“An Army of Working-Men”: American Soldiers as a Labor Force, 1865–1900

An enlisted man serving in the U.S. army in 1888 declared, the “U.S.A. is an army of working-men, not an army of soldiers.” He was not alone: soldiers in the West often remarked that they spent more time on chores and manual labor than they did pursuing hostile Native Americans or training for war. This “army of working-men” built forts, roads, and irrigation systems; escorted railroad surveyors and mail coaches; and explored and mapped unknown territory. In the remote corners of the U.S., soldiers helped underwrite the expansion of extraordinary new ranching, mining, and railroad operations that transformed the trans-Mississippi West during this period.

Soldiers’ labor, although often overlooked by scholars, was essential to the emergence of new economic enterprises in the West. At the same time, soldiers helped defeat Native resistance and expanded the reach of the central state’s power. This paper argues that military labor was at the center of two related processes in the late-nineteenth century: the development of capitalism and the expansion of an American empire in the West. It examines the work soldiers performed in the southwest as well as the ways they resisted the demands of the army’s labor regime. In doing so, this paper challenges conventional narratives about individualism and the West, the era of laissez-faire capitalism, and the role of the army in the history of American empire.