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Birth of the U.S. Cavalry" examines the founding and initial operations of the U.S. Regiment of Dragoons, forebear of the First Cavalry Regiment and thus the army's first permanent mounted unit. The dragoons escorted traders along the Santa Fe Trail and projected American authority by visiting the villages of many Plains Indian nations. Dragoon officers and men made the first contacts between the U.S. government and the Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita nations. They also helped negotiate a treaty that cleared the way for the completion of Jacksonian Indian Removal. The appointment of dragoon officers and recruitment of their enlisted subordinates reflect diverging military cultures in Jacksonian America. Approximately half of the officers served as volunteer officers during the Black Hawk War. These men clashed with the regiment's regular officers, who viewed themselves as members of a nascent profession. Analysis of government records and army registers shows that the regulars emphasized the need for military education, sought to exclude partisan politics from the appointment process, and served longer on average than the ex-volunteers. The army, expressing concerns over the quality of infantry and artillery rank and file, wanted healthy, native-born citizens for the dragoons. It departed from established recruiting practices and recruited the dragoons from all over the country, including rural areas. These novel efforts attained the desired results. Enlistment records reveal that dragoons tended to be younger than other recruits, to hail from all regions of the country, and to have been farmers or skilled tradesmen in civil life. Obtaining these men came at a price. Dragoons saw themselves as virtuous citizens and did not like regular discipline or performing the mundane tasks of frontier regulars. Many expressed dissatisfaction by deserting, making dragoon desertion rates higher than those of the army as a whole. / History

This thesis examined the rhetoric and discourse of the elite political actors in the Cherokee Indian Removal crisis. Historians such as Ronald Satz and Francis Paul Prucha view the impetus for this episode to be contradictory government policy and sincere desire to protect the Indians from a modernizing American society. By contrast Theda Perdue, Michael D. Green, and William McLoughlin find racism as the motivating factor in the removal of the Cherokee. In looking at letters, speeches, editorials, and other documents from people like Andrew Jackson, Theodore Frelinghuysen, Elias Boudinot, and John Ross, this project concluded that the language of civilization placed the Cherokee in a no-win situation. In internalizing this language, the Cherokees tacitly allowed racism to define them as an inferior group to Anglo-Americans. In the absence of this internalization, the Cherokee Indians surely would have faced war with the United States.

Apparitional Economies is invested in both a historical consideration of economic conditions through the antebellum era and an examination of how spectral representations depict the effects of such conditions on local publics and individual persons. From this perspective, the project demonstrates how extensively the period’s literature is entangled in the economic: in financial devastation, in the boundaries of seemingly limitless progress, and in the standards of value that order the worth of commodities and the persons who can trade for them. I argue that the space of the specter is a force of representation, an invisible site in which the uncertainties of antebellum economic and social change become visible. I read this spectral space in canonical works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman and in emerging texts by Robert Montgomery Bird, Theophilus Fisk, Fitz James O’Brien, and Edward Williams Clay. Methodologically, Apparitional Economies moves through historical events and textual representation in two ways: chronologically with an attention to archival materials through the antebellum era (beginning with the specters that emerge with the Panic of 1837) and interpretively across the readings of a literary specter (as a space of lack and potential, as exchange, as transformation, and as the presence of absence). As a failed body and, therefore, a flawed embodiment of economic existence, the literary specter proves a powerful representation of antebellum social and financial uncertainties.

The purpose of this study is to assess American economic thought during the antebellum period. Antebellum political economy has been largely neglected by historians. They have ignored both the valuable contributions made by America’s first political economists to domestic intellectual culture, as well as the importance of American economic thought in the transatlantic discourse. A dynamic, sophisticated, and complex political economy marks the antebellum era, and when studied in its proper context provides insight into how Americans understood the transformative economic changes they experienced. This dissertation draws on an extensive body of primary and secondary literature. Special consideration is given to the more learned articulations of economic thought. However, recognizing the immature state of the science during the period under investigation works of various levels of theoretical erudition are referenced. In their attempts to fashion a distinctly American political economy domestic thinkers entertained a wide range of economic principles. Contrary to conventional wisdom the Americans were not absolutist in their dedication to British orthodoxy. Antebellum political economy manipulated British authorities to suit the immediate concerns of contemporaries, thus spoiling the essence of classical doctrine. This dissertation makes clear that few Americans accepted classical orthodoxy without important qualifications. Classical theory was confronted with its most systematic challenge by protectionists. Despite protectionism having shaped the course of American economic development, its theoretical underpinnings have been summarily discounted by historians and economists. Protectionists, however, afforded the quintessential expression of American antebellum political economy. This dissertation intends to rescue the protectionists from historical abandon and reclaim the position of relevance they enjoyed during their own time. The antebellum period also hosted a fiery set of intellectuals determined to upset the emerging free-market order, exhibiting a particular disdain for institutions of finance and the industrial ethos. Conservatives from the North and South aimed to slow America’s march into the modern economy. These elements did not operate on the fringes of intellectual society, rather they represent something central to the American discourse and are illustrative of the difficulty attendant to classifying antebellum thinkers according to traditional notions of economic ideology.

