| The popular perception of the militia in the early republic is one of drunken buffoons who stumbled into a crooked line, poked each other with ersatz weapons of brooms and cornstalks, and finally, with the lone rusty musket, shot the cap off their commander's head. The caricatures of the over-dressed militia officer and his clownish part-time charges are familiar to even casual scholars of the new nation. Few historians, however, have attempted to go beyond these stereotypes and discover the true social significance of militia companies to nineteenth-century communities.;This dissertation delineates the roles the militia played in Kentucky communities and demonstrates that the militia remained an active civil institution throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The militia made significant contributions to a community's sense of unity, to its economic development, to social order, and to the process of democratization and party politics. In addition, militia service reinforced the individual and collective construction of male gender norms.;The stereotypical image of the militia as an ineffective and irrelevant organization no longer survives close scrutiny. Their influence in communities of the early republic reached well beyond the narrow responsibilities of a purely martial institution. In addition to providing a politically palatable, albeit at times ineffective, military force, militiamen more than any other organization encouraged and facilitated the social, political, and cultural maturation of the public sphere in nineteenth-century America. |
