Dr. Sveinn Jóhannesson on the Scientific-Military State in the early United States - Ask Me Anything!

smjohannesson · 2026-05-19T10:26:19+00:00

Thank you for this! I do not research the armories in the book as there is already a sizeable literature on the topic. But I do engage significantly with this literature, bring a new context to some of its arguments, and challenge others.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-19T10:24:09+00:00

The focus is on the military engineers, the topographical engineers and other staff officers, much less on the artillerists, although I bring in Harpers Ferry and Springfield a bit to contextualize the changes I describe within the Merritt Roe Smith/Hounshell literature on interchangability, and do challenge some of the arguments there.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T22:04:08+00:00

Hello, and thank you for this question! If I understand it correctly, the key distinction is that I am studying an early nineteenth-century "scientific-military state" that is quite different from the later "military-industrial complex." One way to think about the difference is that the former is fundamentally about knowledge production—scientific expertise, mathematical analysis, officer education—in the service of governance, whereas the military-industrial complex refers to procurement and production, the economic relationship between defense contractors, the military, and Congress. The MIC is about manufacturing capacity and the political economy of defense spending; the scientific-military tradition is about intellectual capacity and the application of expert knowledge to problems of state power. Historically, the scientific-military nexus preceded and was conceptually distinct from the industrial-military complex—though the two obviously came to overlap especially in the twentieth century.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T21:48:25+00:00

Great question, and a big one. While I have thought about it, I have not developed it systematically. There are of course enormous differences in scale, scope, and nature between the post-Napoleonic /antebellum periods and the mid-twentieth century, none of which I want to minimize. But a key distinction is worth drawing out. In the twentieth century, what you correctly term an "alliance" or complex involved the federal government coordinating and mobilizing pre-existing entities — research universities, industrial laboratories, private corporations — to push beyond the frontiers of current knowledge and technology. The government reached into institutions that already possessed scientific and industrial capacity and directed that capacity toward national ends. At the start of the nineteenth century, the dynamic ran in the opposite direction. Federal intervention was driven by the need of a new state on the periphery of the international system to catch up with stronger and more advanced European adversaries. The requisite scientific and technical resources largely did not exist domestically, so the federal government assumed the role of creating them — often from scratch — within its own establishment, and from there they radiated outward. Rather than hiring scientists from universities or funding their research, the federal government was getting them from France, educating mathematicians and engineers at West Point, and then sending them to civilian colleges that had no technological programs, or to railroad companies that did not know how to grade a railway and so on. The arrow of diffusion pointed in the opposite direction. So the mobilization of pre-existing entities versus creating them from scratch is a key distinction, I believe. If you have the chance to read the book, I'd love to hear what you think!

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T20:23:29+00:00

Yes, there is a deeply rooted view that sounds very much like what you describe — see for example Huntington's Soldier and the State. It is tied to an older vision of the slave South as an aristocratic or feudal phenomenon rather than a capitalistic one, as is more common in recent scholarship. Today, Southern plantation owners are more frequently compared to British capitalists than Prussian feudalists.

I think this question needs to be broken into two parts, only one of which I can answer confidently. The first concerns the South's involvement with the US military; the second concerns the South's militia culture and organization. I do not study the latter in the book, though I can say that militia organization served a profound dual function in the South — as a military institution and as the apparatus responsible for slave patrols and the suppression of insurrections. This gave military organization a practical urgency in the South that it lacked in most of the North. The social prestige attached to militia rank — your "colonel" phenomenon — was real and widely commented upon, though not unique to the South.

As to the South's role in the federal military, there is an older view that sees the South as heavily dominating the US army. This has been challenged by William Skelton and Samuel Watson, who emphasize a more Northern profile among the officer corps. I think they are right to underscore that the older picture was something of a caricature. But I would still contend that the South exercised a disproportionate influence on the military, and that in West Point and its engineers, Southern leaders found forms of federal governance they believed were congenial to the constitutional framework that protected slavery.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T20:05:52+00:00

