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For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861. By Ricardo A. Herrera. Warfare and Culture. (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015. Pp. [xviii], 247. $55.00, ISBN 978-14798-1994-2.)
For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861 succeeds occasionally as elucidation but also, unfortunately, sometimes does not. Its theme is "the military ethos of republicanism": the framework of values, defined by the founding vision of republicanism, that motivated and sustained American soldiers from the Revolution until the Civil War (p. 1). Ricardo A. Herrera's major contention is that the American soldier was an exemplar of the country's formative ideals, not a challenger or an outsider to them. A republican reverence for virtue, for example, or a desire for the legitimation of self-government, or even a national sense of exceptionalism and God's favor, found fullest expression in the identities of America's citizens-in-arms.
The book's second half is effective because Herrera more ably...