Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South

7. The Antithesis of Union Men and Confederate Rebels: Loyal Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South

7 The Antithesis of Union Men and Confederate Rebels Loyal Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South Susanna Michele Lee After the official closing of the Civil War, former enemies waged new battles over reunion, most pressingly over membership in the reunited nation . “Confederates” and “Unionists” were wartime categories that did not necessarily carry postwar implications. To what extent would distinctions according to loyalty limit or expand conceptualizations of citizenship? Insisting upon the relevance of wartime loyalties, northern and southern Republicans argued that Confederates had abandoned the Union, incurring penalties, while Unionists had stood by the nation, earning rewards. Emphasizing the significance of postwar loyalties, northern and southern Democrats contended that former Confederates deserved equality with former Unionists because they had sincerely returned to their loyalties and had accordingly been pardoned and amnestied. Both sides agreed on the centrality of loyalty to citizenship, but they disagreed over its definition , with one side fixing loyalty in the war years and the other side displacing loyalty to the postwar years. During Reconstruction, politicians debated the role of loyalty as a qualification for access to the rights and privileges of citizenship, including property claims, land restoration, rations, pensions, jury service, suffrage, and officeholding. Loyalty could potentially remake the power structure of the South, disfranchising former Confederates and enfranchising former Unionists. This potential was not achieved, in part, because of the ways that federal officials defined loyalty and its relationship Loyal Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South · 151 to citizenship. In the battles over Reconstruction, former Confederates and their allies successfully decoupled most aspects of postwar citizenship from wartime loyalty. The federal government’s extension of pardon and amnesty and failure to prosecute alleged traitors signaled an official policy of forgetting. During its ten-year operation, the Southern Claims Commission acted as a key bulwark against this trajectory by preserving wartime loyalty as the prerequisite for the payment of property claims. Congress created the commission in 1871 to compensate “loyal citizens” of the South for property appropriated by the Union army. President U. S. Grant appointed three commissioners, all white northern radical Republicans , who decided the cases until they closed their Washington, D.C., offices in 1880. But, even the commissioners defined loyal citizenship in ways that limited its potential to reconstruct the South. The commissioners imagined the “loyal citizen” as an implicitly white masculine actor. They expected southerners to prove active citizenship, specifically the fulfillment of their political obligations through contributions to suppress secession.1 The ideal loyal citizen in the South, according to the commissioners, voted against secession at the ballot box and fought against secession on the battlefield. This conceptualization of citizenship rested upon racial and gendered assumptions about the capabilities of white men and the incapabilities of all non-white men and all women. White men possessed the ability to think and act independently. Blacks and women, the antithesis of ideal citizens, did not. The commissioners held white male claimants to these standards of white masculinity in their determinations of loyal citizenship. Historians often use the commission’s records in accordance with its original goal to uncover the wartime motivations and experiences of loyal southerners.2 This essay adopts a new approach by placing the records in their immediate context to examine the postwar contestation over loyal citizenship between southerners and the federal government. The records of the commission reveal southerners’ understandings of the requirements for reconciliation with northerners and their acceptance or rejection of those terms. Claimants omitted relevant but damning facts, stretched the truth, and committed outright perjury in their testimony in order to appease representatives of the federal government. But some selfprofessed loyal citizens, generally those whom historians would identify as conditional Unionists and former Confederates, refused to conciliate the commissioners, often telling the truth, even when doing so damaged 152 · Susanna Michele Lee their prospects for compensation, because they believed that they possessed the right to claim membership in the Union on their own terms. The commissioners’ decisions, then, do not simply reveal southerners as Unionists or Confederates in the war years. Instead, a decision of loyalty signaled a consensus and a decision of disloyalty indicated a disparity between the claimants’ and the commissioners’ ideas about who qualified as good citizens in the postwar years. These contestations reveal the conservatism embedded within even the most radical conceptualizations of citizenship. Historians focus on the political struggles over disfranchisement and other restrictions on the rights...