An article on Wikipedia — usually, if not always, a fair source of reliable information — notes:
The establishment of a standing army in Britain in 1685 by King James II and the later assumption of control over the British colonies in America by the British Army were controversial, leading to distrust of peacetime armies too much under the power of the head of state, versus civilian control of the military, resulting in tyranny.
Thomas M. Cooley, a Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and the Jay Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, complained in his book, first published in 1868, that for those employed in such armies, “insult and outrage may appear quite in the line of duty.”1
Today, few consider such namby-pamby concerns, fewer still even remember that the concerns were once prevalent amongst Americans, nor why.
Endnotes:
- Thomas M. Cooley, A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations which rest upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union 309 (7th ed. 1903). [↩]