Militia Uniforms Looked Like They Belonged in a Comic Opera, Not on a Battlefield Thomasville, Ga.  Zouaves   above left to right: Lynchburg Virginia Light Artillery;  Louisiana Tiger Zouaves; 11th NY Inf. (note gray uniform)  (more photos of uniforms at bottom of this post)                          The founding fathers of the country saw no need for a large standing army.  The Second Amendment was supposed to be the way around that. The Second Amendment called for states to raise their own militias in whatever manner and structure they chose.  The framers of the constitution never dreamed of the enormous expansion of territory their creation would eventually encompass.  Nationwide, a rough standard emerged based on monthly drills county by county in a state. All able-bodied white men—and white men only in all militias—were required to furnish their own arms and, if they had ...

The US War With Paraguay--1858 Map of the area in 1864 Yes.  The United States almost went to war with Paraguay in 1858. Yeah. That Paraguay. The landlocked country in the middle of South America, then about the size of Texas. Congress authorized President Buchanan “to restore American honor by any means including force if necessary,” (similar to the Congressional authorization President Lyndon Johnson received to launch the Vietnam War.) It was a serious operation which sent one fourth of the US Navy (19 ships) and 2,500 troops to Buenos Aires to await orders to sail 1,300 miles up the Paraná River for which they had few charts, past well-armed forts, to invade a country for which they had no maps nor any idea of the size of enemy forces. And the President/dictator of Paraguay, Carlos Antonio Lopez, originally thought he was signing a treaty of goodwill and trade between the two countries.  President Carlos Antonio Lopez If it had not been for cool heads of an American navy ...