The Civil War and the Transformation of American Citizenship ed. by Paul Quigley (review)

Citizenship in the Civil War era remains one of the richest areas of study in the field. As Paul Quigley and the authors in this collection ably demonstrate, work on citizenship remains as vibrant as it is precisely because historians have not approached the topic narrow-mindedly. With admirable disregard for simple questions or a stock collection of characters, the authors make it clear that the history of wartime citizenship was uneven and up for grabs.

Though the title of the volume suggests otherwise, the essays in this collection posit that the Civil War did not transform ideas about or practices of citizenship as much as the war altered the course of the republic in a series of overlapping historical transformations. Organized thematically and focused, as studies of citizenship in the period so often are, on highlighting what people on the edges of American society did to lay claim to the rights of citizens, the essays track forward and backward across the same rough chronology, offering fine-grained insights throughout.

As Elizabeth Regosin and Tamika Nunley demonstrate in two beautifully written essays, African American women sought both the clarification of their status and the right to press for citizenship, at the point of contest between themselves and the American government. In both essays, the political imaginativeness of freedwomen’s claims dovetails with more recent work on the subject, while both authors show a keen awareness of the darker coercion between the individual and the federal state that colored this relationship. Many of the authors in this collection also plumb the jurisdictional and geographical margins of a wartime state. Earl Maltz, Jonathan Berkey, and Claire Wolnisty each examine the ways definitions of citizenship were defined, refined or, in Wolnisty’s case, where Confederate citizens were permitted the license to carry on their identification with a failed state as part of a wartime white Southern diaspora in Latin America. As Maltz argues in his essay on Native and Chinese Americans, the fashioning of new definitions of citizenship forced difficult questions of Native American loyalties and the issue of whether new migrant groups shared a culture with established American citizens, even as the ground was shifting beneath everyone’s feet.

A focus on margins and marginalized groups leaves little room in the collection for stories from the political center. Despite all that historians know about those in Congress with the power to enact sweeping legislation on citizenship, only Lucius Wedge’s study of Andrew Johnson pushes back at the traditional narrative of wartime and Reconstruction citizenship in the halls of American power. Wedge argues that Johnson’s religious convictions about wartime loyalty and an imagined postwar republic were a key part of the future president’s worldview. While the collection’s focus on the edges of the wartime nation does not diminish the authors’ insights, new work on citizenship could conceive of its history as not only a conflict between center and periphery but something akin to a feedback loop. The faint edges of this loop can be discerned in the essay by David Williard, who emphasizes how ideas about work and labor among white Southerners in the postwar period influenced thinking about citizenship in the defeated South. Williard argues that politics during Reconstruction “acquired a profoundly reciprocal character in which victorious constellations of political interests possessed the power to reshape the electorate that chose them,” giving former white Confederates a powerful weapon to use in battles with African Americans over control of the levers of power (194).

As Paul Quigley argues in his introduction, and Laura Edwards in her afterword, the study of citizenship during the Civil War era was the product of a profound historical reimagining: a rethinking, redefinition, and reformulation of peoples’ relationship to government. It was in the overlapping chaos of a federal system and in the spaces among and between these institutions that ideas...