They were now more concerned with the consolidation of their own country and with its place in the world.

Nor were they as neglectful as their fathers had been of the material means by which to accomplish their somewhat indefinite purposes.
The reconstruction of the American Navy, which had attained such magnitude and played so important a part in the Civil War but which had been allowed to sink into the merest insignificance, was begun by William E.Chandler, the Secretary of the Navy under President Arthur.
William C.Whitney, his successor under President Cleveland, continued the work with energy.

Captain Alfred T.Mahan began in 1883 to publish that series of studies in naval history which won him world-wide recognition and did so much to revolutionize prevailing conceptions of naval strategy.

A Naval War College was established in 1884, at Newport, Rhode Island, where naval officers could continue the studies which they had begun at Annapolis.
The total neglect of the army was not entirely the result of indifference.

The experience with volunteers in the Civil War had given almost universal confidence that the American people could constitute themselves an army at will.