The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America

The Loyal Republic

CIVIL WAR AMERICA

Peter S. Carmichael, Caroline E. Janney, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editors

This landmark series interprets broadly the history and culture of the Civil War era through the long nineteenth century and beyond. Drawing on diverse approaches and methods, the series publishes historical works that explore all aspects of the war, biographies of leading commanders, and tactical and campaign studies, along with select editions of primary sources. Together, these books shed new light on an era that remains central to our understanding of American and world history.

The Loyal Republic

Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America

Erik Mathisen

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2018 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved

Set in Minion by codeMantra

Manufactured in the United States of America.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Portions of Chapter 6 appeared previously in Erik Mathisen, ‘It Looks Much Like Abandoned Land’: Property and the Politics of Loyalty in Reconstruction Mississippi, in After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South, ed. Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 77–97. Reprinted with permission of the University Press of Florida.

Cover photos: District of Columbia, Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln, ca. 1863–66 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division); Confederate POWs taking an oath of loyalty to the United States at the Rock Island Prison Barracks, ca. 1865 (Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mathisen, Erik, author.

Title: The loyal republic : traitors, slaves, and the remaking of citizenship in Civil War America / by Erik Mathisen.

Other titles: Civil War America (Series)

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2018] | Series: Civil War America | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017026943 | ISBN 9781469636320 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469636337 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Citizenship—United States—History—19th century. | Citizenship—Confederate States of America—History. | United States— History—Civil War, 1861–1865. | Allegiance. | Nation-state. | Freedmen— Civil rights—United States—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC JK1759 .M39 2018 | DDC 973.7/1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026943

For my parents and Joanna Cohen

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE A Government without Citizens

TWO The Rise and Fall of a Slaveholder’s Republic

THREE Schools of Citizenship

FOUR Defining Loyalty in an Age of Emancipation

FIVE Loyalty Under Fire

SIX It Looks Much Like Abandoned Land

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Map of Mississippi 43

Gen. Lorenzo Thomas 107

African American soldiers 111

A Proper Family Re-Union 120

Schoolchildren pledging allegiance 174

Acknowledgments

It is a humbling thing to put into words my thanks to all those who have helped to put this project between two covers. I have been bucked up, sustained, encouraged, and inspired by so many friends and family who have offered help at every stage. Each page of this book bears the fingerprint of some wise comment or act of kindness, and though a hat tip is a small gesture, it must do, at least for the time being.

I have had the great fortune to have been taught by inspiring scholars. At Northwestern University, Dylan Penningroth pushed me to think in the broadest possible terms about slavery and emancipation. At the University of Pennsylvania, Kathleen Brown, Phoebe Young, Walter Licht, Barbara Savage, Steven Hahn, Kathy Peiss, Daniel Richter, Rogers Smith, and the late Robert Engs all taught me how to ask good questions, seek complex answers, and do both with humility. The dearly departed Sheldon Hackney taught me more about collegiality and the art of the carefully posed question than any other teacher I have ever had the pleasure to know. His gentle words of encouragement still ring in my ears. And though I started this project after I had finished my time at Western University, so much of how I think about the past was shaped by the devoted teaching of Ian K. Steele, Margaret Kellow, and my old friend Craig M. Simpson, whose imprint on me remains indelible.

To begin the project, I benefited from the assistance of a variety of institutions. The University of Pennsylvania gave me the means to do much of the research. A fellowship from the Penn Humanities Forum proved a lifesaver, where Wendy Steiner, Jennifer Conway, Sara Varney, and Gary Tomlinson made me feel incredibly welcome. The Centre for European and International Studies Research at the University of Portsmouth provided a term’s worth of leave to start writing the early chapters and additional funds to finish research in Washington. My thanks to director Tony Chafer for seeing his way clear to scraping the funds together to help when it was sorely needed.

