3844.10 - Nearly two weeks after X-Day, evaluator Kael seizes command of the Aeon Illuminate and renames it the Order of the Illuminate, paving the way for an alliance with the Seraphim. However, a handful of Aeon commanders, including Rhiza, remain loyal Princess Burke and are branded as heretics. The loyalists begin a guerilla war against the Order.
Supreme Commander Forged Alliance Serial Number
[17] occasion offered an opportunity to correct, at least in part, an inequity in grade structure that existed in the American Army.The fact that the Army did not have sufficient separation in rank at the top levels of the uniformed service, vexing during the Scott-Gaines-Macomb discords and on through the Mexican War, had become even more manifest with the major expansion of the Union forces during the Civil War. It led to the unusual, if not absurd, situation under which the Union had a major general commanding a division, a major general commanding a corps, a major general commanding a field army, a major general commanding a geographical region, and a major general commanding all the armies of the United States. Five echelons thus were commanded by officers of the same rank, and the major general who commanded the American armies of more than a million men held no higher rank than the major general who commanded a field division of a few thousand men. Now, in the spring of 1864, this logjam might be broken, although not as an official correction of an inequitable system, but, as in the case of General Scott, through a personal tribute to an individual officer.43Despite Grant's reputation as a fighting and winning general, not all legislators were in favor of reviving the rank of lieutenant general and assigning it to Grant. In the light of recent experience, went the speculation, suppose the honor had been available to McDowell, McClellan, or Halleck? Why honor one general before the war was over? What could a lieutenant general do that a major general could not do as well? Should a distinguished field commander be sacrificed to the departmental bureaucracy? All of these equivocations were turned aside, and after an extended debate in the Senate as to whether Grant's appointment should be recommended by name in the legislation (it was not), the measure was passed on 29 February 1864.44On 12 March 1864 the Army issued orders of the president of the United States formalizing the new command arrangements. They contained some interesting distinctions concerning the position of senior officer. Major General Halleck, "at his own request," was relieved from duty as general in chief of the Army. Lieutenant General Grant was "assigned to the command of the Armies of the United States." It was stipulated that the "Headquarters of the Army will be in Washington, and also with Lieutenant General Grant, in the field". Here again was that inclination to view the commanding general as a field commander, or, put another way, as commander of the armies in the field, not as a top staff coordinator at the seat of government. But now there was a striking concomitant in the second paragraph of the order: "Major General H. W. Halleck is assigned to duty in Washington as Chief of Staff of the Army, under the direction of the Secretary of War and the Lieutenant General Commanding."45How much of this was a calculated effort to improve command arrangements and how much a propitiary gesture to Halleck who was suffering a demotion it is hard to say. Certainly the action gave Halleck a title and duties more in line with the manner in which he had been functioning all along, and like a good soldier, he served out the war in this capacity. Through the general order, the president made it known that he expected Halleck's orders as chief of staff to be "obeyed and respected accordingly," and any blow Halleck may have felt over his change of status may well have been softened by the president's official tender to him of "approbation and thanks for the able and zealous manner in which the arduous and responsible duties of [commanding general] have been performed."46 Halleck served in his staff role until the war ended in April 1865, then moved on to field assignments. Grant brought to the role of commanding general the strategic direction and coordination the position had required all along. In Secretary Stanton, General Halleck, and Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs he had an energetic and expert administrative and logistical team to provide the resources for his operational plans, while in President Lincoln he had a commander in chief who respected his abilities and applauded his initiative. He operated in the mode of the modern theater commander, maintaining his headquarters in the field, reporting directly to his civilian superiors, and, unlike McClellan, keeping them informed of his plans. As lieutenant general and commanding general, Grant presided over four administrative field[18]divisions embracing seventeen subcommands and employing half a million combat soldiers. That some further adjustments were needed in the grade structure was evident in the fact that, under the wartime structure of volunteer rank, Grant