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  • Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri. by Sharon Romeo
  • Kristen Epps (bio)
Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri. By Sharon Romeo. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. 192. Cloth, $59.95.)

In May 1864, a black woman named Charlotte Ford was standing outside her Saint Louis home when Thomas Farrell, a white man, ran past and struck her with a brick before running off. He explicitly tied this violence to his devotion to the Confederacy, shouting as he committed the assault: "I am a Jeff Davis man all over" (73). Ford's very presence in the city as a free woman of color was an insult to Farrell, who, in assaulting Ford, enacted his protest against slavery's impending demise. Farrell was captured and put on trial in a military court, and Ford was allowed to testify against him, a civil right that had been denied her before the war. In so doing, Ford reconfigured her civil status and sought justice against her perpetrator, an action that would normally have been impossible given her race.

As Sharon Romeo demonstrates in Gender and the Jubilee, Charlotte Ford was only one of many black women who took advantage of the chaos of war in Missouri, seeking redress for abuses and grievances by appealing to federal power (particularly the military) instead of local and state authorities. Through her examination of the legal system, Romeo uncovers how freedwomen inserted the federal government into the conversation [End Page 343] over civil rights for African Americans, essentially bypassing state and local officials in a variety of contexts, ranging from legalizing "slave" marriages to complaints against abusers, child custody cases, and labor disputes. Missouri remained in the Union as a slaveholding state, and slavery did not end there until the Missouri General Assembly passed an emancipation law in 1865. The state's legal system, then, remained one that limited slaves' and free blacks' civil rights, making federal authority like military tribunals the best legal recourse for many freedpeople. While black men experienced emancipation differently, sometimes as the result of military service (enlistment or otherwise), women of color fought for their freedom in other ways, such as casting domestic disputes between owners and slaves as acts of resistance to the Confederacy, thus turning these conflicts into military matters with strategic significance. Black women also used their relationships with black Union soldiers to seek help from the federal government as dependents of soldiers fighting for the cause. In so doing, they were able to involve military courts, the provost marshal, and other organs of the federal government in the dissolution of the peculiar institution.

Romeo argues that these daily acts of resistance were critical to the process of emancipation, but even more so, "the complaints and petitions of African American women promoted a gendered conception of citizenship derived from their experiences in bondage and the wartime struggle to destroy slavery. Freedwomen developed their own visions of what freedom ought to be" (5). By using pension files, slave narratives, and military records, Romeo illuminates these women's political actions in new and interesting ways. Despite the fact that military tribunals, the provost marshal's office, and the suspension of habeas corpus were not originally intended to provide for black rights, all of these were tools black women used for their benefit. The most interesting components of this book are Romeo's discussion of child custody cases and marriage. She concludes that the power of the federal government was key to child custody cases, where some black women successfully lobbied for the return of children who had been kidnapped, sold away, or otherwise separated from their mothers. Before the war, such intervention would have been impossible. In her analysis of marriage, Romeo argues that freedwomen's marital claims were central to their desire for a civil identity. Although the Union military embraced its own definitions of lawful marriage, shaded by harmful stereotypes, black women hoped for (and saw, with some success) a redefinition of marriage that suited their own beliefs and desires.

Much of the scholarly literature on African American...

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