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This book looks at various ways freedom was both gained and lost during Reconstruction. Its unifying theme is the expansion and contraction of the many and varied manifestations and meanings of freedom. The central issue of the that shaped Reconstruction was freedom—but not always in the way we might expect. The essays explore the frequent “gaps” between legal and political gains supposedly secured in the statute books and people’s actual lived experience. Even after legal emancipation, formerly enslaved people faced a lack of economic freedom dependent on equal educational access and employment opportunity. Freedom was not just a question of being enslaved or not enslaved; nor was it just about access to the ballot. Freedom to be educated; freedom to testify in court; freedom from imprisonment; even economic opportunity was a form of freedom. The book takes an expansive approach to studying Reconstruction. This book reaches beyond just the American South, to consider Reconstruction’s impact on freedoms in border states, on northerners, in Brazil, and even in Australia. It also expands the traditional periodization beyond 1876, because Reconstruction—when seen as a series of conflicts in which freedoms were gained and lost—doesn’t end in 1876 but one might argue continues to this day. Approximately 150 years after this crucial period in American history—so often overlooked in popular memory—a group of scholars come together to demonstrate that struggles over the meaning of freedom not only defined Reconstruction but also continue to shape America to this day.

New Perspectives on the Union War explores, at a wide array of points along the political spectrum, the many shapes patriotic sentiment took in the loyal states during the Civil War. The essays provide new insights into well-known figures such as Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, political philosopher Francis Lieber, African American author/entrepreneur Elizabeth Keckley, abolitionist Abby Kelly Foster, New York governor Horatio Seymour, and Attorney General Edward Bates. They also offer the perspectives of common soldiers, of the partisan press, of the clergy, and of social reformers.

This collection of ten essays explores the contested meanings of patriotismin the Civil War North. The words “loyalty” and “duty” vibrated across Northern society but what did they mean? How were they to be demonstrated? The central goal of this study is to scrutinize how notions of loyalty were debated and defined under the pressures of a long and destructive war. The chapters within eavesdrop on conversations about loyalty in many contexts within Northern society. Some of those settings offer a familiar frame of reference, surveying the newspapers, pamphlets, letters, and speeches that evidence partisan definitions of loyalty. These scholars, however, strain to hear those voices not just in the statehouses and capital buildings but in the churches, colleges, workshops, city streets, military camps, and even bedrooms of ordinary northern people. What emerges is not a unified consensus on loyal actions and values but a patchwork of experiences in which the meaning of loyalty was often stretched and strained for differing and sometimes conflicting purposes.

Our Country explores northern evangelical thought and sentiment in relation to the concept of Union during the Civil War era. The book complements our understanding of northern motivation during the Civil War and contributes to a fuller understanding of the eventual “failure” of Reconstruction to provide a secure basis for African Americans’ equal inclusion in American society. In short, the book contends that mainstream northern evangelicals consistently subordinated concern for racial justice to an overarching understanding of the Union as a specifically Christian nation that existed in a covenantal relationship to God under their proprietary care. The book joins recent scholarship that gives primacy to the Union, while it challenges interpretations that understand northern evangelicals primarily in terms of abolitionist millennialism. Mainstream evangelicals did not enter Reconstruction with the primary aim of achieving racial justice. Rather, they entered Reconstruction expecting to see the emergence of a speedily restored, prosperous, and culturally homogeneous Union, a Union strengthened by God through the defeat of secession and the removal of slavery as secession’s cause. That restored Union was to be one in which evangelical religious and political assumptions would be even more culturally dominant than they had been during the antebellum years. Focused on much else besides racial justice, northern evangelicals acted as a brake on the abolitionist vision for a racially equitable and inclusive American Union throughout the entire Civil War era.

This book is a study of soldiers who served in Irish regiments during the American Civil War and the communities that supported them. Tracing the organization and service of self-proclaimed Irish units from Connecticut, Illinois, and Wisconsin, this study transitions the historical debate away from the motivations and sentiment of “Irish America”—a national cohesive entity with similar experiences and attitudes—and towards “Irish Americas,” men and women connected to both local as well as national communities. Such an approach allows us to better understand how adopted citizens, their comrades in arms, and their friends and neighbors experienced the Civil War era. As a social history of the Civil War, Shades of Green explores the experiences, motivations, political identities, and ideologies of Union soldiers and civilians with a particular focus on the impact of the war on immigrants in smaller communities scattered throughout the North. Utilizing an array of sources including muster and descriptive rolls, federal census data, and veterans pensions, this book argues that Irish regiments were as much the expressions of local enlistment patterns as they were reflections of a commitment to a broader Irish American national identity.

