This essay considers the political personas of figures historicized by their own anti-governmental and decidedly excrescent performances of civic and political engagement. Tracing a winding path of Confederate spies’ ideological formation and performance of Southern citizenship during the period of American disunion and the Civil War, the paper argues that these individuals self-consciously framed and justified their performances of outlaw citizenship by relying heavily on both rhetorical and aesthetic performances of the mythologized civic republicanism long-associated in popular consciousness with the founding of the American republic.