With President Trump’s Executive Order issued on 5 September, the United States of America has a Department of War, and thus a Secretary of War again. Pete Hegseth is the 57th man to serve in that office, and the first since Kenneth Claiborne Royall in 1947.
The US Department of War was one of the three original executive departments of the United States during the first Washington administration, along with the Department of State and the Department of the Treasury. It was dissolved and reorganized by the National Security Act of 1947, signed into law by President Truman after the end of World War II, which created the Department of the Army and Department of the Air Force within the newly established National Military Establishment (later renamed the Department of Defense).
The first incarnation of the Department of War existed for 158 years. Here are the most notable of the 56 men to lead that department in that period.
Henry Knox
The Department of War was created in 1789, so it did not exist in the time of the Revolutionary War. However, the first man to ever lead the department served a crucial role on the battlefield in winning independence from the British Crown.
Henry Knox was a big man, both figuratively and literally. He weighed nearly 300 pounds at six feet tall. In his most heroic deed in the war, he famously oversaw the ‘noble train of artillery’, the operation that transported the captured British cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to General Washington in Boston in 1775. This led to the initial retreat of the British forces from the North American colonies in rebellion. He was eventually appointed Major General by George Washington in 1782.
When he assumed office as the first Secretary of War, whether or not the United States should even have a standing federal army, as opposed to relying on state militias, was up for debate. Eventually, he was allowed a 700-man army. During his tenure, he was mainly focused on fighting Native American forces on the new nation’s Western frontier, as President Washington was very careful to remain neutral in international conflicts.
James Monroe
James Monroe was the first US Secretary of War who went on to serve as President. He too was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. He fought in the Battles of Trenton and Princeton in 1776–1777, and is even depicted in the famous 1851 Emanuel Leutze painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware.
He only served as War Secretary briefly, between September 1814 and March 1815, at the tail end of the War of 1812 against the United Kingdom, under President James Madison. He was tasked with re-organizing the defence of Washington, DC after the British burnt down the capital in August 1814.
Jefferson Davis
Here is a man who made our list for all the wrong reasons. Davis went on to become the first and only President of the short-lived Confederate States of America, formed out of the 11 Southern states that seceded over the preservation of slavery in the US between December 1860 and June 1861. He served as Secretary of War under Democrat President Franklin Pierce between 1853 and 1857. His immediate successor, John B Floyd, is also connected to the Confederate cause: he transferred weapons from federal armouries in Northern states to ones in Southern states during the succession crisis to help the pro-slavery side.
Robert Todd Lincoln
He is the son of the man considered by many to be the greatest President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Since he was the only child of President Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln to survive to adolescence, his mother was very reluctant to let him serve in the American Civil War. He eventually did get a commission from his father as a Captain in the Union Army for the last few weeks of the war.
He was appointed Secretary of War by President James Garfield in 1881, and continued to serve in his post under President Chester A Arthur as well, after Garfield’s assassination only a few months into his presidency. Secretary Lincoln was with him at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, DC, when he was shot by a maniac named Charles Guiteau, whose delusions made him believe that the President owed him a job in his cabinet. In an eerie coincidence, Robert Lincoln was also in town when President William McKinley was killed in Buffalo, New York in 1901, despite not serving in his administration in any role. Given that his father was also a victim of a presidential assassination, he vowed never to come near another US President again. He only broke his promise for the inauguration ceremony of the memorial to his father in 1922. The next year, President Warren G Harding, who spoke at the event, died in office from a heart attack…
William Howard Taft
We started our list with a hefty man, let’s also end it with a hefty man. William Howard Taft weighed over 300 pounds at six feet tall. Before being appointed Secretary of War by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, he served as the Governor-General of the Philippines, the newly acquired territory won by the US in the Spanish–American War.
During his tenure leading the War Department, his main focus was securing the new US overseas territories, such as Guam, Puerto Rico, and the aforementioned Philippines, where locals were in an uprising against the occupying US in the Moro Rebellion from 1902–1913. His department also oversaw the construction of the Panama Canal.
Towards the end of his second term, President Roosevelt chose Taft as his hand-picked successor, which granted him the Republican nomination for the 1908 election. He won decisively, making him the second Secretary of War to get to the presidency. However, during the term of his own, he had a falling out with Roosevelt, which ultimately led to President Roosevelt running a third-party campaign against Taft in the 1912 presidential election. With the Republican vote split, Taft only managed to get 8 electoral votes, the worst showing of any incumbent President in US history.
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