Major General Arthur Jr. McARTHUR

  General Notes:

Major General Arthur McArthur, Jr. received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions under fire at the Chickamauga Battle of Missionary Ridge. McArthur received the medal for recovering the unit's flag from a fallen soldier and continuing the charge to its' peak. His son, General Douglas McArthur, would gain fame for his service in the World Wars and also go on to receive a Congressional Medal of Honor.

"I propose to do both, sir," said Arthur, Jr.(4)

At home he talked nothing but war. Even before the South seceded, he was interested in going to Annapolis. One of his closest friends, living two houses away, was a lively youth named Charles King, the acknowledged leader of the neighborhood's teenage boys. King was about to go to West Point and would one day be famous as the leading writer on the Old Army in the Wild West. The judge's son suddenly wanted to don the Army blue too. Instead the judge sent him to a private military school, from where the boy might hope to go on to West Point. In May 1862, Arthur, Jr., visited the White House, accompanied by James R. Doolittle, senior senator from Wisconsin, and bearing a letter from the judge to Abraham Lincoln. "A desire to go into the military service of the country has become the absorbing object of his very existence," the judge had written. He vouched for his son's good health, keen intelligence and ardent patriotism. He urged the President "to give him a cadetship--a prize he treasures above every other earthly possession."(5)

Of the ten at large appointments in his gift, Lincoln had already awarded two to young men from Wisconsin, one of them being Charles King. And here was a-Democratic supplicant asking for a third. The President allowed himself to be persuaded, but there were no vacancies for the class of 1866. The Adjutant General was ordered to award an at large appointment to Arthur McArthur, Jr., for the class of 1867, which would be enrolled in June 1863.(6)

That didn't satisfy young Arthur. The rebellion might be stamped out before the class of '67 graduated. It might even be over before he went to West Point, although Union Army failures in the first year of the fighting seemed to promise a protracted struggle. As his father had told the President, he was totally absorbed in ambitions of soldiering. The boy was determined to go to war.

He secured a commission in the newly formed 24th Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Arthur McArthur, Jr., was made a lieutenant and appointed regimental adjutant. Barely seventeen, he looked young for his age. The regiment's first muster-in roll, compiled in August 1862, gave his occupation accurately enough: He was a "Student." His height was given as five feet seven inches, his complexion was put down as "ruddy" and he was described as being of medium build. He was entered on the roll as "MacArthur" and retained that spelling of his name for the rest of his life.(7)

The officers and men of the 24th took his appointment as their first defeat. The colonel, Charles H. Larrabee, who would have to rely heavily on the adjutant in managing the regiment, was appalled. When the 24th formed for its first dress parade, the adolescent adjutant was almost laughably out of his depth. Just memorizing Army regulations would not turn a thin, pallid, softly spoken youth into an officer with command presence. Colonel Larrabee growled to his staff that he was going to demand the governor give him a fully grown man for an adjutant and get rid of that "white-faced, chicken-voiced boy" whose orders didn't carry much beyond the soldier standing nearest him on the parade ground. On that unpromising note, the military heritage of Douglas MacArthur began.(8)

The North would fight the war with forces that consisted of roughly 5 percent regular troops and 95 percent amateurs. The Regular Army wasn't broken up to provide a leavening of experience throughout the two million volunteers, state militia and draftees who fought the Union's battles. As a result, combat leadership was often placed in the eager but untried hands of officers who owed their rank to political pull or to election by the men they led. As for the men, unlike the sergeants in the Regular Army, they knew even less about war than the officers.

For the Union Army, the first year of the war was mainly a tale of defeats and retreats. In the spring of 1862, however, it went vigorously on the offensive, driving its forces deep into the Confederacy. Despite the colonel's objections, Lieutenant Arthur MacArthur retained his position as adjutant of the 24th Wisconsin and would soon find himself fighting for his life.

In September that year a Confederate army under Braxton Bragg sought to reverse recent Union advances by invading Kentucky. On October 8 Bragg's troops collided with the advancing forces of the Army of the Ohio, including Phil Sheridan's division. The division had recently been joined by the 24th Wisconsin. That day, outside Perryville, Kentucky, Arthur MacArthur got his first taste of battle and impressed his brigade commander with his "great coolness and presence of mind" in the midst of fierce fighting.(9)

At Christmas, Federal troops fought a ferocious four-day battle at Murfreesboro, twenty-five miles southeast of Nashville. The Union right was forced back and nearly enveloped. Sheridan's division was mauled. The 24th Wisconsin suffered heavily, losing nearly half the five hundred men it put into the battle. Neither Colonel Larrabee nor his second-in-command was present at Stones River. Command of the 24th devolved on a major and the adjutant. Both acquitted themselves heroically. Arthur MacArthur had finally won the respect of his regiment.(10)

In the summer of 1863 Arthur MacArthur, Jr., was ill with typhoid fever. His father came to visit him in hospital, then took him back to Milwaukee to recuperate. He rejoined the 24th Wisconsin, however, in time to participate in its most dramatic battle. On September 19, 1863, the Confederates won what proved to be their last major victory. At Chickamauga Creek, outside Chattanooga, they brought a Union army to the brink of destruction. The Federals pulled back into Chattanooga. Grant came and took command of the situation.

