This study uses the biographical method to explore the postbellum Indian Wars that resulted in the consolidation of federal authority over the territory and peoples of the trans-Mississippi West. Frontier army officers Richard Pratt, Gustavus Doane, and Charles Gatewood commanded Indian scouts during campaigns to subjugate tribes that resisted federal authority. Military records and other archival sources, including personal memoirs, allow us to understand this process of consolidation through their experiences. What these officers accomplished by, with, or through Indian scouts provide windows on the army’s essential role in consolidating federal authority. They also demonstrate the effect of their individual agency on the broader outcomes of consolidation.The army was sent west to nation build following the Civil War, facilitating settlement and development throughout the region. To limit friction between settler and Indian communities along the frontier the federal government sought to concentrate Indians on reservations. The army’s role was to subjugate Indian tribes that violently resisted concentration. Pratt enabled General Philipp Sheridan’s plan to subdue the Comanche by employing scouts from a variety of tribes to lead army columns during the 1874-75 Red River War campaign. Doane acted through the Crow tribe to support army commands during the Great Sioux War of 1876-77. In the final phase of consolidation, Gatewood acted with two Apache scouts to open negotiations with Geronimo, resulting in his surrender to General Nelson Miles. The role of commanding scouts also allowed officers to transcend the rigid regimental structure and stagnation of the army’s promotion system. These officers had outsized effects on how consolidation was implemented and, importantly, how we understand that historical process today. Pratt changed the national discourse on Indian assimilation, eliminating overt extermination from the debate. Doane’s official reports motivated national leaders to preserve a precious western landscape, thereby redefining the possible outcomes of consolidation. Gatewood’s faithfulness provided the myth of the west one of its central characters, who remains the benchmark for understanding consolidation today. This study also prepares us to more effectively examine current U.S. policies, the army’s role in implementing those policies, and the effects officers have on implementation.

This study examines the three generations of Civil War reenactors: the veterans, the centennial reenactors, and the modern community. It argues that they are an excellent case study for examining the evolving memory of the Civil War, particularly when considered in the context of five interpretative traditions: the “Lost Cause,” the “Union Cause,” the “Reconciliationist Cause,” the “Emancipationist Cause,” and the “White Supremacist Cause.” At the same time, a careful analysis of the modern community illustrates the myriad ways in which contemporary individuals interact with and utilize the past.

The dissertation is a historical biography of Smedley Darlington Butler (1881-1940), a decorated soldier and critic of war profiteering during the 1930s. A two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner and son of a powerful congressman, Butler was one of the most prominent military figures of his era. He witnessed firsthand the American expansionism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, participating in all of the major conflicts and most of the minor ones. Following his retirement in 1931, Butler became an outspoken critic of American intervention, arguing in speeches and writings against war profiteering and the injustices of expansionism. His critiques represented a wide swath of public opinion at the time - the majority of Americans supported anti-interventionist policies through 1939. Yet unlike other members of the movement, Butler based his theories not on abstract principles, but on experiences culled from decades of soldiering: the terrors and wasted resources of the battlefield, the use of the American military to bolster corrupt foreign governments, and the influence of powerful, domestic moneyed interests. Butler's story is reminiscent of a comment Mark Twain once made about America: "This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth - ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket." That was Smedley Butler in his early years - a soldier shouting for the "cause." Later, he would decide to expose those whose pockets he had helped to fill. This ideological shift - from imperialism to isolationism - rippled through homes across the country in the interwar period as it did in Butler's mind. In this dissertation, I will examine this ideological movement through the study of one of its most prominent leaders.

My dissertation is a cultural and political history of Savannah, Georgia. Exploring the role of ethnic and racial groups in movements for municipal reform, this work complicates historical interpretation of the processes and experiences that shaped political development in the South. Many historians view white supremacy as the only animating feature of southern politics, obscuring the dynamic interaction of immigrant communities, religious minorities, and black southerners within the region's political culture. At the turn of the twentieth century, Savannah was striving to be a progressive, prosperous, and modern city. While still beholden to the broad outlines of the South's racial hierarchy, Savannah's political movements for municipal reform created a fluid political climate. White ethnic minorities carved out a prominent place for themselves in the city's factional political culture, which also provided space for black residents to influence politics and hope for greater enjoyment of their citizenship rights. While ultimately the forces of white supremacy and Jim Crow segregation would temper the depth of reform in Savannah, further examination of municipal politics reveals important contingent moments in the history of the New South.

