What happened
The end has a name and a month. "With the discharge of Marine Lieutenant Thomas Elwood in September 1783, Continental Marines passed from the scene."
That is almost two years before the ship was sold. By Charles R. Smith's account in the official history, the corps did not end with the sale of the last frigate.
His account of the Alliance shows the end on one ship. News of the final peace settlement reached her on the last day of March 1783, and most of the crew was discharged, including 33 of her 41 Marines. By mid-May the eight remaining Marines had been released as well.
The only Marine not included was Lieutenant Thomas Elwood, kept at his post, according to Barry, so that the Alliance could maintain "the appearance of a public Ship." Through the early summer he worked on a final accounting of the Marine stores, and he submitted his report on 20 June.
Smith does describe how its purpose wore away. The original resolution of Congress had established a corps of Marines from which battalions could be formed for expeditionary service and detachments made for service afloat, and "somehow, the intent of the resolve was lost as time passed."
He weighs the explanations and ranks them. It happened "not so much from insufficient resources, large distances, and poor communications, as from the lack of centralized control and Congressional neglect."
As the war went on, he writes, the captains of Continental ships took over the responsibility of raising their Marine detachments in the same way they signed on their naval crews.
Smith reports that records indicate approximately 131 officers held Continental Marine commissions. The number of non-commissioned officers and enlisted men is not exactly known, he writes, but probably did not exceed 2,000.
The winding up was administrative. After Robert Morris retired in 1784, Congress made no attempt to appoint a successor as Agent of Marine, "for there was little need for such an office." The Board of the Treasury, organized early in 1785, "wound up the business of the Navy and Marines."
There was a thought of doing otherwise, and the record says so plainly. "The thought of reorganizing the Navy and Marines under the Articles of Confederation at the conclusion of the war did exist, but the finances of the new government were in no condition to permit such a luxury."
The ship took longer. There was "strong sentiment to keep her in national service for the protection of the coast," while "others believed that all naval expenditures should cease." The question was broached from time to time until late May 1785, "when tightened economic considerations finally prevailed and a committee of Congress recommended the sale of the frigate."
The chronology of the Corps gives the result in a single clause. The Navy of the Revolution, "and, consequently, the Marines, was allowed to dwindle away after the fighting was over."
The entry that follows the authorization in that chronology reads: "Algiers commenced open hostilities against the commerce of the United States, the latter being entirely destitute of a navy."
The two entries sit next to each other under 1785: the last warship authorized for sale, then a country described as entirely destitute of a navy.
What is less known
The two sources mark the end of the Continental Marines in different ways.
Smith ends the corps with Lieutenant Elwood's discharge in September 1783, and his account of the Alliance has every Marine aboard her but Elwood released by mid-May 1783. The chronology gives a different marker under 1784: the last known recorded mention of a Continental Marine is that of Private Robert Stout, who was serving in the Alliance.
This entry cannot reconcile the two from the sources in front of it. Smith himself writes that records indicate Marines enlisted for and served in the few armed American vessels of the period, but that there was no organized corps. This entry follows Smith for the end of the corps and reports Stout as the chronology's last mention of a single Marine.
The other point is about the famous praise. The chronology's conclusion quotes the line that "at no period of the naval history of the world is it probable that Marines were more important than during the War of the Revolution," and cites it to Collum's 1903 history without naming the writer.
Smith names the writer. It is James Fenimore Cooper, writing in 1839, more than fifty years after the sale. Smith introduces it as "a much deserved, and long overdue recognition."
Cooper's full sentence also says less about the Revolution than the shortened version suggests. The effect of Marine fire, he wrote, "not only then, but in all the subsequent conflicts, under those circumstances in which it could be resorted to, has usually been singularly creditable." The version the chronology prints, by way of Collum, leaves out both the later conflicts and the word "usually."
The reading
An institution earns its next year by being useful this year, and the receipt expires.
That costs a certain amount of pride to accept, because the natural move when a unit is threatened is to point at what it has done. The Continental Marines eventually got that argument made for them, by Cooper, and it arrived more than fifty years after Smith has them passing from the scene.
The Reserve version is familiar to anyone who has sat through a force structure brief. A unit's history, its battle honors, its lineage: none of it appears in the column that decides whether it exists next fiscal year.
What appears there is whether somebody needed it recently and can say what for.
The thing I try to keep in front of me is that this cuts down as well as up. If I cannot say what my section is currently useful for, in the present tense, to somebody who does not already care, then I have not done the work of making it survivable.
That is uncomfortable because it feels like marketing, and marketing sits badly with most Marines. The alternative on display here is a corps that Smith says contributed measurably to the British defeat, and that passed from the scene with one lieutenant's discharge.
The detail I would not want anyone to miss is the reason Smith gives for the corps losing its original intent. He puts resources, distance, and communications second to the lack of centralized control and Congressional neglect, which is to say that nobody whose job it was to hold the thing together was holding it together.
That is a failure of ownership, and it is available at every level. A section can be hollowed out the same way, by nobody in particular, over a period in which everyone assumed somebody else was watching.
The date to remember is not the sale. It is September 1783, when Smith has the Continental Marines passing from the scene with a single discharge.
The question
What is your section useful for right now, in the present tense, without reference to anything it did more than a year ago? Write that in one sentence, then before Friday say it to one Marine in the section and ask whether they would have described the job the same way.
Sources
- A Chronology of the United States Marine Corps, 1775-1934, Volume I. Historical Branch, G-3 Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1965. Entries for 1783 through 1785, the Part I conclusion, and the source list entry for Collum. Read at archive.org
- Smith, Charles R. Marines in the Revolution: A History of the Continental Marines in the American Revolution, 1775-1783. History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1975. Chapter XIV, "Mustering Out, 1782-1783," the last cruise of the Alliance and "A Few Gallant Memories," pp. 290-292. Read at archive.org
Corrections
None.