overseas. These reforms made the guard viable militarily.

Tensions between the National Guard and the regular army never evaporated, but the compromises maintained both military utility and the American tradition of the citizen-soldier. National Guardsmen (and, since 1945, members of the Air National Guard) have served in every major military conflict since World War II, in addition to serving their states in situations ranging from riots to natural disasters.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mahon, John K. History of the Militia and the National Guard. New York: Macmillan, 1983.

McCreedy, Kenneth Otis. "Palladium of Liberty: The American Militia System, 1815–1861." Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1991.

Pitcavage, Mark. "An Equitable Burden: The Decline of the State Militias, 1783–1858." Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1995.

Riker, William H. Soldiers of the States: The Role of the National Guard in American Democracy. New York: Arno, 1979.

Selesky, Harold E. War and Society in Colonial Connecticut. London and New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990.

Shea, William L. The Virginia Militia in the Seventeenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

Mark Pitcavage

See also National Guard .