Archivists, librarians, and county court clerks also helped in all kinds of ways to crack open boxes of correspondence and point me in unforeseen directions. At the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Joyce Dixon-Lawson, Grady Howell, Anne Webster, and Clinton Bagley answered all my questions with patience and grace. Gordon Cotton at the Old County Courthouse in Vicksburg lived up to his status as a gracious host par excellence. Rosie Simmons all but gave me the keys to the archive of the Bolivar County Courthouse, and Jill Abraham persevered through my countless questions at the National Archive in Washington. To all of them I owe my heartfelt thanks.

None of this help would have amounted to much had it not been for a family who took me in when I was knee-deep in Mississippi archives. I had the pleasure to be all but adopted by Ben and Dorothy Puckett, who opened their home to a stranger and made much of this book possible with their incredible kindness and unmatched hospitality. By making a home for me in Mississippi, they made the lonely work of research a joy. My one regret about this book is that I did not finish it in time so that Ben could see it in print. My thanks to him and to Dero, as well as their daughter Carol, who introduced me to the Delta in style.

I tested out most of the ideas in this book at all manner of colloquia, conferences, and seminars. My thanks to participants at Queen Mary University of London, Keele University, the British Association for Nineteenth Century History conference, the University of Portsmouth, the Institute of Historical Research, King’s College London, the British Library, the University of Sheffield, the University of Sussex, the University of Cambridge, the British Association for American Studies, Temple University, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Richards Civil War Era Center at Pennsylvania State University for their interest and all of their advice. A wonderful opportunity to present work as part of the After Slavery Project in Belfast in 2008 led to close readings of my work from a fantastic group of scholars that included Brian Kelly, Bruce Baker, Michael Fitzgerald, Richard Follett, Thomas Holt, Moon-Ho Jung, and Susan O’Donovan. The meeting of the After Slavery working group also led me to Eric Foner, who has since offered the kind of support for a young colleague that more than eclipses his reputation as one of the class acts of the profession.

Doing American history outside the United States comes with its challenges, but it has been my great good fortune to have worked with and learned from so many fantastic British academics. To name them all here would be difficult, but my thanks go to Kendrick Oliver, Daniel Matlin, Patrick Doyle, Max Edling, Lydia Plath, Iwan Morgan, Adam Smith, Emily West, Uta Balbier, Alex Goodall, Martin Crawford, and David Sim, who have all, at one time or another, offered help and intellectual companionship. Though my time at the University of Sussex was brief, Robert Cook, Richard Follett, and Jarod Roll listened to early ideas and steered me clear of potholes. At the University of Portsmouth, Lee Sartain was a true brother-in-arms, and both Ann Matear and Emmanuel Godin helped me in ways only they can say. Finally, I had the pleasure of completing this book as a member of the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, where Miri Rubin, Colin Jones, and Julian Jackson were judicious with my schedule to allow me to complete the manuscript, and where so many colleagues have made my time there a wonderful experience and made this book better too. My thanks particularly to Katrina Forrester, James Ellison, Mark Glancy, Reuben Loffman, Mark White, Daniel Peart, Chris Moffat, and Patrick Higgins. And though they probably didn’t realize it, I tried out many of the ideas in this book on captive audiences of students, who took my classes over the years and pushed me to clarify so much of my thinking. My thanks to them for their interest and their passion. They have improved this book, and it has been a joy to learn with them.

It is a real honor that this project found a home with UNC Press, where Mark Simpson-Vos and Lucas Church patiently guided me through every stage of the publication process and made this book better at every point along the way. This book also joins the incredible collection of titles in the Civil War America series and has benefited from the editorial eye of Aaron Sheehan-Dean, who read every chapter with a careful eye and thoughtful encouragement. Stephanie Wenzel edited the manuscript with the utmost skill, and anonymous readers for the press helped me to clarify a lot of my thinking and saved me from several dead ends. Their thoroughness improved every part of this book. Portions of the sixth chapter of this book were drawn from a piece I wrote in After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South, published with the University Press of Florida. My thanks to the press for permission to include some of that chapter here.

