The 1619 project, p.26
The 1619 Project, page 26
A breath.
And…Reverend Potter, just sign it…A Free Colored Woman…she’ll know who it is.
Eli Reed
Thomas Cobb, Brooklyn, New York, 1990s
On July 6, 1853, more than one hundred delegates took their seats in Corinthian Hall, the grandest meeting place in Rochester, New York. They had made their way from ten states—Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont—for that year’s Colored National Convention. Excluded from political parties, statehouses, and Congress, Black activists found, in the convention’s three days of deliberation and discussion, a place for developing ideas, honing strategies, and demonstrating a capacity for full citizenship. The proceedings were models of political debate, organized by republican principles of representation and run along parliamentary-style rules of order.1
Though closer to Canada than to New York City, Rochester was an apt site for a Black convention. From that city in western New York, one of the leading Black activists of the day, Frederick Douglass, published his independent newspapers, The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Papers like these reached the far corners of Black America with news, editorials, lively letters to the editor and reports on the ideas being generated during “colored convention” proceedings.
Since the first convention met in Philadelphia in 1830, delegates had been advancing the cause of slavery’s abolition, which grew to be a force of consequence in national culture and politics. Black abolitionists brought together their distinct voices to promote antislavery, along with education, commerce, agriculture, and temperance. In doing so, they defined an African American political agenda, with a focus on establishing their citizenship.
At the 1853 Rochester convention, Frederick Douglass took the floor as chair of the Committee on the Declaration of Sentiments and delivered a lesson on what it meant to belong in the United States. He wove together principles from founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with political history, moral philosophy, and Christian theology. His message was unequivocal: Black Americans were “by birth…American citizens; by the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we are American citizens; within the meaning of the United States Constitution, we are American citizens; by the facts of history; and the admission of American statesmen, we are American citizens; by the hardships and trials endured; by the courage and fidelity displayed by our ancestors in defending the liberties and in achieving the independence of our land, we are American citizens.”2
Citizenship is an old concept, with roots that stretch back to the ancient world. To be a citizen is to be an insider. It is to belong. A citizen may be guaranteed a place within a set of boundaries and entitled to fundamental rights, and bears responsibilities as a member of the polity. Citizenship is a defining feature of democracy in the United States and promises to protect the despised, the unorthodox, and the unwanted from removal, exile, and banishment. However, for most of its first century, the country neglected to define precisely who was a citizen. Its founding texts speak of U.S. citizens but do not address the question directly. Still, the persistent influence of slavery and anti-Black racism on law and politics meant that belonging in the country was determined, in part, by which side of the color line a person was on. No matter what else they might accomplish, most free Black Americans such as the delegates at the colored conventions could not become citizens.
Twenty-first-century Americans become citizens by many routes, including naturalization after marriage and migration. The foremost way to citizenship is, however, the accident of birth. This is due to the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which established that: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”3 This birthright principle is now so foundational that many people assume citizenship in the United States has always worked this way. It has not. Convention delegates struggled over decades to establish the birthright principle as a foundation of American democracy, and today’s Constitution reflects their vision when it unceremoniously bestows citizenship upon millions of children each year by virtue of their birth on U.S. soil. The birthright principle distinguishes the United States as a democracy and while that rule predominates in the Americas, it is not a standard feature of democracies worldwide. Instead, many nations determine a child’s citizenship by a mix of factors in addition to place of birth, including the citizenship status of their parents.
Today, some U.S. lawmakers charge that birthright citizenship is an arbitrary or excessive principle by which to define national belonging. The House of Representatives, in each session since 2007, has introduced the Birthright Citizenship Act, a law that would exclude the U.S.–born children of undocumented immigrants from birthright’s protections. In 2018, then-president Donald Trump declared his intent to do away with birthright, though the means by which he would do so were never fully disclosed. Remarkably, figures as highly placed as former U.S. attorney general William Barr and U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, when questioned, have declined to express views about the legal parameters of birthright citizenship despite the principle having been law for more than 150 years.
These dismissals of birthright citizenship’s importance overlook the critical history of how this principle has secured the promise of democracy for all, regardless of differences in color, religion, political affiliation, and more. They also erase the decades of work by Black activists, joined at times after 1830 by some white antislavery allies, to clearly define citizenship in the United States. Their efforts are reflected in the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment. In twenty-eight words, it made plain that Black Americans were not outsiders; they were citizens.
