Edited by Paul Quigley
The meanings and practices of American citizenship were as
contested during the Civil War era as they are today. By examining a variety of
perspectives―from prominent lawmakers in Washington, D.C., to enslaved women,
from black firemen in southern cities to Confederate émigrés in Latin America―The
Civil War and the Transformation of American Citizenship offers a
wide-ranging exploration of citizenship’s metamorphoses amid the extended
crises of war and emancipation.
Americans in the antebellum era considered citizenship, at
its most basic level, as a legal status acquired through birth or
naturalization, and one that offered certain rights in exchange for specific
obligations. Yet throughout the Civil War period, the boundaries and
consequences of what it meant to be a citizen remained in flux. At the
beginning of the war, Confederates relinquished their status as U.S. citizens,
only to be mostly reabsorbed as full American citizens in its aftermath. The
Reconstruction years also saw African American men acquire―at least in
theory―the core rights of citizenship. As these changes swept across the
nation, Americans debated the parameters of citizenship, the possibility of
adopting or rejecting citizenship at will, and the relative importance of
political privileges, economic opportunity, and cultural belonging. Ongoing
inequities between races and genders, over the course of the Civil War and in
the years that followed, further shaped these contentious debates.
The Civil War and the Transformation of American
Citizenship reveals how war, Emancipation, and Reconstruction forced the
country to rethink the concept of citizenship not only in legal and
constitutional terms but also within the context of the lives of everyday Americans,
from imprisoned Confederates to former slaves.
About the Editor
Paul Quigley is
James I. Robertson, Jr., Associate Professor of Civil War Studies at Virginia
Tech and the author of Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South,
1848–1865.
ISBN 978-0807168639, LSU Press, © 2018, Hardcover, 256 pages,
Notes at the end of each essay & Index. $47.50. To purchase this
book click HERE.
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