Hitchcock, Ethan Allen (1798–1870)

Military Officer and Man of Conscience

Private U.S. citizens have felt reasonably free to criticize their government's war policies and to decline to volunteer for service in time of war (except when subject to conscription). Professional soldiers who have taken the oath to protect and defend the Constitution are not so free. Hence, when such a professional is called upon to participate in a war he or she regards as immoral or unwinable, that individual may face a crisis of conscience. Ethan Allen Hitchcock faced more than one such crisis and left an extensive diary documenting his thoughts.

Hitchcock was born in Vermont in 1798, the son of a federal judge. His mother was the daughter of Ethan Allen, the leader of Vermont's struggle for independence from the colony of New York and a military leader of the Green Mountain Boys during the Revolutionary War. Hitchcock's [Page 346]parents secured his appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1814.

Hitchcock proved to be an avid student and sought to stay on at the academy for an unprecedented fourth year, but he was commissioned in 1817. He was promoted on the basis of his successful facilitation of the dredging (rows of pilings deepening the channel by narrowing and accelerating the water's flow) of Mobile Bay in 1818. From 1824 to 1827 he served as an instructor in military tactics at West Point, during which time he was advanced in rank to captain. His leisure was spent reading classical works of philosophy and theology.

In 1827 he and several of his academy colleagues objected to Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer's unlawful calling of a Board of Inquiry. He and others were placed under arrest and then reassigned; Hitchcock was ordered to a distant post in the West. He appealed to the secretary of war and then to Pres. John Quincy Adams, explaining to a friend that his “conscientious conviction of the justness of my opinion” had left him no other choice. While on the way to his regiment, he appealed again to the president and soon learned from a newspaper account that Adams had decided that Hitchcock was right. Thayer honored him by securing his recall to serve as the academy's commandant of cadets. When the next president, Andrew Jackson, personally intervened with a case of academy discipline in 1830, Hitchcock traveled to Washington, D.C., appealed to Jackson, and secured a reversal. But the president persisted in intervening in academy discipline; in 1831 both Thayer and Hitchcock resigned their posts in protest.

Hitchcock took several months of leave to visit his older brother, Henry, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and a planter. Henry offered him a cotton plantation said to be worth $10,000 yearly if he would resign his Army commission and move to Mobile. Hitchcock declined. His diary thereafter contains entries critical of slavery.

In 1832 Hitchcock objected in his diary to Col. James Gadsden's defrauding of Seminole leaders in negotiations. When the Second Seminole War began in 1836, Hitchcock was named assistant adjutant general and was soon negotiating with the Seminole leader, Osceola. But, he wrote in his diary, “the government is in the wrong, and this is the chief cause of the persevering opposition of the Indians, who have nobly defended their country.” By 1837 he was serving as the disbursing officer within the Indian Bureau in St. Louis, Missouri. He angered some by refusing to honor the claims of speculators who had acquired Indian treaty land claims for a fraction of their value. Hitchcock was sustained in those actions by his superiors in Washington and promoted to the rank of major. In 1842 he was sent to the Five Nations in Indian Territory to hear their complaints of fraud. Hitchcock concurrently appealed to the chair of the House Indian Affairs Committee and to the secretary of war for a just settlement of the seeming endless Seminole War, with the suggestion that the Seminoles be guaranteed permanent sovereignty of the Everglades region. Soon he was dispatched as the lieutenant colonel of the 8th infantry regiment to the war zone in Florida. “I confess to a very considerable disgust in this service,” he wrote. With considerable delicacy and humanity, he persuaded the Seminole chief, Pascofa, to agree to move to Indian Territory with his exhausted, hard-pressed people.

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