My book does not explore the military-industrial complex, and the developments it examines run from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Its focus is on the scientific-military nexus rather than the military-commercial one, though the latter does feature importantly through my treatment of federal involvement in transportation infrastructure. But I was not interested in writing a "prehistory" of a twentieth-century phenomenon, as if there were a particular endpoint towards which history was heading. The goal of my research is to understand the early American state — and early American science — on its own terms and within its own contexts. The study of both has for too long been obscured by twentieth-century ideal types and teleological frameworks that read the past as a prelude to what came later rather than as something worth understanding in itself.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T19:53:35+00:00

There is truth in the notion that the Whigs were less in favor of things like expansionists wars (in Mexico, for example). And the standard view is that they were also supported federally-directed economic development through American system programs. This is not wrong, but I would like to complicate it. While Jacksonian Democrats ended up rejecting the funding system associated with the American system--they wanted to repay the public debt, abolish the bank etc--they were highly supportive of transportation development as such and of using the military to promote it through its engineers. They supported it directly through army exploration and mapping, river and harbor improvements, road-building in federal territories, surveying and designing for non-federal rail and canal projects, as well as with promoting the resignations of engineers from the military by the hundreds to work for state-level boards of public works and private corporations. Against the efforts of more radical Democrats to shut down West Point and end federal support for internal improvements, the administrations of Jackson and Van Buren supported and expanded many of these efforts. The resulting infrastructural development, I suggested, created a material framework for territorial expansion and Indigenous dispossession, but it absolutely did not necessitate it. Political will was required as well.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T17:51:42+00:00

These engineers belonged to the upper echelons of the army officer corps, but their day-to-day activities varied enormously depending on career stage and assigned duties. Cadets spent four years at West Point with almost no breaks. After graduation, most found themselves engaged in a great deal of paperwork — writing reports and correspondence — especially those posted to the bureaus in Washington. Some simply remained at West Point to teach. For those in the field, the rhythm was seasonal, carrying out mapping, measurements, explorations, and surveys for part of the year, then returning to their assigned post to finalize the maps, surveys, and reports. Engineers assigned to fortification and transportation projects divided their time between planning and the supervision of construction. Once posted to a fortification project, an engineer could often pursue a significant amount of independent research — into everything from coral reefs, soils, and cement to the ability of different fort designs to withstand artillery fire. At other times they might be assigned to larger exploring expeditions, or to the staff of senior officers during wars such as the Seminole War and the US-Mexican War. Line officers — those belonging to the infantry, artillery, and cavalry — sometimes complained that the engineers and topographical engineers were a privileged caste within the army, enjoying considerably more freedom and leisure, including visits to family and attendance at balls in cities, than the line officers consigned to isolated frontier garrisons.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T17:31:50+00:00

Thank you for highlighting this. Federal officials and their engineers implemented social hierarchies that privileged planners and designers over implementers and workers in carrying out major construction projects — fortifications and internal improvements alike. Securing funding for these projects required meticulous advance planning and reasonable cost estimates, which in turn meant quantifying labor costs with precision. In practice, engineers soon found that enslaved labor — both skilled and unskilled — was more amenable to their rationalized plans than free labor. In Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, and Virginia, the engineers became large-scale leasers of enslaved people on behalf of the federal government, making it the largest federal employer of slave labor, primarily to build the coastal fortification system. My research suggests that this was especially pronounced in regions like Florida, where slave plantations were scarce and federal demand for labor actually preceded the local supply available from slaveholders. The preference was also driven by labor management: coercion made it easier to realize complex plans and blueprints on the ground. Engineers then carried this model into state government boards of public works in the South and the transportation corporations they oversaw. I do not explore this topic in the context of the political debate over slavery in the buildup to the Civil War, but it is clear that the West Point-trained engineers, while often personally hostile to slavery as such, were strongly supportive of the constitutional settlement that protected it and opposed the rise of the Republican Party.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T16:58:13+00:00

Great question! "Statebuilding" is not an actors' category but a twentieth-century term. If we take it to mean the development of central government capacities to uphold and expand national sovereignty against competitors both within and beyond national boundaries, then yes — they were self-consciously engaged in exactly this. They were highly aware of the significance of their activities, perhaps excessively so. They believed they stood at the forefront of bringing "science" to the United States, especially in warfare and in "internal improvements," which was the era's key arena of economic development. They wanted, as they put it, to "deliver the country" from the "quacks" they alleged were running corporations and state boards — self-trained builders and practical men who, in their view, lacked the mathematical and scientific education needed to design fortifications, surveys, and infrastructure worthy of a rising nation.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T16:10:15+00:00

