Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era (review)

With novel insights based on substantial primary-source research, Christian Samito's Becoming American under Fire asks scholars of the United States to reconsider the relationships among Irish-American and African-American Union soldiers, the law, and the national body politic in the 1860s. His study offers fresh perspective on the Civil War era by addressing topics that, if distinctive, relate to each other as parts of a broader history of American citizenship and identity. As such, his work, like recent studies by Mitchell Snay, Heather Richardson, and others, deserves praise for moving beyond conventional historiographical subfields.

Samito argues that Civil War-era African Americans and Irish Americans, though often antagonistic to each other, moved along similar paths. In the 1850s, both groups confronted a native-born white society that denied them, if to different degrees and in different ways, full equality. Samito, in fact, sees the 1850s as marked by a "crisis of citizenship," wherein long-running debates about who was American intensified while, paradoxically, the concept of national citizenship remained inchoate. Then, with the start of the Civil War, as both groups considered fighting for the Union, they questioned with renewed urgency their relationship to the United States and whether society would recognize them as citizens. Here, Irish Americans, and even more so African Americans, found their unequal treatment a source of ambivalence about the northern cause. Some Irish Americans actually expressed sympathy with the South at first, and many members of both groups focused on national projects separate from the United States. With the opportunity to serve, however, both groups cultivated a stronger devotion to the Union and invested greater meaning in the idea of being American. Military service was often, Samito explains, a source of aggravation, especially for African Americans confronting restrictions on volunteering and promotion, unequal pay, and pervasive racism. Yet, Samito argues, service also entailed more positive interactions, and clearly ameliorated racial views among some white comrades, at times dramatically so. Similarly, military justice, if harsh, did not establish discriminatory procedures, and often tried African Americans by the same standards as white Americans, including in capital and mutiny cases. For Irish Americans, serving helped to undermine nativist sentiment and thereby created greater leeway for them to be Catholic and Irish while bolstering their claim to being American. Indeed, by the end of the war, not only was the Know-Nothing Party a thing of the past, but many Republicans were attempting to pry the Irish vote away from the Democratic Party.

As the war wound to a close, parallels among Irish Americans and African Americans persisted. By fighting for the Union army, both groups had already acted as citizens, and both continued to invoke their service to demand equality within the United States. Indeed, while most historians have stressed the tensions between Irish Americans and African Americans, Samito contends that they were connected, if not allied, in their demands for an inclusive understanding of national citizenship grounded in loyalty. In a few instances, these parallel efforts even generated sympathies between these groups. Together, their struggles transformed citizenship as both an identity and a legal category, securing greater equality and defining what national citizenship meant for the first time. Here, his analysis is particularly strong concerning legal issues. He notes, for example, that the 14th Amendment explicitly addressed both native-born and naturalized citizens, therefore enumerating for the first time a common set of rights belonging to both groups. He also offers two helpful chapters on the fight, propelled by the Fenian movement, to get the United States to demand and the British to recognize an individual right to change nationality through unilateral expatriation. Samito concludes with the decades following the 1860s, noting that both racism and nativism would revive to limit, but not completely destroy, these groups' hard won recognition, legal and otherwise, as...