Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms

by Allan Peskin

Winfield Scott (1786-1866) was arguably the premier soldier of his era. More than any other, he was responsible for the professionalization of the U.S. Army during his long career (1807-61). He served as general in the War of 1812, commander of the U.S. forces it the final campaign of the war with Mexico, and general-in-chief at the beginning of the Civil War. Scott was known for his boldness and courage during the War of 1812 and wisdom and caution in his direction of the Mexico campaign.

Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms is a balanced and thorough biography of this long-neglected military figure. Scholars and military historians will welcome its significant contributions to the literature.

Genres: Military History, History, Civil War, American History, Biography

328 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2003

About the author

Allan Peskin was a professor of History at Cleveland State University from 1962 until 2000. Peskin earned his Bachelor of Arts, MA and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago and Case Western Reserve University.

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the story that in 1847 the Duke of Wellington, last of the victors of Waterloo, when he learned of Winfield Scott's intention to lead an outnumbered US army from its beachhead on the Gulf coast and plunge into the interior of Mexico, cried, "Scott is lost! He can't take the city and he can't fall back upon his base." When Scott took Mexico City - one siege and seven battles later - Wellington declared Scott's campaign "unequalled in military annals" and Scott "the greatest living soldier." In 1864 Scott, then seventy-eight and living in retirement at West Point, relayed the plaudit when he inscribed a copy of his memoirs to Ulysses S. Grant, "From the oldest general to the greatest general."

Scott here is but the link between two of my favorite historical personages, but he is interesting in his own right. The main story of Peskin's biography is Scott's long struggle to build the US Army - commissioned a captain in 1808, he left it a brevet Lieutenant General in 1861 - into a professional, European-style force, in a rustic republic suspicious of expertise, sentimental about the citizen-soldier, and wary of expensive standing armies and aristocratically insular officer classes. Many of Scott's ideas had their merits and he fit the part of their advocate: next to his frontier-bred, Indian-fighting peers and rivals Jackson, Harrison and Gaines, he appears absurdly Europeanized. He had the instincts of a Marshal of France. He was serious about splendor, and might have said with Madame Merle, “I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I chose to wear.” (Those clothes, and his 6’4 height, made Cadet Grant think him “the finest specimen of manhood my eyes ever beheld, and the most to be envied.”) He loved haute cuisine and spoke spiritually of gastronomy. He even had an expatriate wife who lived in Paris and died in Rome, inhabiting a Henry James novella that floats behind Scott's very masculine record of war, politics, and antler-crashing public feuds (he would not enter Virginia politics because he objected to the anti-dueling oath required of state officials). He awed the grandees of Mexico City and a cabal offered him a million dollars to remain in the country as its new Generalissimo.

Scott's literary culture is of a particular, Caesarean kind - he was one of those cultivated men of action whose command of classical rhetoric and biography, and conscious study of the resources of his own language's poetry, equipped him, in his letters, orders, dispatches, proclamations and memoirs, to serve as his own historian, eager to present to posterity, in a suitably grand style, the events in which he is the foremost figure. In his march to Mexico City Scott consciously retraced "the route of Cortes," and carried in his saddle-bag a copy of W.H. Prescott's soberly-researched but lusciously dramatic History of the Conquest of Mexico.

That all sounds very fine but to his contemporaries Scott was as ridiculous as he was revered - a “silly giant,” as Peskin writes:

He fought a stubborn rear-guard action against the modern, Americanized system of spelling and grammar advocated by Noah Webster. Once when enrolling a daughter at a boarding school, he spotted the despised dictionary on the headmistress's desk and instantly withdrew the child, rather than expose her to its corrupting influence. Even in the heat of battle, during the siege of Vera Cruz while the shells were flying, he could dress down an officer for minor errors in transcribing a dispatch: "My dear Colonel!...that interlineation should be there and not here, don't you see? The sense requires it! You make me write nonsense! You will kill me! I'll not survive it! What? Send this nonsense to the government? And here again...there should be a period and not a semicolon. The capital letter shows it. How could you make it a semicolon? Correct that on your life.”

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

General Scott during his 60 years of military service provides an author with a lot of material. Peskin, covers his military experience, campaigns and battles, domestic life, personality and contemporary political events all without a great deal of depth. I would have like to have learned more about the operation of the military during those 60 years particularly the last three decades when he had so much influence. Many issues were raised but not answered. His portrait of the man was good, but I hoped for more in part based upon the title.