It wasn’t that a professional standing army “wasn’t expected” - in fact they were quite common at the time. Standing armies don’t tend to go unused, they make it easy for asshole politicians to pick stupid fights with other countries. Not having one was a deliberate choice we made to avoid such things, and for the most part it worked, for a little while at least.
I wouldn’t say the were quite common. They weren’t unheard of, but only the major powers in the world could afford them. The US would be a nation of mostly farmers isolated from most of the developed world. There’s no reason they would have expected to become a world power. A militia, at the time, would seem to be the reasonable expectation for such a nation for the foreseeable future.
It wasn’t that a professional standing army “wasn’t expected” - in fact they were quite common at the time. Standing armies don’t tend to go unused, they make it easy for asshole politicians to pick stupid fights with other countries. Not having one was a deliberate choice we made to avoid such things, and for the most part it worked, for a little while at least.
I wouldn’t say the were quite common. They weren’t unheard of, but only the major powers in the world could afford them. The US would be a nation of mostly farmers isolated from most of the developed world. There’s no reason they would have expected to become a world power. A militia, at the time, would seem to be the reasonable expectation for such a nation for the foreseeable future.