Two hundred and fifty years ago, the U.S. Army came into being when the Continental Congress voted in the affirmative to raise ten companies of riflemen in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia on June 14, 1775. Outside of the Continental Congress itself, the Continental Army was the first truly American institution, as it gathered, for the first time, individuals from across more than two separate colonies in a common activity and common pursuit. In doing so, the Continental Army showed America the feasibility of national institutions as well as of the union of the thirteen colonies.
The Continental Army was also the living embodiment of formal national public spiritedness in the Revolutionary era. In his general orders of July 4, 1775, General Washington directed his troops at the siege of Boston that they were “the Troops of the several of the United Provinces of North America,” and that “all Distinctions of Colonies will be laid aside; so that one and the same Spirit may animate the whole, and the only Contest be, who shall render, on this great and trying occasion, the most essential service to the Great and common cause in which we are all engaged.”
Where the colonial militia proper was only ever a strictly local force for emergency defense, the Continental Army represented the nation. It showcased how both diverse individuals across social ranks and diverse, larger regional entities like local governments could work successfully together across a vast territorial expanse. In this way, it was the “first test” of the ability to live continentally as well as to talk continentally—to put their daily lives under the control of the Union without the constant support of a familiar community. Among other things, this meant a personal confrontation for many with their own (perhaps unconsciously imbibed) local habits and community prejudices. Once divorced from the pressures of their local communities and families, it was also a test of those soldiering individuals’ private virtue, and not just in terms of physical courage.
Truly, the Continental Army was an initial essay of the mechanics that would have to be maneuvered to build a shared civic behavior across a nation of united provinces. General Washington believed that the mutual acts of communicating, meting out, and accepting orders and discipline were the type of mutual care necessary for building the trust and affection between these separate citizen-individuals and thus within their military units. Washington clearly grasped that it would be such actions repeated again and again that could create “the same spirit” that would in turn “animate the whole.” As for the Continental officers and their regular soldiers, so too for the new nation’s political elite and all citizens.
The Continental Army, and thus the U.S. Army, one might argue, grandfathered in the new nation, the United States of America. As it turns out, having a military—an organizational and institutional means of national protection and defense—is the traditional prerequisite for any nation building a civil society. By providing for the collective defense, as it were, of the United States, America’s military foregrounds the possibility of America having a civil society. And hence the military’s very existence enables a civic function: to ensure the American regime, in both its political and its social avenues, a continued existence that stretches into the future.
Arguably, then, the military has a role in regard to civic life. We don’t often—if ever—think about that role. But outside of its historic role in showcasing national public spiritedness and helping to build the nation, the military has always maintained that informal role in civic life. Even the Preamble to the Constitution reflects this truth: Providing for the collective defense of each of the states, the American government, American citizens, and the United States at large is the prerequisite for “promot[ing] the general Welfare.” And it is together, like soldiers and civilians, that these two elements work to “secure the Blessings of Liberty” for all citizens.
Ideally, America’s particular military dynamic at any given moment has nourished the character of what must be a free and equal people by being a repository of corresponding public qualities or virtues that strengthen, rather than detract from, robust democratic behaviors. The bundle of these virtues has traditionally been called martial virtue, but one group of contemporary scholars has a more attractive name for them: “civic virtue armed.”
James Madison wrote in Federalist 57 that “the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America” is the same spirit “which nourishes freedom, and in return is nourished by it.” This is how he—and his peers—believed that traditional martial virtue could be contained within the bounds of civic virtue in the new nation. By the same token, Madison’s “vigilant and manly spirit” formulation indicated how civic virtue itself could chart a pathway for a just code of conduct for the American soldier.
Free men—and free women, as Abigail Adams would trumpet—are spirited men and women, off the battlefield as well as on it. What the American founders knew for certain from their theoretical forebearers was that, in passing from the Revolutionary Era to the Constitutional Era, the spiritedness with which they had fought for the liberty of their new nation and for their individual rights on the battlefield would need to be translated into a deep connection with the new Constitution, the constitutional order, and the particularly American expression of the rule of law and the defense of freedom and equality. And for 250 years, their vision—of taming or democratizing military courage and valor into vigilance about liberty and individual rights, married with a spiritedness that would always rise to the occasion to defend the same—has shown exactly to what extent the health and character of its military and America are entwined.