Northern troops had retreated so hastily they had abandoned the high ground that nearly surrounds the town. Chattanooga was virtually besieged. On November 24 Sherman seized the northern end of Missionary Ridge, which was the linchpin of the Confederate defenses. The next day Grant attacked, with Sheridan's division foremost in the advance. The troops had been ordered to seize the lowest line of trenches, which were expected to be lightly held. This line was swiftly overrun. Without orders, Union soldiers rushed onward to the second line, taking it in turn. Discharging the pent-up frustration of men who'd endured a prolonged siege, they headed irresistibly for the crest. It was a clear, sunny winter's day. "I watched their progress with intense interest," said Grant.(11)

Confederate resistance was light in most places, but not where the 24th Wisconsin advanced up the slope toward Missionary Ridge. Wisconsin men went down in droves, including the regimental color-bearer. Lieutenant Arthur MacArthur ran to the fallen man and seized the regimental color.(12) Climbing the slope had broken up the regiment's line, while musket and artillery fire had torn large holes in it. For the 24th to continue to advance and fight as a unit, it needed to re-form its line. That was one reason for carrying regimental flags into battle. MacArthur led his regiment up Missionary Ridge.(13)

As Union troops approached the crest, yelling and shooting, the Confederates pulled out and ran down the reverse slope of the ridge, pursued by Sheridan's soldiers. Family legend had it that a hero yet again, Arthur MacArthur, Jr., was recommended for the Medal of Honor by Sheridan. In truth the medal had just been created and only enlisted men and NCOs appeared eligible.(14) What he did get was a promotion. In January 1864, without his ever being a captain, the men of the 24th elected him to a major's oak leaves.(15)

The 24th Wisconsin meanwhile was advancing into Georgia as part of the 2d Volunteer Division. It would play an important role in William Tecumseh Sherman's brilliant Atlanta campaign. In June 1864 MacArthur was entrusted with leading a reconnaissance in force as Sherman skirmished for Atlanta.

This is one of the most difficult of military operations. Reconnaissance in force missions are usually entrusted to fast-moving units composed of experienced troops. A successful reconnaissance in force requires luck, sound judgment and firm leadership. MacArthur's operation on this occasion unmasked strong Confederate defenses at Kennesaw Mountain on the approaches to Atlanta. His reconnaissance was cited after the war as a model of its kind in one of the most influential military texts in Army history. "The men of this regiment [the 24th Wisconsin] were instructed each to select a tree about 50 yards in front of the line and, at command, to run forward and halt behind the tree selected. The regiment thus pushing forward by a series of rushes, advanced three-fourths of the distance separating it from the enemy, developed- his position and completely gained the object of the reconnaissance, with the loss of only two men killed and eleven wounded."(16)

Even so, Sherman proceeded to squander the intelligence harvest MacArthur had brought him. He did something completely uncharacteristic. He launched his troops, including the 24th Wisconsin, at the solidly entrenched Confederates. In the space of two hours he suffered three thousand casualties, with absolutely nothing to show for his losses. Among the wounded was nineteen-year-old Major Arthur MacArthur, whose life was saved by a packet of letters and a small Bible carried close to his heart.(17)

He soon recuperated, and at Jonesboro, Georgia, one day that summer he led a charge across an open field that sent Confederates fleeing from a bordering wood. On September 2 Sherman captured Atlanta. Later that fall he headed east, just as a Confederate army under the one-armed, one-legged John Bell Hood invaded Tennessee. Thirty-four thousand Union troops, including the 24th Wisconsin, were sent to Franklin and ordered to hold. On November 30 Hood's Confederates attacked, launching a stunning frontal assault. For five hours they had the Federals on the ropes, inflicting several thousand casualties, but suffering heavily in return.

The 24th Wisconsin fought a heroic rearguard action as the Federal lines buckled and other regiments pulled back toward Nashville. Major MacArthur led a counterattack that recaptured eight Union artillery pieces and the colors of one of the retreating regiments. He received two serious wounds, one in the chest and one in the leg, and was carried off the field of battle.(18) Federal casualties numbered twenty-five hundred, but Hood's exceeded six thousand.

