Congress puts a standing army under the new War Department, several hundred strong
Three months after Congress created the Department of War, the new government still had no soldiers of its own to speak of. On September 29, 1789, in New York, the temporary seat of government, Congress authorized a regular army of several hundred men under President Washington's War Department, led by Secretary Henry Knox. The department itself had started with just five people: a secretary, an assistant, and one or two clerks. It was a modest beginning for a force that soon took on frontier posts and relations with Native nations.
This vote settled a long-running argument among the Founders: whether soldiers would answer to elected civilians or to their own generals. Putting the army under Knox, a cabinet secretary accountable to Washington and Congress, put civilian control of the military into daily practice, not just into the Constitution's text.
QWhat disaster destroyed the War Department's early paper trail?
On November 8, 1800, a fire consumed the War Department building along with its records and files. This happened just as the federal government was settling into its new home in Washington, D.C., after moving from Philadelphia that same year. The loss wiped out much of the paperwork generated during the department's first decade under Henry Knox and his successors, the enlistment rolls, correspondence, and administrative records documenting how the young army had actually been built and run. Historians studying the department's founding years have had to rely on surviving congressional records and outside correspondence to fill the gaps left by that single blaze in the capital's earliest days.
QHow did the army's regular officer corps get built out beyond the original five War Department jobs?
Through the 1790s, Congress layered on specialized appointments that had nothing to do with paperwork: a physician general and an apothecary general to handle medicine, a purveyor to manage supplies, and a chaplain to attend to the troops' religious needs, alongside the major general, quartermaster general, and judge advocate. The Bureau of Indian Affairs came later, created in 1824 by Secretary John C. Calhoun, and it stayed under the War Department's roof until 1849, when Congress handed it off to the brand-new Department of the Interior. That transfer was the first time a major War Department function was carved away entirely rather than expanded.
QWhere was the War Department physically located before Washington, D.C., existed?
From 1797 to 1800, the department ran out of Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the federal government before the move to the new capital. Once relocated, it eventually settled into a brick Georgian building at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in 1820, one of four matching structures built for the cabinet departments, with War in the northwest corner, Navy across the way, and State and Treasury on the opposite side. That building later gave way in 1888 to the ornate French Empire-style State, War, and Navy Building, now known as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, standing on the very same ground.
