For the U.S. Army, Western experiences illustrated its role in ensuring national security and in fostering national development. Its soldiers performed feats of great heroism and rank cruelty. Debates regarding the military's role in projecting Indian policy, the division of power between state and federal authorities, and the size of a professional military establishment reveal the inconsistency in the nation's views of its army.

Details the U.S. Army's campaign in the years following the Civil War to contain the American Indian and promote Western expansion

The end of the Seven Years? War found Britain?s professional army in America facing new and unfamiliar responsibilities. In addition to occupying the recently conquered French settlements in Canada, redcoats were ordered into the trans-Appalachian west, into the little-known and much disputed territories that lay between British, French, and Spanish America. There the soldiers found themselves serving as occupiers, police, and diplomats in a vast territory marked by extreme climatic variation?a world decidedly different from Britain or the settled American colonies. Going beyond the war experience, Army and Empire examines the lives and experiences of British soldiers in the complex, evolving cultural frontiers of the West in British America. From the first appearance of the redcoats in the West until the outbreak of the American Revolution, Michael N. McConnell explores all aspects of peacetime service, including the soldiers? diet and health, mental well-being, social life, transportation, clothing, and the built environments within which they lived and worked. McConnell looks at the army on the frontier for what it was: a collection of small communities of men, women, and children faced with the challenges of surviving on the far western edge of empire.

The United States Army and the Making of America: From Confederation to Empire, 1775–1903 is the story of how the American military—and more particularly the regular army—has played a vital role in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States that extended beyond the battlefield. Repeatedly, Americans used the army not only to secure their expanding empire and fight their enemies, but to shape their nation and their vision of who they were, often in ways not directly associated with shooting wars or combat. That the regular army served as nation-builders is ironic, given the officer corps’ obsession with a warrior ethic and the deep-seated disdain for a standing army that includes Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the writings of Henry David Thoreau, and debates regarding congressional appropriations. Whether the issue concerned Indian policy, the appropriate division of power between state and federal authorities, technology, transportation, communications, or business innovations, the public demanded that the military remain small even as it expected those forces to promote civilian development. Robert Wooster’s exhaustive research in manuscript collections, government documents, and newspapers builds upon previous scholarship to provide a coherent and comprehensive history of the U.S. Army from its inception during the American Revolution to the Philippine-American War. Wooster integrates its institutional history with larger trends in American history during that period, with a special focus on state-building and civil-military relations. The United States Army and the Making of America will be the definitive book on the army’s relationship with the nation from its founding to the dawn of the twentieth century and will be a valuable resource for a generation of undergraduates, graduate students, and virtually any scholar with an interest in the U.S. Army, American frontiers and borderlands, the American West, or eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nation-building.

Unlike previous histories, this book argues that the politics of slavery profoundly influenced the western mission of the regular army - affecting the hearts and minds of officers and enlisted men both as the nation plummented toward civil war."--BOOK JACKET.

In Jackson's Sword, Samuel Watson showed how the U.S. Army officer corps played a crucial role in stabilizing the frontiers of a rapidly expanding nation. In this sequel volume, he chronicles how the corps' responsibilities and leadership along the young nation's borders continued to grow. In the process, he shows, officers reflected an increasing commitment to professionalism, insulation from partisanship, and deference to civilian authority-all tempered in the forge of frustrating, politically complex operations and diplomacy along the nation's frontiers. Watson now focuses on the quarter-century between the Army's reduction in force in 1821 and the Mexican War. He examines a broad swath of military activity beginning with campaigns against southeastern Indians, notably the dispossession of the Creeks remaining in Georgia and Alabama from 1825 to 1834; the expropriation of the Cherokee between 1836 and 1838; and the Second Seminole War. He also explores peacekeeping on the Canadian border, which exploded in rebellion against British rule at the end of 1837, prompting British officials to applaud the U.S. Army for calming tensions and demonstrating its government's support for the international state system. He then follows the gradual extension of U.S. sovereignty in the Southwest through military operations west of the Missouri River and along the Louisiana-Texas border from 1821 to 1838 and through dragoon expeditions onto the central and southern Plains between 1834 and 1845. Throughout his account, Watson shows how military professionalism did not develop independent of civilian society, nor was it simply a matter of growing expertise in the art of conventional warfare. Indeed, the government trusted career army officers to serve as federal, international, and interethnic mediators, national law enforcers, and de facto intercultural and international peacekeepers. He also explores officers' attitudes toward Britain, Oregon, Texas, and Mexico to assess their values and priorities on the eve of the first conventional war the United States had fought in more than three decades. Watson's detailed study delves deeply into sources that reveal what officers actually thought, wrote, and did in the frontier and border regions. By examining the range of operations over the course of this quarter-century, he shows that the processes of peacekeeping, coercive diplomacy, and conquest were intricately and inextricably woven together.

Jackson's Sword is the initial volume in a monumental two-volume work that provides a sweeping panoramic view of the U.S. Army and its officer corps from the War of 1812 to the War with Mexico, the first such study in more than forty years. Watson's chronicle shows how the officer corps played a crucial role in stabilizing the frontiers of a rapidly expanding nation, while gradually moving away from military adventurism toward a professionalism subordinate to civilian authority. Jackson's Sword explores problems of institutional instability, multiple loyalties, and insubordination as it demonstrates how the officer corps often undermined-and sometimes supplanted-civilian authority with regard to war-making and diplomacy on the frontier. Watson shows that army officers were often motivated by regionalism and sectionalism, as well as antagonism toward Indians, Spaniards, and Britons. The resulting belligerence incited them to invade Spanish Florida and Texas without authorization and to pursue military solutions to complex intercultural and international dilemmas. Watson focuses on the years when Andrew Jackson led the Division of the South—often contrary to orders from his civilian superiors—examining his decade-long quasi-war with Spaniards and Indians along the northern border of Florida. Watson explores differences between army attitudes toward the Texas and Florida borders to explain why Spain ceded Florida but not Texas to the United States. He then examines the army's shift to the western frontier of white settlement by focusing on expeditions to advance U.S. power up the Missouri River and drive British influence from the Louisiana Purchase. More than merely recounting campaigns and operations, Watson explores civil-military relations, officer socialization, commissioning, resignations, and assignments, and sets these in the context of social, political, economic, technological, military, and cultural changes during the early republic and the Age of Jackson. He portrays officers as identifying with frontiersmen and southern farmers and lacking respect for civilian authority and constitutional processes-but having little sympathy for civilian adventurers-and delves deeply into primary sources that reveal what they thought, wrote, and did on the frontier. As Watson shows, the army's work in the borderlands underscored divisions within as well as between nations. Jackson's Sword captures an era on the eve of military professionalism to shed new light on the military's role in the early republic.