Field ArTillery - US Army Center Of Military History

diverging missiOns
tactics for infantry. 9 In practice, however,
there was little change in artillery
employment or doctrine.
Because the school at Fort Monroe
concentrated on heavy artillery,
the Secretary of War in 1869 directed
the establishment of a school for light
artillery, similar to one recommended
by General Scott in 1857. Established
at Fort Riley, Kansas, as the School of
Instruction for Light Artillery, the new
facility was to provide more uniformity
in artillery tactics and improve ment
in materiel. But the effort turned to
nothing. The Army reduced the ten
authorized light batteries to five and
used four to establish the school. The
batteries remained in Kansas only two
years before being reorganized as cavalry
to serve on the frontier, and the
school closed. 10
One of the Army’s primary interests
in the latter half of the nineteenth
century was coastal defense. This posture was taken because officers in the reduced
postwar Army strongly believed that large numbers of trained troops were required to
conduct an offensive and because the civilian populace viewed defensive measures as
a means of strengthening the country against foreign invasion without incurring the
expense of a large standing army. There were also foreign influences. Great Britain
had led the way in improving seacoast defenses with a vast construction program
between 1863 and 1880, and Germany and France followed suit. Furthermore, the
develop ment of rifled cannon had rendered the old vertical masonry forts along
the American seaboard obsolete. Fortifications needed to be dug into the earth and
armed with breechloading heavy rifled ordnance, shielded by armor plate, in order
to withstand attacks from modern weapons. As early as 1869, General of the Army
William T. Sherman pushed for the replacement of prewar for tifications with defenses
that could resist modern artil lery. Sherman persisted in his recommendations
throughout the 1870s, and his successor, General of the Army Philip H. Sheridan,
did the same. Although some construction work began, appropriations halted in the
mid-1870s, and all work soon ceased. 11
Major General Barry
9 WD GO 60, 6 Aug 1869; HQ Army GO 6, 17 Jul 1873. The manual was not actually published
until 1874.
10 WD GO 6, 18 Feb 1869; WD GO 17, 4 Mar 1871; Annual Report of the Secretary of War,
[FY1869], 1:24, 69.
11 Annual Report of Secretary of War, [FY1869], 1:31–32; ibid., 1879, 1:xv–xvi.
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