ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on more prosaic motives, which distinguished career soldiers from civilian volunteers. It argues that regular army officers expressed little overt support for the program of Manifest Destiny and expansion, and that their silence on the broad issues was complemented by a lack of interest in the military details of their work. Historians have long seen the officers of the United States Army as the nation's primary "agents of empire" during the era of Manifest Destiny. The United States army officers of Jacksonian era were primarily careerists, not professionals; their values and motives were fundamentally social and bureaucratic rather than functional ones, contrary to the requirements of practical and normative definitions of professionalism. Rumours of war with Britain were a much more common topic in officers' letters of the early and mid-1840s than those concerning Mexico, and they rested their hopes for an expansion of the army primarily on the Oregon crisis.
