Chapter 1 considers dual transformations – how cadets at West Point became officers, and how immigrants enlisted to become soldiers – and follows these groups to war in Florida. It argues that officers graduated from the military academy with deeply held beliefs regarding what it meant to be a leader in the army family – a stern father to enlisted men and the Native peoples whom the army considered its wards, and a committed protector of supposedly harmless women. Soldiers, many of whom joined up soon after arriving in New York City from places throughout Europe, had other ideas and asserted their privileges as white men, often resisting officers’ efforts to impose discipline.

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.

Chapter 2 shows how officers and enlisted men related to one another. Both groups were white, but where many officers were middle class, enlisted men were often poor immigrants with unstable access to white men’s privileges in the Jacksonian Era. Officers had to hold the army together to fight a war, and they could not do it by punishment alone. Much as officers sought to tame the Florida wilderness and the Seminole people, they sought to gentle their soldiers. As the regulars fought their enemies and struggled with each other, a shared culture emerged, premised on the common ideal that regulars should protect women. Hierarchical white male unity – based on the concept of the army family in which all military men protected and subordinated all women – helped the army function. This framework appealed to paternalistic officers because it allowed for intense distinctions (of rank) between white men. In this climate, although rhetoric rooted in the need to protect women could bolster army cohesion, it could also serve as a weapon. Soldiers used such language to rebut officers’ claims of superiority.

Chapter 7 culminates in 1848 with a study of Mexican women’s varied strategies in dealing with the occupation. It argues that US officers and enlisted men misunderstood women’s actions in war to characterize Mexican women as affectionate friends, and surveys the harmful consequences of that misconception. The core cultural belief that the army protected women was powerful enough that soldiers were unable or unwilling to see what was in front of them: pervasive evidence of women’s combatancy. The chapter concludes by uncovering the violence of protection – how army depictions of Mexican women as nonthreatening and sexualized allies both generated violence against women and encouraged officers to exclude evidence of that violence from official records.

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.