* * *
—
Black Americans had been exploring citizenship and how to secure it since the eighteenth century. They knew that the Declaration of Independence provided that “all men are created equal” and at one point speaks of “fellow citizens,” but did not explain who was and was not a citizen. The Articles of Confederation, drafted in 1777 to govern the new loose assembly of former colonies, told them nothing about who was a citizen and instead promised that “the free inhabitants of each of these states, paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from Justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states.”4 It was not even clear who had the authority to rectify the oversight. The principle of federalism divided governance in the new nation between the states and the federal government, but neither had express authority over citizenship. Ambiguity and confusion followed.
In the years after the American Revolution, Paul and Jonathan Cuffe, men of African and Native descent, lived in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where they were required to pay taxes but denied the right to vote. This, they argued, was a contradiction. If they were to be taxed like white citizens, they could not then be denied citizenship’s political rights. In a series of petitions in 1780 and 1781, the brothers demanded “to know…whether all free Negroes & mulattoes Shall have the same Privileges in this Town of Dartmouth as the white People have.” If they were equal to white men, the brothers allowed, they should pay their share of local taxes. But without the right to vote—without privileges equal to those of white taxpayers—they would not. The Cuffes eventually settled their dispute by paying a reduced tax. Still, they exposed an ambiguity in the new Massachusetts state constitution, which noted, “All men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.” No one could say for certain whether the Cuffes were included among “All men.”5
The new U.S. Constitution of 1787 more tightly knit together the states and made express provisions for taxation and national defense. The framers engaged in wide-ranging debates across competing interests—Southern versus Northern; slaveholding versus free-soil; Republican versus Federalist. But they addressed citizenship only indirectly. Article II provided that the president must be a “natural born Citizen.” Article I said that members of the House of Representatives must have been U.S. citizens for at least seven years; for senators, the requirement was nine years. Federal courts, the new Constitution provided, could hear disputes between citizens of different states. “Citizens of each state” were entitled to the privileges and immunities of “Citizens in the several states.” Still, nowhere did the Constitution define what made one a citizen.6
This ambiguity frustrated clergy member Absalom Jones and the men and women of Philadelphia’s Free African Society. By the end of the eighteenth century, their city was home to a community of formerly enslaved people and their descendants—free Black Americans—that had burgeoned after 1780, when Pennsylvania began to gradually abolish slavery. They busily built churches, mutual aid societies, and their own political culture even as their lives were plagued by racism. Federal laws, such as the 1790 Naturalization Act, set in place a color line that excluded Black people from citizenship by way of naturalization, further creating an atmosphere of uncertainty about where they stood before the law.7
In 1799, seventy-one Black Philadelphians lodged a formal claim and insisted on their entitlement to “Liberties and unalienable Rights” and likened themselves to “every other class of Citizen within the Jurisdiction of the United States.”8 The petition arrived in Congress in January 1800, where representatives managed to do little more than disagree. There was not even a consensus about whether Black Americans had a right to petition Congress in the first place, though the First Amendment guaranteed “the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” When it came to the question of whether Black Americans enjoyed the rights of citizens, the House considered the petition only long enough to send it to a committee, where it quietly died.9
Dissension—and contradiction—persisted into the 1820s. None among the country’s political and legal elite were willing to answer the citizenship question that stalked Black Americans. In 1821, an appeal from customs official William Lindsay, the collector for the Port of Norfolk, Virginia, asked U.S. attorney general William Wirt: Could a free Black man command an American merchant vessel? Federal law, Lindsay understood, barred noncitizens from commanding such ships. Wirt’s answer confused as much as it clarified. The attorney general wrote: “I am of the opinion that the constitution, by the description of ‘citizens of the United States,’ intended those only who enjoyed the full and equal privileges of white citizens in the State of their residence.” It followed that because free Black Virginians were not full and equal citizens of their state, they could not be citizens of the United States. They were instead, in Wirt’s view, mere residents. But he also left the door open to the idea that if a Black person’s home state deemed them a citizen—as did some Northern states, such as Massachusetts and New York—they might also be citizens of the United States. Wirt answered the Norfolk official’s question, but he did not settle much else.10
Congress was similarly muddled in its thinking about Black citizenship. In 1820, the western territory of Missouri was admitted as a new state. In what became known as the Missouri Compromise, Congress decided that slavery would be permitted in Missouri but prohibited in all other parts of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36°30ʹ parallel, a surveyor’s line that arbitrarily delineated North from South. But soon a second disagreement erupted when lawmakers in Missouri proposed a constitution that flat-out barred “free Negroes and mulattoes” from the state.11
Debate on this restriction gave Congress a chance to say whether the Constitution guaranteed to Black Americans, as citizens of the various states, equal rights under the Privileges and Immunities Clause. It was clear that Missouri could not, for example, bar citizens from Ohio from entering. The proposed prohibition against Black migration to Missouri might violate this principle, but only if Black Americans were citizens. If Congress found Missouri’s proposal to be in violation of the Privileges and Immunities Clause, it would be a roundabout way of affirming Black citizenship.
