More than merely a legal status, citizenship is also a form of belonging, giving shape to a person's rights, duties, and identity, exerting a powerful historical influence in the making of the modern world.

The pioneering essays in this volume are the first to address the evolution and significance of citizenship in the South from the antebellum era, through the Civil War, and down into the late nineteenth century. They explore the politics and meanings of citizenry and citizens' rights in the nineteenth-century American South: from the full citizenship of some white males to the partial citizenship of women with no voting rights, from the precarious position of free blacks and enslaved African American anti-citizens, to postwar Confederate rebels who were not "loyal citizens" according to the federal government but forcibly asserted their citizenship as white supremacy was restored in the Jim Crow South.