In its brief seven-year existence, the Freedmen’s Bureau became the epicenter of the debate about Reconstruction. Cognizant of its responsibilities, partisans fiercely debated its necessity. Historians continued that debate about the agency’s policies and necessity. But historians have only recently begun to focus on the Bureau’s personnel in Texas, the individual agents termed the “hearts of Reconstruction.” Not ignoring individual experiences and attitudes, this work focuses on them at a more personal level. Where were they from? Were they wealthy? Were they married or single? Did the agency prefer the young? Did agents have military experience or were they civilians? What occupations did the Bureau draw from? The answers illuminate the type of man Bureau officials believed qualified—or not—to oversee the freedpeople’s transition to freedom. Officials in Texas desired those able to meet emancipation’s challenges. That meant northern-born, mature, white men from the middle and upper-middle class, and generally with military experience. Dispelling the idea of a uniform Bureau policy, this work shows that each agent, moved by his sense of fairness and ideas of citizenship, gender, and labor, represented the agency’s policy in his subdistrict. They protected freedpeople’s labor and established their right to set up a household (and protected within in it). They worked to recognize their marriages, and, despite the practice of apprenticeship, they tried to establish their rights as parents to their children. These men further ensured the former slaves’ right to an education and right of mobility, something they never had while in bondage.

This book examines the development and application of character, a code of honor that motivated the gentleman class of the North during the Civil War Era. The “New Brahmins,” college-educated men who constituted the elite of northern society, learned this code of behavior in their classrooms and social settings. Character encompasses ideas of proper masculine behavior, nationalistic beliefs, and a leadership class identity that these highly educated men attempted to live by. The Civil War represented both a crisis and opportunity for these young men. Viewing secession as a threat to their vision of an American-led world where representative government and free labor dominated, these members of the North’s professional class also saw the war as an opportunity to prove themselves and demonstrate their character to society at large. Travelling through the South as junior officers in the Union Army, New Brahmins evaluated the people and society they came across using the nationalist and character-based framework that they had adopted for their own code of conduct. Additionally, these men identified traits of character in their adversaries and this recognition helped promote reconciliation between the gentleman classes of the two sections after the conflict.

This study examines the ways in which black Richmonders, black Mobilians and their white allies created, developed and sustained a system of African American schools following the Civil War. As partners and circumstances changed over the twenty-five year period, Green argues that urban African Americans never lost sight of their vision of citizenship in their struggle for educational access and legitimacy; and consequently, they successfully enshrined the African American schoolhouse as the fundamental vehicle for distancing themselves from their slave past. The African American schoolhouse embodied black Richmonders’ and black Mobilians’ participation in the redefinition of American citizenship and transformation of the physical landscape wrought by Confederate defeat. Green contends that the end of Freedmen’s Bureau resulted in the expansion and not contraction of African American education. By demanding quality public schools from their new city and state partners, black Richmonders and black Mobilians found additional success through the employment of African American teachers, creation of normal schools, and development of a robust curriculum. Ultimately, Green concludes that their collective inability to resolve school funding challenges resulted in the demise of Educational Reconstruction and the ushering of a new phase of African American education in 1890.

This edited collection of essays brings together the work of senior and junior scholars to demonstrate how social and cultural tools complement intellectual history. George Fredrickson’s pioneering work, The Inner Civil War (1965), has long been the seminal text for scholars interested in the intellectual history of the American Civil War Era. The historians in this volume broaden the scope of what has traditionally been considered intellectual history. By including works about the history of medicine, art history, Catholic history, education, ethnicity, and identity, these contributions demonstrate how intellectual history informs many different fields within the study of nineteenth-century U.S. history. Additionally, the volume expands the definition of which individuals in society are considered intellectuals: Health reformers, sketch artists, college professors, lawyers, and religious leaders are considered alongside Fredrickson’s writers and business leaders. Following up on Fredrickson’s queries, this volume examines whether the Civil War forced out or strengthened old notions and ideas, supported or suppressed democratic individualism, and challenged or maintained ideas about nationalism. In short, the essays in this collection ponder whether the Civil War changed how northerners viewed themselves, others, and individuals’ roles in American society.