Some leaders believed that care should be taken to prepare newcomers by extending the waiting period for naturalization and/or holding office. George Mason, in arguing that no male person be qualified for election to the House of Representatives until he had been a citizen for seven years, was afraid that a rich foreign nation such as Great Britain might send over hostile or at least monarchical persons to infiltrate the legislature. Gouverneur Morris argued that the requirement for admission for election to the Senate should be fourteen years, saying that there are degrees of hospitality one ought to give the stranger. Morris was afraid that newcomers would retain attachment to the interests of the countries from which they emigrated, and engage in what much later would be called ethnic lobbying. “Admit a Frenchman into your Senate,” he said, “and he will study to increase the commerce of France.”36
Eventually, a residency requirement of seven years was established for election to the House, with an additional two years for the Senate (on the ground that the upper chamber has a direct responsibility in foreign affairs and two more years would provide even more time to wean immigrants from their foreign loyalties). The only other distinctions made in the Constitution between native-born and naturalized citizens was that the newcomers would not be eligible for the presidency. The basic questions of a waiting period and other requirements for naturalization itself were not included in the Constitution but were left for Congress to establish in a uniform rule of naturalization in 1790.
When Congress debated the issue no one challenged the proposal to restrict naturalization to white persons, and nothing was said about establishing religious, cultural, or linguistic tests for citizenship, making the terms of membership for whites unprecedentedly liberal, while excluding dark-skinned persons altogether. The argument over the length of the period of residency required before being eligible for citizenship was between a short period of one or two years versus none at all. One advocate of no waiting period, a congressman from Virginia, maintained, “We shall be inconsistent with ourselves, if, after boasting of having opened an asylum for the oppressed of all nations … we make the terms of admission to the full enjoyment of that asylum so hard as is now proposed. It is nothing to us, whether Jews or Roman Catholics settle amongst us; whether subjects or kings, or citizens of free states wish to reside in the United States, they will find it their interest to be good citizens.”37
No one in the debate quarreled openly with the idea that Jews or Roman Catholics might make good citizens. Although several states required officeholders to be Christians, no one pressed that position on the convention. Even liberal Pennsylvania required officeholders to swear that they believed in the divine inspiration of the Old and New Testaments, but there would be no such test for federal officeholders. Religious affiliation was not to be the criterion either for holding office or for becoming citizens in the new republic. But several congressmen wanted to make sure that whatever religious beliefs newcomers might profess, they had sufficient time to learn the political principles of the republic before becoming naturalized citizens. Thomas Hartley of Pennsylvania thought that admission to citizenship should be delayed long enough for immigrants to acquire a “firm attachment to the government.” Michael Stone of Maryland wanted a term of residence prior to naturalization long enough to guarantee that aliens would “have acquired a taste for this kind of government.”38
On the other side were those who thought any period of residence unnecessary. Even two years was too long for Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania, who contrasted his confidence that immigrants would become Americans easily with the more conservative view of New Englanders. Maclay, forgetting the widespread enmity of Pennsylvania’s Anglo-Americans toward German immigrants only a few decades earlier, said that “we Pennsylvanians act as if we believed that God made of one blood all families of the earth; but the eastern people seem to think that he made none but New England folks … these are the men who affect the greatest fear of being contaminated with foreign manners, customs or vices.”39
The Pennsylvania Approach Prevails: Equal Rights Regardless of Religion or Nationality
The Pennsylvania approach to procuring worker-citizens prevailed, as the final passage of the 1790 act put newcomers on a swift and unobstructed single path to what amounted to virtually full citizenship by establishing a residence period of two years in the U.S. prior to admission as a citizen (one year in the state where the applicant resided) and proof that “he is a person of good character” who will “support the Constitution of the United States.”40 But the Virginia idea of maintaining a noncitizen labor force also was continued. There would be no entry into the political community by persons of color unless states themselves allowed native-born free blacks to participate.
As immigrants continued to arrive, new arguments were generated about their ability to learn quickly and practice effectively the art of self-government. German Pietists fleeing forced military service, aristocratic French escaping revolutionaries in France, French planters running from the black revolution in Santa Domingo, and Irish men and women escaping from poverty and English domination each had their critics. Although some were disliked because of differences in language, religion, or cultural customs, the arguments about immigration and naturalization again usually were couched in Jeffersonian terms. How capable were the new immigrants of self-government, it was asked again in 1795 when the issue of naturalization was debated in Congress for the second time. Federalist leaders, concerned because most of the newcomers were voting for the Jeffersonians, had a simple partisan reason for desiring a longer residency requirement prior to eligibility for naturalization. Many also clung to the Massachusetts idea that civic membership should be based, as in other societies, on a close affinity of religious and cultural background to those who already were citizens so as to guarantee a national unity of values and sensibilities. Senator Maclay was correct in accusing most New England Federalist leaders of wanting only immigrants who were linguistically, culturally, and religiously like themselves. The New Englanders tended to think of themselves as charter members, the original Anglo-Americans, but when Thomas Sedgewick of Massachusetts argued for a longer residency requirement, he did not do so on the basis of the old Puritan idea of religious and cultural exclusivity, but that the newcomers, having been subjects of “despotic, monarchical and aristocratical” governments would not be qualified “to participate in administering the sovereignty of our country … as soon as they set foot on American ground,” an argument expressed by Jefferson fourteen years earlier.41
By 1795, Jefferson and his followers had totally repudiated the charter member mentality, tending to accept the Pennsylvania view that European immigrants could learn to become good citizens regardless of their religious or national backgrounds once they came under the influence of the American environment. Jeffersonians wanted to make certain that immigrants with aristocratic backgrounds would convert to the political ideology of republicanism before admitting them to citizenship, and they pushed through a naturalization bill that required any applicant to “make an express renunciation of his title or order of nobility,” comparable to a stipulation in the old New York statute. It was a measure necessary, argued William B. Giles of Virginia, to keep aristocrats from subverting republican government.
Some congressmen, though averse to test oaths, also were concerned that fugitive nobility would come to the United States in such numbers