The Practice of Citizenship. Derrick R. Spires

conventions as a matrix of textual production and physical meetings also invites us to reconsider the printed proceedings as circulating texts that convention organizers envisioned as having the power to change established configurations of citizenship. As I demonstrate through the Pennsylvania conventions, these documents (including minutes, addresses, petitions, and reports) extended and circulated black civic presences via the periodical press and pamphlets, formally modeling and enacting the delegates’ vision of republican citizenship as the texts moved among white and black audiences and state institutions. In the state conventions’ most radical appeal directly to voters, delegates invoke the people’s authority over state institutions and their power to revise or dissolve the civic compact when these institutions fail to be responsive to the people. A new political community materializes not through the formal franchise but rather through audiences’ reading, consuming, and acting on these new civic texts. The black state conventions, then, are important not only because of the arguments they make for and about suffrage but also for the work they do as texts, as performative speech acts that seek to manufacture the very citizenship practices from which the delegates had been excluded.⁹

      Why Voting? Why State Based? Citizenship Practices in the 1840s

      In this section, I offer a brief history of the black state convention movement as a distinct counterpart to the more recognized national colored convention movement and how the rise of the black state conventions maps onto a shift in how antebellum Americans linked their political identities to voting as the expression of citizenship. Here, I also want to emphasize that localized differences in how white supremacy shaped law necessitated different approaches between states in a way that may have made national conventions more difficult to organize in the 1840s in particular but that created conditions under which state conventions proliferated. This section also offers a general sketch of how convention organizers used print, particularly newspapers, throughout the process to cultivate a sense of urgency and to produce black political presences in states that increasingly refused to recognize black citizenship. Maintaining and circulating a public presence as an explicitly political community was crucial to the black state conventions’ overall project.

      As states began instituting universal white male suffrage, democratic governance, particularly in the form of voting, became increasingly identified as the defining act of full citizenship.¹⁰ As Barbara Welke notes, in the republic’s early decades, “the right to vote was not freighted with the political and social significance it would acquire as the century progressed; the rights of citizens were yet in the making.” This significance accrued, argues Welke, as gradual emancipation, westward expansion, and waged labor posed the “first major threat” to assumptions about white male citizenship.¹¹ If, as David Waldstreicher observes, nationalist celebrations during the revolutionary and early national periods revealed an “indeterminacy about who were the people’ and who were the citizens,’ or true political actors,” the expansion of voting through state constitutional conventions in the 1820s through the 1840s helped reconcile some of this indeterminacy.¹² Voting emerged as the “very practice” of citizenship, a political counterpart to nationalist rituals like parades that consolidated the image of active citizenship and a united white citizenry in the public imaginary.¹³ White men could imagine themselves collectively exercising their privileges as sovereigns and see the results of that collective action, particularly after Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828.

      Even as suffrage served as one of the primary political and cultural points of identification for white male citizenship, it became an even more powerful symbol of dis-identification and political and legal disempowerment for black citizens. The linkage of voting and white manhood resulted in an ascriptive conflation of citizenship practice with race and gender that provided a national standard for citizenship identity in the absence of explicit federal guidelines. Citizens who could not vote or had limited access to other rights, then, were not fully citizens before the law. Instead, as Georgia state courts argued in 1843, such people were in a perpetual “state of pupilage.”¹⁴ The restriction of the right to vote contributed to what historian Douglas Bradburn describes as the “denization” of black citizens. States increasingly differentiated black Americans from white as “inhabitants,” “denizens,” or wards of the state who had some basic rights and obligations (rights to property and public education in some states, tax requirements, etc.) but whose status varied from state to state.¹⁵ Under these terms, black citizens had the burdens of legal culpability associated with personhood without the privileges and protections of full citizenship.¹⁶ By the end of the 1840s, only Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Rhode Island offered unrestricted suffrage to black men.¹⁷ Over the previous two decades, other states had instituted or were in the process of instituting universal white male suffrage but disenfranchised virtually all black men in the process. The loss of the franchise became foundational to further state-sanctioned stripping of black civil rights and symbolized a forcible removal of black citizens from the civic imaginary itself.¹⁸ This logic created a circular argument: black men cannot vote, so they are not full citizens; black men are not full citizens and therefore should not be allowed to vote (without qualification).