<i>U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth</i> (review)

against African Americans. The historical focus on the 1863 draft riots, as well, centers on Irish American animosity toward African Americans. But Samito shows a number of confl uences and interactions among African Americans and Irish Americans. Samito demonstrates that at times Irish Americans and African Americans expressed concern for one another’s plights. Samito is never blind to tensions between these groups, although he may downplay them in an eff ort to show what the two groups shared. There is one facet of citizenship, however, that Samito neglects, and this arena is too important to ignore. Gender plays no role in his study, even though issues of gender are crucial to the secondary literature of the time period and to those who lived through it. When feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and when social reformers like Frances Willard defended women’s rights with anti-immigrant claims, they tapped into the gender bias of this new American citizenship. If military service was a prerequisite for establishing new parameters of citizenship, then women—whether African American, immigrant American, or native—were put in a bad position. Moreover, the rhetoric of citizenship was laced with masculine language, such as Frederick Douglass’s claim that African Americans would achieve their manhood by taking up arms. Scholarship by Nina Silber and Louise Newman could have been included to point out the gendered bases of the citizenship Samito fi nds constructed. Overall, this is an outstanding book. It off ers a terrifi c bottom-up approach to citizenship debates in the Civil War era and demonstrates the powerful role played by Irish American and African American men in creating new forms of American citizenship and nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century. It would be extremely useful in any course on the Civil War. edward j. blum