"The change from militia to a standing army took place in the American West immediately upon the conclusion of the War Between the States. " Thomas J. DiLorenzo...

"...The change from militia to a standing army took place in the American West
immediately upon the conclusion of the War Between the States."

When (and why) did the US first decide to go to a "standing army" since the framers of the constitution, etc. were so dead set against such a thing????? 

-Gunny G

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(Excerpt Only ~ Continues @ Link...)

The result, say Anderson and McChesney, was that white settlers and railroad corporations were able to socialize the costs of stealing Indian lands by using violence supplied by the U.S.Army. On their own, they were much more likely to negotiate peacefully. Thus, "raid" replaced "trade" in white–Indian relations.

Congress even voted in 1871 not to ratify any more Indian treaties, effectively announcing that it no longer sought peaceful relations with the Plains Indians. Anderson and McChesney do not consider why a standing army replaced militias
in 1865, but the reason is not difficult to discern.  

One has only to read the official pronouncements of the soldiers and political figures who launched a campaign of extermination against the Plains Indians. On June 27, 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman was given command of the Military District of the Missouri, which was one of the five military divisions into
which the U.S. government had divided the country.

Sherman received this command for the purpose of commencing the twenty-five-year war against the Plains Indians, primarily as a form of veiled subsidy to the government-subsidized railroad corporations and other politically connected corporations involved in building the transcontinental railroads. These corporations were the financial backbone of the Republican Party.

Indeed, in June 1861, Abraham Lincoln, former legal counsel of the Illinois
Central Railroad, called a special emergency session of Congress not to deal with the two-month-old Civil War, but to commence work on the Pacific Railway Act.

Subsidizing the transcontinental railroads was a primary (if not the primary) objective of the new Republican Party. As Dee Brown writes in Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow, a history of the building of the transcontinental railroads, Lincoln's 1862 Pacific Railway Act "assured the fortunes of a dynasty of American families . . . the Brewsters, Bushnells, Olcotts, Harkers, Harrisons, Trowbridges, Lanworthys, Reids, Ogdens, Bradfords, Noyeses, Brooks, Cornells, and dozens of others" (2001, 49), all of whom were tied to the Republican Party..................

Ref
http://gunnyg.blogspot.com/2011/04/culture-of-violence-in-american-west.html
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