Democracy and the American Civil War: Race and African Americans in the Nineteenth Century eds. by Kevin Adams and Leonne M. Hudson (review)

Democracy and the American Civil War is a collection of essays based on talks given at Kent State University's 2012 Symposium on Democracy, which took on the topic of democracy and the Civil War in honor of the Civil War's sesquicentennial. In each of the essays, an established scholar of nineteenth-century American history explores how the pressures of the Civil War, the chaos of its aftermath, and shifting ideas of race affected conceptions of American democracy and citizenship. It is a slim work that touches on a number of big issues.

The diverse topics covered in the book are all united by the theme of race and democracy, but the authors come at it from wildly different angles, exposing to the reader just how complicated questions of racial justice were during the era of Civil War and Reconstruction. Because the chapters in the volume are based on talks given at a conference, the tone and purpose of each vary greatly. The first two essays, by Stanley Harrold and John David Smith, introduce large historiographical issues commonly considered by scholars of the era, and the latter three, by Fay A. Yarbrough, Kevin Adams, and Mitchell Snay, delve more deeply into more specific topics that shed light on questions about civil rights and racial identity. Despite the different angles, every one of the essays illuminates important questions that should be of interest to both a broad audience and specialists. I believe this volume would be especially valuable in the classroom, as each essay is written in a thought-provoking and accessible style and each highlights important themes that are commonly introduced in college-level courses on the era of Civil War and Reconstruction.

Harrold and Smith provide useful overviews of some of the big questions concerning emancipation and war. In the first chapter, Harrold provides an excellent treatment of the abolitionists and the way in which the view of their role in the war and emancipation has evolved over time. Central to his discussion are the abolitionists' debates about the use of violence and how these debates have shaped abolitionist historiography. His essay is a great resource for understanding the shifts in our scholarly understanding of the movement. In the second chapter, Smith turns to the question of Lincoln's motivations in promoting emancipation and the use of black troops during the Civil War. This topic has been a favorite of scholars who in recent years have debated the question of who really freed the slaves, some of them deemphasizing Lincoln's role and others highlighting it. Smith takes a pro-Lincoln approach that recognizes the limits of his pragmatism while at the same time emphasizing his antislavery credentials. Whatever one's point of view, Smith's essay is a good entry into the scholarship on Lincoln and emancipation.

After engaging in these more commonly considered issues, the latter half of the book turns to some lesser-known topics that allow the reader to think about race and democracy in new ways. In the third chapter of the volume, Yarbrough explores the complicated racial dynamics within the Cherokee Nation as its leaders sought to define Cherokee citizenship in the years after emancipation. Her analysis illuminates the three-tiered understanding of citizenship that emerged among tribe members as they distinguished between the rights of those who held Cherokee citizenship by birth, whites who married into the tribe, and persons of African descent who lived within the tribe. Next, Adams discusses the legal history of the use of American soldiers as a posse comitatus and discusses in particular the way in which the U.S. Army was used as such in order to enforce civil rights in the South during the Reconstruction era. In the book's final chapter, Snay recounts the way in which the...