was senior to 73 major generals and 271 brigadier generals. The Union could take a back seat to the Confederacy in this regard, for the South had long before solved its grade structure problems by assigning full generals to command separate armies, lieutenant generals to command corps, major generals to command divisions, and brigadier generals to command brigades. And at the apex, General Robert E. Lee was additionally appointed general in chief of the Armies of the Confederate States in February 1865. The Union did not bring its senior officer into line until after the war, when a bill was finally introduced to revive the rank intended for but never bestowed upon George Washington. The title of the grade was modified from the 1799 version-General of the Armies of the United States-to General of the Army of the United States. Ulysses Grant assumed four-star rank on 25 July 1866, and Major General William T. Sherman moved into the vacated lieutenant generalcy. Grant thus became Americas first full general under the Constitution, as Washington's rank had been conferred in 1775 by the Continental Congress.47The end of the Civil War, Lincoln's death, and Grant's retention of the top military post during a period when the Army acquired a central role in the reconstruction process, placed the commanding general at center stage on the national scene. His position exposed him to problems that, endemic to the job and present in the best of times, were exacerbated by postwar agitation. President Andrew Johnson's leniency in dealing with the South raised problems for the Army and led to the unusual situation in which the secretary of war and the commanding general found themselves allied with the Congress in opposition to the policies of the commander in chief. The sharp differences between the president and the Congress over how to proceed with reconstruction prompted the legislators to pass a series of acts to assert their supremacy and protect sympathetic executive officials, notably Stanton and Grant, from peremptory presidential reaction. The Command of the Army Act, attached to the Army Appropriations Act of 1867 and of questionable constitutional validity, provided that presidential orders to the Army be issued through the commanding general whose headquarters would be in Washington, and who could not be removed from office without Senate approval. The Tenure of Office Act denied the president the right to remove cabinet officers-presumably his own appointees-from office without Senate approval, almost a reverse confirmation procedure. The Congress had Secretary Stanton, a Lincoln appointee, in mind in this measure, one that was also of dubious constitutionality. Finally, the First and Third Reconstruction Acts divided the South into five military districts and authorized their commanders, major general in rank, to superintend civil processes and report directly to Washington, essentially free of civil control. The net effect of all of this was to make the commanding general rather than the commander in chief the effective head of the Army, or at least that part of it assigned to reconstruction duty in the South.48Highly sensitive to constitutional prerogatives, angered by congressional attempts to frustrate his reconstruction policies, and indignant over opposition within his executive family, President Johnson on 12 August 1867 suspended Stanton from office and appointed General Grant as secretary of war ad interim. Grant, ill-disposed to be at the center of a controversy between his departmental superior and the commander in chief, yet thoroughly devoted to the Army, accepted the assignment reluctantly and exercised the title while retaining his position as commanding general. When the Congress, which had been in recess, resumed its deliberations, the Senate refused to concur in Stanton's suspension, invoked the Tenure of Office Act, and Grant relinquished and Stanton reclaimed the secretaryship in January 1868. Johnson retaliated by dismissing Stanton, by offering the post to General Sherman, who refused it, and by attempting to place Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas in the office. The Congress then launched impeachment proceedings against the president.49The Senate conducted the trial from March into May, and the final vote of 35 to 19 in favor of impeachment fell one short of the margin required[19] for conviction. With the disruptive issue settled through constitutional processes but with none of the parties-president, Congress, secretary-so substantially vindicated as to revel in victory, Stanton resigned and the turmoil subsided. The president, and the Congress, perhaps subdued by the experience, agreed, although for different reasons, upon Major General John M. Schofield as a candidate to pick up the war office portfolio. Only months later, Grant, little damaged by the imbroglio, was elected president of the United States. One day after his inauguration on 4 March 1869 he promoted Lieutenant General William T. Sherman to full general and commanding general of the Army. Major General Philip H. Sheridan was advanced one grade to fill the lieutenant general vacancy.50 Like