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One of the objectives of the Cardwell-Childers reforms was to establish the auxiliary armies — the militia, yeomanry, and volunteers — as a reserve for regular army and as a bridge between the regulars and civilian society. This chapter examines some of the reasons why the reforms only partially succeeded by looking at the often difficult and distant relationship between regular soldiers and their colleagues in the auxiliary regiments.

The place of the British Army in the years between the South African War and First World War has not received the attention it deserves. Brian Bond and John Gooch have provided important studies of the Staff College. With regard to the Auxiliary Forces, Edward Spiers has provided a fine study of the Haldane reforms, and Ian Beckett, Hugh Cunningham, and Keith Mitchinson have provided useful accounts of the Rifle Volunteers and Territorial Force. However, reforms attempted by Arnold Forster and St John Broderick have received little attention and too many of the existing accounts provide a top‐down study of the army, neglecting the regimental experience. The militia, Special Reserve, Yeomanry, and Officer Training Corps have been largely ignored by professional historians. This work seeks to redress this balance.

The auxiliary forces underwent considerable reform in the Edwardian period. The South African War witnessed a fillip in recruitment which was not sustained. The Haldane reforms of 1906–08 established the Territorial Force, streamlining the old Volunteers and Yeomanry and, crucially, adding logistical and technical units to the auxiliary forces. One of the most notable innovations was the establishment of the Officer Training Corps (OTC). However, judged by contemporary standards, the auxiliary forces were seen to be failing. The militia, reincarnated as the Special Reserve, was seen as merely a feeder to the regular army, and the Territorial Force remained under strength and with a high turnover of personnel. The OTC provided pitifully few officers pre‐World War I. The auxiliary forces were open to considerable regimental and regional variation, notably in Ireland, where political considerations prevented the establishment of the Territorial Force.

This chapter narrates the 135 year debate over the facts and the meaning of the Jones County, Mississippi, uprising known as the Free State of Jones. It begins with Mississippi’s 1948 conviction of Davis Knight—the great-grandson of Civil War guerrilla leader Newt Knight and former slave Rachel Knight—for the crime of miscegenation. From there, “Sacred Wars” analyzes the effects of wartime family divisions, racism, and Lost Cause history on the subsequent folklore and histories that tell the story of the anti-Confederate uprising known as the “Free State of Jones.” The chapter emphasizes that the uprising was a community-wide insurrection against the Confederacy that reflected opposition to secession, class tensions over slavery, and escalating desertion rates reflective of anger over a “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight.

This chapter explains how Republicans applied their ideas by connecting land use with social structure to both the South and the West during the Reconstruction. Republicans called for an end to the treaty system characterizing Indian and United States relations. They argued that forcing Indians to become small farmers would open up more land for whites and help “civilize” recalcitrant tribes. Likewise, some Republicans believed that the big plantations of the South needed to be divided and redistributed to former slaves and white unionists so that a yeomen class could form in the South. The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 used 1862 legislation pertaining to the American West as a model to grant small plots of public land to Unionist whites and freedmen in the former Confederacy. However, by the 1880s the Republican Party stopped favoring small farmers in almost every arena except Indian policy. Even in Indian policy, allotment would fail to create a prosperous Indian yeomanry.

This is the longest section in the book and comprises seventeen poems, many of which use satire not only to delight a sympathetic readership but also as a way of demonstrating defiance and voicing outrage at the actions of the authorities both during and after Peterloo. The introduction explores how writers in the Romantic period, from the full range of the cultural spectrum, used satire as a form of cultural defiance and challenge to authority at a time when any form of opposition was deemed seditious. Another theme evident is that of chivalry, a contentious issue during the eighteenth century with its revival by conservatives such as Edmund Burke fuelling a radical counter-revival focussed on a new age of political chivalry. As a consequence, the language and symbolism of chivalry was adopted by both conservatives and radicals in support of their cause. The Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry is the target of many of thesatirical poems in this section, alongside the detested politicans, Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth and the Manchester Magistrate, Reverend Ethelstone. It includes poems written by the radical writers, Robert Shorter and Allen Davenport.