At every point, I also learned from the many friends who listened attentively to weird ideas and offered sage advice all the same. Rene Alvarez, Dan Amsterdam, Erin Park Cohn, John Kenney, Clem Harris, Andrew Lipman, Kyle Roberts, Brian Rouleau, Nicole Maurantonio, Eric Taylor, Sarah Van Beurden, Julie Davidow, Will Kuby, Julia Gunn, Nicole Myers Turner, Jack Dwiggins, Adrian O’Connor, Larisa Kopytoff, Justin Behrend, David Sellers Smith, Aaron Astor, and Zara Anishanslin have all contributed to this book in ways large and small. My quasi-roommate in Philadelphia, Sarah Manekin, listened patiently and read a lot of what became this book. Both she and her husband, Ari Abramson, remain testaments to transatlantic friendship. David Brown, Adam Smith, Andrew Heath, James Ellison, Colin Jones, Frank Towers, and Bruce Baker read drafts of manuscript chapters and pushed me to hone some key ideas. Two graduate school friends went above and beyond the call of duty. Matthew Karp read several chapters and made each one better with his humor and panache. Gregory Downs read the entire project, pushed me to clarify my argument, and keep a tight grip on what was important. I owe them both a great deal.

My family have supported my every move with love and good humor, and this endeavor would have meant nothing without them. My mother, Gloria, my father, Brian, my stepfather, Doug, and my sister, Ashley, have encouraged me with countless conversations, and my extended family have taught me more than they know about what it means to keep at it and never give up. My in-laws, Micky and Jonathan, my brother in-law Richard and his wife, Karin, as well as Natasha and Simon Ruben and Miri Sigler, also helped in all sorts of ways, never tiring of asking about the book, even if they found my answers perplexing to say the least. And though they did not live to see it on a shelf, this book and my interest in history was stoked by my grandparents, whose life stories inspired me to be a historian and whose experiences taught me the value of hard work, perseverance, and laughter.

One of my biggest debts is to the mentor who encouraged me to think big and never settle. Stephanie McCurry’s passion, her counsel, and her sharp reading of my work never failed to amaze me. As anyone who has ever had the pleasure of being her student knows, seminars with Stephanie are feverish, intense experiences. They rearrange your mental furniture in the best way possible. She urged me to get lost in the archives and encouraged me to follow my own path. Her laser-beam focus refined so many of my ideas, and her friendship has remained steadfast. Through all the roadblocks along the way, she has truly been a champion. Her wit, wisdom, and honesty, the depth of her knowledge, and the arresting way that she views the past have influenced me in ways that are hard to calculate.

Finally, mere words do not do justice to all that I owe Joanna Cohen, the indomitable, loyal, side-splittingly funny, passionate, brilliant woman I share my life with. Her sharp eye improved every page of this book. Her creativity as a historian challenged me to think longer and harder about what I was doing and why I was doing it. Over the course of this project we have moved across an ocean, made a life together and a family as well. And even if Olivia and Jacob show no interest in what lies between these pages—beyond their potential for crayon scribblings—I hope that when they are grown they might read this one small part and know how much their mother has improved their father’s life, in all the ways that matter.

The Loyal Republic

Introduction

Late in February 1864, almost three years into the Civil War, five planters from the Mississippi Delta county of Bolivar were forced from their homes by a detachment of Confederate militia. Handcuffed, the men were made to watch as militia set to insulting the ladies, taking all the clothing and dry goods they could lay their hands on and any scant currency the soldiers found tucked away for safekeeping. The scene of armed men pillaging homes was hardly new in the Delta by the middle of the war. But this was no act of undisciplined looting. The militia had arrived that morning to dispense wartime justice. All five planters had been caught trading with the enemy. The raid was their punishment.

