Unskilled laborers and artisans came not just from Germany but mostly from England, the Scottish highlands, and Ireland (nearly all Protestants). Rampant land speculation drew families—sometimes of substance—not only the single men who came to labor.25 By the time of the Revolution, most of the children and grandchildren of Dutch, French, German, and Swedish immigrants in the colonies spoke English and were otherwise indistinguishable from the children and grandchildren of English settlers, although in Albany, where the Dutch predominated, it was difficult to assemble an English-speaking jury, and several counties in Pennsylvania were overwhelmingly German-speaking.26 Hostility toward speakers of Dutch and German and toward the English-speaking Scotch-Irish, the newest large immigrant group, was widespread, but none of the newcomers were kept from easy naturalization or from participating in politics on roughly equal terms with the native-born. That such persons could be good citizens even though they were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, German Pietists, or English Quakers had become a commonly accepted idea.
Can Immigrants Learn New Republican Principles?
It was one thing to welcome immigrants to labor. It was quite another to welcome them as citizens. Even Thomas Jefferson wondered shortly after the Revolution if the new nation could accept large numbers of immigrants and maintain its republican principles. But the Pennsylvania ideal of equal rights for white newcomers had no more eloquent apostles than George Mason, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, all of whom came from Virginia, a state that held 40 percent of the slaves in America. Calling the principles that underlie the Declaration of Independence “an expression of the American mind,” “the genuine effusion of the soul of our country,” Jefferson was nonetheless uncertain that immigrants could learn those principles or practice them easily.27 “Our principles,” he wrote in 1781, “are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe,” being based on “a composition of the freest principles of the English Constitution, with others derived from natural right and natural reason.” Against these, “nothing can be more opposed than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet, from such, we are to expect the greatest number of emigrants.”
To underscore his concern about immigration as a potentially royalist or otherwise disruptive force, he wrote of immigrants that “they will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness … these principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its directions, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”
Issuing a challenge for generations to come, Jefferson asked, “May not our government be more homogeneous, more peaceful, more durable,” without large-scale immigration? He queried further, “Suppose twenty million of republican Americans [were] thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of a half million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here.”28 While skeptical about taking vigorous measures to speed immigration, Jefferson did not oppose it, however, and he later became a champion of easy naturalization, partly for partisan reasons, but also because as the nation expanded it needed more settlers.
Capitalism and territorial expansion were the driving forces behind a wide-open immigration policy. But Americans continued to worry about the potentially divisive effects of immigration. In the early seventeenth century, Boston’s John Winthrop had been concerned about religious purity; in mid-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, Franklin was concerned about linguistic and cultural unity; in 1781, Jefferson’s apprehension about immigration was based on a different idea of membership, that Americans were united by a common set of political beliefs. But how could one test the newcomers for political ideology?
Many states required some sign of commitment to the political principles on which the new experiment in self-government depended before admitting immigrants as members of the polity. New York, in language close to that used later in the naturalization law of the federal government, required that any settler who wished to become a citizen “abjure and renounce all allegiance and subjection to all and every foreign king, prince, potentate and state, in all matters ecclesiastical as well as civil.”29 Georgia required an applicant for citizenship (all male) to produce from a circuit or county court judge where he had last resided a certificate verifying “his … Attachment to the liberties or Independence of the United States of America, and also of … Honesty, Probity and Industry.”30 Some states required signs of commitment beyond an oath of allegiance renouncing old and accepting new political principles before they gave newcomers full membership. Virginia naturalized all white persons who had lived in the state for two years and had “evinced a permanent attachment to the state, by having intermarried with a citizen of the Commonwealth, or a citizen of any other of the United States, or purchased lands to the value of one hundred pounds therein.”31
Pennsylvania allowed every male foreign settler of good character who took an oath of allegiance to acquire land or other real estate and after a year to become a citizen entitled to all of the rights of natural-born subjects, “except that he shall not be capable of being elected a representative until after two years of residence.”32 Other states made the privileges of naturalized citizens somewhat less than those for the native-born. A white male in South Carolina who resided in the state one year and swore allegiance to it could become a citizen and obtain the privilege of voting for the legislature or the city corporation of Charlestown, but was not eligible for high office unless authorized by a special act of the legislature. In Georgia, a new citizen could not vote for the legislature or hold any office of trust until the completion of a seven-year residence.33 But these limitations, and others imposed on the rights of Jews to vote in Maryland or to hold office in New Hampshire, were exceptions to the general rule. In contrast to England, where only Protestants who took the sacraments in the Church of England were eligible for naturalization, white male immigrants regardless of their religious affiliation were placed on a clear, fast track to full membership in nearly all of the states of the new nation by the 1830s.
The issues of immigration and naturalization—those crucial questions of membership—were little discussed at the constitutional convention, but such discussion as there was took place within the context of Jefferson’s concern for inviting as members only those who believed in the American idea of self-government and who were capable of practicing it. Although