Slavery and War in the Americas: Race, Citizenship, and State Building in the United States and Brazil, 1861-1870 by Vitor Izecksohn (review)

Slavery and War in the Americas: Race, Citizenship, and State Building in the United States and Brazil, 1861-1870artfully compares how wartime recruitment refracted both on state-local political dynamics and on the institution of slavery in the United States and Brazil during the Civil War and the Triple Alliance War, respectively. More specifically, the book explores how black enlistment, including free and freed men, affected the broader social and political legacies of the conflicts. A professor of U.S. and Latin American history at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Vitor Izecksohn works from archival collections in both the United States and Brazil. The product is a balanced and well-structured study that is sure to stimulate passionate debates in U.S. and Brazilian classrooms on the workings of race and citizenship in the two largest slave nations in the Americas.

Beginning with a comparative overview of how military traditions informed citizenship narratives in both places, Izecksohn draws out two baseline differences that will guide his later thinking about each war’s consequences. First, he argues that prior to the need for mass mobilization, in the United States “service in the militias was considered an honorable obligation, well suited to citizens,” whereas “the Brazilian vision of military service was derogatory” (p. 11). Izecksohn posits this contrast in ideological terms, linking militia service in the United States to political traditions of strong local power. In Brazil, however, where political power remained more centralized, seigneurial legitimacy was actually demonstrated through finding exemptions from military obligations. These differences in how local power was constructed in turn shaped the effects of mass recruitment and slave enlistment.

The second key difference pertains to race and its relationship to slavery and citizenship. Izecksohn highlights the “widespread enrollment of free people of color in the Imperial [Brazilian] army” and notes that “its American counterpart remained a segregated institution” (p. 11). This, too, should have been explained in ideological terms. The impetus for interracial narratives of belonging in Brazil, as well as the possibilities for free Afro-Brazilians to meaningfully engage in public life, was, in fact, ideological and not demographic. In Brazil this ideology created the impression that the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion were drawn around the “free” and the “enslaved” categories, not racial differences, and thus worked to entrench the institution of slavery. Notwithstanding the enrollment of people of color in the military, Brazilian national narratives were racist in their production of social hierarchies. Cross-racial participation in associations, politics, and the military by no means offset other aspects of structural racism. On the U.S. front, segregation was an ideological instrument of white political formations. Segregation cannot pass as prejudice or appear as extra-institutional; it was, among other things, a means of constricting public debates on slavery.

The complex decisions to enlist enslaved people in both wars dominate the second half of the book. Izecksohn painstakingly situates these developments within their specific social and political contexts and attributes both processes to the combination of slave agency and the recruitment pressures necessitated by conflicts that far outlasted initial predictions. He concludes that federal power increased in the United States in part through the recruitment issue. Additionally, the move to incorporate runaway slaves into Union ranks—albeit in segregated units—strengthened the military’s war efforts, which in turn fortified the government’s commitment to defend civil rights in the postwar era. In comparison with Brazil, “where changes were more gradual and not as substantial,” Izecksohn argues that “the American Civil War must now be considered a Total War” (p. 171). In Brazil, slave owners were typically compensated for the slaves manumitted for the war, and thus the state did not directly...