Jarret Ruminski's The Limits of Loyalty: Ordinary People in Civil War Mississippi is a volume which strives to provide fresh insight into a much-debated subject – the nature of Confederate loyalty. Specifically, the book seeks to move beyond the idea that Confederate citizens held either “weak” or “strong” attachments to their nation, a binary that has typified a good deal of work on the Civil War South, and instead present a more complex picture by appreciating the multiple layers of loyalty that Mississippians held. Understanding the important role of allegiances beyond that to nation, according to Ruminski, “can explain why the Confederacy can seem both united and divided, why some historians think it should have lasted longer, and why others marvel that it lasted so long against such steep odds” (6).

The book comprises five chapters, which are more thematic than chronological. Chapter 1 explores Mississippi's path from secession to war, arguing that the tensions, anxieties, and uncertainties following Abraham Lincoln's election created an environment in which patriotism could, and would, flourish. During this formative period for the Confederacy, the author claims, protective nationalist ideals came to the fore. Protective nationalism advocated “a total devotion to the state by its component parts through the mustering of all human and material resources to work toward the singular goal of achieving Confederate economic, social, and cultural independence” (9). In short, protective nationalism necessitated the prioritization of one's loyalty to nation above all else. Such a demand seemed plausible for many ordinary Mississippians in 1860 and 1861, prior to the escalating sacrifices the war would later require. Protective nationalism would remain central throughout the war to the ways in which ardent Confederates understood the conflict, and thus it remains central to Ruminski's later chapters because it became the (rather high) benchmark against which the behavior of citizens would be judged.

The heart of the book, chapters 2, 3, and 4, focusses on a series of wartime activities that were conceived by Confederate authorities as evidence of questionable loyalty at best and downright treason at worst. Closely analyzing Mississippians who swore an oath of loyalty to the Union, who illegally traded across Union lines, and who deserted from the Confederate army, respectively, these chapters enable the author to elaborate on the centrality of loyalty layers; for protective nationalists, these actions were seen as straightforward evidence of either Union or Confederate allegiance, or an individual's macro loyalty, but Ruminski posits that such behavior was, in fact, often just as much shaped by the micro loyalties that the state's citizenry held to self, family, or locality. The Union and Confederate nation-states strove to compel and enforce national allegiance by expanding their infrastructural reach but “neither state fully succeeded in this goal, revealing the limits of their expanded powers” (190). The Limits of Loyalty thus poses some probing questions for scholars who emphasize the strength of both Confederate nationalism and the Confederate nation-state.

Loyalty, as a concept, remains central to the book's final chapter on the master–slave relationship. Mississippi's white slaveholders demanded that their slaves demonstrate an unconditional loyalty to them as their masters, but the circumstances of war enabled the enslaved to act on a variety of their own loyalties, often to the detriment of both their masters’ and the Confederacy's interests. Behavior ranging from working slowly, poorly, or not at all to fleeing to Union lines were interpreted by slaveholders as a form of personal betrayal, and this, for Ruminski, is a critical point. By viewing the actions of their slaves as primarily disloyalty to the white master class and not to the Confederacy, slaveholders posited themselves as the foremost enforcers of white supremacy. Racial hierarchy in Mississippi, then, was to be defined and contoured at the local level, meaning that the death of the Confederate nation would certainly not mean the death of white Mississippians’ desire to control the now formerly enslaved.

As should be clear from the above, The Limits of Loyalty is a book that is not afraid to address the big, challenging questions posed by the Civil War era or the nineteenth-century US South. Indeed, Ruminski should be commended for producing a volume that is not only deeply researched but thoughtful and theoretical in its approach to its subject(s). The discussion of the layered nature of human loyalty is particularly insightful, and situates this work among other recent research, including my own, that has endeavored to move beyond the “strong”-versus-“weak” paradigm in attempting to understand Confederate allegiance. Ruminski's analysis of the nation-state did, however, leave me with further questions that might have been more fully addressed in the book. For instance, we are told that the power of the Union and Confederate governments was inadequate at times to compel or maintain the loyalty of Mississippians, but is this not, in part at least, a product of the divided and contested nature of the state during the war? As Ruminski acknowledges (112), parts of Mississippi following Union invasion were contested territory, territory in which neither Confederate nor Union authority could be deemed absolute. This fact surely had ramifications for the nation-state, its infrastructure, and its reach into the lives of its citizens. And, moreover, one might also ponder whether any nation-state, ever, has been able to fully achieve or enforce the protective nationalist ideal.

Notwithstanding these quibbles, Jarret Ruminski has produced a thoughtful and thought-provoking account of how ordinary people navigated the vicissitudes of war in Mississippi. In telling this story, though, he also provides us with a good deal more; The Limits of Loyalty is replete with valuable observations about loyalty, nationalism, and race in mid-nineteenth-century America and accordingly deserves a wide readership.