The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783-1846 - Prucha, Francis Paul

The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783-1846 by Prucha, Francis Paul

Format: Paperback

Published by Indiana University Press, 1977

On April 19, 1783, Washington ordered his soldiers to go home. No one favored a peacetime army. Yet the years that followed saw the young nation embark on a dramatic surge of expansion that not demanded the military as national protectors. Sword of the Republic is the story of the army in its new multicultural role as agents of the republic during the period 1783-1846.It is the story of federal troops called up to enforce paper possession with physical occupation when treaty and purchase opened up the region from the Appalachians west to the Mississippi and the vast new frontiers in the Louisiana Territory. The duties of these soldiers were to protect the settlers and to establish a military presence that maintained American rights with honor in the face of Indian intransigence and British and Spanish scheming. These soldiers, in accomplishing their mission, became farmers, roadbuilders, scientists, and pioneers of the new West.At Fallen Timbers, Tippecanoe, and the Thames, the federal military forces met the early challenge from the Indian nations and their British allies. Military control of strategic points on the Great Lakes and western rivers enforced American control of the fur trade. Army endeavors shored up crumbling territorial edges where Spanish an British officials or traders weakened American power. Sword of the Republic recounts vividly the Blackhawk War and the Florida War. It details the construction of western forts and tells the tragic story of the removal of Indians from the East. It is a chronicle of the transition from wilderness to hard-core settlement.

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