A Leading Indicator of Societal Trajectory

In October of 1864, Joseph Miller escaped from slavery in Kentucky with his wife and their four children. They reached a federal post, Camp Nelson, where they were offered refuge, but only on the condition that Miller enlist in the army. He did, and he settled his family in a tent village at the edge of the post.

Shortly after, though, the army reversed course — and ordered the families to leave, in falling temperatures and with a storm coming on. A detail moved to the tent village and destroyed it, tearing down tents and driving families out. Miller protested, with particular concern for his obviously sick seven year-old son, in a comment later captured by army officials in an affidavit: “I told the man in charge of the guard that it would be the death of my boy. I told him that my wife and children had no place to go. I told him that I was a soldier of the United States.”

As the historian Jim Downs writes in his description of these events, Miller and his family weren’t emancipated slaves — because they were from Kentucky, a state that hadn’t seceded and so wasn’t covered by the Emancipation Proclamation. The army accepted Miller’s enlistment, then classified his family as fugitives from lawful slavery, unqualified for shelter by the government. Soon after the eviction, Miller left the camp at the conclusion of his duty day and walked to find his family. Finding them a few miles away, he learned that the sick seven year-old had died; with orders to return to his place of duty immediately, he walked back to Camp Nelson, got permission to bury his son, walked back to his family, dug a grave himself, buried his child, and walked back to the post.

“About six months later,” Downs concludes, “news of the Miller family’s condition and whereabouts did surface. A sexton, employed in the vicinity of Camp Nelson, recorded that roughly three weeks after Miller’s son died, his wife Isabella and his son Joseph Jr. died. Ten days later, his daughter, Maria, died. Then a day after the New Year, Miller’s only remaining child, Calvin, passed away… Joseph Miller died on January 6, 1865, just a few days after the death of his youngest son.”

The federal government freed the slaves, Downs writes, but developed “no provisions for how they would survive in the midst of war.” Examining the treatment of black soldiers and their families, Downs finds hints about what would come next: Emancipation, then a period of nothing much. Freed, former slaves found themselves in a country without a sustainable plan for what would follow, and where they would fit into the post-slavery economy. Then came vagrancy laws and labor contracts, sharecropping and debt peonage, the Colfax Massacre and the implosion of Reconstruction. The treatment of the soldier Joseph Miller tells you what was coming next.

A few years ago, I wrote a book arguing that the controversies that have played out in military courts have closely reflected the controversies playing out in American society; in some instances, I said, watching courts-martial would have given you hints about the way social conflicts would be settled. The way armies treat soldiers tells you about the contested values of the society the soldiers serve. That argument didn’t set the world on fire; the law school professor who reviewed the book in the Wall Street Journal had no idea what I was talking about, and appears to have believed that I was dropped on my head as a baby. (I have checked with my parents, and do not believe this to have been the case.)

But the US Army officer 2LT Jack Robinson was court-martialed for sitting on an army bus next to a light-skinned black woman — mistaken for a white woman — well before the baseball player Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball. And Irish immigrant enlistees who fled brutal discipline from nativist WASP officers were sentenced to death by courts-martial for deserting to the enemy during the war with Mexico, as America tried to figure out where Irish Catholics fit in a Protestant nation. And so on. Sergeant William Walker was executed by abolitionists, for crying out loud. I still make this argument: If you want to know what’s happening in a society, look at the way it treats its soldiers — and look at the disputes over the way it treats its soldiers, at the contests and controversies. Military organizations are the place where governments exercise the most direct control over individual lives; what they do with those lives is a clue about societal values.

It works in the opposite direction, too: During World War II, the US Army was plagued by tens of thousands of battlefield desertions in Europe, and leaders were extremely reluctant to use the punishment for wartime desertion against a citizen army. Eddie Slovik is treated as a tragic example — the single deserter shot by his own army — but his example could have been multiplied tens of thousands of times by a genuinely punitive military. Dwight Eisenhower regarded military conscripts as human beings, and hesitated to brutalize them. Take that as a sign about the nature of American society in the middle of the twentieth century.

So a military that begins to decline is a sign of something larger. A schism between the organization and the people who compose it tells you that something is happening between citizens and the state.

Leaders who loot from and condescend to their military organizations are telling you who they are, and telling you about the character of the political leaders they serve. They’re a sign of our societal trajectory.

And the current indicators are not enormously positive.