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  • Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South by Susanna Michele Lee
  • Daniel Ritchie
Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–Civil War South. Susanna Michele Lee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-1-107-01532-6, 256pp., cloth, $95.00.

Susanna Michele Lee’s book focuses on the work of the Southern Claims Commission (1871–80), which awarded compensation for property losses during the Civil War to southerners who could prove they had been loyal citizens. It helpfully elucidates how loyal citizenship was conceptualized and disputed in the aftermath of the conflict. The author has provided us with an engaging, clearly written, and well-researched account of the commissioners’ work.

Lee argues that the commissioners initially defined loyal citizens as white men who had opposed secession at the ballot box and on the battlefield. Southern claimants were expected to prove they not only possessed Union sympathies (ideological citizenship) but had also vigorously contributed to the Union cause (active citizenship). The supposition that loyal citizens were to be defined as white men was undermined by both the complex relationship of former slaves, free blacks, and women to the state and the efforts of these groups to prove that they had been loyal citizens during the war to the commissioners.

During its ten-year lifespan, the Southern Claims Commission acted as a bulwark against the Democrats’ idea that postwar loyalty should be the basis for access to the rights and privileges of citizenship in the United States. Lee’s first chapter situates the work of the Southern Claims Commission within a wider context of congressional debates over citizenship and loyalty, while the second examines the efforts of white men to demonstrate their loyalty.

What is perhaps most striking about the chapters on white men is how strict the Southern Claims Commission was in its definition of loyalty. The three commissioners (Asa Owen Aldis, Orange Ferris, and James B. Howell), all Republicans appointed by President Grant, believed that residence in a seceded state was prima facie evidence of disloyalty. They assumed that a real unionist could not have remained in these localities without being subjected to severe harassment. Unsurprisingly, many white southern claimants did not meet the commissioners’ standards of loyalty. The author suggests that [End Page 323] the Southern Claims Commission’s elevation of wartime actions over ideology, moreover, promoted an understanding of citizenship that ensured that the passive unionists in the South could be marginalized as cowards who had shirked their obligations to the nation.

It is significant that the Southern Claims Commission did not ask claimants about their position on slavery unless they mentioned it. The commissioners did not view slaveholding as evidence of treachery, but they did see criticizing emancipation as incongruous with loyalty to the Union. This position posed a significant problem for those unionist slaveholders who claimed allegiance to the Union on the basis that it was a proslavery compact.

In the case of southern women who were pro-emancipation and who had opposed the Confederate war effort, the Southern Claims Commission was forced to recognize that white men did not possess a monopoly on loyal citizenship. The common law tradition of coverture, the notion that women possessed no relationship to the state unmediated by a father or husband, had made it difficult for women to claim to be loyal citizens. Coverture, however, allowed some white southern women to claim the political sympathies of their husbands while preserving their essential feminine domesticity.

In harmony with these principles, white women sometimes presented their opposition to male enlistment on behalf of the Confederacy as an action appropriate to their sphere of influence. There were some obvious cases of inequity in the commissioners’ treatment of women, which the author usefully highlights. For instance, on the one hand, cooking for or nursing Union soldiers was dismissed as merely circumstantial evidence of loyalty. On the other hand, the Southern Claims Commission regarded even cooking and sewing as indicative of assistance for the Confederacy.

The chapters on non-white southerners are useful, if only for reminding us of the need to avoid the tendency of conflating southerners with whites. The Southern Claims Commission had initially not...

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