Members became mired in disagreement and deliberated for many weeks. In 1821, Representative Josiah Butler of New Hampshire and Representative John Floyd of Virginia faced off on the House floor. Butler argued that in Northern states such as Massachusetts, the “rights of the colored citizens…are as sacred as those of the white citizens.” In Butler’s view, Black Americans were unequivocally citizens of the state and, by implication, entitled to constitutional protection. Floyd deemed such a proposition unthinkable and mocked Butler: “Who is there that believes [Black Americans] ever had any rights but such as the indulgence of the States permitted?” He went so far as to assert that Black Americans’ privileges could at any time be rescinded. Free Black people could even be enslaved, without cause or process: “Could not the States now seize their persons, and make them slaves?”12
Eventually Congress allowed the ban on Black migration to Missouri to remain but still admonished the new state that it must not pass any law “by which any citizen, of either of the states in this Union, shall be excluded from the enjoyment of any of the privileges and immunities to which such citizen is entitled under the constitution of the United States.” Congress self-consciously drew no color line when drafting this provision. Still, life for prospective Black migrants to Missouri was, in the end, no less harrowing than it had been before congressional review.13
Lawmakers again and again fumbled when called upon to settle the question of Black citizenship, leaving the country’s elite politicians, merchants, lawyers, and philanthropists to devise their own approach. Their most popular “solution” was known as “colonization,” a plan to remove Black Americans from the United States. The American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816, committed to preserving the United States as a white man’s country by ensuring that Black Americans would not become citizens. The ACS recruited supporters, raised funds, won public appropriations in some places, and built a network that made colonization one of the largest political movements of the time. Some colonizationists encouraged the abolition of slavery, while others agreed with the organization’s open espousal of anti-Black racism. Some Southerners opposed colonization, fearing that it might succeed in manumitting enslaved people but then not live up to removing them from the country. Still, the ACS managed to attract supporters across lines of region and party.14
In 1822, just one year after Congress allowed a ban on Black migration to Missouri, the ACS established the West African colony of Liberia. Promising migrants economic independence, political autonomy, and citizenship, the society outfitted ships, organized expeditions, and did all it could to encourage Black people to leave the United States. The society worked hand in hand with state lawmakers friendly to its cause; these legislators pressured free Black Americans into self-exile by enacting local statutes, termed Black laws, that restricted their work, movement, and public gatherings. With life in the United States too onerous, the thinking went, Black Americans might give in to the enticements of Liberia. In some states, lawmakers proposed new laws that would require free people of color to leave by threat of force, or which predicated manumission by owners on an enslaved person’s agreement to leave the country once free. Over the next two decades, more than four thousand Black people would go to Liberia.
* * *
—
It fell to Black activists to fight for citizenship and resist colonization, and with that the Colored Convention movement was started. At the inaugural gathering in 1830, Black men came together from New England, the mid-Atlantic, and as far south as Virginia to discuss the rise of Black laws and the prospect of leaving the United States. Among them were delegates from Ohio who were being driven out of their state by discriminatory Black laws. The way forward was not yet clear. Without a way to ensure their equality, some delegates urged resettling in Canada, where Black Americans might be guaranteed that “no invidious distinction of colour is recognised…there we shall be entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of other citizens.”15
Baltimore delegate Hezekiah Grice returned home from the Philadelphia convention determined to fend off exile. He organized the Legal Rights Association, which aimed to prove that Black Americans were citizens. His associate William Watkins, an educator and commentator in the anti-slavery press, summarized the association’s argument, one rooted in the Declaration of Independence:
This imperishable document, whose attributes are truth, justice, and benevolence, has declared to the world that liberty, in the full sense of the word, is the birth-right of “all men”; (consequently, of every colored man in the Union;) that we are not only “born free,” but have, by virtue of our existence, “certain rights,” which are emphatically termed “inalienable.”16
Watkins asked whether the Constitution had incorporated the Declaration’s ideals: “The Declaration of Independence is our advocate, and we hope it will yet be ascertained, whether or not the Constitution of the U[nited] States secures to us those rights which the Declaration so freely accords.” This thinking led Watkins to probe the depths of the nation’s morals:
Why, I emphatically ask, should we not enjoy those rights which all must confess have been wrested from us without the shadow of a crime? What evil could possibly accrue from the adoption, by the white people of this nation, of a liberal, just, and humane policy towards three hundred thousand of the home-born citizens of the United States?17
While Watkins made his case in newspapers, the same argument animated the deliberations during the second national colored convention, held in 1831.18 There, a resolution recommended that “the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States, be read in our Conventions; believing, that the truths contained in the former are incontrovertible, and that the latter guarantees in letter and spirit to every freeman born in this country, all the rights and immunities of citizenship.”19 The claim to birthright citizenship had gained traction, and Black activists would grow only more resolute.