To illuminate varying political perspectives and experiences, I employ a biographical approach, focusing on the careers of two of Savannah's most influential leaders, Herman Myers and Sol C. Johnson. Herman Myers was a German Jewish immigrant and prominent businessman who served as mayor of Savannah for ten years at the turn of the century. At the forefront of a local progressive political realignment, Myers played a formative role in Savannah's transformation into a modern city. Sol C. Johnson, editor of the weekly African American newspaper, The Savannah Tribune, was a community leader and fierce advocate of black rights both in Savannah and the South. Johnson used the Tribune as way to encourage black political participation and protest Jim Crow segregation, and helped lead an eighteen-month boycott of Savannah's segregated streetcars. Drawing primarily from newspapers, pamphlets and public records, this study traces the careers of Myers and Johnson, and the political colleagues and opponents they encountered, through several major local political contests. The story of Myers, Johnson, and Savannah's distinctive New South evolution, highlights the power of the rhetoric of reform, and the saliency of racial, ethnic and religious identity in southern political culture.

Recent historians have argued that the American Civil War was a relatively restrained conflict compared to other wars occurring concurrently. However, the irregular war in Missouri has generally been considered an exception. My dissertation addresses the nature of the war from the perspective of contemporary witnesses living in an eleven-county region located along the Missouri River plagued by guerrilla warfare and Union occupation. The local citizenry were caught between two equally unappealing foes but were most shocked by the behavior of the U.S. citizen-soldiers, occupying the region for the entirety of the war, who embraced irregular tactics and targeted local civilians in retaliation for the acts of destruction and violence meted out by Confederate guerrillas. Over the course of the war, residents grew increasingly disillusioned by soldiers’ irregular tactics and the government’s punitive policies aimed at the civilian population, and their once conservative, cooperative stance evolved into overt hostility. In the wake of the war, resident’s disillusionment caused them to identify more closely with the South and to embrace a southern regional identity symbolized by the application of the moniker “Little Dixie” to the region in the postwar period.

During the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, national politics operated under the influence of Andrew Jackson’s political rise and enduring influence. The Jacksonian Era saw dramatic changes occur in the United States. Most importantly, the United States’s national borders expanded to reach the Pacific Coast of North America, encompassing an area that Mexico, Great Britain, Russia, and numerous Native American groups claimed. At the same time, American letters burgeoned into a vibrant and unique national literature, one that practitioners believed rivaled any European discourses of nationalism in passion and erudition.

George Bancroft operated at the nexus of these developments. He wrote the first popularly acclaimed and professional history of the United States, while simultaneously participating in Democratic Party politics. Ultimately, Bancroft served in the Presidential administration of James Knox Polk, influencing national policy and international diplomacy. This dissertation articulates the ideological assumptions and functions of the first three volumes of Bancroft’s History of the United States, which covered the Colonial Era of American history, during the Age of Jackson, a period in which the United States ceased to operate on the periphery of European colonialism and became a colonial power in its own right.

This dissertation examines conflict and discipline in the militias of five New England states during the years 1792 to 1826, describing local contests for order during a period of postrevolutionary testing and negotiation. While historians have argued that the model of universal white male militia service failed in the early republic because of legislative neglect and administrative inattention, this study argues that the men subject to militia service shaped the institution to a substantial degree through their willingness to dissent and disobey. They engaged in ordered disobedience, signaling their values and placing authority within the limits they made by their local action. Further, militia discipline eroded the boundaries between military affairs and social relations, making a state institution subject to broad sources of conflict and tension. Military character and social identity were inextricably intertwined. These conflicts in the militia were not conflicts between order and disorder, as they are often depicted, but rather were competitions between competing conceptions of order.

The first chapter examines state courts martial as structured social trials, "conversations with verdicts." The second chapter examines contests over political and institutional boundaries, many of which related to questions of court martial jurisdiction and the limits of military authority, as when militia officers were tried by military courts for off-duty political speech. The third chapter examines contests over social honor that took place before state military courts, as militia officers stood accused of eccentricity, licentiousness, and other forms of poor character. The fourth and final chapter examines contests over the election of militia officers, particularly in Massachusetts, finding that the establishment of military authority in local militia units was often hampered by social conflict and disputes over the nature of proper authority.