The Limits of Loyalty: Ordinary People in Civil War Mississippi
The Limits of Loyalty: Ordinary People in Civil War Mississippi
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Abstract
In The Limits of Loyalty, Jarret Ruminski examines the lives of ordinary people in Confederate Mississippi to show how military occupation and the ravages of war tested the meaning of loyalty during the American Civil War. The extent of southern loyalty to the Confederate States of America has long been a subject of historical contention that has resulted in two conflicting conclusions: southern patriotism was either strong enough to carry the Confederacy to the brink of victory or so weak that the Confederacy was doomed to crumble from internal discord. Mississippi, the home state of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, should have been a hotbed of Confederate nationalism, but the reality was more complicated. This study breaks the “weak/strong” Confederate loyalty impasse by examining how people from different backgrounds–women and men, white and black, enslaved and free, rich and poor–negotiated the shifting contours of loyalty in a state where Union occupation turned everyday activities into a potential test of patriotism. While the Confederate government demanded total national loyalty from it citizenry, this book focuses on wartime activities like swearing the Union oath, illegally trading with the Union army, and deserting from the Confederate army to show how Mississippians acted on multiple loyalties to self, family, and nation, thereby thwarting the government’s attempt to enforce nationalism at any cost. Ruminski also explores the relationship between loyalty and slavery to demonstrate how an internal war between slaves and slaveholders defined Mississippi’s social development into the twentieth century.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
- One “A Contest of Passion, Not Reason”: Secession, War, and the Roots of Protective Nationalism
- Two “Well Calculated to Test the Loyalty of Her Citizens”: Property, Principle, and the Oath of Allegiance
- Three “Tradyville”: The Contraband Trade and the Problem of Loyalty
- Four “Prey to Thieves and Robbers”: Desertion, Exemption, and the Limits of Military Loyalty Enforcement
- Five “I Believe That ‘the Institution’ Is Extinct”: Loyalty in the Master-Slave Relationship
- Conclusion “Allegiance and Protection Are and Must Be Reciprocal”: The Aftermath of War in Mississippi
- Epilogue
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End Matter
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