And…Reverend Potter, just sign it…A Free Colored Woman…she’ll know who it is.
Eli Reed
Thomas Cobb, Brooklyn, New York, 1990s
On July 6, 1853, more than one hundred delegates took their seats in Corinthian Hall, the grandest meeting place in Rochester, New York. They had made their way from ten states—Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont—for that year’s Colored National Convention. Excluded from political parties, statehouses, and Congress, Black activists found, in the convention’s three days of deliberation and discussion, a place for developing ideas, honing strategies, and demonstrating a capacity for full citizenship. The proceedings were models of political debate, organized by republican principles of representation and run along parliamentary-style rules of order.1
Though closer to Canada than to New York City, Rochester was an apt site for a Black convention. From that city in western New York, one of the leading Black activists of the day, Frederick Douglass, published his independent newspapers, The North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Papers like these reached the far corners of Black America with news, editorials, lively letters to the editor and reports on the ideas being generated during “colored convention” proceedings.
Since the first convention met in Philadelphia in 1830, delegates had been advancing the cause of slavery’s abolition, which grew to be a force of consequence in national culture and politics. Black abolitionists brought together their distinct voices to promote antislavery, along with education, commerce, agriculture, and temperance. In doing so, they defined an African American political agenda, with a focus on establishing their citizenship.
At the 1853 Rochester convention, Frederick Douglass took the floor as chair of the Committee on the Declaration of Sentiments and delivered a lesson on what it meant to belong in the United States. He wove together principles from founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with political history, moral philosophy, and Christian theology. His message was unequivocal: Black Americans were “by birth…American citizens; by the principles of the Declaration of Independence, we are American citizens; within the meaning of the United States Constitution, we are American citizens; by the facts of history; and the admission of American statesmen, we are American citizens; by the hardships and trials endured; by the courage and fidelity displayed by our ancestors in defending the liberties and in achieving the independence of our land, we are American citizens.”2
Citizenship is an old concept, with roots that stretch back to the ancient world. To be a citizen is to be an insider. It is to belong. A citizen may be guaranteed a place within a set of boundaries and entitled to fundamental rights, and bears responsibilities as a member of the polity. Citizenship is a defining feature of democracy in the United States and promises to protect the despised, the unorthodox, and the unwanted from removal, exile, and banishment. However, for most of its first century, the country neglected to define precisely who was a citizen. Its founding texts speak of U.S. citizens but do not address the question directly. Still, the persistent influence of slavery and anti-Black racism on law and politics meant that belonging in the country was determined, in part, by which side of the color line a person was on. No matter what else they might accomplish, most free Black Americans such as the delegates at the colored conventions could not become citizens.
Twenty-first-century Americans become citizens by many routes, including naturalization after marriage and migration. The foremost way to citizenship is, however, the accident of birth. This is due to the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which established that: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”3 This birthright principle is now so foundational that many people assume citizenship in the United States has always worked this way. It has not. Convention delegates struggled over decades to establish the birthright principle as a foundation of American democracy, and today’s Constitution reflects their vision when it unceremoniously bestows citizenship upon millions of children each year by virtue of their birth on U.S. soil. The birthright principle distinguishes the United States as a democracy and while that rule predominates in the Americas, it is not a standard feature of democracies worldwide. Instead, many nations determine a child’s citizenship by a mix of factors in addition to place of birth, including the citizenship status of their parents.
