The Rise and Fall of a Slaveholder’s Republic

When southern states seceded from the United States, a fiery argument held that white southerners’ love of their home state would translate without trouble into love for a new southern nation. As a consequence of a Confederate nation that grew in size and power to fight a modern war, however, a southern nation would in time swallow southern states whole. This chapter focuses on Mississippi, where Governor John Pettus imagined a state government that would maintain its sovereignty and the loyalty of the populace. As he would discover, however, a combination of Union incursions into the state and the development of the Confederate nation, would together sap Pettus’ government of its power.

Epilogue

Though the fusion of loyalty and citizenship in Civil War America proved short lived, the mark that it left on the republic would endure. While former Confederates would benefit from the uncoupling of loyalty from citizenship by the later decades of the nineteenth century, the treason at the heart of the Civil War and the collective memory of that conflict would live on every time a politician waved the memory of the war before the electorate in a bid for votes. The national state would experience a hollowing out of its wartime powers in the decades that followed the Civil War, but the experience of Reconstruction would set the nation against individual states. And for more than a century after the war, former slaves and their descendants bore the hardship and galling discrimination in the nation’s military, to prove and prove again their allegiance to the United States through their service as soldiers in war.

It Looks Much Like Abandoned Land

This chapter examines the many ways in which loyalty became part of a struggle for property, a struggle that would have profound consequences for the shape of Reconstruction in the Mississippi Valley. The chapter examines how state-sponsored emancipation worked in lockstep with the wartime seizure of property to create an environment within which loyalty to the United States gave worthy individuals claim to their possessions and left disloyal traitors with the flimsiest of holds over their land, their homes, and the black laborers many once owned. African Americans seized on the language of loyalty to claim a meaningful freedom for themselves and knit their families together again. The twinned power of allegiance and property nearly proved the undoing of white supremacy in the state. In the claims and counterclaims of black and white alike, what emerged was potentially the most radical edge of American emancipation: a bold attempt to give to former slaves the property of their disloyal former owners. In this, the collective stepping back from the most revolutionary of Reconstruction measures also spelled the slow erosion of loyalty, leaving former slaves without the means to claim anything more than political rights.

Loyalty Under Fire

By the middle stages of the Civil War, few members of Congress had become more forthright in the defense of the nation-state’s power, or more determined to fuse loyalty with citizenship, than Andrew Johnson. This chapter examines Johnson’s short-lived career at the helm of Reconstruction, focusing on the kind of loyalty Johnson imagined as the key to postwar citizenship and on the pleas of whites in Mississippi for pardon.

Schools of Citizenship

Conceived in war, the Confederate States of America was a nation-state built around its military. As this chapter argues, military service quickly became fused with ideas about Confederate citizenship, and the military became a site where faith in the national cause melded effortlessly with religion and where white southern men were schooled in how to become soldiers and citizens, all at once.

Introduction

The Civil War marked a turning point not only in the history of the republic, but the history of citizenship in the United States as well. But there is more to this moment than might appear on the surface. What this book stakes out are a new set of questions about what it meant to be a citizen, how Americans thought about it, and just how much the rapid development of two warring nation-states brought the relationship between citizens and states into such sharp relief. By placing ideas about obligation at the center of a history of citizenship during the Civil War era, The Loyal Republic charts new ground.

A Government without Citizens

From the early nineteenth century until the Civil War, Americans were at odds over a fundamental concept: what does it mean to be an American citizen? Political change, sectional tensions, the development of abolitionism and reform movements and more, all forced Americans to confront the notion that while the relationship between themselves and the states of their birth were well-established, the connection between citizens and the nation-state was hazy at best. This chapter surveys the period between the 1830s and the 1860s and focuses attention on the contradictory ways that Americans defined themselves as American citizens.

Defining Loyalty in an Age of Emancipation

Beginning at the start of the war, the growth of the American state worked in tandem with concerns about the threats to that state’s survival from disloyal persons, all of which generated a rapid expansion of state power. By the middle of the Civil War, ideas about loyalty had coalesced around a new plan for the occupied South, a plan in which white southerners, shorn of their citizenship, would become colonial subjects of the American state. At the same time, the doctrine of emancipation created opportunities and challenges for African Americans, who grabbed the idea of loyalty as a key to their inclusion in the republic. Looking at how freedpeople both encouraged and challenged U.S. policy as soldiers and laborers, the chapter examines how officials came to realize that any future for the United States in the Confederate South lay in providing some measure of protection for loyal African Americans, in contrast to white southerners, whose loyalty was suspect.