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FOR over a generation, Samuel P. Huntington's Soldier and the State has largely defined the academic debate on military professionalism and civil-military relations. As a young Harvard government professor in the 1950s, Huntington took on a daunting task--the development of a theoretical framework for understanding military institutions in the modern world. In the grandest tradition of political theory, he sought to uncover broad principles that govern the evolution of military leadership groups and their complex relationships to the societies that produce them. He wrote in exceptionally forceful prose, and his book resonates with sweeping truths: the two varieties of civil control; the three components of military professionalism; and so forth. Huntington acknowledged that his theoretical framework could not incorporate all situations. He noted that "the real world is one of blends, irrationalities, and incongruities: actual personalities, institutions, and beliefs do not fit into neat logical categories." Yet he argued that abstraction and simplification were essential to clear thinking, and rarely did a hint of ambiguity enter his analysis.(1)
If Huntington had confined his work to the realm of grand theory, he might be forgiven a degree of overgeneralization. But he wrote as a historian as well as a political theorist: Over two-thirds of his book consists of a history of military professionalism and civil-military relations in the United States from the eighteenth century to the post-World War II era. For historians, of course, the devil is always in the details, and over the years a number of scholars have taken issue with his findings. Most of this revisionism has focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period that Huntington thought critical to the emergence of the modern military profession. In particular, critics have challenged Huntington's belief that the professionalization of the armed forces occurred in isolation from the main currents of civilian society and have argued that military reform fit well with the Progressive era's emphasis on efficient management and scientific planning.(2) This essay will examine more closely Huntington's findings on the preceding era--the antebellum decades where he found only the early "roots" of the American military tradition. It will focus on the Army and argue that the key steps in the formation of the American profession of arms occurred a half...