ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the professionalization of the army officer corps between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War was in large measure self-induced, the product of reforming elite of young officers who rose to positions of power during the War of 1812. American officers derived from no particular social level. For most Americans, traditional loyalties to family, community, and state outweighed a national orientation. In practice the officer corps of the republic reflected the same diffuseness, the same close connection with local power centres that typified other professions. The absence of adequate communication and administrative precedents made it impossible for high commanders, had they been so inclined, to impose uniform standards of conduct on the officer corps. The intellectual orientation of the Jacksonian army may be easily exaggerated. The trend toward social atomization identified with the Age of Andrew Jackson signalled both the dissolution of traditional social patterns and the stages of "modern" ones.
