Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South

Abstract

Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South. Edited by William A. Link, David Brown, Brian Ward, and Martyn Bone. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. Pp. viii, 302. $74.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-4413-2.) As the editors of this volume point out, studies of citizenship often focus too narrowly on the expansion and retraction of formal political and civil rights. By bringing together wide-ranging--some might even say eclectic--essays that look at notions of not only political but also social and cultural belonging, Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South delivers on its introductory promise to expand the conceptualization of what it meant to be American in the South during this pivotal century (p. 5). The essays are grouped both chronologically and thematically. The essays in the first section, covering the antebellum period, look at the contradictory meanings of citizenship that emerged in the slave society of the Old South. Individual essays in this section include Daina Ramey Berry's provocative exploration of the relationship between citizenship and commodification in the slave market; she argues that just as white southerners exercised their political and social status as buyers of human chattel, so too did enslaved people nurture a complex understanding of their worth and personhood through the prices placed upon their bodies. Instead of seeing citizenship and commodification as antithetical. Berry imagines the two as complementary, even mutually constitutive, conditions in a slave society. Similarly, Emily West's essay on 'voluntary' enslavement among free blacks examines how people lacking formal political rights nonetheless developed a deeply affective sense of belonging (p. 8). Freedom itself could be isolating for antebellum free people of color, West argues, especially when the threat of expulsion threatened familial separations (p. 66). To secure the affective bonds of love and kinship, some free blacks chose to follow loved ones into bondage, thereby complicating traditional liberal notions of freedom by denying that liberty was an unequivocal good that could not willingly be surrendered. These essays, along with two others on the idea of citizenship in proslavery ideology, offer insights into the intellectual and cultural worlds of the antebellum South that have heretofore been missing. The book's second section deals with the Civil War's impact on ideas of citizenship. Both James J. Broomall and Susanna Michele Lee examine postwar contestations over the role of gender and its meaning. Although focused on different groups within the postwar South, both essays argue for the importance masculinity played in the reconstruction of southern citizenship. Broomall's essay looks at the struggles of Confederate veterans to reconstruct their manhood, while Lee's essay examines how ideas of loyalty and citizenship converged for southern men making claims with the Southern Claims Commission. Military defeat made the process of reinventing their place within the southern social and political order much more difficult for Broomall's veterans than it did for Lee's Unionists, most of whom stayed at home during the war. …