What happened
Eighteen days earlier Congress had resolved to raise two battalions of Marines and had written a hiring standard into the resolution. No person was to be appointed to office or enlisted "but such as are good seamen, or so acquainted with maritime affairs as to be able to serve to advantage by sea when required." That sentence was the whole of the qualification.
The men were supposed to come from Washington's army, and Washington had said no. On 19 November he objected that because they had to be acquainted with maritime affairs he would have to disrupt many organizations picking and choosing them. On 30 November Congress relieved him of the task and ordered the battalions raised independently of the army.
In between those two dates, Congress commissioned its first Marine. "On 28 November it commissioned the first Marine officer, Samuel Nicholas."
What the History Division can establish about him is thin. He was a Philadelphia Quaker, born in 1744, the only son of Mary Shute and Anthony Nicholas, a blacksmith. He was thirty-one years old.
What it can establish in detail is who he knew. In 1760 he was admitted to the Schuylkill Fishing Company, "an exclusive gentlemen's club devoted to the rod-and-reel and pleasures of the table." Six years later he helped found the Gloucester Fox Hunting Club, whose membership came from the leading families of Philadelphia and the country gentry across the river.
Through those two clubs, the history says, he became acquainted with John Cadwalader, Thomas and James Wharton, Robert and Samuel Morris, John Nixon, Clement Biddle, and Thomas Willing, "all of whom later played leading roles in the Revolution." Cadwalader is the name to hold onto. Thirteen months later he would be the general who ordered Nicholas' Marines to hold a bridge at Trenton.
On his occupation the record gives up. "The vocation he followed in the years before the Revolution is not definitely known, although there are unsubstantiated indications that he was an innkeeper and served in the colonial merchant service." A position in the merchant service would have met the standard Congress had set.
Then the history states the alternative without flinching. "If, on the other hand, he had no experience in such affairs, he could possibly have achieved his appointment through a recommendation by one or more of his many prominent acquaintances."
With the appointment, recruiting began. Among the first officers picked was Joseph Shoemaker, a member of the Fox Hunting Club with Nicholas, and Isaac Craig, an Irishman from County Down who had arrived in 1765, worked as a journeyman carpenter, and quickly made master. Craig "had no maritime experience" and joined in late November as the Corps's oldest lieutenant.
Recruiting rendezvous opened in early December, probably in a number of Philadelphia public houses, and drummers paraded the streets to draw men in. One of the drums was painted with a coiled rattlesnake and the motto "Don't Tread on Me." Craig turned out to be one of the best recruiters, signing nine men his first day, four the second, and more than forty by 22 December.
What is less known
The Corps's first hire may not have met the Corps's first written standard, and its official historian says so on the page. That is not a debunking. It is the History Division declining to paper over a gap in the record, in a book published by Headquarters Marine Corps.
The second and third hires are the sharper detail. Shoemaker came from the same club as Nicholas. Craig, the man the history singles out as one of the most successful recruiters, had no maritime experience at all, which is the one thing the resolution of 10 November actually required.
Within a month, the standard Congress wrote had bent twice. It bent toward a man's friends, and it bent toward a carpenter who happened to be good at the job. The Corps got its first officers out of a fishing club and a rendezvous in a public house, and both bends are in the official record rather than in a legend about it.
Worth noticing too is what the history does not do. It does not resolve the question in Nicholas' favor, and it does not use his later record at Trenton to argue backward that the appointment must have been sound. The gap is left open, in print, by the institution the man founded.
The reading
Every appointment looked reasonable to the person who made it. What it costs to test one properly is a conversation with a Marine you would take anywhere, telling him this billet is not his.
The standard was real and it was written down first, which matters. What happened next is what always happens next: a name came up, the name was known and trusted, and the paper requirement went unexamined because the person recommending it was credible.
Congress did not lower the bar. It just never checked this particular man against it.
I have made this call and I have watched it made. The Marine who gets the billet is the one a staff noncommissioned officer can vouch for personally, and vouching is usually better information than a record brief.
The failure is not that you trusted your own judgment about a person. It is that you never wrote down what the billet actually required before the name came up, so there was nothing for the name to be checked against.
The cost of doing it properly is that you sometimes have to tell a Marine you like, and would take anywhere, that he is not what this particular billet needs. That is the price, and it is paid in a conversation you will remember longer than he will. Congress never had that conversation, and it worked out.
The other half of the story is Craig. He was a carpenter with no maritime experience, hired against the same loose standard, and he turned out to be the best recruiter the Corps had that winter.
The bent standard produced one officer who may not have been qualified and one who provably was not, and the second one was excellent. That is the uncomfortable part. A hiring process that ignores its own criteria will still produce good Marines often enough to keep feeling justified.
It worked out here. Nicholas took a battalion ashore in the Bahamas, then held a line for Cadwalader at Trenton and Princeton. The record does not tell us whether that was a good process or a lucky one, and a leader should be able to hold both of those at once.
The question
Think back to the last time you recommended a Marine for a billet or a school. Which requirement did you skip checking because you already trusted the person, and what one-sentence rule would you want your relief to inherit about what has to be true of a name before it goes forward?
Sources
- 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 I, "Marine Officers Commissioned" and "General Washington's Reply." Read at archive.org
- 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 10, 19, and 28 November 1775. Read at archive.org
Corrections
None.