his three immediate predecessors, William Tecumseh Sherman had graduated from the United States Military Academy. Commissioned in 1840, he held various assignments in the southern states and then served as an aide and adjutant in the East and in California during the Mexican War. He resigned in 1853 to try his hand at banking and law, but his lack of success turned him to the more compatible and more successful occupation of superintendent of a military college in Louisiana. Back in the Army in time to command a brigade in the 1861 Bull Run disaster, he was transferred to the western theater and participated in a succession of operations that culminated in his command of the Union forces there and final defeat of the Confederate armies in the deeper South. He was in command of the Division of the Missouri, with headquarters at St. Louis, when he was ordered to Washington in March 1869 to be the Army's commanding general. Sheridan replaced him at St. Louis. Having been exposed, as the Army's senior officer and secretary ad interim, to the long-standing controversy between the commanding general and the bureau chiefs, if not the secretary of war, President Grant now had it in his power to resolve matters in the general in chiefs favor on behalf of his successor. To Sherman's great satisfaction Grant did just that on 5 March 1869, directing through Secretary Schofield that "The Chiefs of the Staff Corps, Departments and Bureaus will report to and act under the immediate orders of When President Andrew Johnson (above) challenged Congress over Reconstruction policies and suspended Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (below) for siding with the opposition, the legislature brought impeachment proceedings against him. Ulysses S. Grant consequently found himself in the awkward position of serving not only as commanding general but also as secretary of war ad interim until the constitutional process ran its course. Johnson photographic portrait by Matthew Brady and Stanton portrait by unknown photographer from the collections of the National Archives. [20] the General commanding the Army. All official business, which by law or regulation requires the action of the President or Secretary of War, will be submitted by the General of the Army to the Secretary of War; and in general, all orders from the President or Secretary of War to any portion of the Army, line or staff, will be transmitted through the General of the Army."51Sherman's gratification was short-lived. A week later Schofield departed the War Department and Grant installed his principal wartime staff officer, John Aaron Rawlins, in the secretary's chair. From that vantage point it was Rawlins' interpretation, abetted by strong pressures from the bureau chiefs and congressional representations, that control of the bureaus should be in the hands of the secretary, not the commanding general. Grant deferred to Rawlins' wishes, and only three weeks after the Schofield order, a Rawlins directive switched the channels of bureau business away from the commanding general and back to the secretary of war.52Rawlins attempted to ease Sherman's displeasure by routing his orders to the bureau chiefs through the commanding general's office, but the action cooled Sherman's relationship with Grant and represented another setback to a resolution of the War Department's own ménage à trois. Rawlins' death in early September and his replacement by William Worth Belknap in October raised the prospect of even further dissension. Little credit accrued to Sherman for a stint as secretary of war ad interim during the Rawlins-Belknap interregnum. The new secretary was a strong personality, fully prepared to assume every ounce of power and authority prescribed by law and as much more as imprecise definition, administrative vacuum, and tolerant or irresolute officials might allow. Without hesitation, Belknap took over direction of the War Department bureaus and began to intrude upon Sherman's domain, renewing, as Sherman described it, "all the old abuses . . . which had embittered the life of General Scott in the days of Secretaries of War Marcy and Davis. . . ."53One of Sherman's first encounters with Belknap involved the question of jurisdiction over sutlerships at Army posts. When the secretary infringed upon the commanding general's prerogatives in this regard by replacing a sutler at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, Sherman restored the ousted party. Belknap then worked through friends in Congress to secure legislation that removed the authority from the general in chief and gave it to the secretary. He then installed his own man. Uncomfortable in the political atmosphere of Washington, unlikely to prevail in clashes with his civilian superior, and with his authority largely circumscribed by the secretary, Sherman followed perhaps the only course open to him during the Belknap administration-that of absenting himself from the capital. From April to June 1871 he made an inspection tour on the Indian frontier, visiting Army units and installations in Texas (where he narrowly escaped a collision with a Kiowa war party), Indian Territory, Kansas, and