Government Lawyers and the Making of the Federal Citizen

Scholars of American political development have noted that under some conditions, people of color have gained significant rights advances in the United States during and immediately after wartime crises based upon their crucial contributions to the war effort. This paper considers this process specifically with respect to the period after the Civil War, but looks at how government lawyers marshaled their resources to generate and defend a new conception of national citizenship. However, these ideas played out in two legal spheres: first, in the struggle to articulate and defend black men's rights during Reconstruction, and second, through the struggle to suppress Mormon polygamy, which was understood to be incompatible with American citizenship. The juxtaposition of these two struggles reveals much about how governmental choices to invest resources and to pursue goals relating to federalism shaped emerging ideas about what a citizen was. Gender, race, and the performance of sexualized civic roles greatly affected how the government would reinforce rights and when they would stop these campaigns. The paper is part of a larger project