In the wake of the raid, the planters had few options and even fewer friends. Desperate, they drafted a petition to the governor of the beleaguered state government of Mississippi, begging him for his help. They claimed that the American occupation of their county had made it impossible for them to obtain the absolute necessaries of life from any portion of the Southern Confederacy not occupied & held by the Enemy. Without assistance, the planters doubted that they could survive the rest of the winter, let alone plant a crop that might sustain them for the year to follow. While they underscored their devotion to the Confederate cause, the petitioners stated that to keep their families from ruin and their slaves from running away, they had been forced to trade with American merchants in nearby Memphis. Exchanging cotton for sundries was a transaction that would have been interpreted by many, if not most, as an act of treason. They argued, however, that their hands had been tied. Necessity, they wrote, is said to have no law. Publicly shamed, they sought the personal protection of Mississippi’s governor, Charles Clark, a fellow planter from the county who they believed would not suffer his fellow citizens to be thus trampled upon. Suspect in the eyes of American occupying forces, suspicious to Confederate officials, and fingered as traitors by the neighbors in their occupied community, the petitioners had gambled with their loyalty and lost, perhaps more than they could appreciate. They had wagered not only their property but potentially their right to the protection of a state in a time of war. Their decision to cross lines and trade with the enemy had won them the derision of friends and the ire of their enemies. For dry goods, the planters from Bolivar had been left stateless, stripped of their rights as citizens in a war-torn South.¹

That desperate people might wrestle with their loyalties in a civil war will not come as a surprise.² What is interesting about these claims, however, are the broader questions they reveal about why two nation-states made such unsparing demands of loyalty from people living within their borders and how those demands redefined what it meant to be a citizen in a divided United States. This is a book about these questions. It is about how the Civil War encouraged the creation of two modern states and how that transformation changed how Americans understood their relationship to those modern structures of bureaucratic power. It is about how secession and a cataclysmic conflict of arms forced people to confront the rapid expansion of two national governments in their lives, and how that expansion and the obligations that those governments placed on people to be loyal created opportunities for some and foreclosed opportunities for others to lay claim to a place in two rapidly shifting body politics. It is a book that is at once about the everyday reality of making do in a time of war and about the abstract and often contradictory ways in which people reckon with the power of government. And it is a book that helps to explain why the United States fell apart and the materials that people used to knit it back together again, however imperfectly.

The study of loyalty has long been of interest to scholars of the Civil War. What has animated much of this literature is the question of whether certain people in particular places remained loyal to the United States or the Confederacy during the war, as part of the internecine fighting during the conflict that convulsed so many communities. This study builds on this work. It focuses more attention, however, on the ways in which loyalty—as a political act, a language, and a bundle of state policies—became part of a larger attempt to redefine citizenship and reckon with the power of nation-states, all at once.³ The story that this book tells, then, is of how loyalty became fused with ideas about what citizenship meant on both sides of the battlefield, at the same time as both American and Confederate nation-states grew in dramatic fashion. To survey these twinned developments, this book tracks how the experience of the Civil War altered the terms of citizenship by making loyalty the key to membership in two shifting body politics. Moving from high politics to conflicts over loyalty that emerged in one of the most important battlegrounds of the war, Mississippi, this book examines how people in and out of power, as well as two nation-states, clarified the obligations at the heart of modern citizenship. At the same time, this book also focuses on the actions of bureaucrats, military officials, secessionists, and slaves, all of whom attempted to reckon with the power of states by using a politicized language of loyalty. If the war altered the terms of the relationship between individuals and the nation-state, it also widened the terrain on which a postwar struggle over the shape of a new republic would be fought. Between the start of the Civil War and the tumultuous years that followed, Americans attempted to rebuild their nation on new foundations. To achieve this, they had to confront not only those who had severed the republic but also those who had been counted as human property when the war began. While it would not serve as the most durable of political tools, loyalty during and immediately following the Civil War would become an implement that sorted the patriots from the traitors and gave former slaves their most important means to secure a lasting bond with a postwar United States.