This chapter explores themes of war, migration, gender, and sectarian conflict between 1798 and 1830. It questions how the 1798 Irish Rising factored into some emigrants’ motivations for coming to Canada in the decades that followed. The Rising also affected how these new arrivals were associated with presumptions of Irish aggression and disloyalty. Many United Empire Loyalists in Upper Canada expressed particular concerns about the violent tendencies of new Irish immigrants and the importation of Irish sectarian conflict to British North America. The chapter then examines the influence of James and Alexander Buchanan, brothers from the north of Ireland in the colonial establishment who decided which Irish immigrants would be most welcome in the Canadas. The chapter closes with the case studies of the Richards and Tackaberry families on their journeys from Co. Wexford to Upper Canada after the War of 1812.

There was a long tradition of Catholic, as well as Protestant, Irish service within the British armed forces. By 1913, 9% of British regular soldiers were Irish, a figure just slightly below the Irish share of the United Kingdom population. Militia, Yeomanry and Officer Training Corps units, which all attracted part-time amateur soldiers, were also well-recruited, though the wholesale disbandment of militia units in 1908 broke this link between some Irish counties and the British army. This recruitment occurred in spite of determined, if localised and unco-ordinated, attempts made by advanced Nationalists to prevent Irishmen enlisting in the British armed forces. Most recruits were from urban areas and were unskilled workers or unemployed at their time of enlistment. Recruitment rates were disproportionately high in Dublin and Cork, and notably low in industrial Belfast.

Several of William Richardson's ancestors fought at the siege of Derry in 1689. He was rector of Clonfeacle during another troubled period when sectarian conflict engendered the Catholic Defenders and the Orange Societies. Escalating political tension peaked in the United Irishmen's rebellion of 1798. The chapter investigates Richardson's reactions to plebeian Orangeism and his crucial role in the Irish Yeomanry's formation in 1796. It explores how he helped mobilise loyalism on the ground and simultaneously influences MPs at Westminster to support Protestant Ascendancy. The argument is advanced that Richardson's propaganda more accurately reflected the concerns of Ulster Protestants than that of Sir Richard Musgrave.

The significant and sustained mobilisation of British men into some kind of military service outside of the regular army between 1740 and 1815 necessitated a means to establish the legitimacy of these forces in the eyes of contemporary society. Although the many Acts of Parliament that sanctioned and regulated this mobilisation provided a legal framework, they did not, and could not, facilitate the transformation from a civilian to a soldier. Moreover, almost none of these men saw active service so their primary identity as a weapon of war was never evidenced to themselves and others. This chapter explores how these auxiliary soldiers were made, through an examination of the creation of new units, the experience of these soldiers and the details of the units they joined, as well as how they were received and accepted by the Britons they were serving to protect. In this period a process of legitimisation developed, in which new military language, social status, soldier-like behaviour, and public display were combined to create a military culture.

The FANY, a small, patriotic, imperialist organisation that epitomised Edwardian Britishness in both its modern and reactionary forms, was founded in a period of intense anxiety about and scrutiny of the country’s readiness for a future conflict. While much of the reorganisation of civic life focused on boys and men in order to improve their physical fitness, the FANY sought to attract strong athletic women who were motivated by a desire to assist their country as mounted first aiders. While couching his vision in very conventional terms of feminine compassion that harked back to Florence Nightingale, the FANY founder, Edward Baker, simultaneously visualised a much more modern, extended, active and physically demanding role for women. This chapter utilises Corps ephemera such as its magazine, minutes of meetings and regulations, as well as newspaper articles, published and unpublished FANY memoirs, and archived interviews to examine the climate in which the Corps was formed, the dual rationale of nursing and equestrianism that was central to the notion of the organisation, and the social composition of its membership.