The Patriot Act: Loyalty and Treason during the Civil War Era

When the Civil War began, Private Edward Pierce of the Third Massachusetts Volunteers predicted that emancipation would begin the next stage in human progress. Stationed at Fortress Monroe, Pierce prophesied that American slavery would end where it began, on Virginia’s oldest shore. In 1619, a Dutch slave ship traveled up the James River and landed twenty Africans for sale on the peninsula where runaways now escaped to the Union army. Pierce believed the slaves would “become heir to all the immunities of Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution,” by proving their loyalty to the Union. He expected “military logic” and “international law” would set them free. Anticipating arguments for black male suffrage during Reconstruction, Pierce envisioned black men proving their patriotism by shouldering a musket, stamping out Southern treason, and dying for the Union. Those who opposed his vision should beware: “events travel faster than laws or proclamations.”¹

Twenty miles up the peninsula, William Clegg of the Second Louisiana Volunteers imagined a different future. In May 1861, Clegg’s unit occupied the trenches of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. He watched slaves fortifying river batteries, and he walked through town hunting for Revolutionary relics. While Pierce linked the origins of slavery to its imminent demise in Virginia, Clegg drew a straight line between the last battle of the old Revolution and the first fight of a new one. On July 4, Clegg observed the holiday by pronouncing the old Union dead. The U.S. Constitution created what was “once the best of all human governments,” but Northern traitors disregarded the compact, proving that the republic “is a failure & was but an experiment.” With a fresh start, the Confederacy had a better chance than the Union of realizing the ideals of the American Revolution. Clegg thought the Federal government slid toward a military despotism by building an army without congressional consent, suspending habeas corpus, and using the military to imprison and sentence citizens. In October 1861, Clegg watched the American flag wave above the enemy’s position across the James River. How incredible. “That once proud emblem of liberty” now represented armies trying “to subjugate a free enlightened & brave people.” While he thought about his old flag, smoke darkened the horizon. Enemy squads were burning nearby homes.²

Pierce and Clegg made sense of the Civil War by focusing on the uses and abuses of treason, and in recent years, historians have done the same thing. Border-state history has flourished, deepening our understanding of the local textures of identity and duty. This attention to boundaries has complemented a proliferation of work on guerrilla warfare and military occupation, subjects redolent with concealed allegiances and hostile populations. Beyond military insurgency, scholars have reconsidered political dissent in both regions. Superb work on Southern Unionism, the slaves’ political opposition, and Northern Democrats has complicated binary models of wartime loyalty by presenting a wide spectrum of political ideologies and identities. Likewise, recent studies of Union and Confederate nationalism have moved beyond assessing their relative strengths to explore how governments coerced loyalty and the effects such practices had on Reconstruction and postwar memory. This essay considers recent books by Ian Binnington, William Blair, and Gary Gallagher that make important contributions to the field.

In Becoming Confederates, Gary Gallagher focuses on the careers of three officers in the Army of Northern Virginia—Robert E. Lee, Dodson Ramseur, and Jubal Early—to study a range of loyalties: to the United States, their home state, the slaveholding South, and the Confederacy. During crises, each...