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4  “It Looks Much Like Abandoned Land” Property and the Politics of Loyalty in Reconstruction Mississippi Erik Mathisen In the spring of 1866, a writer in a Vicksburg newspaper directed readers to what he thought was a new phrase in American politics. It was, he claimed, “a word that we never heard or saw used . . . until this late war of the ‘so-called’ rebellion,” a phrase better suited to the “bloody purposes of court-martials and military commissions” than the politics of a republic. The new phrase was “loyalty,” and what concerned the writer and many Mississippians in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War was that an individual’s loyalty to the Union had become the key to membership in a postwar body politic.1 Editorials revealed little that whites in Mississippi were not aware of already . During the Civil War, oaths and pledges of loyalty had become a fact of life: a language of rights used by Mississippians in their day-to-day interactions with both Union and Confederate states. In the immediate postwar period, however, loyalty quickly came to define something more: not only individual civic rights but also the act of legitimating claims to property. Loyalty —the measuring of an individual’s faithful allegiance to government— became something of a political currency, used by whites to secure the property of those who had lost their land or possessions during the war. And in countless local battles over property, white Mississippians attempted to minimize their past transgressions as former Confederates and claim a renewed spirit of Unionism, often with checkered results. This essay looks at this process, focusing particular attention on how Mississippians fused political loyalty with rights to property, in a manner that had a lasting impact on Reconstruction.2 Understanding this process is crucial, if only because it focuses attention on how whites and blacks alike practiced a complex politics of loyalty in a bid for property. Freedpeople had spent 78 Erik Mathisen much of the war attempting to secure a close, meaningful relationship between themselves and the Union. Their efforts had not always been successful , but one of the outcomes of civil war and emancipation was that African Americanslearnedhow to make use of their newrelationshipwiththe federal state, leveraging their loyalty in return for federal protection and civic rights. Claiming their loyalty to the Union as both more profound and all the more trustworthy when compared to that of former Confederates, African Americans deployed the politics of loyalty to make a bid for citizenship and possessions they believed were rightfully theirs. The relationship between citizens and the American state has long been difficult to define. From the founding of the nation onward, the ties that bound citizens to the nation were clear: they were formed from the ideological materials that undergirded the American nation. But if being American meant preserving the liberties and freedoms associated with the Revolution, nineteenth-century Americans found it harder to identify their relation to the national state. Local struggles over property in occupied portions of the South immediatelyfollowingthe war,however,forcedindividuals(white and black) to confront the ambiguities of this relationship head on.3 At a point during the earliest months of Reconstruction, former Confederates and former slavesinMississippiclashednotonlyover who ownedwhatbutalso over what citizenship in a postwar United States would entail. Conflicts over loyalty and property also point to an unexplained aspect of Reconstruction history. While scholars have made much of the efforts by the federalgovernmentto craft a meaningfulpeace inthe former slave South,this work has, with some justification, focused on what was lacking in the federal response. Presidential Reconstruction, according to the prevailing literature, wasthe prelude to a much wider conflict.4 Butbyfocusingmore attentionnot onwhatWashingtonfailedtodointhisperiod,andinsteadonwhatMississippians hoped Washington would do in the months that followed Confederate surrender, a picture emerges of a rural people whose demands for property became the basis of their relationship with an elusive federal government.5 By the winter of 1863, the line of occupation that divided Confederate Mississippi from Union-controlled territory forced those living along that line to constantly clarify their allegiances to one state or another. One of those caught on that border was R. Phelps, who addressed a high-ranking official in Mississippi’s state militia, asking that he be pardoned for taking an oath of allegiance to the Union. Like most of the letters of this sort written in the midst of the war, Phelps’s decision to swear an oath to one state or another often reflected the reality of...

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