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inspiring his men to many deeds of valor that would ring down through the ages, but after the final victory, when he resigned his commission and Congress disbanded the national army entirely, most citizens cheered. They associated standing armies with European monarchies, with troops of mercenaries and conscripts—“hirelings and slaves,” as Francis Scott Key called British redcoats in his famous anthem—maintained in support of tyranny. What could be less democratic, after all, than the use of force to sustain power and impose policy? In 1847, as American troops fought a war of aggression and conquest in Mexico, one young Midwestern congressman had warned against “the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood—that serpent’s eye, that charms to destroy.”28

Yet just a few months later, the same politician who had spoken those words took to the stump for Zachary Taylor—a leading general in the Mexican War whose only qualification for high office was “military glory,” since he had never held a civilian post of any kind. (Pro-Taylor campaign lithographs showed him gallantly leading the charge at Buena Vista; an anti-Taylor cartoon showed him perched atop a gigantic heap of skulls, clutching a bloody sword in his hand.) As for the Midwestern congressman himself, he would go on to be America’s greatest war president. That young legislator was, of course, Abraham Lincoln.29

Lincoln’s metaphor of the “rainbow that rises in showers of blood” perfectly captured his countrymen’s mixed feelings. Between the 1840s and the outbreak of the Civil War, however, more and more Americans, in the North as well as the South, were increasingly drawn to the gleam of that rainbow. The change was especially noticeable among antislavery advocates and other reformers. Theodore Parker, the famed Boston abolitionist, had once condemned war unequivocally as “an utter violation of Christianity.” But by the late 1850s, referring to the Garibaldian struggle in Italy, but also thinking of the growing conflict closer to home, he reflected: “All the great charters of humanity have been writ in blood, and must continue to be for some countries. I should let the Italians fight for their liberty till the twenty-eight millions were only fourteen million.”

In 1838, a dovish Emerson wrote in his journal: “a company of soldiers is an offensive spectacle.” By 1859, in the aftermath of the Harper’s Ferry raid, he was publicly calling John Brown “that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death.” By 1863, Emerson had accepted an appointment to the West Point military academy’s Board of Visitors.30

The 1850s saw an increasing spirit of militancy enter American politics and culture. The Wide Awakes who marched by the thousands for Lincoln in 1860 were simply the culmination of a trend, the logical outcome of the new republican ideology that prized manliness and unyielding idealism. It was a short step from such militancy to outright militarism. In retrospect, its seeds were clearly present even in the early work of avowed pacifists like Emerson: at the same time that he called for the outright abolition of war, he hailed Napoleon Bonaparte, the century’s most famous general, as the hero of “young, ardent, and active men, everywhere,” who had nobly transformed “old, iron-bound feudal France” into “a young Ohio or New York.” The sage failed to mention, of course, that in the laudable process of turning France into Ohio, the late emperor had also brought about hundreds of thousands of deaths.31

Indeed, despite the new republic’s professed aversion to war, military feeling often seemed more intense in the United States than it did among the European nations where Napoleon and Wellington had fought. Americans could lionize their military heroes as citizen volunteers, men who had freely chosen to lay down their lives for the nation. What higher expression of democratic values was there than willingly dying for the sake of one’s country and countrymen? It was the ultimate