Last year, I suggested here that anti-standing army ideology had remarkably little real effect on the development of American military institutions. A year later, I'm far more confident that I was right.

In the decades following the Revolution, the statement of opposition to standing armies was frequently followed in the next breath by proposals to enlarge the standing army; the rhetorical purpose of such statements was to cloak the growth of state power in the garments of humble republican restraint: No man among us has ever loathed and despised a standing army as much as do I, gentlemen -- and so it gives me no pleasure, no pleasure indeed, to stand before this House and propose that we enlarge the peacetime establishment by 2,000 men.

The statesmen of the period recognized that anti-standing army rhetoric was just rhetoric. In January of 1816, debating the size of the postwar army, Henry Clay belittled opponents in the House of Representatives who expressed displeasure with the proposed peacetime force of 10,000 troops.

"From the tenor of gentlemen's observations," Clay said,"it would seem as if, for the first time in the history of this Government, it was now proposed that a certain regular force should constitute a portion of the public defence. But from the Administration of Washington, down to this time, a regular force, a standing army (if gentlemen please) had existed, and the only question about it, at any time, had been what should be the amount. Gentlemen themselves, who most loudly decry this establishment, did not propose an entire disbandment of it."

Clay was right: In 1816, the most outspoken opponents of a peacetime military establishment conformed to a rhetorical pattern in which they expressed their distaste for the principle of the standing army, then promptly allowed that they weren't proposing to eliminate the actual standing army. Accepting the principle, politicians discussed only the size of the standing army to be retained. Political debate did not center on opposition to a"standing army"; rather, it centered on an argument against"large" standing armies, or"expensive" standing armies.

Representative Albion Parris, speaking in the House on the same day as Clay, provides a good example of the form:"Sir, much has been said in this debate about reducing the Army and dismantling the Navy; I confess myself not to be a favorite of large standing armies, they add nothing to the security of the citizen, little to that of the States. But why reduce the present Peace Establishment? it is not so large as to be dangerous in the hands of any Executive, nor so expensive as to be burdensome to the people."

Acknowledging that the standing army quickly became an accepted part of a republic that supposedly opposed such a thing, we face other questions: What did early Americans believe to be the purpose of a peacetime military? What did they think an army did, in the absence of a war? And how did policymakers judge the appropriate size of such a force? These questions also speak to the nature of military history, and particularly suggest (to me, anyway) that military historians tend to focus far too narrowly on stories about combat. The social and economic roles of the peacetime military are rich fields for historians to explore, and I hope to suggest answers to these questions in the next few weeks.

Another question centers on the problem of teleology. An obvious trap awaits historians who wish to discuss the"growth" or"development" of governments and armies. But historical actors themselves thought in terms of stages and development. Again, Henry Clay provides an easy example. Clay believed that the army's growth should be" commensurate with the actual growth of the country"; the military, he argued,"should grow with its growth, and keep pace with its progress."

For Clay, the nature of actual and imminent threats had little to do with the size and role of the army. In the House, he"maintained the position, that, if there was the most profound peace that ever existed; if we had no fears from any quarter whatever; if all the world was in a state of the most profound and absolute repose, a regular force of ten thousand men was not too great for the purposes of this Government."

Going on, he added,"When gentlemen talked of the force which was deemed sufficient some twenty years ago, what did they mean? That this force was not to be progressive? That the full grown man ought to wear the clothes and habits of his infancy?"

So an army, and a government, experience progressive growth from infancy to later stages. Historians don't have to agree with that view to recognize and engage it when it appears in the historical record.

One final note: Several comments last year suggested that any analysis of the early United States Army had to take into account a transnational comparison with the European armies of the period. I disagree. Two hundred thousand men fought at Waterloo; early that same year, in one of the great battles of War of 1812, Andrew Jackson's ad hoc force of a few thousand defeated a British force of 7,500 soldiers. The context of European and North American wars were entirely different; no foreign power could throw an army of a hundred thousand soldiers at the early United States. Logistics matter; the ocean existed.

As Henry Clay said in 1816,"The question of the preparation for the state of war at any time is a relative question -- relative to our own means, the condition of the other Power, and the state of the world at the time of declaring it."

Historians have to ask the same relative questions.

More to follow.