Citizen-Soldiers and Manly Warriors by Claire R. Snyder

Author:Claire R. Snyder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 1999-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Policing the Borders of the Civic Republic:

The Vices of the Citizen-Soldier Tradition

Vices as well as virtues characterize the Citizen-Soldier tradition. While civic and martial practices create citizen-soldiers and instill in them patriotism, fraternity, civic virtue, and a common civic identity, these same practices can also yield chauvinism, racism, violence, and homogeneity. In nineteenth-century America, participation in civic and martial practices did indeed create virtues that underwrote participatory citizenship. But participatory citizenship also produced a set of undemocratic vices. The citizen-soldier identity was forged in opposition to denigrated “others.” The question for democratic theorists is whether we can augment the virtues of the Citizen-Soldier ideal while downplaying its vices.

The Citizen-Soldier tradition that was so essential to the constitution of republican citizenship in America produces a package of interconnected virtues and vices. Richard Moser agrees on the importance of the Citizen-Soldier tradition to American political culture. However, in his study of the role of soldiering in American history and historiography, Moser argues that there are actually two important and conflicting soldier ideals in American culture: the Citizen-Soldier and the Fighter. Moser concludes that “the American soldier ideal is defined by the tension between [these] two opposing historical traditions, each with its own meanings and myths.”67 But while Moser provides important insights into the role of the Citizen-Soldier ideal in American culture and on the constitution of armed masculinity with the U.S. military—a topic we will discuss more fully in chapter 6—I disagree with his stark separation of the Citizen-Soldier and the Fighter. In essence, Moser locates all of the virtues of the Citizen-Soldier tradition in the former figure and all the vices in the latter. But as we shall soon see, the practices of the Citizen-Soldier tradition itself produce both virtues and vices.

Indeed, the virtues and vices go hand in hand. For example, individuals became republican citizen-soldiers as they waged war on Native Americans. In fact, one of the earliest and most important reasons for maintaining a militia system was to engage in a war to contain Native Americans that in time became genocide.68 During the Jacksonian period of American democracy, removal of the eastern Indians to areas west of the Mississippi was a major project. The Black Hawk War during the early 1830s “showed the citizen soldiery at its worst.” For example, “many of the short-term irregulars considered these redmen to be animals, much lower on the life scale than man. They wanted this animal out of the way and welcomed the chance to kill it.” Hatred of the Sauk and Fox Indians “grew among the citizen soldiery. . . . Some of them, finding a few Indian women furrowing in the river bank to hide, shot them and especially relished watching them jerk as they died.” The Indians “became the active enemy of the militia, both standing and volunteer, during the decades following the War of 1812.”69 White male Americans constructed their civic identity through violent martial practices that annihilated Native American populations.

American citizen-soldiers likewise constituted their identity in opposition to the Mexicans, as they patrolled America’s southern border.

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