Nebraska. From November 1871 to September 1872 he made the grand tour of Europe, traveling as a private citizen but accorded the highest honors, official and social, in most of thecountries he visited. Then in 1874, taking a lead from Winfield Scott, he moved his headquarters to St. Louis.54Sherman remained away from the seat of government, abdicating to Belknap the running of the Army as well as the War Department, until 1876. In March of that year the chairman of the legislative committee on expenditures reported to the House of Representatives that Belknap was guilty of malfeasance in office, as a result of having accepted money in return for the award of a post tradership at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The evidence led the House to vote unanimously to impeach the secretary of war, but Belknap resigned even as the Senate's vote fell short of the two-thirds margin required for conviction.55President Grant then appointed Alphonso Taft as secretary of war, and Taft moved at once to get Sherman and Army headquarters back to Washington. His formal order of 6 April returned a goodly measure of control to the commanding general, stipulating that "all orders and instructions relative to military operations, or affecting the military control and discipline of the Army, issued by the President through the Secretary of War, shall be promulgated through the General of the Army, and the Departments of the Adjutant General and the Inspector General shall report to[21] Generals William T. Sherman (left), Philip H. Sheridan (center), and Nelson A. Miles (right) took office expecting to command the whole Army. When these proud, ambitious, strong-willed, and distinguished soldiers found that the scope of their power and control as commanding general had been largely circumscribed, they vented their frustrations in part by relocating headquarters, making official trips, and writing personal memoirs. Sherman and Sheridan photographic portraits by Matthew Brady; Miles photographic portrait by the U.S. Army Signal Corps. From the collections of the National Archives. him and be under his control in all matters relating thereto." Said General Sherman: "This was all I had ever asked."56Sherman spent his remaining years as commanding general on good terms with the last four of the eight secretaries he served under in almost fifteen years as general in chief: James Donald Cameron, George Washington McCrary, Alexander Ramsey, and Robert Todd Lincoln. He saw the Army through its "Dark Ages," when strength, appropriations, pay, and even rank levels were under legislative assault, and he turned aside active attempts to get him to stand as a presidential candidate. He acted with rare consideration when, faced with the statutory requirement to retire at age 64, he relinquished the title of commanding general in November 1883 so that his successor would have time to prepare the Army's congressional presentation for the coming year.57When Sherman retired from the Army in February 1884, the troublesome constitutional and statutory problems that surrounded the office of commanding general were yet unresolved. That they had not succumbed to the best efforts of a famous, well-connected, able, strong-willed leader suggested that the very nature of the senior officer's job was uncertain. An irascible Sherman had tried to straighten things out but had failed; now a combative Sheridan would have his turn. As with his four immediate predecessors, Philip Henry Sheridan had graduated from West Point. He served on the Rio Grande frontier and against Indians in the Northwest before the Civil War drew him into operations in the border states and the South. His instrumental role at Chickamauga and Chattanooga brought him into Grant's circle, and to command of the cavalry of the Army of the Potomac when Grant took over the main Union forces. A key figure in the final operations in Virginia, he went on to administer the Division of the Gulf during the external threat represented by Maximilian's suzerainty in Mexico, and was military governor of New Orleans during reconstruction. He followed Sherman to the Division of the Missouri and its Indian campaigns, and to Washington as commanding general, picking up the reins on 1 November 1883. At the time Sheridan entered office the responsibility and authority of the General of the Army was touched upon in the Army Regulations of 1881. Several of the provisions harkened back to the first published expressions of 1834-1835, and a tenuous trail had appeared in general orders[22]and regulations at intervals down through the years, although the provisions fell far short of the required substance. Article XV of the 1881 edition of the regulations referenced earlier publications for antecedence: THE GENERAL OF THE ARMY 125. The military establishment is under the orders of the General of the Army in all that pertains to its discipline and military control. The fiscal arrangements of the Army belong to the several administrative departments of the Staff, under the direction of the Secretary of War, and to the Treasury Department.