Abstract
Writing with the laudable goal of encouraging US citizens to understand the motivations of the men and women whom they ask to fight their ever-longer wars, Ricardo A. Herrera’s For Liberty and the Republic argues that American soldiers fought to vindicate and uphold the republican principles on which their nation was founded. Herrera identifies five specific republican motivations that tied soldiers’ service to the larger political culture of the United States: virtue, legitimacy, self-governance, God’s will and national mission, and personal distinction (glory, honour, and fame for themselves). He argues that these motivations remained constant throughout the period 1775–1861, despite the many economic, political, and social changes that the nation experienced in those years. This provides evidence of what Herrera sees as the power of republican ideals across time and the centrality of those ideas to soldiers’ conceptions of their service.
Herrera makes a convincing case that soldiers throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries spoke the language of republicanism. The letters home, field orders, speeches, and associations/constitutions for volunteer units he has uncovered repeatedly invoke and evoke his five themes, each of which has a chapter devoted to it. It is difficult to read the declarations of self-sacrifice or appeals to divine mission in these chapters and not be convinced that many men spoke the language of virtue and exceptionalism. The chapter on self-governance is at times less convincing. He shows, for example, that mutineers in American armies insisted that they were asking nothing more than the fulfilment of their government’s obligation to them, but this argument also justified mutinies in the British army and is, thus, perhaps less indicative of republican sensibility than Herrera argues. The introduction and its footnotes, it should be added, provide an invaluable guide to the historiography on soldiers and the military in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War.
If the book succeeds in the breadth of its ambitions, questions arise about the depth of Herrera’s analysis. The book’s argument hinges on concepts such as ‘virtue’ or ‘masculinity’ having stable meanings through the period 1775–1861, yet we know from authors as diverse as Ruth Bloch, J.G.A. Pocock, Gordon Wood, Greg Knouff, and Dana Nelson that they did not. Saying that soldiers consistently embraced virtue or masculinity or even democratic self-government is to ask which definition of these concepts the soldiers advocated and why. It is certainly worth noting that soldiers consistently embraced the language of republicanism, but, to understand their motivations we need to press beyond the mere presence of the language and to try to grasp the ends to which it was employed.
The question of depth against breadth also arises with Herrera’s sources. While he visited an impressive 36 archives across the country, Herrera does not provide any quantification concerning rank, status, or class for the material he used to construct his argument. Herrera assures readers that he consulted material from a broad cross section of soldiers, but in the light of some of his conclusions an additional quantitative reassurance that a meaningful subset of his sources came from men and women from the lower ranks would not have been amiss. For example, his argument that ‘the troops of the Continental army won the immortality that so many of them desired’ (p. 162) stands at odds with several of the better-known pension applications filed by soldiers from the Continental Army, most famously by Joseph Plumb Martin and Deborah Samson. Readers could more easily sort the anecdote from the history if Herrera had provided a quantitative and demographic breakdown of his sources similar to that provided by James McPherson in his For Cause and Comrades (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Herrera’s emphasis on the inclusive nature of soldiers’ republican ideology also warrants comment. He makes the important point that participation in the militias and voluntary units, even the regular army, could promote democratic sentiments and provide a path for minorities’ inclusion in the nation. Herrera, however, leaves out the fact that many enlisted in these various units with the express purpose of excluding from the nation the Indians they intended to kill, even exterminate; the slaves they intended to discipline; and, the dissenters, religious and political, they intended to silence. To be fair, when discussing Manifest Destiny, Herrera emphasizes that soldiers’ republicanism resulted in the oppression of Indians and Mexicans, but by portraying these negative qualities as an effect of republican soldiering and not an essential cause for it, he oversimplifies the complicated political legacy behind the pursuit of virtue, self-governance, glory, honour, and fame. All of which is not to deny Herrera’s central point – that soldiering should be understood as an extension of soldiers’ ideas of republican citizenship – but to remind us that once we have established that point, we need to continue to push to uncover what republican citizenship meant and for whom.