This dissertation follows a group of American political leaders who wielded power for three decades after the US Civil War. As volunteer officers during the sectional struggle, these figures learned from military professionals and engaged with salient policy issues. After the conflict ended, some former officers relied on their uniformed record to claim public authority through their rhetoric, involvement in commemorative culture, and networks of veterans. These ex-Union and Confederate volunteers won voters’ trust and flooded into public offices. Such individuals, who built postwar careers by emphasizing their voluntary martial service, merit the title of soldier-politicians. Soldier-politicians’ wide-ranging occupancy of state and federal government positions gave them influence over Gilded Age policymaking. Eminent ex-officers used reflections on the Civil War to argue for keeping the US Army small, strengthening state militias, and asserting US leadership in the Western Hemisphere. Powerful former volunteers’ vision for national defense sparked conflicts with West Point-trained career officers, local communities, and even with each other at times. War with Spain in 1898 validated some of the soldier-politicians’ efforts but also revealed significant problems with their concepts, so the group’s power declined in the war’s aftermath. This dissertation brings together evidence from correspondence, diaries, memoirs, speeches, newspapers, legislative records, and other government documents to illuminate the Civil War era. It argues that prominent veterans’ attempts to recall the sectional struggle amounted to much more than “waving the bloody shirt.” It aims to demonstrate that the political influence exercised by a set of leaders with martial experience shaped the development of diplomacy and military policy in the United States. / History

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