-[G.O. 28, 1876; R.S. 1133, et seq.] 126. All orders and instructions relating to military operations, or affecting the military control and discipline of the Army, issued by the President or the Secretary of War, will be promulgated through the General of the Army.-[G.O. 28, 1869; G.O. 28, 1876.]58 The dichotomy that placed the military establishment under the commanding general for discipline and control and under the secretary and the staff bureaus for fiscal affairs perpetuated the command problem. "Basic to the controversy was an assertion of the primacy of the line over the staff departments, for which there was a theoretical foundation in the developing conception of war as a science and the practice of that science as the sole purpose of military forces. Since the Army existed only to fight, it followed that its organization, training, and every activity should be directed to the single end of efficiency in combat. Therefore, the staff departments, which represented technicism, existed only to serve the purposes of the line, which represented professionalism. From that proposition it followed that the line in the person of the Commanding General, should control the staff."59Remarking that Sherman "threw up the sponge," Sheridan moved to the attack by announcing it as his interpretation that the president's order assigning him to command the Army necessarily included all of the Army, not excepting the chiefs of the staff departments. To prove the point, he ordered one of the bureau chiefs out on an inspection tour without informing Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln. When Lincoln learned that the head of one of his staff departments had departed on a field trip without his sanction, he informed Sheridan in writing that he was sure the commanding general had missed the true meaning of the president's order relative to command of the Army.60Sheridan's lesson in humility did not stop there. When the secretary of war was absent from Washington, the senior bureau chief served as acting secretary. Thus, as General Schofield later described it, Sheridan, "the loyal subordinate soldier who had commanded great armies and achieved magnificent victories in the field while those bureau chiefs were purveying powder and balls, or pork and beans," had to submit to this because of "the theory that the general of the army was not an officer of the War Department and hence could not be appointed Acting Secretary of War." Although this construction did not endure, it lasted long enough for General Sheridan to suffer a situation under which the adjutant general, junior in rank and supposedly a subordinate under the commanding general, served as acting secretary of war, supposedly over the commanding general.61Chafing under the compromise of the general in chief's authority, Sheridan lost no opportunity to raise the problem and press for action to codify the government and regulation of the military establishment and to position the commanding general in the direct line of command at the top of the uniformed service. When General Schofield addressed the subject in his 1885 report to Sheridan concerning developments in the Division of the Missouri, the lieutenant general of the Army was impressed. "I most heartily coincide with the remarks of General Schofield on the need of military legislation," he informed Secretary of War William C. Endicott in his own summary report. "His views are of so much importance that I transfer them bodily to my report:" There is a great need in the military service of legislation under the power conferred by the Constitution upon Congress to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces. It is sometimes of supreme importance that the responsibilities of military administration and command be clearly defined by law. And it is important at all times that the rules for the government of the military service be established, like other laws, by competent authority, after due consideration, and under all the [23] light which experience can bring to the aid of the legislature. Regulations thus established, and subject to change only by Congress, would have such degree of stability as to become the basis of a sound military system which up to the present time has not existed in this country. Although the regulations have undergone changes almost without number, the most important questions involved in the command and government of the Army which have been the source of constant embarrassment and the cause of much controversy for many years, remain unsettled at the present time. No commanding general, from the highest to the lowest, can know the extent or limits of his authority, and no one can have any staff responsible to him for the faithful execution of his orders. During the last twenty-five years the country has passed through three momentous crises, wherein these unsettled questions were of vital importance to the nation, and their decision, for the occasion, depended solely upon individual opinions. Another such crisis may not be far distant, when such a decision might not be so fortunate for the country. Hence, while I present the necessity of a considerable increase of the Army, I also suggest, as a still