A great deal of recent Civil War scholarship has moved beyond battlefields to consider the tremendous changes military conflict wrought in American peoples’ lives. Civil War Citizens is a solid addition to this literature. The collection explores the ways immigrants and nonwhite people experienced the war, and emphasizes two often conflicting impulses: the desire to protect ethnic community interests while simultaneously proving loyalty to a war-torn nation. In seven chapters, each focussed on a particular “outside group” (3), authors encourage a reconsideration of the meanings of identity, loyalty, and citizenship in this tumultuous period.

Stephen Engle's chapter, “Yankee Dutchmen,” opens the work with an insightful analysis of these themes in the lives of German immigrants during the Civil War. There was no single German American identity at the outbreak of the war, but perception and circumstance combined to forge that unity. During the war, many Americans outside the urban North had their first experiences with Germans, whom they saw as monolithic because they shared a language. Simultaneously, life together in Union regiments “raised [Germans’] ethnic consciousness” (34), while it heightened other Americans’ awareness of German difference. Strikingly, these changes coincided with the vigorous pursuit of inclusion in an American community. Many German soldiers proclaimed their desire to fight as a way to prove their loyalty to – and win a place within – the nation. In doing so, they often linked American patriotism to a concern with Germany. Dedicated to the principles rather than the place, they framed the American Civil War as a struggle for “the kind of Republic many had hoped to establish in Germany” (16). Engle does a remarkable job of capturing these and other complex issues of identity, loyalty, and the place of Germans in the United States.

Susannah Ural, the book's editor, and David Gleeson also offer excellent contributions, with chapters on Irish Americans in the Union and Confederacy respectively. They both reveal the powerful influence Irish heritage had on decisions to join an American war. Ural traces an arc of Irish American support for the Union. When the war began, many Irish Americans embraced combat both as preparation for a freedom fight in Ireland and as the work of preserving the United States as a destination for future immigrants. These same loyalties eventually led many to reject the war. Emancipation and attacks of Irish American soldiers like George McClellan made it seem as if the war was creating “a nation that could no longer be their home” (117). Gleeson shows that many Irish Americans supported the Confederacy because they saw its fight against “Northern aggression” as analogous with Irish resistance to British tyranny. Both authors emphasize immigrants’ efforts to use military service – and postwar narratives of wartime sacrifice – to demonstrate loyalty and find a place in their new communities.

Other valuable chapters include those on Native Americans by William Evans and African Americans by Joseph Reidy, each of which effectively points to the challenges of multiple loyalties and highlights the strong connections between struggles on the battlefield and on the home front. In some cases, though, contributions lapse into a presentation of facts without fully elaborating on their implications. Chapters on Jews and Germans in the Confederacy present a wealth of information on these peoples’ wartime experiences, but leave unanswered the question of how they influenced the war and the nation more broadly. Home fronts and battlefronts were inextricably intertwined in this moment. Scholars must consider war as an experience that is always both endured and influenced by soldiers and civilians.

In addition, all of these authors might have asked more critical questions about citizenship as an unstable concept and the ways particular “outside groups” defined and pursued that status. For instance, what did it mean for women that military combat became the chief means to prove one's loyalty and be recognized as a citizen? What did it mean to be a citizen, and how did race and ethnicity shape the ways people envisioned status?

Despite some reservations, Civil War Citizens should garner a wide readership among scholars interested in the war, the problem of citizenship, and the marginalized groups that take center stage in its chapters. The work will encourage scholars to examine what it meant to be an American citizen in 1861 and how the process of war changed that meaning. The collection's authors thus greatly improve our efforts to understand the people involved in the rupture and rebuilding of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.