Where U.S. Civilian Control over the Military Began
Our Founding Fathers were uncomfortable with having a standing army and a navy. Thus, in 1783, with the Treaty of Paris signed, the Continental Army was dissolved and its equipment and supplies divided amongst the state militias. The Continental Navy suffered a similar fate, and all its ships were sold or broken up.
These decisions and their subsequent actions made the country defenseless, but they were taken by men who had a deep distrust of standing military forces. Four of these concerns were enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.
Grievance 12 reads – He (King George III) has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power. This is a direct reference to the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774, which is one of the Intolerable Acts. In it, Parliament revoked the colony’s charter, dissolved the state assembly, and appointed General Thomas Gage as the new Royal Governor. By doing so, King George III placed a serving British Army general in charge of the Massachusetts Colony with the power to decide who would or could be elected to the state assembly and fire those he did not like and replace them with those who were totally loyal to him and the Crown.
Grievance 13 states – He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving their acts of pretended legislation. This statement, given the word usage and syntax of the time, needs some interpretation. What our Founding Fathers were saying is that the Thirteen Colonies were quite capable of governing themselves and didn’t like their laws either violated or superseded by a government in England in which they had no representation.
Grievance 14 says – For quartering large bodies of troops among us. What angered our Founding Fathers was that, via the Quartering Act of 1765, the British Parliament required those living in the colonies to provide food, supplies, and housing for the British Army units stationed in the Thirteen Colonies. At the time, the British Army was seen as an occupying army kept in the colonies to quell any possible rebellion. In other words, the colonists felt that they were being required to pay for the very force that was oppressing them.
Grievance 15 states – For protecting them by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants. In Maryland in 1768, British soldiers killed two citizens. Rather than having them stand trial in Maryland, they were tried in England. Parliament then passed a law ensuring that this was British policy.
When the Constitutional Convention convened in 1787, 21 years after the Declaration of Independence was written, our Founding Fathers remembered the above grievances and included clauses in the Constitution that addressed each of these (and others) grievances. They made sure that the civilians would control the military. And that is the subject of next week’s post.
1824 John Trumbull painting of Washington resigning his commission as Commander of the Continental Army on December 23rd, 1783.