Slavery and War in the Americas: Race, Citizenship, and State Building in the United States and Brazil, 1861-1870 by Vitor Izecksohn

Abstract

Slavery and War in Americas: Race, Citizenship, and State Building in United States and Brazil, 1861-1870. By Vitor Izecksohn. A Nation Divided: Studies in Civil War Era. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 251. $45.00, ISBN 978-08139-3585-0.) Slavery and War in Americas: Race, Citizenship, and State Building in United States and Brazil, 1861-1870 artfully compares how wartime recruitment refracted both on state-local political dynamics and on of slavery in United States and Brazil during Civil War and Triple Alliance War, respectively. More specifically, book explores how black enlistment, including free and freed men, affected broader social and political legacies of conflicts. A professor of U.S. and Latin American history at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Vitor Izecksohn works from archival collections in both United States and Brazil. The product is a balanced and well-structured study that is sure to stimulate passionate debates in U.S. and Brazilian classrooms on workings of race and citizenship in two largest slave nations in Americas. Beginning with a comparative overview of how military traditions informed citizenship narratives in both places, Izecksohn draws out two baseline differences that will guide his later thinking about each war's consequences. First, he argues that prior to need for mass mobilization, in United States in militias was considered an honorable obligation, well suited to citizens, whereas the Brazilian vision of military service was derogatory (p. 11). Izecksohn posits this contrast in ideological terms, linking militia service in United States to political traditions of strong local power. In Brazil, however, where political power remained more centralized, seigneurial legitimacy was actually demonstrated through finding exemptions from military obligations. These differences in how local power was constructed in turn shaped effects of mass recruitment and slave enlistment. The second key difference pertains to race and relationship to slavery and citizenship. Izecksohn highlights widespread enrollment of free people of color in Imperial [Brazilian] army and notes that its American counterpart remained a segregated institution (p. 11). This, too, should have been explained in ideological terms. The impetus for interracial narratives of belonging in Brazil, as well as possibilities for free Afro-Brazilians to meaningfully engage in public life, was, in fact, ideological and not demographic. …