Remaking the Republic. Christopher James Bonner

closed the meeting with an “Address to the Free Colored People,” they made clear their central political goals. They wanted to confront legal exclusion, and they described the convention as part of a project “to unite the whole family of free colored people in interest and feelings” in that pursuit. In this way, activists looked to make the project of building American citizenship a collective black project. The convention could bring together a broad body of politically engaged people. Perhaps a large gathering could show the American public that black activists were invested in democracy and fit to take part in the nation’s formal political processes. The Philadelphia convention was part of a string of such meetings held across the Northeast and Midwest in the early 1840s designed to foster a cohesive activist community and present collective arguments on black Americans’ rights.²

      What we know about this meeting comes from a statement of its “views and object,” bearing the names of Jehu Jones, Nathan W. Depee, Benjamin Pascal, Jonathan C. Miller, and Leonard Collins. “Union is Strength,” they proclaimed, and their present circumstances demanded “unanimity of action.” They looked to continue the work of their activist predecessors by denouncing the American Colonization Society’s removal program, and they warned of persistent, intense efforts at black removal that were taking place in “a neighboring state.”³ They might have been thinking of the aggressive and organized Maryland colonizationists, who separated from the national body of the ACS in the late 1830s and established a shipping company to link them with their colonial settlement in Liberia.⁴ For the Philadelphia delegates, colonization was an attack on black people’s belonging in the United States, a project that could prevent African Americans from claiming citizenship by denying them physical space in the country. In response, they urged black people to pursue “our national rights, as they are secured to all citizens, in the Constitution.”⁵ The delegates’ speech raises important questions about black politics in the 1840s and African Americans’ developing arguments about citizenship. Why did those men place so much emphasis on black unity in that particular historical moment? And what did it mean for them to envision citizenship as a protection of “national rights” under the federal Constitution?

      Those Philadelphia delegates, along with their counterparts in other locations throughout the early 1840s, made the transformative claim that citizenship should be a national status connecting individuals to the federal government. In the early nineteenth century, few American people felt that the national government should play an important role in their lives, and many worried that centralizing legal authority might tread dangerously close to monarchy or tyranny. Not only had the nation’s founders refused to define citizenship in its founding documents, but also in the antebellum period, individual Americans typically did not see the federal government as an important force for shaping their legal lives.⁶ The framers of the Constitution left unsettled the question of whether ultimate sovereignty resided in the states or the federal government. By extension, it was unclear where a person should turn in seeking an authority to secure and protect his rights. The precise terms of both state and national citizenship and the specific ways those separate legal identities related to one another were uncertain. The legal structures under which American people lived were defined most robustly at the state level. But the program of colonization compelled black people to argue that they belonged in the nation, and as they did so, black activists put forward new ideas about citizenship as a relationship between individuals and the federal government.⁷ The activists in Philadelphia therefore called for fundamental legal change that would expand the reach of the federal government, bind individuals more firmly to its power, and yield a unifying legal status under which American people would live.

      In the early 1840s, faced with state laws limiting their rights and denying them protections, black activists sought a relationship with the federal government that would make real the egalitarian language of the nation’s founding documents. They reimagined the relationship between individuals and American governments, both state and national. Activists made claims on different governments based on the specific concerns they faced at particular political moments. While they issued strategic appeals to state governments, black northerners also saw legislators and judges on the state level constructing specific barriers to black rights, defining state citizenship in ways that were often built around racial exclusion. Given the specificity of some state-level restrictions, activists appealed to a national citizenship because of the broad, soaring, egalitarian language in the nation’s founding documents. In so doing, black people answered questions about who had access to the law and made claims that framed the federal government as the chief arbiter of individuals’ rights and protections.⁸

      Black activists’ calls for a unifying citizen status both mirrored and influenced their desire for a political community knit together by shared concerns. They worked to revive the national convention movement, presenting themselves as a “family of free colored people,” in order to seize the power of numbers to promote their political aims. Activists thus linked their investment in a national community of citizens to their desire for a unified community of African Americans. But in that project, they experienced the challenges of ideological conflict over both the past and future of black people in the United States. Their work to craft a national citizen status emerged amid arguments over the geographic expansion of the nation and the future of slavery and freedom in the country. Most critically, black activists argued among themselves about the best approach for the fight against slavery, an internal struggle that limited their efforts to make collective claims about citizen status.

      * * *

      Black men took to the sea in large numbers in the antebellum period. The ocean, they felt, could be a means to economic security as well as a place of physical and psychological liberation, and African Americans came to comprise about one-fifth of the people who worked for northern merchants in the burgeoning shipping industry. That the sea provided black men with so much freedom alarmed white southerners already on edge due to rebellion among the enslaved. In 1822, Denmark Vesey’s planned revolt sparked anxieties and led to a wave of prosecutions and executions in South Carolina. That same year, state lawmakers adopted the Negro Seamen Act, requiring that when vessels made port, black sailors had to disembark and be detained in jail.⁹ From the 1820s through the outbreak of the Civil War, seven southern states would follow South Carolina and pass laws restricting black seamen.¹⁰ Southerners passed these laws because they wanted to use the power of their state governments to protect their enslaved property and their own lives, but laws generated intense opposition among northern lawmakers, abolitionists, and black Americans. The ensuing debate touched on crucial questions about the nature of citizenship and the relationships between individuals and American governments, and these arguments represent the range of ideas lawmakers held about federalism, citizenship, and black people’s legal status.

      In 1824, a man of color named Amos Daley was jailed when his ship made port in Charleston. Daley, with his captain’s support, claimed that he had been born free in Rhode Island and was a citizen of the state. He said that because of the Constitution’s Privileges and Immunities Clause, he was entitled to move freely in South Carolina as in any other state. That provision, also known as the Comity Clause, was one of the central tools that black activists used to make arguments about the content of citizenship. “The citizens of each state,” the clause read, “shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.” Its wording created an opportunity for black activist work because it connected citizenship to a set of legal protections but remained vague about who state citizens were or what privileges and immunities they should possess. When they invoked the clause, Daley and his attorneys presented a richly textured argument about what citizenship was—a legal status that accrued to a person based on birth in the nation, one that should protect an individual throughout the United States and, in particular, should offer free mobility within the nation’s borders. South Carolina authorities were unimpressed by that specificity. Denying Daley’s claims to citizenship and the support his captain offered, officials bound him to a whipping post and delivered thirteen lashes, punishment, perhaps, for having the gall to make radical arguments about his legal status in the heart of American slavery.¹¹

      The Negro Seamen Acts roused opposition far beyond southern ports. In the late 1830s, a group of Massachusetts merchants brought their concerns about the laws to their