This dissertation is the first scholarly study to comparatively analyze the mutinies of Anglo, immigrant and African American soldiers in the Union Army. Those collective and individual military protest actions were part of the war's capacity, in the words of historian David Blight, to "unleash, reinforce, and reshape nineteenth century values and attitudes." I contend that mutinies reveal Civil War volunteers who possessed a conception of soldier rights derived from membership in free associations and the citizenry's long history of local control. While republicanism and the market contributed a language and ethos, it was native-born Anglo soldiers' real practice of self-government in peacetime that led them to demand its continuation in the interstices of military law during wartime. At the same time, though hardly acknowledged by Anglos, northern free blacks took part in the associational and print culture of their day and conceived of themselves as active citizens. Their military protest actions continued their practice of self-government even as it risked being labeled as disloyalty. European immigrants who volunteered to prove their allegiance to the republic could resort to mutiny if they detected a violation of their soldier rights. Yet, these moments actually served to prove the very fitness for citizenship originally questioned by nativist opponents before the war. Most surprisingly, the mutinies by emancipated Southern blacks drew on their culture of confrontation and resistance during bondage to assert their new rights under the rule of law as soldiers of the United States. When they protested unequal treatment while in uniform they took their first steps in using the war to achieve political and civil equality in American society. My project analyzes the proceedings of general courts martial as well as relevant manuscript collections, regimental histories, and newspapers to construct a web of popular constitutional citizen action both at home and in the military against perceived violations of Americans' right to rule themselves in association with one another. Regardless of ethnic origin, citizen-soldiers' mutinies are a window on their campgrounds and drill fields as another theater of the war where they debated its grand questions of loyalty, self-government, Union, and freedom.
