Birth, Belief, and Blood: Gaining and Losing Citizenship during the American Civil War

Among the seemingly infinite number of oddities concerning the American Civil War is the fact that the conflict was fought between two entities that called themselves nations but had no definition of national citizenship. This paper highlights three major types of citizenship claims—birthplace, parentage, and allegiance—and then spends most of its space providing evidence from three sets of sources that have been underused by historians and that offer opportunities for further research. One set is the responses given by sailors and civilians on board ships that were seized as “prizes” by the U.S. naval blockade during the Civil War. Each person on board a seized ship was asked a series of questions about birthplace, citizenship, allegiance, and family. The resulting answers yield no clear single vision of citizenship, but they do indicate the primacy of allegiance. The second set of sources are interrogations of prospective Black civilian witnesses in U.S. military trials of civilians and soldiers held by military courts in the states of the South. The questions that officials asked of prospective Black civilian witnesses, and, even more so, the answers provided by the Black respondents (some of them men, some women), reveal, again, the primacy of allegiance in considerations of citizenship. The last set of sources is a set of claims made to confiscation and sequestration courts by those who had been deemed enemies and had had their property seized. In making their claims as to why they were true Confederates or true Unionists, the claimants, most white but some black, offered competing narratives of citizenship that, again, put allegiance above all.