New from the University of Georgia Press:
Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri, by Sharon Romeo (University of Alberta). A description from the Press:
Gender and the Jubilee is a bold
reconceptualization of black freedom during the Civil War that uncovers
the political and constitutional claims made by African American women.
By analyzing the actions of women in the urban environment of St. Louis
and the surrounding areas of rural Missouri, Romeo uncovers the
confluence of military events, policy changes, and black agency that
shaped the gendered paths to freedom and citizenship.
During the turbulent years of the Civil War crisis, African American
women asserted their vision of freedom through a multitude of
strategies. They took concerns ordinarily under the jurisdiction of
civil courts, such as assault and child custody, and transformed them
into military matters. African American women petitioned military police
for “free papers”; testified against former owners; fled to contraband
camps; and “joined the army” with their male relatives, serving as
cooks, laundresses, and nurses.
Freedwomen, and even enslaved women, used military courts to lodge
complaints against employers and former masters, sought legal
recognition of their marriages, and claimed pensions as the widows of
war veterans. Through military venues, African American women in a state
where the institution of slavery remained unmolested by the
Emancipation Proclamation, demonstrated a claim on citizenship rights
well before they would be guaranteed through the establishment of the
Fourteenth Amendment. The litigating slave women of antebellum St.
Louis, and the female activists of the Civil War period, left a rich
legal heritage to those who would continue the struggle for civil rights
in the postbellum era.
And a blurb:
This is a landmark book. Rather than simply
resulting from the work of lawmakers who ratified the Fourteenth
Amendment during Reconstruction, the concept of ‘citizenship’ emerged
out of the innumerable actions carried out by African Americans in the
slaveholding states during the Civil War. Romeo shows that in war-torn
Missouri, black women petitioned Union officers for their freedom, filed
lawsuits against their former owners in military courts, and claimed
widows’ pensions after the deaths of their veteran husbands. By
documenting black women’s activism in a state where the Emancipation
Proclamation did not even apply, Romeo forces us to reexamine precisely
how and why constitutional and legal change occurred during this
period.” —Timothy Huebner
More information is available here.
