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

Among its many other transformational effects, the Civil War exploded the agreed-on understandings of citizenship that had guided the nation from its founding. But secession did much more than nullify the principle of federalism. On both sides of the contest, central government officials presumed to exercise a direct relationship with citizens of the states that would have been unthinkable before Fort Sumter. In the process, prewar assumptions and practices were turned upside down or discarded, often to be replaced by entirely new ones. Erik Mathisen explores this transformation through the dual prisms of loyalty and military service, with a broad focus on the two warring nations and a narrow focus on Mississippi.

As war clouds gathered, Mississippi's officials, like their counterparts in the other seceded states, quickly learned how antebellum traditions of minimal government undermined the cause of independence. Incapable of paying the troops they had recruited, state leaders appealed to Richmond, not realizing that the central government's support would come at a cost that extended well beyond command over the men in arms. Mathisen views the Confederate army as "a school of citizenship" wherein soldiers learned "powerful lessons about not only the sacrifice necessary to securing the independence of their nation but also the coercive power of a modernizing state" (66). Early in 1863, as Union forces pressed toward Vicksburg, Mississippi rapidly descended to the status of "a failed state," unable to protect or provide for its citizens or command their loyalty (57). The central government captured the allegiance of Mississippi's citizens and steeped them in loyalty that long outlived the Confederacy's own failure.

Secession and war taught powerful lessons about the relationship between loyalty and citizenship to Northern leaders as well. Most strikingly, the steadfastness of black Southerners prompted policies of confiscation and emancipation, which cleared the way for the eventual enlistment of nearly two hundred thousand black men into the army and navy. Their service made a strong case for awarding citizenship, eventually including male suffrage. Mathisen ably traces this progression, but he inexplicably passes up the opportunity to explore how black regiments also functioned as schools of citizenship.

White citizens of the Confederate States posed two challenges for federal policymakers. Those who remained loyal to the Union merited assistance, if not deliverance, but converting promises into reality proved difficult even in Tennessee, where President Abraham Lincoln had appointed US senator Andrew Johnson as governor and then chose the staunch unionist as his 1864 running mate. Luring Confederate sympathizers posed even greater challenges. By the end of the war, a prevalent strain of Northern thought held that disloyal whites would be treated as colonial subjects and loyal blacks as citizens. Then Lincoln's assassination and Johnson's elevation to the presidency intervened. From the dawn of secession, Johnson had viewed rebels as traitors, but he never conceded black citizenship, keeping his ears closed to African Americans' demands for equality. He devised an ingenious way to repair the broken link between loyalty and citizenship in the case of white former Rebels. Employing the presidential pardon, he placed himself as a magnanimous father while requiring of each applicant "a deeply personal act of capitulation and supplication" (122). At his hands, "the idea of loyalty itself underwent a slow devaluation" (137).

Mathisen's analysis wavers a bit when he introduces the element of property. He argues that freedpeople "deployed the politics of loyalty in a bid for citizenship, through the possessions they believed were rightfully theirs," such as churches they had built before the war (147). But he does not fully explain whether such claims for property were intended to bolster the case for economic independence, respectability, and citizenship or the other way around. On the other side of the property coin, he correctly observes how even disfranchised former slaveholders used legal and extralegal means...