The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America by Erik Mathisen (review)

Citizenship in the era of the U.S. Civil War is not an easy thing to write about. Every reader comes to the subject with a preconception of what citizenship meant—often shaped by their understanding of what it now means. Yet those preconceptions tend to be shaky, not least because Civil War–era Americans themselves had no clear idea of what citizenship actually was. As Erik Mathisen contends in The Loyal Republic, “By 1860 the United States really was a government without citizens”; although Americans certainly tried to define citizenship, there were “more failures than successes” (14). Moving from the age of nullification to the Reconstruction period, Mathisen explores an array of murky, shifting, and competing definitions of citizenship.

The Loyal Republic offers any number of keen insights and fruitful approaches to the subject. Like other recent works, it asks what citizenship meant rather than how many people were included or excluded at any particular time—a healthy corrective to traditional scholarship that tends to assume a fixed definition of the term and is mostly interested in charting contractions and expansions in the membership of the citizenry over time. Mathisen guides the reader through complex antebellum debates about sovereignty and competing definitions of citizenship advanced by the likes of Dred Scott and Roger Taney. He carefully analyzes ongoing tensions between national, state, and even local levels of authority. And he emphasizes the rapid growth of central power in the Confederacy, showing in particular how the military leveraged the crisis of war to replace the previous system of local militias with a nationalized institution that demanded the ultimate sacrifice of its citizens. Reinforcing the findings of previous studies, though adding many fresh twists, the principal wartime story is one of rapid Confederate state formation intensifying the obligations of citizenship.

This is a book more about ideas and structures than people, but one character does loom large: President Andrew Johnson. Mathisen expertly reveals how Johnson’s “obsession with loyalty tells us something vital about the way so many Americans understood citizenship as the country slowly emerged from the Civil War” (121). As wartime governor of Tennessee, Johnson used loyalty oaths to quash the rebellion and draw a firm line between friend and foe. And as postwar president, Johnson continued to hold loyalty above all else as the test of a true citizen. Positioning himself as the sole arbiter of citizenship status, he himself adjudicated applications for pardon from former Confederates. Once you declared yourself loyal to U.S. authority—or to Andrew Johnson, for the two blended in his mind—you were once more a citizen. Unless, of course, you had dark skin, in which case Johnson placed you outside the boundaries of U.S. citizenship.

The most significant and original scholarly contribution Mathisen makes is his argument about how the loyalty-citizenship nexus changed over time. During the war, for obvious practical reasons, loyalty became central to prevailing definitions of citizenship. If you were loyal, you were a citizen; if you were a citizen, you must be loyal. But after the war, partly because of the ease with which Andrew Johnson extended amnesty to former Confederates, and the disingenuousness with which they proclaimed themselves loyal, “the idea of loyalty itself underwent a slow devaluation” (137). After all, Johnson himself had never taken the concept as seriously as he claimed, welcoming patently traitorous Confederates back into the fold while marginalizing the largest group of southerners who had fought for the Union: African Americans. During and after the fighting, African Americans recognized they had a strong claim to citizenship status. During the war they had impeded the rebellion, and after it they continued to be the strongest southern proponents of Union authority. Accordingly, “The basic idea that loyalty in war would bring protection and preferential access to federal authority formed the core of black...