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“You Have No Flag Out Yet?”: Commercial Connections and Patriotic Emotion in the Civil War North
- The Journal of the Civil War Era
- The University of North Carolina Press
- Volume 9, Number 3, September 2019
- pp. 378-409
- 10.1353/cwe.2019.0050
- Article
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Abstract:
The outbreak of civil war in 1861 prompted a great outpouring of patriotic feeling among northern communities. Eager to satisfy their consumers’ desire to express that feeling, entrepreneurs across the Union produced a huge variety of new goods and repackaged old ones, offering citizens the chance to demonstrate their patriotic devotion. But such purchasing prompted questions about the authenticity and depth of feelings expressed in these ways. This article probes how Americans in the North used the rise of commodified patriotism to test the relationship between emotion and market relations. It examines how northerners used this moment to draw new boundaries between their transactions and themselves. In conclusion, the article argues that this story demonstrates that the collective management of emotions was an important means of defining the scope of the market, and in charting these efforts, it offers a new approach for evaluating the development of capitalism in the United States.