Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 58-11, Section: A, page: 4415.

Director: David Montgomery.

This dissertation discusses the role of soldiers as laborers, defenders of popular politics, enforcers of racial hierarchy, and arbiters of United States foreign expansion. The context is the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, and the surrounding decades of undeclared war for land and commercial dominance. During this period citizens' militias, filibuster organizations, political gangs, and the regular and volunteer army harbored a strong discourse of egalitarian citizenship. Political and economic elites invoked the tradition of the citizen-soldier as a means of promoting militarist expansion, but rarely made good on promises of land and opportunity for soldiers.

The celebration of the volunteer ethic that permeated Mexican War recruiting in the U.S. masked widespread coercion: organized, politically conscious bodies of volunteers rejected the terms and leadership imposed on them, or were themselves rejected when they protested unfair conditions. "Volunteers" were then solicited or coerced from the poorhouses and jails of urban areas. Boston and New York provide two detailed case studies of manipulative political organizations and discontented volunteers.

The experiences of Americans as occupiers of Mexico shook the foundations of Jacksonian ideas and practices, particularly the principle of herrenvolk democracy, which envisioned landed equality for whites, with servile subject races. Soldiers in Mexico rebelled against their increasingly disciplined waged role, subordinate to national and commercial interests. The loosely organized volunteers decided at the company level to collect the wages of manifest destiny in the form of looting and racial atrocity, or simply to return home. The regular army subjected immigrant and poor soldiers to harsh discipline; these men deserted the service in large numbers, most seeking non-military employment, with a small but significant minority joining the Mexican army.

In the post-war occupation of Texas and California, the promises of land and heightened citizenship for soldiers disintegrated into a reality of outlawry and depredations upon natives. Former officers allied with commercial interests to monopolize wealth and political power. Never again would the U.S. government send citizen-soldiers abroad with promises of land and conquest. The ideal of armed citizens persisted, but was increasingly subservient to a centralized state and oligarchic capitalism.