The end of the war in April 1865 found MacArthur hunting down Confederate guerrillas operating around Blue Spring, Tennessee. Several weeks later MacArthur was promoted to lieutenant colonel. Still too young to vote, he now commanded a regiment and proceeded to lead it back to its home state. He was promoted once more, to colonel, and on July 4 led the 24th Wisconsin through Milwaukee in an Independence Day parade, walking with a slight limp, the result of his leg wound at Franklin. He had an uneven gait for the rest of his life.(19) Shortly afterward he returned to civilian life. Of the l,l50 original members of the 24th Wisconsin, barely 400 had survived the long struggle to save the Union.

The one and a half million men who'd served in the Union Army and survived the experience without being killed or crippled went back to their plows and workshops, their store counter$ and steel mills, their great adventure behind them. Having been soldiers for a part of their lives was enough to satisfy whatever patriotic urges and ideas of manly courage may have stirred their young selves. All but a handful had seen enough of military service. Yet for fifty years to come they would, through organizations such as the Grand Army of the Republic, dominate American life. They bored their families with their reminiscences, bought up the memoirs of their generals and in old age visited their former battlefields, where they embraced aged foes, who, like them, had kept their faded uniforms. Federal blue and Confederate butternut were sentimentally filmed in another age as skinny old men under big black hats, sporting white goatee beards, acting defiantly spry for Methuselahs.

Twenty-one-year-old Arthur MacArthur, Jr., however, found going to war had not satisfied the martial itch. Military service remained "the absorbing object of his very existence." He tried to settle down to being a student back in Milwaukee. For six months he studied law, but his heart wasn't in the dull mysteries of torts, estoppal and easements. He wanted to be back in Army blue, back as an officer, back with troops. He had applied for a commission in the Regular Army even before his return to Milwaukee.(20)

He sought to be commissioned as a captain but had to settle for something less. On February 23, 1866, he became a second lieutenant, with a promotion to first lieutenant next day in the 17th Infantry Regiment stationed at David's Island, a picturesque post in Long Island Sound. Feeling aggrieved that his war record was not getting the respect he felt it deserved, MacArthur continued to agitate for higher rank.(21) A certain prickliness where honor and what he considered his due were concerned became part of his legacy to his son Douglas. This lobbying effort was successful.(22) In September 1866 he was promoted to captain in the 36th Infantry Regiment, which was heading for Fort Kearney, Nebraska Territory. The regiment's main duty would be to protect the Union Pacific as the iron road snaked westward.

As the railroad advanced, so did the 36th Infantry. By the summer of 1867 MacArthur was in Wyoming Territory. His company was policing unruly frontier mining towns, patrolling the railroad and offering protection to emigrants heading down the Oregon Trail. Always a conscientious and capable officer, Captain MacArthur continued to feel aggrieved about his rank. He had plenty of company. Most former Regular Army officers who'd risen rapidly in the war had been forced to settle for something much less exalted in peacetime. Few, if any, liked it. MacArthur, feeling that he was really a colonel disguised as a captain, continued the tense correspondence with the War Department over his rank.(23)

He sought promotion with a brash and shameless ambition that might seem comical or pathetic were it not for the fact that overt lobbying was just about the only way an infantry officer could get promoted in the post-Civil War Army. He wasn't unique in his pleas. There were plenty of others like him. Nor was it simply a matter of status. Officers were paid considerably less after the war than they had received in wartime. Congress cut their pay to below the 1860 level.

The Union Pacific building west met up with the Central Pacific moving east at Promontory, Utah, in May 1869. With the great railroad completed, Congress cut Army appropriations. MacArthur remained a captain, but now he had no assignment. He went home that summer on leave while the War Department decided what to do with him.

Although the captain's fate remained in doubt, the judge's career was progressing splendidly. His wife had died during the Civil War. He remarried in January 1868 and later that year headed the American delegation to the Paris Exposition. Shortly after his return to the United States he quit the provincial purlieus of Milwaukee forever. He moved to Washington, to take up an appointment as a federal judge on the supreme court of the District of Columbia. Unhappily his second wife died soon after this.

The Army found a new assignment for Captain MacArthur, at the Cavalry Recruiting Rendezvous in the Bowery. It isn't likely that he enjoyed being a recruiting officer. The Regular Army was generally despised as the last legal refuge of men who were fit for nothing else. Discipline tended to be brutal, and desertion rates were high. For a line officer who had spent all his military service with troops, being stuck in New York signing up immigrants straight off the boat or trying to lure desperadoes from the streets of the Bowery can hardly have been a congenial form of service.

In September 1869 he was transferred out of New York, back to field service and the 13th Infantry Regiment at Fort Rawlins, in Utah Territory. He arrived to endure one of the coldest winters to freeze the high plains that century. The 13th was commanded by one of the more interesting figures in the Army, Colonel Philippe Regis de Trobriand, whose father had been a general de brigade in Napoleon's Grande Armee. He had studied law as a young man in Paris but never practiced it. He had become a journalist instead, a career choice that brought him the editorship of a French newspaper in New York before the Civil War. During the war he'd taken American citizenship and risen to become a brevet major general. After the war he wrote a classic account of his experiences, Quatre Ans de Campagne a l'Armee du Potomac, and was commissioned a colonel in the Regular Army.(24) In Utah he fought the Indians and tried to reason with the Mormons, neither of whom was willing to be told how to behave by politicians in Washington.

The life of the 13th Infantry in the early 1870s was like most field service--long periods of boredom punctuated by bouts of frenetic activity. There were periodic skirmishes that amounted to aggravated constabulary duty, but big fights were almost unknown after the 1860s.(25)

In 1874 MacArthur and Company K participated in a major expedition against the Sioux that ended with large numbers of Indians agreeing to move onto reservations.(26) Throughout the West the Indians were rapidly being penned in on some of the poorest land the United States possessed. When the 1874 campaign ended, the 13th Infantry got a new assignment. It was transferred to Louisiana. Having a French-speaking, French-born aristocrat for a commander (De Trobriand's father had been both a Bourbon count and a baron of the empire) may have inspired this move. At all events, the state was still under federal occupation, with a much-hated, Washington-imposed carpetbagger in the governor's chair, propped up with Army bayonets. The state legislature too was under Washington's control. When legislators opposed to the governor tried to take their seats in 1875, they were stopped by the 13th Infantry from entering the state capitol.

For Captain Arthur MacArthur, Jr., the high point of his time in Louisiana came when he attended a Mardi Gras ball in New Orleans in February 1875. There he met a tall brunette with expressive dark eyes and strong features, twenty-two-year-old Mary Pinkney Hardy of Norfolk, Virginia.

Her father was a prosperous commission merchant of old Virginia stock. During the Civil War the Hardy family had been displaced from its spacious home on the Elizabeth River to Baltimore, one northern city that was sympathetic to the South. There Mary, whose family nickname was Pinky, had attended a Catholic girls' school. The family was Episcopalian, but the gulf between upper-class Anglicanism and the Roman Church was pretty narrow. Her life appears to have been uneventful until, on a visit to New Orleans, she attended the same Mardi Gras ball as Captain MacArthur and both experienced what they remembered as "love at first sight."(27)

The course of true love did not promise to run smooth. Two of her brothers had attended Virginia Military Institute and fought for the Confederacy. Her entire family seems to have disapproved of Captain MacArthur. If he ever warmed to them, or they to him, no record of it survives.

The courtship was brief. The young couple married in Norfolk in May 1875. The captain was assigned to Washington, where he served as a staff officer on various Army boards. In the spring of 1876 Mary traveled down to Norfolk for the birth of her first child, Arthur III. Shortly afterward Captain MacArthur went back to Louisiana, to resume command of Company K, 13th Infantry.

The year 1877 saw the occupation of Louisiana draw to a close. The regiment was briefly deployed to western Pennsylvania, which was in the grip of a violent railroad strike. The breakneck industrialization that followed the Civil War brought numerous bloody struggles between business and labor. The Army was sent to intervene in many of these clashes, some of which were suppressed with deadly force.(28) Although the 13th didn't fire a shot in Pennsylvania, MacArthur, like most professional soldiers, probably found this kind of duty distasteful.

In 1878 the MacArthurs visited Connecticut, where Pinky's parents were on vacation. While there, a second child, Malcolm, was born. When the vacation ended, the captain, his wife and two infant sons returned to Louisiana and the 13th Infantry Regiment.

In 1879 the 13th was assigned to the former government arsenal at Little Rock Barracks, Arkansas. It was a fairly comfortable post as Army garrisons went, and MacArthur's duties weren't particularly heavy. Although not given much to socializing, he had become an enthusiastic Freemason and was warmly welcomed by the Grand Lodge of Arkansas in Little Rock, which awarded him its Fellowcraft degree.(29)

With a wife and two children to support, the issue of MacArthur's rank--and pay--was more pressing than ever. When he failed to move the War Department, the captain began urging the Senate to review his lowly position in the Army. This brought a stiff rebuke from the Adjutant General, with whom he was already quarreling about his place on the Anny Register:(30)

While this acrimonious correspondence with the War Department rumbled on, a third son was born to the captain and his wife. Pinky gave birth to her last child, Douglas, in the Arsenal, a large redbrick structure, with two imposing octagonal towers, at Little Rock Barracks on January 26, 1880.
SOURCE: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/oldsoldi.h tm

Not long before his own death, Douglas MacArthur summed up his feelings about the passing of his father this way: "My whole world changed that night. Never have I been able to heal the wound in my heart."

