Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri by Sharon Romeo (review)

Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri, a five-chapter monograph based largely on public records, military files, and slave narratives, “analyzes political beliefs as expressed through everyday social practices.” “It is through the study of these actions that we can understand the specific ways in which power operated during the Civil War,” the author concludes (5). How power operated in nonslaveholding northern states during the Civil War was one matter but quite another in slaveholding Missouri, a loyal border state, under martial law. There the military authority, or provost marshal system, replaced civic authority in 1861. That military authority was not designed to advance black civil rights, yet it helped African Americans advance toward freedom while gaining rights to testify against whites in legal proceedings and access to a more equitable system of justice.

At the outset of Gender and the Jubilee, Romeo details black citizenship in prewar Missouri, and especially St. Louis, where emancipated and enslaved persons interacted, became familiar with the judicial system, and used its courts for their advancement. Scores of freedom suits originated there and reached the courts before Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). This practice of litigation by African Americans was continued throughout the Civil War. After the war, African Americans petitioned the Freedmen’s Bureau for assistance and the US Bureau of Pensions for aid to widows and dependent children.

Enslaved Missourians, male and female, were active agents in the emancipation process when fleeing from bondage to Union lines, but they were not treated equally. The Union accepted men as military laborers but rejected women. However, the Second Confiscation Act (July 1862) opened a path to independence for nonmilitary personnel who reported disloyal employers. Romeo writes, “Enslaved African Americans had a strong incentive to report suspicious behavior,” explaining how “enslaved African Americans used the Union military’s need for information about Confederate sympathizers as a strategy to earn a hearing before military officials” (81).

Another path to emancipation opened in 1863 when the US Army enrolled enslaved men and granted them freedom. But that liberty did not extend to spouses and families. Ultimately, a large segment of the black population, including men who did not enlist in the US military and women who were not employed outside the home, forged their own paths to freedom. Gender and the Jubilee contains much data about women emancipating themselves and their dependents. In the introduction, Romeo provides an anecdote about the 1861 attempts of the slave-born Charlotte McNeil to seek help from the US Army in retrieving her twelve-year-old daughter, Catherine, from a white St. Louis couple who wanted a servant as during slavery. McNeil challenged the prevailing political ideology of whites “by asserting her own definition of citizenship informed by her experience as an enslaved woman” (2). Although “her own definition of citizenship” is never articulated clearly, readers may assume McNeil believed she had a right to her own person along with her offspring and that she alone could determine the price of their labor while extolling the value of family integrity as she defined it (2). McNeil’s story is one example among many others told by enslaved women. Enslaved women’s fight for rights as citizens is a consistent theme in Gender and the Jubilee.

Gender and the Jubilee may revise “popular conceptions of the Civil War,” as Romeo asserts, but the book doesn’t fully resolve the problem because it considers the political actions of enslaved women without fully considering the treatment of enslaved men, who had identities beyond the amorphous “enslaved population” (5). Readers who reject the word or concept “gender” as synonymous with women and who look for relational notions between women and men will be disappointed. There is little here on the construction or reconstruction of male citizenship; on gender dynamics in Civil War...