Jackson’s Sword: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1810–1821 by Samuel J. Watson (review)

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Over the past decade, Samuel J. Watson has in a series of articles and book chapters established himself as a leading authority on the antebellum United States Army. With the publication of Jackson’s Sword, the first of two volumes on army officers and American life between the War of 1812 and the U.S.-Mexico War, Watson moves to the head of the class. Based upon prodigious research in both primary and secondary sources (the 285 pages of text and appendices are complemented by 13 pages of appendices, 93 pages of notes, and 39 pages of bibliography), he demonstrates that the army and its officers played a major role not only in projecting U. S. influence into the Gulf Borderlands and the Great Plains, but in asserting the power of an active national state throughout the southern and western frontiers.

Watson’s complex narrative begins in the South, where army officers aggressively pushed territorial expansion. Major General Andrew Jackson, commander of the Southern Division from 1815–21, set the tone with his self-confidence and willingness to blatantly disregard constitutional provisions for representative government. Buoyed by the popular desire for expansion and convinced that national security could only be guaranteed by expelling Indian and European rivals and eliminating any refuges for escaped slaves, Jackson and his subordinates exploited the frequent absence of effective civilian leadership in the War Department, difficulties of long-distance communication, and ill-defined international boundaries to press claims to Louisiana, Texas, and even Cuba. Florida topped the list, and consistent with President James Monroe’s well-known support for expansion, Jackson’s 1818 invasion of Spanish Florida seems to Watson an almost natural culmination of the era.

With Florida secured, attitudes within and without the army changed. As Watson explains, Jackson’s high-handed actions had caused enormous political turmoil, and his resignation removed the most formidable champion of southern expansion from the army’s ranks. Other veterans of the War of 1812 did the same, often to live in the very southern borderlands their actions had secured for the United States. In addition, the strategic threats posed by Mexican Texas or by the Indians of the upper Missouri River valley seemed minimal so the nonstate actors the army had once tolerated (and often supported) now seemed to threaten an orderly society. To Watson, however, the major change stemmed from the growing sense of accountability, subordination, and responsibility of army officers fostered by their shared experiences at the United States Military Academy, whose graduates after 1821 enjoyed a near-monopoly among new appointments. National, rather than sectional, interests now drove the typical officer; although Congress refused to devote many financial resources to the standing army, its officers nonetheless represented an extremely useful—and to Watson largely effective—agent of the central state which had no other means by which it might enforce national sovereignty or implement national policy. “Indeed,” Watson concludes, “a dependent standing army beholden to the nation-state perfectly suited civilian executive branch officials, whatever their party or ideological perspective” (268).

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