In the early decades of the American Republic, American soldiers
demonstrated and defined their beliefs about the nature of American
republicanism and how they, as citizens and soldiers, were participants
in the republican experiment through their service. In For Liberty and
the Republic, Ricardo A. Herrera examines the relationship between
soldier and citizen from the War of Independence through the first year
of the Civil War.
The work analyzes an idealized republican ideology as a component of
soldiering in both peace and war. Herrera argues that American soldiers'
belief system--the military ethos of republicanism--drew from the larger
body of American political thought. This ethos illustrated and informed
soldiers' faith in an inseparable connection between bearing arms on
behalf of the republic, and earning and holding citizenship in it.
Despite the undeniable existence of customs, organizations, and
behaviors that were uniquely military, the officers and enlisted men of
the regular army, states' militias, and wartime volunteers were the
products of their society, and they imparted what they understood as
important elements of American thought into their service.
Drawing from military and personal correspondence, journals, orderly
books, militia constitutions, and other documents in over forty archives
in twenty-three states, Herrera maps five broad, interrelated, and
mutually reinforcing threads of thought constituting soldiers' beliefs:
Virtue; Legitimacy; Self-governance; Glory, Honor, and Fame; and the
National Mission. Spanning periods of war and peace, these five themes
constituted a coherent and long-lived body of ideas that informed
American soldiers' sense of identity for generations.