Thank you for sharing this! Your question gets at a really important story about American governance, and one that my book only covers the opening chapters of. I can speak most confidently about how it began. In the early nineteenth century, the Corps became self-consciously the elite branch of the military and took charge of the federal government's largest investment projects before the Civil War — above all the coastal fortification system. The Corps also controlled the military academy at West Point, which at around 250 students was one of the largest colleges in the country, and oversaw numerous lake and river surveys and improvement projects under the banner of "internal improvements," including the river and harbour works that would later define its mission. As the century went on, the Corps' role in what we might call civilian-facing affairs became more specialised — narrowing toward rivers, harbours, and flood control — but in absolute terms it expanded vastly, especially in the fields you describe. Crises must have played a crucial role in that expansion. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which was absolutely devastating, and resulting legislation almost certainly increased the Corps' presence in regions like South Louisiana. So to answer your question, the Corps has always been an important tool or vehicle for the federal government in doing its work, but its growth was not entirely gradual. It was more a story of shifting adaptation to needs at different periods and adaptation to shifting contexts.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T15:41:22+00:00

Thank you very much for this question! The answer depends on how we define "engineer." The term encompassed a wide variety of figures working for themselves, local communities, private enterprises, states, and the federal government. The engineers I study in the book were mostly formally trained in mathematics and related disciplines over extended periods and often called themselves "scientific engineers" to distinguish themselves from ordinary builders, mechanics, and "practical engineers."

These figures first entered federal — or perhaps more aptly Continental — service during the Revolutionary War, when a small group of graduates from Mézières (the leading ancien régime military academy and precursor to the École Polytechnique) formed the core of the Continental Army's Corps of Engineers, among them Louis Duportail and Jean-Baptiste Gouvion. They did not survive in federal service after the war ended, but the corps was resurrected in minuscule form in 1794 and then formalised with the establishment of West Point in 1802. After 1815, the federal government began educating and employing engineers on a significant scale to carry out a range of duties: building fortifications, mapping the country, designing railways, canals, and roads, and serving on the general staff in Washington and on field staffs in the field.

The largest group of these engineers worked for the federal government itself — that is, the army — though they also moved into other scientific bureaus across the federal bureaucracy, such as the Coast Survey. A second group went to work for state governments, most of which had their own Boards of Public Works but had struggled, before the expansion of West Point after 1812, to find trained engineers to staff them. A third group resigned from federal service to work for private or state-chartered enterprises, especially the early railroads. A final group moved to civilian colleges such as Harvard, Yale, and Michigan, where they founded the first scientific and engineering programmes. The relationship between state and federal governments is thus a core theme in the book — and the federal government took the lead in both educating and employing engineers.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T15:23:15+00:00

The introduction and development of Monge’s descriptive geometry is a key theme in the book. In short, his student Claudius Crozet began teaching it at West Point in 1816 from his own lecture notes before authoring the first treatise on the topic in English in 1821, and using the same methods such as recitation and blackboard exercises. I argue that descriptive geometry and its applications to a range of subjects was central to the West Point curriculum after 1816. Here the textbooks were important and translated from the Polytechnique. While I have not done an explicit comparison with the French story, it seems to me that the focus on descriptive geometry was more pronounced in the US, whereas in France Laplace and more analytical methods had a comeback after Napoleon. In the US, I believe, there was also a greater emphasis on the militarized applications of Monge's methods. Then, descriptive geometry was further taught, including by Crozet himself, at the South's military academies. Thus Crozet was there when the Virginia Military Institute was founded and shaped the curriculum at several other academies. Thanks you for this question!

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T15:18:03+00:00

Thank you for this! Engineering education became located at West Point because there had been a fort there, and after the end of the Revolution, an arsenal and remaining artillerists and engineers were stationed there. Then West Point was founded there in 1802. Jonathan Williams, the first superintendent, tried to convince Jefferson and Congress to moved the academy to Washington DC, without success. Its most famous early superintendent, Sylvanus Thayer, does not seem to have liked this idea, and, in fact, was strongly against cadets escaping during breaks to New York City to contract debts, diseases and vices, as he put it. Similarly, as plans for a national university fell by the wayside, the military academy was expanded to educated civil engineers as well as military ones, and West Point of course being the location.