In taking up this history, this book makes several interventions. First, by focusing less on the rights of citizens and more on the obligations bound up with the title, this book charts a different course in the literature. It shows how nation-states and individuals attempted to clarify what it meant to be a citizen at a moment of profound change and why, over time, this concern slowly ebbed from debate. Second, in contrast to the story so often told about the Civil War as a conflict between Americans who merely disagreed about the future direction of the republic, this study shows just how much white southerners were counted as traitors by many in and out of government in the years that followed the war. Peeling back the layers of the Lost Cause that continue to obscure popular understandings of the Civil War and its aftermath, this book reveals an alternate narrative of national reconciliation that nearly sent the republic down a very different path. Third, by looking more closely at the possibilities that professions of loyalty presented to African Americans, who were not yet citizens when the war ended, this project highlights the canny ways in which freedpeople used loyalty (and the disloyalty of their former masters) to pry open the body politic to demand their place as citizens in a reconstituted republic. Though their efforts did not come without hazard or sacrifice, African Americans augmented a legal claim to citizenship with a powerful argument that their wartime loyalty to a republic that faced the greatest of challenges ought to win them a place in the nation’s body politic when the dust had settled. And finally, by connecting the history of loyalty to the various attempts made by people to understand the long shadow that two warring states would cast in their lives, this book reveals how state formation looked through the eyes of those who were witness to its development, and how ordinary people played a part in that process.

To make sense of how ideas and practices of loyalty and citizenship intertwined during the Civil War requires that we think in new ways about what it meant to be an American citizen or, at least, to think again about why Americans had such trouble coming to agreement about what the title entailed by the middle of the nineteenth century. Prior to the Civil War, Americans lacked a clear, national definition of citizenship and, by extension, had an equally unclear understanding of what connected them to the nation-state. While the national government possessed the potential to expand and cast a long shadow over many on the geographical and jurisdictional edges of American society before the war, citizens, individual states, and local communities enjoyed a closer connection to one another as part of a constitutional bargain that made the American federal system possible.⁴

It was not that Americans had no idea of what the nation meant to them. The rhetoric of revolution that suffused the early national period, the public demonstrations of national memorialization, and the swirling energy of a party system all connected Americans to a common taproot of republican belonging by the middle decades of the century. Moreover, at points throughout the republic’s early history, Americans had expressed their love and devotion to the nation, as something to be saved when threatened or as a bundle of ideas worth protecting. Times of war had called forth pledges of allegiance to ideals, if not to the government that had distilled some of them. But the obligations bound up with citizenship—the hard expectations that states could demand of people and what people could demand of states—lay buried beneath inchoate constitutional language and hazy case law. Americans were clear about what rights they enjoyed but less so about what tied them to the national state or what obligations the state could demand of them in return.⁵

The Civil War marked a sharp break in the relationship between citizens and the national government. In its wake, both American and Confederate nations demanded loyalty from persons living within their borders and extended the reach of the state into every corner of civic life and in unprecedented ways to secure it. Moreover, as the war bore down on people on both sides, demands for loyalty generated a politics of allegiance, a politics that allowed a variety of people to prove their value, lay claim to protections, and bolster their bid for a new kind of citizenship that they would help to fashion by the war’s end. By the time American forces began to make inroads into Confederate territory and certainly as Union policy sharpened its focus on emancipation as the price white southerners were to pay for their treason, loyalty emerged as the animating principle of wartime citizenship. The disloyalty of white southerners who had cast their lot with the Confederacy left them on the outside looking in, as Unionists on the ground and in Congress demanded retribution for the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers strewn on battlefields all over the country. Plans for a unified postwar future became infused with serious discussion about whether the disloyal Confederacy ought to be tied to the republic as a colonial possession and not as a collection of states equal in law with the rest of the nation. And as the war turned in earnest into a battle over emancipation, African Americans amplified their devotion to the United States to make the claim that their loyalty in war ought to secure for them the rights of citizens and the possessions of their former, disloyal owners. Over the span of only a few short, tumultuous years, Unionists, Confederates, and African Americans would come to terms with the chaos of war and the rapid development of warring nation-states by using loyalty as the lens through which they made sense of such dramatic, historic change. They and their governments would fashion new definitions of what it meant to be a citizen in a modern republic, one in which the obligations of loyalty that individuals owed the nation-state loomed particularly large.

