Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821–1846 by Samuel J. Watson (review)

This second volume in Watson’s impressive study of the U.S. Army’s officer corps’ critical role in the nation’s volatile frontier zones—following Jackson’s Sword (Lawrence, 2012)—charts the emergence of a professional and nationally orientated managerial class, the first in the nation’s history. Watson places particular stress on West Point in the socialization and education of an officer corps committed to gentility, legalism, and subservience to civilian authority. Drawing on extensive archival research and a wide reading of the secondary literature, Watson borrows perspective from sociology, particularly regarding his understanding of professionalism, and political science in his telling critique of the notion that the nineteenth-century liberal state was, perforce, a weak state.

On the northern and southwestern frontiers, army officers operated in complex constabulary and diplomatic, as well as purely military, roles. Frequently caught in an uncomfortable position between local priorities and national imperatives, they mediated relations between non-state actors (white filibusterers, Native Americans, maroons, and runaway slaves) and between state governments and Washington. Watson acknowledges that, as a class, army officers broadly shared the ethnocentric and racial prejudices of their civilian compatriots and their commitment to territorial expansion. Yet their actions were frequently restrained by a sense of duty to the public good, a respect for legal process, a distaste for belligerent frontiersmen and their demagogic leaders, and a degree of empathy for Native Americans.

Watson maintains that the regular army was far less likely to commit atrocities against Native Americans during this period than were poorly disciplined state volunteer formations. Indeed, the army frequently protected Native Americans from the depredations of white settlers and squatters, although, ultimately, the army was used in a coercive fashion against native peoples who became the main victims of state-sponsored violence. Watson covers the federal removal policy and the Second Seminole War in much detail. Army officers did their duty but saw little justice, not to mention honor or glory, in these miserable endeavors.

War against an international opponent offered soldiers a better opportunity for personal advancement, but, even when facing the British on the northern frontier or Mexicans in Texas, army officers displayed an admirable resolve to operate for the public good. Their prompt actions against filibusterers on the Canadian border from 1838 to 1842 were instrumental in preventing a potentially ruinous clash with Britain. In Texas, the professionals had no mania for war, but, despite the disdain that many officers felt for the Democrats who had orchestrated the conflict with Mexico, they followed their orders.

Watson’s sympathetic portrayal of a professional, publicly minded, and statist officer corps is compelling and, for the most part, convincing. Yet his explanation for the split in loyalties evident in 1861 on the eve of the Civil War (not a lingering sectionalism among West Pointers but rather a choice between two distinct nations) may overstate the reality of Confederate nationalism. His conclusion, the most audacious chapter of the book, moves beyond the evidence presented earlier, stating (1) that regular soldiers were the most important instrument of Western expansion, (2) that officers trained at West Point were the key to victory in the Civil War, and (3) that the officer corps was pivotal to the “Market Revolution” and even to the emergence of Progressivism. One can only hope that Watson will return to these bold claims in a future work to substantiate them more fully.