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

For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775–1861 succeeds occasionally as elucidation but also, unfortunately, sometimes does not. Its theme is “the military ethos of republicanism”: the framework of values, defined by the founding vision of republicanism, that motivated and sustained American soldiers from the Revolution until the Civil War (p. 1). Ricardo A. Herrera’s major contention is that the American soldier was an exemplar of the country’s formative ideals, not a challenger or an outsider to them. A republican reverence for virtue, for example, or a desire for the legitimation of self-government, or even a national sense of exceptionalism and God’s favor, found fullest expression in the identities of America’s citizens-in-arms.

The book’s second half is effective because Herrera more ably separates his voice from the voices of his sources. Elsewhere his interpretation seems positioned from a perspective where the tradition described is also the tradition prescribed. Herrera recognizes that soldiers tended to see themselves as defenders and conservators, even though warfare can be a force of intended and accidental transformation. Yet he does not linger over the contradictions and tensions warfare creates. Nor does he make many sustained attempts to distinguish his soldiery by region, class, race, or ethnicity. For him, “[t]he military ethos of 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” (p. 24). Time, of course, did not merely pass between 1775 and 1861: the national culture shifted dramatically toward a related but very different ethos of democracy. The idioms of republicanism remained even as its substantive concepts—liberty, freedom, equality—underwent a fundamental, ongoing displacement. One is at a loss to comprehend how citizen-soldiers managed to be representative of all that flummox if they were necessarily apart from it.

Repetition warps the presentation. On the matter of volunteer motivation, for instance, Herrera insists “that enlistment bounties and negotiations for terms of service cannot be written off solely as acts of narrow economic interest” (pp. 90–91). We are already aware of his stance; he maintains it thirty pages previously. Yet Herrera again repeats that claim, nearly verbatim, five sentences later, and then repeats the observation of Charles Royster, previously quoted to the same effect, that “only a fool would remain a soldier for reasons of immediate material interest” (pp. 59, 91). The issue is more problematic than slipshod copyediting. One recognizes a straw man in this instance, and in the example a broader, tautological tendency to privilege assertion over argument. Herrera’s propensity to rely on the sockdolager technique—quoting the arguments of other historians, all of them well-thumbed students of military culture and republicanism, as “clinchers”—has less the feel of confirmation than it does of affirmation.

Ideals conceive of their inversions. They are elastic yet mercurial. Opposite conceptions are often projected onto enemies or others, but they are also expressions of the conflicting aspirations, behaviors, and fears of those articulating them. One senses throughout this book a fair amount of trepidation in handling the quicksilver, even in the closing passages, in which Herrera maintains that “[i]n light of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is an appropriate time to consider the United States’ civic-military tradition and how it shaped American soldiers’ identities in the country’s formative decades” (p. 167). He does not say exactly why we should consider matters in this light. It need not be said, of course, if the reasons are taken as self-evident in the affirmation of tradition itself.