“The chiefs of staff corps, departments, and bureaus will report to and act under the immediate orders of the General commanding the Army.”[135]
This act of revolution, exalting the military power above the civil, showed instant fruits in an order of the General, who, upon assuming command, proceeded to place the several bureau officers of the War Department upon his military staff,[136] so that for the time there was a military dictatorship with the President at its head, not merely in spirit but in actual form. By-and-by John A. Rawlins, a civilian by education and a respecter of the Constitution, became Secretary of War, and, though bound to the President by personal ties, he said, “Check to the King.” By General Order, issued from the War Department March 26, 1869, and signed by the Secretary of War, the offensive order was rescinded, and it was enjoined that “all official business which by law or regulations requires the action of the President or Secretary of War will be submitted by the chiefs of staff corps, departments, and bureaus to the Secretary of War.”[137] Public report said that this restoration of the civil power to its rightful supremacy was not obtained without an intimation of resignation on the part of the Secretary.
THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY BY DEPUTY.
Kindred in character was the unprecedented attempt to devolve the duties of the Navy Department upon a deputy, so that orders were to be signed “A. E. Borie, Secretary of the Navy, per D. D. Porter, Admiral,” as appears in the official journal of May 11, 1869,—or, according to another instance, “David D. Porter, Vice-Admiral, for the Secretary of the Navy.” The obvious object of this illegal arrangement was to enable the incumbent, who stood high on the list of gift-makers, to be Secretary without being troubled with the business of the office. Notoriously he was an invalid, unused to public business, who, according to his own confession, modestly pleaded that he could not apply himself to work more than an hour a day; but the President soothed his anxieties by promising a deputy who would do the work. And thus was this great department made a plaything; but public opinion and other counsels arrested the sport. Here I mention, that, when this incumbent left his important post, it is understood that he was allowed to nominate his successor.
PRESIDENTIAL PRETENSION AT THE INDIAN BUREAU.
At the same time occurred the effort to absorb the Indian Bureau into the War Department, changing its character as part of the civil service. Congress had already repudiated such an attempt;[138] but the President, not disheartened by legislative failure, sought to accomplish it by manipulation and indirection. First elevating a member of his late staff to the head of the Bureau, he then, by a military order dated May 7, 1869,[139] proceeded to detail for the Indian service a long list of “officers left out of their regimental organizations by the consolidation of the infantry regiments,”—assuming to do this by authority of the Act of Congress of June 30, 1834, which, after declaring the number of Indian agents, and how they shall be appointed, provides that “it shall be competent for the President to require any military officer of the United States to execute the duties of Indian agent.”[140] Obviously this provision had reference to some exceptional exigency, and can be no authority for the general substitution of military officers, instead of civilians confirmed by the Senate and bound with sureties for the faithful discharge of their duties. And yet upward of sixty Army officers were in this way foisted into the Indian service. The Act of Congress of July 15, 1870, already quoted,[141] creating an incompatibility between military and civil service, was aimed partly at this abuse, and these officers ceased to be Indian agents. But this attempt is another illustration of Presidential pretension.
MILITARY INTERFERENCE AT ELECTIONS.
Then followed military interference in elections, and the repeated use of the military in aid of the revenue law under circumstances of doubtful legality, until at last General Halleck and General Sherman protested: the former in his report of October 24, 1870, saying, “I respectfully repeat the recommendation of my last Annual Report, that military officers should not interfere in local civil difficulties, unless called out in the manner provided by law;”[142] and the latter, in his Report of November 10, 1870, “I think the soldiers ought not to be expected to make individual arrests, or to do any act of violence, except in their organized capacity as a posse comitatus duly summoned by the United States marshal, and acting in his personal presence.”[143] And so this military pretension, invading civil affairs, was arrested.