Henry Dearborn

Secretary of War

Henry Dearborn served as President Thomas Jefferson‘s secretary of war for the entire eight years of his administration. A native of New Hampshire, he came to the job with a wealth of military experience acquired during the Revolutionary War—he had fought at Bunker Hill, Quebec, and Saratoga, and later served on Washington’s staff. A hands-on administrator with a penchant for detail, he peppered Joseph Perkins, the superintendent of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia with suggestions about the design of the U.S. Model 1803 rifle. Meriwether Lewis carried Dearborn’s instructions to Perkins when he visited the armory to outfit the expedition. Although the Model 1803 went into production too late to be part of the Corps of Discovery’s arsenal, some of its design features (including a half stock and relatively short barrel) were probably incorporated into the rifles issued to Lewis^[2]See on this site The Muskets and Rifles. Dearborn also came up with an idea, ahead of its time, for highly mobile “flying” artillery, which would be used to great effect forty years later during the Mexican War.^[3]Theodore J. Crackel, Mr. Jefferson’s Army: Political and Social Reform of the Military Establishment, 1801–1809 (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 78–9.

It was under Dearborn, too, that the army began the systematic exploration of the American West—an enterprise that was to last the better part of a century and for which the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with its emphasis on natural history and cartography, was a prototype. In 1805, while the Corps of Discovery was following the Missouri to its source on the Continental Divide, Lieutenant Thomas Freeman led a party up the Red River on the southern plains—the Freeman-Custis Expedition and Lieutenant Zebulon Pike explored the headwaters of the Mississippi. In 1806, Pike and Lieutenant James Wilkinson^[4]The son of General James Wilkinson. led a detachment up the Arkansas River to the Colorado Rockies. Subsequent decades were marked by the expeditions of other soldier-explorers, including Major Stephen H. Long (1819-20), Lieutenant John C. Frémont (1842, 1843-33, 1845), and Lieutenant William H. Emory (1846).^[5]William H. Goetzman, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1991). James P. Ronda, Beyond Lewis & Clark: The Army Explores the West … Continue reading

Dearborn and Clark’s Commission

Dearborn has come in for criticism for his role in the confused affair of Clark’s commission. As every student of Lewis and Clark knows, Jefferson agreed to Lewis’s request to offer his friend a captaincy in the Corps of Engineers, but to the chagrin of both men, the commission eventually authorized was a second lieutenant’s in the artillery.^[6]When Clark left the army in 1796 he held the rank of lieutenant—not, it is sometimes erroneously reported, a captain. Nor was he a first lieutenant. At the time, the army didn’t distinguish … Continue reading Adding insult to injury, this was a grade below first lieutenant, the rank Clark had held when he left the army in 1796. Clark accepted Lewis’s invitation and began recruiting men for the expedition in early August of 1803, but the commission that gave him the authority to do so was effective March 26, 1804, the date it was approved by the Senate as part of a list of nominations from the War Department.^[7]Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents: 1783-1854, 2nd ed., ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 1:172–73. The late date of the commission denied Clark seniority important for future promotion, and because there was no provision for back pay, he was left uncompensated for his first eight months of service.

Lewis’s biographer Stephen E. Ambrose offered several hypotheses for the government’s failure to grant Clark his promised rank: Jefferson and Dearborn overlooked the details, or Jefferson wanted Lewis in “sole command.”^[8]Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 135. Commissioning Clark a captain would have jumped him ahead of lieutenants on the active-duty rolls, and it could be that Dearborn and Jefferson simply bowed to the army’s seniority system. But there was a bigger problem, as William E. Foley points out in his biography of Clark: “In fairness to Dearborn he had to operate under the constraints of an 1802 statute designed to shrink the military establishment during peacetime, and there were no vacant captain’s slots at the time.”^[9]William E. Foley, Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 70. Ironically, this statute—the Military Peace Establishment Act—had been passed at Jefferson’s behest, and it would have taken another act of Congress to create a captain’s slot for Clark.

Presumably at Dearborn’s direction, the War Department eventually made at least partial amends for its shoddy treatment of Clark. Army pay records indicate that he was promoted to first lieutenant in February 1806, while the Corps of Discovery was still on the Pacific. Following the expedition’s return, when the department computed Clark’s back pay it did so from August 1, 1803, thereby restoring both the early pay due him (albeit as a second lieutenant) and his seniority. In addition, on Jefferson’s orders the War Department made up the difference in total compensation (pay plus subsistence allowance) between a lieutenant and a captain, and like all members of the expedition, Clark was also awarded double pay for his service and a grant of land (in his and Lewis’s case, 1,600 acres west of the Mississippi).^[10]Arlen J. Large, “‘Captain’ Clark’s Belated Bonus,” We Proceeded On, November 1997, 12-14, lewisandclark.org/wpo/pdf/vol23no4.pdf#page=10; Jackson, 1:363-364 and 375–76. Clark’s total pay package for his 43 months with the corps amounted to more than $4,000, equivalent in today’s currency to about $60,000.^[11]“Economic History Services” (http://eh.net/hmit/ppowerusd), accessed 6 September 2004.

Dearborn also asked the Senate to promote Clark to lieutenant colonel in the Second Regiment of Infantry—a jump of three grades. His request was presumably intended to recognize Clark’s contributions to the expedition, although Dearborn must have realized it had little chance of approval. Some senators were apparently unwilling to buck the seniority system, and the request was rejected.^[12]Jackson, 1:376n; Foley, 158.

[For Clark’s perspective on his rank, see on this site Clark’s Military Rank by Joseph Mussulman.]