The Battle With No Name - How the Founders Relented and Finally Created a Standing Army Though It Was the Last Thing They Wanted.

It is not surprising that the U.S. Army and its related branches were created as a non-partisan military. What is surprising is that it was created at all. America’s Founders dreaded the possibility that their new nation would end up with a “standing army” — a permanent, national armed force — once the Revolution ended. The Founding Fathers believed a standing army is what the “tyrants of Europe” employed to suppress the common people. To circumvent that possibility, the Continental Army was disbanded at the end of the Revolutionary War, except for just a handful of soldiers. The decision was that the new nation would rely primarily on local and state militias to provide its defense.

Then, in 1791 in the Ohio Valley wilderness, a coalition of Native warriors utterly destroyed a large U.S. force that was a cobbled-together patchwork of these militias. It was such a humiliation that it has gone largely unremarked in our conventional telling of U.S. history, and thus is sometimes called “The Battle With No Name.” Yet it was due to this little-known battle, that President Washington and Congress relented, realizing that the infant nation needed a permanent, professional fighting force in order to survive.

The result has been the world’s most powerful military — today known as the U.S. Army and its related branches. It was one of the Founders’ most deeply held principles that one individual could not be allowed to wield this national force for personal or partisan reasons. This talk is based on research done for my book Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation.