Remaking the Republic
AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Series editors:
Brian DeLay, Steven Hahn, Amy Dru Stanley
America in the Nineteenth Century proposes a rigorous rethinking of this most formative period in U.S. history. Books in the series will be wide-ranging and eclectic, with an interest in politics at all levels, culture and capitalism, race and slavery, law, gender, and the environment, and regional and transnational history. The series aims to expand the scope of nineteenth-century historiography by bringing classic questions into dialogue with innovative perspectives, approaches, and methodologies.
REMAKING
REPUBLIC
Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship
Christopher James Bonner
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-8122-5206-4
For my parents, Ramona Bonner and James Bonner
CONTENTS
Introduction: Making Black Citizenship Politics
Chapter 1. An Integral Portion of This Republic
Chapter 2. “Union Is Strength”: Building an American Citizenship
Chapter 3. Nations, Revolutions, and the Borders of Citizenship
Chapter 4. Runaways, or Citizens Claimed as Such
Chapter 5. Contesting the “Foul and Infamous Lie” of Dred Scott
Chapter 6. Black Politics and the Roots of Reconstruction
Epilogue: The Enduring Search for Home
INTRODUCTION
Making Black Citizenship Politics
What is striking is the role legal principles have played throughout America’s history in determining the condition of Negroes. They were enslaved by law, emancipated by law, disenfranchised, and segregated by law; and, finally, they have begun to win equality by law.
—Thurgood Marshall, “Reflections on the Bicentennial
of the United States Constitution,” 1987
John Brown Russwurm sat at his desk on a winter day in 1829 to write an essay explaining why he could no longer live in the United States. Russwurm had been born in Jamaica in 1799, the child of a white American man and a woman of African descent. Little is known of his mother. She may have been free or enslaved, may have been African or of mixed parentage, and may have died in childbirth or lived to see her son leave Jamaica when he was eight years old. Russwurm’s father gave the child parts of his name and his privilege, sending young John to school in Montreal in the early 1800s, then inviting his black son to live with his white family in Portland, Maine.1
Russwurm was an immigrant, a background that likely shaped his feelings about the possibilities of the United States. When he graduated from Bowdoin College in 1826, he delivered a commencement address that praised the accomplishments of the Haitian Revolution and the republic it created. Haiti, Russwurm said, revealed the “principle of liberty” that dwelt in men of all colors. Russwurm considered studying medicine and emigrating to Haiti to help the country become “an empire that will take rank with the nations of the earth.” But by the spring of 1827, he had put down roots in New York, where he connected with a community of black activists that included Samuel Cornish, a minister and abolitionist who had been born to free black parents in Delaware. Together, Cornish and Russwurm transformed African American politics when they launched Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first black newspaper, printing its first issue on March 16, 1827.2
From the paper’s office at No. 5 Varick Street, blocks away from the Hudson River in lower Manhattan, Russwurm and Cornish had considered the “many schemes … in action concerning our people.”3 These included a plan to forcibly remove black people to the West African colony of Liberia, the pet project of a group of white politicians who established the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816. For most of the life of Freedom’s Journal, Cornish, Russwurm, and their correspondents denied that the ACS would solve the problems free black people faced. That changed abruptly after Cornish left the Journal in Russwurm’s hands.4
In February 1829, the new editor-in-chief announced his decision to leave the United States in terms that surprised and alarmed other activists. “Our views are materially altered,” Russwurm wrote, declaring that he was now “a decided supporter of the American Colonization Society.”5 He believed black people had reached an impasse in working to change their status in the United States. “We consider it a mere waste of words to talk of ever enjoying citizenship in this country: it is utterly impossible in the nature of things.”6 In September 1829, John Brown Russwurm sailed for Liberia and never returned to the United States.7
While Russwurm did not believe black citizenship was possible in the United States, other African Americans understood that the meaning of citizenship was unsettled and that this instability might help them change their legal lives. Free black activists in the northern states publicly challenged racial exclusion by calling themselves citizens, invoking the status to claim specific rights. Because the terms of citizenship were uncertain, the status was a flexible and potent tool for African American politics. Black protest spurred conversations about citizenship among state and federal lawmakers, most notably Chief Justice Roger Taney’s 1857 effort to deny that any black person