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

Historians have long debated the development of the American state and the meanings of American citizenship, and Erik Mathisen reveals an alternative to birthright citizenship that never transpired. In The Loyal Republic, Mathisen argues that Americans during the Civil War era used conceptions of loyalty as a political act, a language, and a set of state policies, to define who was entitled to the rights of citizenship in two growing nation-states. A diversified primary source base bolsters Mathisen’s analysis. Contemporary newspapers and periodicals, state conventions, the Congressional Globe, Freedmen’s Bureau papers, as well as personal papers and correspondence of soldiers, politicians, and many others, help Mathisen show that Americans reacted to the growth of the Confederate and U.S. nation-states by making loyalty an obligation of citizenship.

Mathisen begins before the Civil War, explaining that while Americans had defined citizenship loosely, secessionists and slaveholders envisioned a government in which loyalty bound white men to their states. Secessionists’ vision of citizenship failed in war-torn Mississippi, which Mathisen uses as a case study. The case study effectively reveals how, in the face of the collapse of the state government and U.S. occupation, loyalty to a national government—the Confederacy—delineated white men’s citizenship status. Future scholarship might explore how Mississippians’ visions of citizenship compared to those in other Confederate states or in states and territories in the West, where state formation looked different.

Loyalty also contributed to the Confederate state-building process. The Confederate military fostered white men’s loyalties and developed a new kind of national citizenship. Sermons, military manuals newly written for the Confederacy, and punishment for desertion taught soldiers to become loyal citizens to the national government. Meanwhile, the U.S. government expanded its power out of concern for the nation’s survival against disloyal persons and emancipation. Newly freed African Americans insisted that their loyalty to the United States had earned them citizenship.

After the war, Americans and the U.S. government thought loyalty ought to be the benchmark for citizenship, but worried that it was too difficult to measure. Although Congress justified depriving white southerners of citizenship for their disloyalty immediately after the war, President Andrew Johnson believed that individual pardons and the act of taking an amnesty oath could reunite former Confederates. African Americans reminded the United States of their loyalty in order to claim rights like land ownership after emancipation. While discussing these claims, Mathisen refers to disenfranchised southerners as “colonial subjects” of the federal government (p. 123). He does not explore whether occupation after a failed rebellion against the United States differs from colonial conquest or distinguish between white and black southerners’ relationship to the nation as colonial subjects. As historians continue to examine how southern Reconstruction and U.S. imperial ventures in the West affected citizenship and state sovereignty, it may be worthwhile to reconsider the meanings and implications of the idea that white southerners were colonial subjects. Such research may give more insight into the relationships among loyalty, race, and citizenship that Mathisen explores.

When the Fourteenth Amendment enshrined birthright citizenship into the U.S. Constitution, African Americans gained citizenship but lost one of their most powerful tools to claim the prevailing rights of citizenship. Loyalty faded as a litmus test for citizenship by the mid-1870s, Mathisen concludes, but never completely disappeared. White Americans continued to assert their loyalty to the U.S. in debates over the place of foreigners in the United States. By establishing loyalty as one of the obligations of citizenship, Mathisen successfully unites historiographies on the U.S. states, the concepts of loyalty and citizenship, and the Civil War era. The Loyal Republic is essential for historians interested in these topics as well as immigration.