greater necessity, that laws be established by Congress for the 'government and regulation' of the military forces.62 If the commanding general's authority was circumscribed, so was his rank. When Sheridan took over the senior officer's position, he retained his three-star rank because of the Army Appropriations Act of 1870 provision specifying that "the offices of General and Lieutenant General of the army shall continue until a vacancy shall occur . . . and no longer. . . ." This stipulation made the ranks of general and lieutenant general personal to Sherman and Sheridan, respectively, with the four-star level lapsing at the time of Sherman's retirement.63Congressional sentiment against upper-level institutional rank, firm during periods of peace and routine operation, had a way of softening to meet special individual circumstances. As noted above, the Congress in February 1855 had revived the grade of lieutenant general, specifying that it could be conferred by brevet only, "to acknowledge eminent services of a major general of the army in the late war with Mexico." The honor was tailored for and bestowed upon Winfield Scott.64 Again, in February 1864, the Congress, with Ulysses Grant in mind, had revived the grade of lieutenant general in the Army of the United States so that it could be conferred upon a major general "most distinguished for courage, skill, and ability."65 The congressional action of July 1866 reviving the rank of general was intended for Grant as the victorious field commander in the late war rather than as the appropriate rank for the uniformed head of the Army.66 And now in 1888 the Congress, prompted by Sheridan's rapidly failing health, acted on behalf of the individual rather than the institution by discontinuing the grade of lieutenant general, merging it with the grade of general, and ensuring that the four-star billet go to Sheridan by stipulating that it should continue "during the lifetime of the present Lieutenant General of the Army, after which such grade shall also cease."67Sheridan's four-star rank was approved on 1 June 1888. On 2 August he signed the preface to his memoirs, and on 5 August 1888, still the Army's commanding general, he died. Nine days later General Schofield, the senior major general, was appointed to succeed him as commanding general of the Army. With his designation as the Army's senior officer, John McAllister Schofield continued the succession of West Point graduates in the commanding general's chair. Early in his career he had taught philosophy at his alma mater, and physics while on leave at Washington University of St. Louis. The Civil War drew him into field operations in Missouri, with command assignments at department, division, corps, and army levels in the western and southern theaters. In the postwar period he visited France on a confidential diplomatic mission concerning the French presence in Mexico, succeeded Stanton in mid-1868 as President Andrew Johnson's secretary of war, and then successively headed several of the Army's major geographical commands, coming to the senior officer post from command of the Division of the Atlantic. Schofield differed from his immediate predecessors in both personality and philosophy. Operating from the premise that a soldier might properly crave recognition, including promotion, from "past services," he saw individual efforts to achieve "higher command, greater power, and more unrestrained authority" as evidence of "ambition inconsistent with due military sub-[24] ordination and good citizenship." Thus, upon Sheridan's death, although he was the senior major general of the Army, Schofield made no move to seek the office of commanding general and allowed no one to speak for him.68 When President Grover Cleveland selected him to be commanding general, Schofield brought into play special skills and experience. His teaching, command, and diplomatic background, coupled with upwards of ten months as secretary of war and "a more modest ambition" than that possessed by his predecessors, gave him a breadth of vision and a sensitive appreciation of the controversy concerning the relationships between the command and administration of the Army. He had no illusions about the state of things; as he wrote later, "the condition of the War Department at that time was deplorable." One of his first official acts was to send a written order to the adjutant general specifying that all orders issued by the commanding general or in his name should be shown to the secretary of war before being released. He submitted to the president a paper on the general subject of command of the Army, and used it as his guide while in office. Staff officers commented that "for the first time the [commanding] general actually does command the Army."69 Command relationships during Schofield's tenure ran smoothly because Schofield "regarded himself as a Chief of Staff of the President and Secretary of War, rather than a self-assertive commanding general." Schofield served as commanding general under Presidents Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and again Cleveland, and under one lawyer, Secretary William 2ff7e9595c
Comments