This thesis explores the disfranchisement of free men of color in 1835 North Carolina through the lens of antebellum citizenship and within the context of the racial turmoil of the 1830s. Citizenship and the evolution of southern racial ideology converged in the 1835 North Carolina Constitutional Convention. On the one hand, free men of color voted, a right permitted in North Carolina for all taxpaying men regardless of race and one of the most crucial components of citizenship in the early republic and Jacksonian periods. But on the other hand, some North Carolina white slaveholders saw free people of color as instigators of slave uprisings and a threat to their social order and economic system. As convention delegates debated disfranchisement, they drew on their notions of citizenship and their fear of people of color, and a majority ultimately decided that free nonwhites did not deserve a voice in the political arena. My explanation of why delegates disfranchised free men of color is twofold. First, members of the convention supported disfranchisement because of the perceived connection between free people of color and slave violence. Disfranchisement also came about because the majority of delegates determined that political citizenship was reserved exclusively for white men, and the elimination of nonwhite suffrage in North Carolina was one of the most explicit representations of the ongoing transition of citizenship based on class to a citizenship based on race in the antebellum United States. / Master of Arts

The purpose of this thesis was to analyze President Trump's Afghanistan foreign policy and to determine if it fits the mold of one of the four historical foreign policy paradigms as described by Walter Russell Mead in his book, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. Mead describes four U.S. foreign policy schools of thought, in which he titles after influential statesmen who embody the specific school's core principles. These paradigms include the Hamiltonians, who believe in a strong relationship between big business and government for foreign policy success. The Wilsonians, who encourage the spread of democratic principles abroad. The Jeffersonians, who favor the protection of domestic liberal democracy over other foreign policy endeavors. Lastly, the Jacksonians, who prioritize the physical and economic security of American citizens above all else. The primary research question in this thesis states, which of the four traditions of U.S. foreign policy identified by Walter Russell Mead helps explain President Trump's Afghanistan foreign policy? President Trump's rhetoric and specific foreign policy actions were analyzed. His rhetoric was examined through his August 2017 Afghanistan Strategy speech and his specific foreign policy actions were measured through various air operation metrics, U.S. aid to Afghanistan, and U.S. troop deployment trends. Overall, this thesis gave support to my hypothesis that President Trump's Afghanistan foreign policy contains various Hamiltonian and Wilsonian principles, but it has proven to be principally Jacksonian. / Master of Arts / The objective of this thesis was to further understand President Trump's Afghanistan foreign policy through the theoretical framework of Walter Russel Mead's four historical foreign policy paradigms. Mead's four historical paradigms are useful tools to examine and understand U.S. foreign policy. Mead provides in-depth historical context, goes into great detail on core principles, and also provides a surfeit of advantages and disadvantages for each school of thought. His breakdown of U.S. foreign policy into complementary yet combative paradigms is one of the most complete explanations of U.S. foreign policy to date. The primary research question in this thesis states, which of the four traditions of U.S. foreign policy identified by Walter Russell Mead helps explain President Trump's Afghanistan foreign policy? President Trump's rhetoric and specific foreign policy actions were analyzed. His rhetoric was examined through his August 2017 Afghanistan Strategy speech and his specific foreign policy actions were measured through various air operation metrics, U.S. aid to Afghanistan, and U.S. troop deployment trends. Overall, this thesis gave support to my hypothesis that President Trump's Afghanistan foreign policy contains various Hamiltonian and Wilsonian principles, but it has proven to be principally Jacksonian.

The Electoral College and Jacksonian Democracy are two subjects that have been studied extensively. Taken together, however, little has been written on how the method of choosing presidential electors during the Age of Jackson changed. Although many historians have written on the development of political parties and the increase in voter participation during this time, none have focused on how politicians sought to use the method of selecting electors to further party development in the country. Between 1824 and 1832 twelve states changed their methods of choosing electors. In almost every case, the reason for changing methods was largely political but was promoted in terms of advancing democracy. A careful study of the movement toward selecting electors on a general ticket shows that political considerations in terms of party and/or state power were much more important than promoting democratic ideals. Despite the presence of a few true reformers who consistently pushed for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing that all states used the same method, the conclusion must be that politics and party demanded a change. This study relies heavily on legislative records at both the state and national level and newspapers throughout t the country from the period. Beginning with a brief history of the office of the president and an overview of the presidential elections prior to 1824, the author then carefully analyzes the elections of 1824, 1828, and 1832, as well as the various efforts to amend the constitutional provisions dealing with the Electoral College. Particular emphasis is placed on political factions at the state level, the development of the Democratic and National Republican parties nationally, and how each party used and at time manipulated the electoral process to secure a favorable outcome for their candidates.

The Whig party, which existed in the United States approximately twenty years, 1834-1854, was a coalition of diverse economic, political and social groups united by their disapproval of Jacksonian politics and methods. This minority organization derived its strength from powerful congressional leaders, who held strongly nationalistic ideas regarding economic policy and governmental function, which had a profound and lasting influence on American political and economic thought. In the battle for the presidency, however, Whig leaders sometimes resorted to the expediency of subverting their views and choosing military heroes as candidates in order to attract a larger electorate. This study examines the Whigs in the context of the presidential campaigns of 1840, 1844, and 1848, with major emphasis on the national issues which dominated each election and influenced the choice of candidates and development of tactics.

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