This introduction shows how US Army officers used reports and other official correspondence to deploy specific narratives, constructing an identity for themselves and their institution premised on protecting women. This previously unacknowledged process erased or reframed evidence of women’s wartime activities. Yet, acknowledging this process reveals how paternalism shaped army culture; naturalized officers’ authority over enlisted men; and provided a cultural foundation for military law, policy, and strategy. Breaking up the fictive separation of women and war shows how army culture developed between 1835 and 1848. It also illuminates how that culture shaped, rather than removed, violence against women.

The conclusion analyzes the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its provisions regarding protecting noncombatants. Focusing on what the treaty said about women reveals meaningful changes. Militaries could not imprison women, destroy their property, or seize their food without payment – all critical elements of army strategy a few years earlier in Florida. The treaty’s architects expanded noncombatant protections beyond women to encompass US ideas of civilization. It protected non-fighting men who behaved according to Euro-American notions of land use: merchants, manufacturers, and farmers. It did not protect Native people who adhered to lifeways that the US and Mexico considered uncivilized. Although the treaty established a European laws of war framework for future conflict between the republics of the US and Mexico, it equally legitimized a less restrained approach to disputes with uncivilized enemies whom it deemed criminals. In the army’s future “Indian Wars” the ideals of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo would help the US Army to legitimize violence used against Indigenous peoples.