Just weeks after Russwurm embraced colonization, Samuel Cornish returned to New York City and launched the Rights of All, the nation’s second black newspaper.9 He offered an alternative vision of the legal possibilities of African American life in the ways he wrote about citizenship in that paper. Some white Americans believed colonization would compensate Africa for the continent’s stolen generations, but Cornish instead demanded that lawmakers “do her sons justice wher ever we find them.” “Educate this oppressed and afflicted people,” Cornish proclaimed, “encourage them in agricultural and mechanical persuits, and there will be no difficulty in making them good and happy citizens.”10 In addition to claiming that black people could be citizens, he declared that the status should entitle them to rights and opportunities. “Our colored citizens have been uniformly denied License as Car[t]-men and porters,” he wrote, using the status to seek new employment opportunities.11 He also centered political rights in his vision of citizenship, urging black New Yorkers to seek and to use the right to vote—to “participate in your rights as citizens.”12 Cornish and other free black people saw possibility and power in the concept of citizenship. When Russwurm denied that black people could be citizens, he sparked immediate, forceful opposition because other black activists wanted to use citizenship to seek rights and protections. That form of protest grew out of their opposition to Russwurm and became a critical thread in antebellum black politics.
Free black Americans’ overarching political goal was to change the legal circumstances of their lives. The malleable nature of citizenship made the status an important tool in that pursuit. In the era of the American Revolutionary War, lawmakers in several northern states enacted measures to gradually abolish slavery. But legislators and judges also constrained black freedom, denying black men the vote, excluding them from militias, and considering measures that would force African Americans out of their states. Black people relied on the concept of citizenship to challenge those restrictions and seek specific rights and protections. Remaking the Republic is the story of that political work as it developed from the 1820s through the 1860s across the free states. This book examines how and why black people called themselves citizens and the meanings of that particular form of their politics. Exploring their political work from this perspective illuminates the legal possibilities of citizen status and the ways African Americans took part in re-creating the legal order of the United States in the nineteenth century. African Americans were active participants in the process of constructing citizenship, determining to whom the status was available and what its content would be.
Black people were able to use citizenship in their politics because there was no agreed-upon definition of citizen status in the law of the early United States.13 The authors of the U.S. Constitution used the terms “citizen” and “citizens” eleven times in the document. According to the Constitution, citizenship was a criterion for election to Congress or the presidency, a descriptor of those who might sue in federal court, and a status that secured to an individual an unspecified set of “Privileges and Immunities.”14 The framers suggested that citizenship could be an important determinant of an individual’s legal life, but they did not clarify the rights or obligations the status entailed or who could call themselves a citizen. Generally, people in the early United States agreed that citizenship described a relationship between individuals and a government, but the conditions and content of the relationship were ill-defined.15 As late as 1862, U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates acknowledged the persistent vagueness of the status. “Eighty years of practical enjoyment of citizenship, under the Constitution, have not sufficed to teach us either the exact meaning of the word, or the constituent elements of the thing we prize so highly,” Bates wrote.16 That uncertainty provided a space for black politics to operate, enabling African Americans to claim legal protections through citizen status.
Although citizenship could be a path to rights, no decisive legal statement declared that the status must be the foundation for an individual’s legal identity. Citizenship remained vague for so long in part because many lawmakers and others did not agree that the status was important for defining identity or securing legal protections. The vagueness stemmed in part from the fact that the framers of the Constitution refused to resolve essential questions about the relationship between states and the federal government. It was unclear how the legal authority of the states related to one another and to that of the national government, and so it was also uncertain to whom an individual should turn to resolve disputes about his or her rights or which level of government would be the operative authority in shaping people’s legal lives. State and federal governments legislated and adjudicated questions of rights and obligations, and it was not clear how citizenship might be crafted or administered on either the state or national level or through some combination of the two. Many people in the early United States looked to local courts for justice and had little sense of close ties to the federal government. Generally, authority was decentralized and individuals’ legal lives were individual, particular to their contexts, personal connections, wealth, gender, and race.17 By claiming rights as citizens, black people therefore helped make citizenship more important, pushing the status toward the center of lawmaking discussions, arguing that it should be a cornerstone for individuals’ rights and their relationships to American governments. Through their political work, black people built a new republic, one that rested on a legal order in which citizen status connected individuals to the federal government through a web of rights and obligations.
Free black people in the North established community institutions, developed distinctive cultural practices, and organized to practice multiple forms of politics in the nineteenth century. Black northerners did all these things in the face of prejudice, racist violence, legal exclusion, and widespread economic disempowerment.18 Scholars have explored the myriad ways activists pushed against the limits of freedom and sought to remake their lives. But much of this scholarship has presented activists as striving toward “full citizenship” and has thus obscured the particular ways African Americans used citizen status in pursuit of legal change. Important forms of black protest were possible because there was no accepted legal understanding of citizenship. Further, black protest was potent because it made claims about the foundations of individual Americans’ legal identities. Black citizenship politics involved African Americans calling themselves citizens and issuing public demands for formal legal changes, deploying the ill-defined legal status in pursuit of protections they deemed essential.19
By understanding the ways black people exploited the uncertainties of citizenship, we can see how their work contributed to the process of defining the status and helped remake the nation’s legal order. In the ways black activists used citizenship, they generated and engaged in lawmaking conversations that were part of the long process of determining the legal shape of the republic. Exploring black citizenship politics offers a fuller portrait of African American protest and its transformative potential. This book seeks to specify the work black Americans did when they talked about citizenship and to examine the broadest possibilities of their protest for legal developments in the United States.20
This study is built around the work marginalized people did to shape legal development in the early United States. Although African Americans were often excluded from spaces where laws were drafted and court cases decided, black northerners exploited uncertainties of federal law in order to shape its terms.21 For instance, in 1837, hundreds of black women and men violently rescued an alleged fugitive slave in New York City, challenging the legal process of slavecatching and demanding protections of their personal security. In the 1840s, a black New Yorker named Willis Hodges acquired land in upstate New York as a path to securing the franchise in the state, realizing his vision of a citizenship defined by participation in formal politics. In the late 1850s, black Bostonians protested the Dred Scott decision that denied they could be citizens by celebrating Crispus Attucks, a black hero of the revolutionary era who represented the longstanding, critical presence of black people in the nation. These and other black northerners molded ideas about their legal position and the nature of citizenship through the statements they broadcast in conventions and newspapers as well as through legal and extralegal public displays. By grappling with the concept of citizenship, African Americans pushed their voices