Agents of Empire: The U.S. Army, The Civil War, and the Making of the American West, 1848-1872
Restricted (Penn State Only)
Author:
Zander, Cecily
Graduate Program:
History
Degree:
Doctor of Philosophy
Document Type:
Dissertation
Date of Defense:
June 01, 2021
Committee Members:
Christina Snyder, Major Field Member William Blair, Chair & Dissertation Advisor Michael Kulikowski, Program Head/Chair Alicia Decker, Outside Unit Member Kathryn Salzer, Outside Field Member
Keywords:
regular army civil war western expansion republican party slave expansion borderlands
Abstract:
In the five years that followed the American Civil War, the regular army of the United States experienced a five-year period of retrenchment, losing manpower, funding, and congressional support. Prior to the Civil War, the same army had represented the pinnacle of American imperial ambitions, and benefitted from robust financial support and a clearly defined mission. The question at the center of my dissertation is: how did this happen? The answer focuses on the rise of the Republican Party and the association its adherents drew between the army and the expansion of slavery—casting the regulars as a conservative and anti-democratic institution opposed to their vision of free labor expansion. The dissertation contributes a reconfiguration of the traditional narrative of U. S. military for the period between 1848 and 1872, which has always emphasized the weaknesses and failures of the antebellum regular army and depicted a robust postbellum military that benefitted from the experience of the American Civil War. I argue that the opposite narrative—a strong and capable antebellum army that became a weakened and struggling postbellum force—was the reality.