Nelson Appleton Miles
Westminster, Massachusetts, 1839 - 1925, Washington, D.C.
Though boasting but a smattering of military training, acquired through a personal tutor, Miles overcame the disappointment stemming from the governor's slight and distinguished himself as an exceptionally able field officer. Suffering a minor foot wound at the battle of Fair Oaks during the 1862 Peninsula campaign, Miles subsequently took a lieutenant colonelcy in the Sixty-first New York Infantry Regiment. Promoted in September to full colonel for his leadership at Antietam, he took a bullet in the throat during the army's failed advance at Fredericksburg that December. Miles was wounded even more severely during the battle of Chancellorsville (May 1863), for which he would in 1892 be awarded a Medal of Honor for personal bravery. Following a brief convalescence, he was appointed brigadier general of volunteers and brevet major general in May 1864 for his leadership in the fighting at Spotsylvania and Reams' Station, respectively. Slightly wounded at Petersburg, Miles again distinguished himself at Sutherland's Station and Sayler's Creek in the final weeks of the war.
Following the collapse of the Confederacy, Miles, who was recognized as one of the most aggressive and effective officers in the Army of the Potomac, was assigned command of the Military District of Fort Monroe, Virginia. Concerned that his famous prisoner, the recently captured Jefferson Davis, might escape, Miles ordered him placed in leg irons. Although improved facilities soon allowed the removal of the shackles, Miles's action was roundly criticized in many circles. Happy to be rid of the thankless task, in September 1866 Miles accepted the colonelcy of the Fortieth Infantry Regiment, comprised of white officers and black enlisted men, in the greatly reduced postbellum army. He took up Reconstruction duties with the Freedmen's Bureau in North Carolina the following year, and in 1868 he married Mary Hoyt Sherman, daughter of a district court judge and niece of Senator John Sherman and General William T. Sherman.
In mid-March 1869 Miles secured a transfer to the all-white Fifth Infantry Regiment, then stationed in Kansas. His first major western campaign came five years later during the Red River War. Leading a column south from Kansas into the Indian Territory and the Texas panhandle, Miles doggedly pursued Comanches, Kiowas, and southern Cheyennes deemed hostile by the federal government well into the winter. Shifted to Montana in the wake of the battle of the Little Bighorn, Miles's command won a sharp skirmish in October 1876 at Cedar Creek against a large Indian coalition, which included Sitting Bull. Defying the northern Montana winter, Miles drove many of the tribes into Canada. In January 1877 Miles won another victory, this time against Crazy Horse and an assortment of Oglala Sioux and northern Cheyennes, at the battle of Wolf Mountains. As increasing numbers of Plains Indians turned themselves in to the federal government, Miles shattered resistance among Lame Deer's defiant Minneconjou Sioux in May at the battle of Muddy Creek.
Now recognized as one of the army's most effective Indian fighters, Miles further enhanced his image during the 1877 campaigns against the Nez Percé. From the Tongue River Cantonment, through a series of forced marches, his command cut off the attempted flight of many Nez Percé to Canada. An attack on the Nez Percé encampment at Bear Paw Mountain failed, but a subsequent siege of the Indian camp forced the surrender of Chief Joseph and some four hundred followers. One year later Miles routed a small party of Bannock Indians near Clarke's Fork (now Clark Fork) Pass in the eastern Yellowstone Mountains.
In 1880 Miles received his first regular general's star and--after presiding over the controversial court-martial hearing of U.S. Military Academy cadet Johnson C. Whittaker, a black cadet whom officials accused of having staged an incident in which he was found beaten and bound in his own room, and serving on the Ponca Commission--assumed command of the military Department of the Columbia. He was transferred to head the Department of the Missouri in 1885 and replaced his rival, George Crook, in the Department of Arizona the following year. From Arizona, Miles mounted an elaborate campaign against Geronimo and his Chiricahua Apache followers. Initially depending heavily on regular army personnel, Miles's troopers chased their foes across southern Arizona and into northern Mexico without much success. He then changed his tactics, employing smaller teams of Indian auxiliaries led by officers of proven abilities in frontier conditions. After five months of exhausting pursuits, Geronimo gave himself up to Miles in September 1886 amid complaints in some quarters that Miles had made unauthorized promises to his foe.
