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William B. Skelton, An American Profession of Arms: The Army Officer Corps, 1784-1861. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Pp. 481. $45.00, cloth.
This well organized book takes its place as one of the most important studies of the 19th-century U.S. Army. Readers of Armed Forces & Society will recall that Skelton contributed parts of his research on this subject to this journal in 1975 and 1979, originating from a doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University in the 1960s. The present work is considerably expanded from the dissertation (which covered 1821-1837), and incorporates Skelton's extraordinary research into a wide variety of primary sources, including War Department records in the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., dozens of officers' personal papers, letters, and diaries in archives across America, as well as memoirs and contemporary periodicals. The author has made masterly use of these materials.
His analysis supports the thesis that the U.S. Army matured remarkably as an institution from 1784 to 1861, and that the army's officer corps in particular grew more sophisticated from the 1820s to the eve of the Civil War. Moreover, Skelton places this maturing army in context of the times, concluding that "the rise of the military profession was not a unique event but part of a broader trend toward specialized education, group consciousness, and social...