The first regular, uniform, federally administered U.S. army was created early in George Washington’s first term as president, in response to a shocking event: the greatest military victory that indigenous North Americans would ever enjoy over the United States, the high-water mark in resistance to U.S. expansion westward. This devastating defeat of the young republic dwarfs in U.S. casualties and historical significance the famous 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn. It occurred in November 1791, on a bank of the upper Wabash River in modern-day Indiana. A large confederation of indigenous nations, led by the philosophical Miami chief Little Turtle and the flamboyant Shawnee chief Blue Jacket, wiped out much of the force serving under Gen. Arthur St. Clair: a 1,500-strong hodgepodge of state militiamen, short-term enlistees, a few regular troops, wives, girlfriends, children, drivers, cooks and other civilians.
In minutes, what the Washington administration had billed as a swift, highly targeted action to pacify a few recalcitrant savages turned into a horrifying rout. Native tactics and discipline were exemplary. The few surviving U.S. troops threw down their guns and sprinted, and the people of the United States and their government went into a state of shock. Western expansion looked stymied.
Expansionist ambition was a key factor in the movement that led to the founding of the U.S. As a young man, Washington had explored and invested financially in the potential wealth of the great woodland that stretched from the Ohio River’s headwaters to its mouth at the Mississippi, and from Kentucky and western Virginia up to the Great Lakes. It was chiefly in reaction to British restrictions on land speculation across the Appalachians that he’d taken up the cause of American independence in the 1770s. In the 1780s, Washington’s all-important support for forming a nation was again inspired by his continuing financial and political interest in westward expansion. For him, as for many of his peers, without what the United States called its Northwest Territory, the nation had no future.
As president, Washington was eager to maintain a regular army, but after the War for Independence, the Continental Army he had commanded was disbanded in keeping with a century-long American ethos: the preference for militia and short-term, dedicated enlistments rather than a paid, peacetime, nationally organized “standing army,” an institution widely associated with monarchical oppression. Congress had therefore declined to act on its constitutional power to create a force of any effective size and duration.