The American Civil War and the Transatlantic Triumph of Volitional Citizenship

Abstract

Among the most far-reaching of the American Civil War’s consequences was the transformation of citizenship. Four years prior to the war, the Dred Scott decision categorically denied African American citizenship, not only in the slaveholding South but in the supposedly free northern states as well. Yet by 1868, slavery had been abolished nationwide, and the fourteenth amendment created the new constitutional category of national citizenship, guaranteeing equal legal protection to all citizens, whether black or white. There were, of course, glaring limitations to these gains. But there is no denying the fact that within eleven years Americans rebuilt the basic structure of citizenship. Moreover, the war itself had already begun to alter the nature of citizenship. In both the Union and the Confederacy, the exigencies of near-total war caused governments to make new demands upon the governed, while also magnifying people’s expectations of government. Policies such as taxation and conscription forced men and women on both sides to reexamine their basic conceptions of what it meant to be a citizen. The war and its aftermath, in short, led to a fundamental overhaul of the ideas and practices of citizenship in the USA.