In a fundamental way, Douglas MacArthur's remarkable career was fueled by his desire to live up to the shining example of his father. From his exploits as a teenaged hero in the Union Army until his death at a reunion of his Wisconsin regiment, Arthur MacArthur, Jr. was a dedicated soldier who was in many ways the archetype of the 19th century U.S. Army officer.

Arthur was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, but at the age of four moved to Milwaukee, where his father established a law practice and soon became a star in local politics. Although just sixteen when the Civil War erupted, Arthur was determined to enlist, ignoring his father's wishes that he train for a career in the law, or at least attend West Point if he insisted on becoming a soldier. But no sooner had Judge MacArthur arranged an appointment to West Point, than his headstrong son forced him into arranging a commission as first lieutenant in the 24th Wisconsin Volunteers.

At first soldiers laughed at the "baby adjutant," but not for long. Quickly impressing others with his coolness and dedication to duty, Arthur first became a highly valued member of the unit, then a genuine hero. In an action which eventually earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor, MacArthur seized the regimental flag from the fallen color bearer and led his men up Missionary Ridge near Chattanooga, Tennessee. The commander who recommended him for the award commented that "he was most distinguished in action on a field where many in the regiment displayed conspicuous gallantry, worthy of the highest praise."

But for career officers like Arthur MacArthur, life in the post-Civil War U.S. Army would hold little glory. Without foreign wars, promotions were few and far between; instead, the Army was asked to make settlement of the West safe from the Indian "menace." For Arthur and his wife Pinky, whom he had married in 1875, this meant raising their young family on a series of dusty Army posts like the one at Ft. Selden, New Mexico. A voracious reader, MacArthur did his best to challenge himself intellectually, and his efficiency reports were always excellent. Nevertheless, these were difficult and frustrating years for the MacArthurs.

That began to change in 1886, when MacArthur's Company K was transferred to the large Army base at Leavenworth, Kansas. Just three years later, his excellent work as an instructor -- and the ceaseless lobbying by him and his well-placed father -- finally paid off, and MacArthur was promoted to major and assigned to the Adjutant General's office in Washington. There, while his family enjoyed the high society that gathered around his father's table, Arthur flourished at the War Department. By the time the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, he was ready for a sizeable command.

Newly-minted Brigadier General Arthur MacArthur, commanding a 4800-man brigade of volunteers, arrived in Manila on August 1, three months after Admiral Dewey's navy had defeated the Spanish navy. When the American army arrived, the Spanish commander in Manila, hopelessly outnumbered by the Americans and Emilio Aguinaldo's Filipino insurgents, negotiated the surrender of his forces after a staged battle. All went smoothly at first, until suddenly MacArthur's brigade ran into heavy fire from a Spanish unit which had not received word of the understanding. Displaying "much gallantry and excellent judgment" during the skirmish, MacArthur defeated the renegade Spaniards. Unfortunately for MacArthur, subduing the Filipinos, eager for true independence after generations of colonial domination, would prove far more difficult.

In April of 1900, in recognition for his work in managing the guerrilla war, MacArthur was appointed military governor of the Philippines, replacing General Otis. As if fighting the Filipinos wasn't hard enough, MacArthur soon faced another challenge: the arrival of a civilian commission from Washington, headed by rising Ohio Republican William Howard Taft. Resentful of what he saw as political interference in an essentially military situation, MacArthur treated Taft coolly at best. Taft, knowing that Washington wanted only good news and the quick establishment of a civilian government, saw MacArthur as an inconvenience and successfully lobbied for his removal.

Upon his return to the States in 1901, MacArthur was first disappointed by the lack of fanfare he received, then by his assignments, which did not conform to his rigid sense of honor. The final straw came in 1909, when he retired after being passed over for the Army's top job, Chief of Staff, despite being the highest ranking officer. For the rest of his life he would harbor bitter resentment against what his biographer called "civilian politicians and deskbound warriors of the general staff." It was a lesson his son Douglas would not soon forget.
SOURCE: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/macarthur/peopleevents/pandeAMEX107.html

Arthur married Mary Pinkney HARDY. (Mary Pinkney HARDY was born on 22 May 1852 and died in 1935.)