Although widely acknowledged to be among the nation's premier soldiers, Miles had throughout his career frequently clashed with military superiors, civilian authorities, and fellow officers. Intensely ambitious, his unseemly lobbying engendered the jealousy of many rivals for the infrequent promotions available in the postbellum army. As his rivals within the army reached mandatory retirement, Miles gained successively more important posts: the Division of the Pacific in 1888 and a major generalship and command of the sprawling Division of the Missouri, which encompassed most of the Plains region, in 1890. From the latter he directed army operations during the Ghost Dance campaign, during which the bungled attempts to disarm Big Foot and many Minneconjou Sioux by a subordinate, Colonel James W. Forsyth, led to a disastrous slaughter of some one hundred and fifty Indian men, women, and children at Wounded Knee. During the 1894 Pullman strike Miles, a confirmed nativist, asked permission to allow his troops to fire on protesters, who he believed threatened American institutions. Later that year Miles secured a transfer to command the Department of the East. With the retirement of John M. Schofield in 1895, President Grover Cleveland appointed Miles commanding general.
Miles's greatest challenge in his new post came with the outbreak of war with Spain in 1898. With a standing force of only 25,000 men and virtually bereft of strategic planning, the regulars in blue were overwhelmed by the onslaught of volunteers and the political pressure to act quickly against Spain. Dissatisfied with Miles's suggestions that the United States adopt a defensive posture until healthier fall weather allowed an invasion of Puerto Rico, President William McKinley directed the war from his executive office. Only after the Cuban expeditionary force was well established was Miles allowed to strike Puerto Rico. Benefiting from lessons learned in the near-disastrous Cuban invasion, Miles's Puerto Rico operations proved a model of efficiency and order, overrunning disorganized Spanish troops in a lightning campaign in late July and early August and paving the way for U.S. annexation of the island.
Following the war's conclusion, Miles accused the War Department of having issued the troops chemically "embalmed beef." Although an investigating committee found no evidence to substantiate these charges, Miles still enjoyed enough political support to secure an appointment to lieutenant general in 1900. However, his continuing reluctance to acknowledge the need for substantive military reforms in the wake of the recent near debacle against Spain left him increasingly isolated. Miles eventually broke with both the reform-minded Elihu Root, appointed secretary of war in 1899, and President Theodore Roosevelt, who as a veteran of the Cuban expedition knew firsthand the army's logistical and organizational problems. Through much of the latter half of the nineteenth century controversies between the commanding general and the secretary of war had disrupted relations between the nation's leading military officials. Root and Roosevelt resolved to break the impasse by creating a general staff, designed to institutionalize and rationalize planning, and abolishing the office of commanding general. The president ordered that Miles "be reprimanded severely" and threatened to force him to retire immediately. But Miles still retained the support of many in Congress, which in a compromise measure adopted the general staff bill and abolished the office of commanding general effective on Miles reaching his mandatory retirement in 1903.
Determined to secure revenge against his Republican enemies, Miles mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic party's 1904 presidential nomination. Although his wife died that year, leaving him with two children, Miles maintained a vigorous schedule through his waning years, participating in a motion picture project with his old friend William "Buffalo Bill" Cody in 1913 and proposing that he be dispatched at the head of an American expeditionary force to Russia during the First World War. He died in Washington, D.C.
In compiling an impressive record against his Confederate, Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Sioux, Nez Percé, Bannock, Apache, and Spanish opponents, Miles became one of his nation's greatest fighting soldiers. Yet his immense personal ambition rivaled his enormous martial talents. Like many of his peers, he believed the nation had not adequately rewarded him for his military services. Further disappointed by the failure to secure immediate promotion for his victories against Indian opponents, Miles was sometimes too eager to share his dissatisfaction with the press and the general public. His enormous ego was perhaps reflected in the fact that he published two book-length autobiographies as well as a volume describing his 1897 military tour of Europe. Further, Miles's refusal to cooperate with Root's plans for reform marked him a hero of the old frontier army rather than a visionary leader who might help pull the army into the twentieth century. "The future historian," the editors of the Nation (13 Aug. 1903) accurately concluded upon his retirement, "will find few if any searching reforms due to Gen. Miles's advocacy," but "if the historian then turn[s] to this officer's purely military services he will find much to praise."
Bibliography
Miles's papers are in the Library of Congress and the U.S. Army Military History Institute (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.). His books include Personal Recollections and Observations of General Nelson A. Miles (1896; repr. in 2 vols., 1992), Military Europe: A Narrative of Personal Observation and Personal Experience (1898), and Serving the Republic: Memoirs of the Civil and Military Life of Nelson A. Miles, Lieutenant-General, United States Army (1911). Brian C. Pohanka, Nelson A. Miles: A Documentary Biography of His Military Career, 1861-1903 (1985), contains published versions of many of his official reports. For a complete biography, see Robert Wooster, Nelson A. Miles and the Twilight of the Frontier Army (1993).
Robert Wooster
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American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
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