For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775–1861 by Ricardo A. Herrera (review)

Like most historians of the early American republic, military historians have typically depicted this era as one of profound change, in which evolving military institutions helped to transform the scale and meaning of the union. Three themes predominate within this literature—the military’s role in expansion and domestic nation-building; the rise to preeminence of a professional, national military establishment; and the consequent decline of a militia tradition central to national identity. Historians of the U.S. Army, in particular, have cast the army and the militia in almost antithetical terms—not as complementary components of an integrated defense establishment but as competing paradigms representing divergent views of the nation and military virtue.

In For Liberty and the Republic, Herrera turns this historiography entirely on its head. He argues that the era bounded by the Revolutionary and Civil Wars (1775–1861) was characterized less by change or competition than by extraordinary continuity in the moral domain of military thought. More remarkably, at the core of this continuity was a political ideology supposed by many scholars to have faded by 1830s—republicanism. As a multigenerational military ethos, “republicanism provided a vibrant, durable, and long-lived set of interrelated concepts that gave order to and made sense of Americans’ military service for nearly a century. Despite the passage of time, this ethos did not change” (24). In five thematic chapters, Herrera convincingly establishes (1) citizen soldiers’ preoccupation with demonstrating republican virtue, (2) their commitment to maintaining the conservative legacy of the Revolution and advancing its progressive agenda, (3) the ways in which American military culture resolved (or did not resolve) the tension between the republican ideals of individualism and civic-mindedness, (4) a pervasive sense of providential destiny, and (5) soldiers’ obsession with earning individual distinction.

Any historical work that asserts continuity over change and commonality over heterogeneity opens itself to criticism; For Liberty and the Republic is no exception. Herrera relies on the broadest possible definition of republicanism, which at once allows him to see commonalities that have eluded other historians and, on occasion, to downplay important differences. This breadth and ambiguity allows Herrera to pitch a large republican tent, under which he is able to fit all manner of American citizen soldiers—regulars, volunteers, militiamen, Yankees, Rebels, officers, and enlisted men—and find among them common republican convictions even where they and other historians have not.

Notwithstanding citations of writings by political theorist R. Claire Snyder, sociologist Morris Janowitz, and political scientist Samuel Huntington, For Liberty and the Republic is distinguished not for its interdisciplinary innovations but for the depth of Herrera’s archival research. Generally eschewing memoirs and reminiscences, he sought “greater authenticity and truthfulness” in unpublished letters, unit records, diaries, and journals scattered across more than 40 archives and nearly 300 collections in twenty-three states (xi). But the book offers much more than lush endnotes and an exhaustive bibliography. Especially valuable for its nuanced treatment of citizen soldiers’ “contract ethos” and the exclusive “voluntary associations” that supplanted the organized militia during the nineteenth century, For Liberty and the Republic complements and complicates other recent works in the field to provide a composite portrait—at once impressionistic and compelling—of the American citizen soldier.