The study of citizenship has long been the narrative thread that has bound the whole of the republic’s history: a story of struggle, disappointment, adversity, and perseverance that gives the nation’s past much of its propulsive force. In that narrative, the Civil War remains a major plot point, but the broad sweep of the literature has focused on the question of who did or who did not enjoy the constitutional rights of citizens. Envisioning the history of citizenship as a series of concentric circles in constant motion—expanding at some points, contracting at others—scholars track various groups into and out of the orbit of the body politic. Whether it was women who pressed to be counted, immigrants who struggled for inclusion, or African Americans who pushed for rights after the Civil War—or who marched for equal protection in the decades that followed—a focus on rights remains central to the study of citizenship.⁶

What has not been as well studied are the obligations at the heart of modern citizenship, and the reasons for this have a lot to do with how we conceive of citizenship in the modern era.⁷ As political theorist Carole Pateman observed decades ago, the contradiction at the core of modern liberal citizenship is such that the obligations that citizens owe modern liberal states are assumed. Liberal democracies focus on rights—to hold property or to elect representatives in government—rather than on the harder commitments that are bound up with living in a modern state. This focus clouds the study of citizenship, pushing the rights that citizens enjoy to the forefront, obscuring citizenship as an often fraught compact between individuals and nation-states. As a result, the relationship between citizens and states remains opaque, made manifest only at times of conflict, when the obligations of citizenship take precedence to safeguard the nation. If the organizing principle and animating power of the modern state is that it is both everywhere and nowhere in the day-to-day lives of citizens, wars crack open that paradox, allowing historians to trace more carefully the struggle for rights and the expectations that governments demand of those who live within their borders.⁸

While the study of citizenship remains one of the strongest undercurrents in American history, the history of the American state has only more recently received sustained scholarly attention. Part of the reason for this stems from the way that historians and political scientists have traditionally approached the topic: a doggedly comparative model of study against which scholars have set the American state alongside European ones and found the former wanting. More recent work has avoided this interpretive dead end. Scholars now resist measuring the formation of states against an ideal type and have examined the history of the American state on its own terms. With this reorientation, they have pushed back the rise to power of the American government from the early twentieth to the first decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time, more recent work has also focused on the potential capacity of the American state: its constitutional power, its reach across the continent, and its ability to knit the republic together. We now have a clearer picture of American statecraft, a more contextualized understanding of the point at which the nation-state expanded and a deeper appreciation of the economic, legal, and military apparatus that allowed the national government to grow.⁹

But scholarly work that has measured how and when the American state grew reveals very little about how Americans understood this change. Work that has focused due attention on the relationship between the growth of the national government and the protections it provided to the nation’s slave system has offered some important insights that make it clear that African Americans certainly understood all too well what state power meant. So too has work on Native Americans documented a long, intimate, brutal experience with the panoply of coercive powers at the disposal of government officials on the nation’s shifting frontier. Yet the reactions of people to the development of state power stand in the literature more as a set of inferences than a subject of focus. The result is a call without a response, an often-one-sided attempt to see like a state without paying closer attention to how people watched the state grow. What a focus on the Civil War reveals is the opportunity not only to examine the rise of not one but two nation-states but also to see how a variety of people made sense of this development. Moreover, examining this history in contested territories that both the United States and the Confederacy coveted lays bare a tumultuous story of state formation and its lasting effects.¹⁰

One of the best places to examine these transformations can be found in the Mississippi Valley. Few parts of the American South had a more bruising experience with civil war and state formation. Before the conflict, the region was the beating heart of the American plantation complex. By 1860, Mississippi’s plantations alone produced the lion’s share of the nation’s cotton crop, with only 11 percent of the nation’s slave population. Unsparing, ruthlessly efficient, and profoundly powerful, slavery in Mississippi was the institution that secessionists dreamed of when they closed their eyes: a system of black bondage guaranteed by white supremacy and a system of local, state, and federal governance that protected the institution and insulated slaveholders. By the middle of the Civil War, however, Mississippians collectively experienced the collapse of the state government, the hollowing out of the local power that had propped up the plantation system, the ebbing of Confederate authority, and the rapid development of the American state, bent on destroying slavery, that would come to occupy