Black activists continued to declare that they could be citizens by proclaiming themselves integral to the United States and seeking new ways to contribute to American communities. They exhibited their value in their states and in the nation and at the same time argued for specific legal protections. Their claims gave substance to the idea of the citizen, which they said entailed the obligations to work and to defend the nation’s ideals as well as rights of formal political access. The citizen status they constructed was available to black Americans. They made these claims at an urgent moment, as westward expansion, Indian removal, and the entrenchment of slavery threatened to make the United States an exclusionary empire in which power was reserved to white men. Black activists suggested that national progress need not be defined by slavery and racial exclusion, that African Americans could play a critical role in fostering the growth of the United States.74
Those activists were locked in struggle with a vocal faction of white writers who continued working to remove black people from the United States. In 1836, Pennsylvania lawyer John Denny published An Essay on the Political Grade of the Free Coloured Population, using law and history to argue that black people did not belong in the United States. John Marshall, the long-serving chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, reviewed Denny’s manuscript and wrote, “The sentiment it conveys, appears to me, to be perfectly sound”; that endorsement served as the book’s preface. With Marshall’s support, Denny proceeded to examine African Americans’ rights before and after the ratification of the Constitution, a thin legalistic veil for what was in essence a colonizationist tract. He offered his own definition of citizenship to exclude African Americans. Black activists sometimes claimed rights through a constitutional clause declaring citizens of one state must have “all privileges and immunities of citizens” in any other, but “the term citizen is no where defined in the Constitution,” Denny noted. Given the legal restrictions black people faced, “it would certainly be a perversion” to call them citizens, he argued. “It appears not a little strange” that more black people had not emigrated to Liberia.75 “He is tempted there by all the high privileges of political and civil liberty.” Black politics was high-stakes work because people like Denny were pushing for their legal exclusion and ultimate removal from the country, and legal authorities like John Marshall endorsed those projects. Colonizationists used the vagueness of the law to justify black removal, demanding that activists resist an American citizenship defined by whiteness.
But in the ways they challenged colonization and disfranchisement, black activists built their own racialized version of citizenship. They endorsed a restrictive standard of conduct in order to secure black legal belonging. People would earn citizen status by performing a set of behaviors dictated by uplift ideology. African Americans had to allay racist anxieties about black freedom to prove themselves worthy of citizen status in order to secure legal protections. For instance, Purvis and his fellow Pennsylvanians called for a single standard of conduct to determine black and white suffrage. But they accepted the idea that lawmakers could limit suffrage based on personal conduct. “We do not ask the right of suffrage for the inmates of our jails … but for those who honestly and industriously contribute to bear the burdens of the State.”76 Accused or convicted criminals were far from the only people who might justifiably be denied rights. “We would have the right of suffrage only as the reward of industry and worth. We care not how high the qualification may be placed. All we ask is that no man shall be excluded on account of his color.”77 Black activists in New York and Pennsylvania confronted voting restrictions by arguing that citizenship must secure political rights and economic opportunity. They built a narrow path for black people to secure rights. Their arguments helped perpetuate stereotypes that African Americans were predisposed to poverty or crime. Making personal conduct a barrier to the franchise echoed the belief that African Americans had to be prepared for freedom and legal protection. Activists’ arguments about how African Americans should work to earn citizen status perpetuated the ideas that had produced the extant, unequal racial order. The citizenship activists built remained qualified because it required qualification.
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A number of black people heeded the calls for uplift and agrarianism in order to confront disfranchisement and change their legal status. Those changes took concrete form in upstate New York on land belonging to the wealthy white abolitionist Gerrit Smith. In 1846, Smith chose to give 3,000 black New Yorkers land to settle in the Adirondacks. He hoped to create an agrarian community in which African American men would attain the $250 of real property necessary to vote. Smith was an abolitionist at heart, and he believed the settlement would help “loosen the b[o]nds of the enslaved.” Black activists Theodore S. Wright, Charles B. Ray, and James McCune Smith agreed to work as agents to recruit settlers. Any black person between the ages of twenty-one and sixty who did not already own land and was not a “drunkard” would be eligible for a 40- to 60-acre plot.78 Gerrit Smith expressed serious concerns about drinking among black New Yorkers. “I am grieved to learn, that intemperance has made such havoc among the colored people of this State,” he wrote. “Vain, and worse than vain, will be my grant of land to a drunkard.” He asked his agents to send a message to the settlers that would “inculcate the deepest abhorrence of intoxicating drinks.” Smith and his agents made absolute temperance a prerequisite for pursuing political rights in the Adirondacks.79
Wright, Ray, and McCune Smith included their patron’s remarks in their message recruiting potential settlers. They urged applicants to see the Smith Lands as an opportunity to improve “the heart of an almost free state” and to amend its “nearly equal laws.” Once the settlers began to till the soil, the inherent nobility of farming combined with the creation of interracial agrarian communities would elevate black New Yorkers in the minds of white observers. The land grants were an opportunity for a “practical vindication of our claims to manhood.”80 By cutting timber, building homes, and clearing land, taking on all of “the labour and privations incident to pioneer cultivators,” black people could embody a masculine American ideal and assert their place in a community of self-sufficient landowners.81 Black New Yorkers would enter the formal political community by owning land, and they would claim a place in an American cultural community by moving west and conquering the wilderness. That process demanded “the labour of self-denial”—thrifty habits to sustain new rural communities—including above all “TOTAL ABSTINENCE FROM ALL INTOXICATING DRINKS.” “The grant to you is free, untrammelled, unconditional,” the agents lied.82 Wright, Ray, and McCune Smith sought a specific type of person for the settlement, crafting a citizenship that included the vote and mapping a path to that status on the narrow route of thrift, industry, manliness, and temperance.
Willis Augustus Hodges was among those who heeded the call to the Smith Lands, continuing his lifetime of movement in search of opportunity. Hodges was born in 1815 to free parents in the Tidewater region of southeastern Virginia. As a child, his family endured a series of violent attacks by armed bandits. “No free person of color … was safe in person or property,” he wrote.83 Hodges said that “the friends of the American Colonization Society” had perpetrated those attacks in order to compel black Americans to emigrate. He felt connected to his “native land” and refused to leave the United States, but he did want to escape the