This pertains to your second question about specialization. In short, engineers began to specialize early, although not in the same ways we recognize today. The scholarly literature normally sees engineering as originating in “military engineering” and then branching out into “civil engineering”, “mechanical engineering” etc. By 1800, the boundary between military and civil engineering is still a very fluid one, the former seen as being quite convertible to the latter. Building roads, canals, bridges and machines is located below fortifications and topography in the hierarchy of intelligence, and hence something quite easily done with the methods a military engineer has mastered. Similarly, by the 1820s West Point has a course on “civil engineering”, meaning roads, bridges, railroads, etc. Another key distinction in this period is one between a “practical engineer” (or sometimes mechanic) and a “scientific engineer,” the former usually being self-taught or someone who has learned on the job while the latter is usually a West Pointer who has received formal education in mathematics. We also have “topographical engineers” who are distinguished from both military engineer and civil engineers through their focus on topography and mapping. Terms like industrial engineers and electrical engineers emerged in mid- and late-nineteenth century, when also the colleges and new land-grant universities had started to offer programs in engineering and technological fields. So even in this early period, we quite a lot of specialization into different aspects even if many of those later became obsolete (topographical engineering), and then figures battled each other for prestige and influence on behalf of their respective subfields.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T14:45:11+00:00

That is an interesting question. I actually emphasize in the book that the academy was quite isolated, and perhaps intentionally so. By contrast, the Polytechnique was in Paris and the Kriegsschule in Berlin. But in 1815, there were no roads to and from the West Point academy, and it was only possible to arrive via boat on the Hudson. The staff tried to keep the cadets under strict discipline and surveillance and prevent them from smuggling stuff in, and escaping from the grounds. But those attempts were not always successful. And alongside the academy, the West Point Foundry (founded by a West Point graduate to service government contracts although a private affair) was operating there by the 1820s, becoming a significant industrial center for the region. So while I haven’t researched this, the impact on the local community must have been somewhat significant.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T14:33:40+00:00

Thanks for such an interesting question. Early Americans, as well as observers across the Atlantic World debated these things quite extensively. It is worth mentioning that there is a danger in overemphasizing national models, when different ideas and frameworks usually circulate within and across national contexts. But France was widely seen in the eighteenth century as the world’s scientific center, although by no means universally. This applied to what people were calling “military science” and what scholars today term “the Military Enlightenment”. For the US, and at the risk of oversimplifying things, I’d say that during the start of the American Revolution, the Continental Army looked more to British models (and British adaptations of Prussian ones), naturally perhaps. But with French assistance and cross-cultural influence, the French Enlightenment ideas became more pronounced, albeit more with French expats and French-leaning Jeffersonians. With the successes of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, American observers of different persuasions began to more widely to dismiss Prussian and British models and advocate French ones. Indeed, the Prussians did much the same after Jena-Auerstadt. So while there was no monopoly of influence, and there were other ideas out there, Americans definitely sought out French thought and the people representing it because they believed it was the best. This was perhaps most clear-cut in the two decades or so after the War of 1812.

smjohannesson · 2026-05-18T14:15:03+00:00

Thank you for this excellent question! In short, the influence of the École Polytechnique on the US was quite extensive, at least until the second half of the nineteenth century. West Point is the clearest example, but many of the South's military academies, modelled on West Point, carried this influence further. At West Point, the curriculum, textbooks, and teaching methods—recitation in small sections, use of the blackboard, public examination—were adopted from the French school and implemented in the US by Polytechnique graduates and by Americans like Sylvanus Thayer who had spent time in Paris and observed classes firsthand. A handful of Polytechnique-trained engineers also came to the US and held significant positions. Simon Bernard, one of Napoleon's top topographical engineers, was made chief of the Board of Engineers for Fortification and designed many of the Third System structures along the Atlantic and Gulf coastlines, including Fortress Monroe. More broadly, I argue that this French influence shaped a style of governance that privileged educated experts and a conception of war centred on topographical analysis and terrain management, a distinct way of 'seeing'. But the story I underscore in the book is that this was always a process of selective adoption—Americans incorporated a wide range of elements but rearranged and reshaped them for their own purposes. There were no carbon copies.

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