Book Review
The United States Army and the Making of America
From Confederation to Empire, 1775-1903
Reviewed by Fred L. Borch III
The United States Army and the Making of America: From Confederation
to Empire, 1775-19031 is an important book and a model of scholarship. Every judge advocate, legal administrator, and paralegal specialist should read it for its unique and comprehensive synthesis of how civil-military relations, internal Army politics, and various Army wars played a critical role in the creation of the United States prior to the twentieth century.
The major theme of the book is that the professional or “Regular” Army played a significant role in determining the political, social, economic, and cultural features of pre-twentieth century America. In author Robert Wooster’s words, “Americans used the army not only to secure their expanding empire and fight their enemies but also to shape their nation and their vision of who they were . . . .”2
It follows that those Americans who argue that the Army should only be concerned with the physical defense of the Nation—“fighting and winning wars”—and that “nation-building” is not a proper role for Soldiers3 will quickly learn from The United States Army and the Making of America
that the Regular Army played a significant, if not critical, role in
building the United States prior to the twentieth century.
This is ironic in that powerful political figures like Thomas Jefferson
and his allies, who were key players in the birth of the United States,
opposed any sort of permanent Regular Army in the new republic. It is
doubly ironic in that the Army itself was obsessed with inculcating a
“warrior ethos” and, consequently, often disdained its nation-building
activities; the Army leaders believed these efforts undermined that
ethos.4
The United States Army and the Making of America
argues persuasively that Regular troops were key in the development of
life and living in the United States in the nineteenth century. Rightly
or wrongly, Soldiers played a seminal role in displacing Native peoples
from their lands in North America. The Army built forts along the
western frontier, which “provided the cutting edge for white expansion”
by creating the infrastructure that made white settlements and commerce
possible.5
It was Regular Army officers who led an Army of mostly volunteers in a successful war with Mexico in 1848 (and brought the greater Southwest into the United States). These same Regulars provided the leadership and organization for an Army that preserved the Union between 1861 and 1865. After all, it was West Point graduate, General Ulysses S. Grant, who ultimately achieved victory over the Confederacy and who was a “steadfast supporter of the most aggressive use of the armed forces to affect social and political change in U.S. history.”6
Soldiers were also responsible for Reconstruction throughout the Confederacy between 1865 and 1877 since “enforcing Federal justice in the South depended on the Regular Army.”7
Even after Congress created the Department of Justice in 1870, it
“relied on Soldiers to protect voting rights in the former
Confederacy.”8 Finally, it was the Regular Army that helped establish America’s new empire in the Pacific, especially in the Philippines after 1899. Even while it was fighting Filipino guerrillas, the Army was also trying to win Filipino “hearts and minds” by establishing health clinics, schools, sanitation projects, and marketplaces.9 Officers in the islands also took over key civil functions ranging from provincial governors to police chiefs and sanitation inspectors.10
In the United States, the Army also built roads that tied communities together and encouraged commerce. Additionally, engineer officers “had long responded to local requests for advice on public works,”11 including railroad, river, and harbor improvements—all of which transformed American society. Finally, Regular Army personnel performed missions in the absence of any Federal agency. For example, during the winter of 1874-75, “Soldiers distributed shoes, clothing, and more than a million rations to civilians in Kansas and Nebraska” who were suffering from a drought and a plague of locusts.12
Generally, Wooster is positive about the Regular Army’s role in pre-twentieth-century America. He lauds, for example, the role the Regulars played in “preventing anarchy” during the Reconstruction era.13 But, Wooster also acknowledges that Regular officers could be petty, corrupt, and not above lobbying politicians for personal or professional gain.14
A final note: What sets The United States Army and the Making of America
apart from other “big picture” military books is the author’s extensive
use of published and unpublished primary sources, especially private
papers. One-third of the volume is composed of notes and
bibliography.15
What is the Regular Army’s proper role in America today? How large should it be and who should be in it? What is its ultimate purpose? Judge advocates, legal administrators, and paralegal specialists looking for the answers to these questions should start their search by reading Robert Wooster’s fine book. TAL
Mr. Borch is the Regimental Historian, Archivist, and Professor of Legal History and Leadership at The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Notes
1. Robert Wooster, The United States Army and the Making of America:
From Confederation to Empire, 1775-1903 (2021).
2. Id. at 1.
3. See, e.g., Issue: Defense, PBS Time to Choose: A PBS/NPR Voter’s Guide, https://www.pbs.org/timetochoose/issues/defense.html (last visited Aug.
3, 2023) (explaining George W. Bush and Al Gore’s differing views on
defense policy).
4. See Wooster, supra note 1, at 2.
5. Id. at 79.
6. Id. at 219. Grant, however, was not without his faults. Prior to the Civil War, he owned an enslaved man by the name of William Jones, who “was essential help to Grant on his farm.” Ulysses S. Grant and Slavery (Senior Ranger Activity), Nat’l Park Serv., https://www.nps.gov/articles/ulysses-s-grant-and-slavery-senior-ranger-activity.htm (last visited Aug. 3, 2023). Perhaps recognizing the immorality of owning another human being, Grant freed Jones in March 1859 instead of selling him. See William Jones, Nat’l Park Serv., https://www.nps.gov/people/william-jones.htm (last visited Aug. 3, 2023). During the Civil War, convinced that Jews were behind a black market in cotton, Grant promulgated General Orders expelling all Jews from his military district—an order that President Lincoln countermanded less than a month later. Ulysses S. Grant and General Orders No. 11, Nat’l Park Serv., https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/ulysses-s-grant-and-general-orders-no-11.htm (last visited Aug. 3, 2023).
7. Wooster, supra note 1, at 206.
8. Id. at 229.
9. Id. at 278.
10. Id.
11. Id. at 90.
12. Id. at 229.
13. Id. at 241.
14. See id. at 117.
15. The Notes run from pages 281-387 with the Bibliography following from pages 389-455.