Today, some U.S. lawmakers charge that birthright citizenship is an arbitrary or excessive principle by which to define national belonging. The House of Representatives, in each session since 2007, has introduced the Birthright Citizenship Act, a law that would exclude the U.S.–born children of undocumented immigrants from birthright’s protections. In 2018, then-president Donald Trump declared his intent to do away with birthright, though the means by which he would do so were never fully disclosed. Remarkably, figures as highly placed as former U.S. attorney general William Barr and U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, when questioned, have declined to express views about the legal parameters of birthright citizenship despite the principle having been law for more than 150 years.
These dismissals of birthright citizenship’s importance overlook the critical history of how this principle has secured the promise of democracy for all, regardless of differences in color, religion, political affiliation, and more. They also erase the decades of work by Black activists, joined at times after 1830 by some white antislavery allies, to clearly define citizenship in the United States. Their efforts are reflected in the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment. In twenty-eight words, it made plain that Black Americans were not outsiders; they were citizens.
* * *
—
Black Americans had been exploring citizenship and how to secure it since the eighteenth century. They knew that the Declaration of Independence provided that “all men are created equal” and at one point speaks of “fellow citizens,” but did not explain who was and was not a citizen. The Articles of Confederation, drafted in 1777 to govern the new loose assembly of former colonies, told them nothing about who was a citizen and instead promised that “the free inhabitants of each of these states, paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from Justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states.”4 It was not even clear who had the authority to rectify the oversight. The principle of federalism divided governance in the new nation between the states and the federal government, but neither had express authority over citizenship. Ambiguity and confusion followed.
In the years after the American Revolution, Paul and Jonathan Cuffe, men of African and Native descent, lived in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where they were required to pay taxes but denied the right to vote. This, they argued, was a contradiction. If they were to be taxed like white citizens, they could not then be denied citizenship’s political rights. In a series of petitions in 1780 and 1781, the brothers demanded “to know…whether all free Negroes & mulattoes Shall have the same Privileges in this Town of Dartmouth as the white People have.” If they were equal to white men, the brothers allowed, they should pay their share of local taxes. But without the right to vote—without privileges equal to those of white taxpayers—they would not. The Cuffes eventually settled their dispute by paying a reduced tax. Still, they exposed an ambiguity in the new Massachusetts state constitution, which noted, “All men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.” No one could say for certain whether the Cuffes were included among “All men.”5
The new U.S. Constitution of 1787 more tightly knit together the states and made express provisions for taxation and national defense. The framers engaged in wide-ranging debates across competing interests—Southern versus Northern; slaveholding versus free-soil; Republican versus Federalist. But they addressed citizenship only indirectly. Article II provided that the president must be a “natural born Citizen.” Article I said that members of the House of Representatives must have been U.S. citizens for at least seven years; for senators, the requirement was nine years. Federal courts, the new Constitution provided, could hear disputes between citizens of different states. “Citizens of each state” were entitled to the privileges and immunities of “Citizens in the several states.” Still, nowhere did the Constitution define what made one a citizen.6
This ambiguity frustrated clergy member Absalom Jones and the men and women of Philadelphia’s Free African Society. By the end of the eighteenth century, their city was home to a community of formerly enslaved people and their descendants—free Black Americans—that had burgeoned after 1780, when Pennsylvania began to gradually abolish slavery. They busily built churches, mutual aid societies, and their own political culture even as their lives were plagued by racism. Federal laws, such as the 1790 Naturalization Act, set in place a color line that excluded Black people from citizenship by way of naturalization, further creating an atmosphere of uncertainty about where they stood before the law.7
In 1799, seventy-one Black Philadelphians lodged a formal claim and insisted on their entitlement to “Liberties and unalienable Rights” and likened themselves to “every other class of Citizen within the Jurisdiction of the United States.”8 The petition arrived in Congress in January 1800, where representatives managed to do little more than disagree. There was not even a consensus about whether Black Americans had a right to petition Congress in the first place, though the First Amendment guaranteed “the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” When it came to the question of whether Black Americans enjoyed the rights of citizens, the House considered the petition only long enough to send it to a committee, where it quietly died.9
Dissension—and contradiction—persisted into the 1820s. None among the country’s political and legal elite were willing to answer the citizenship question that stalked Black Americans. In 1821, an appeal from customs official William Lindsay, the collector for the Port of Norfolk, Virginia, asked U.S. attorney general William Wirt: Could a free Black man command an American merchant vessel? Federal law, Lindsay understood, barred noncitizens from commanding such ships. Wirt’s answer confused as much as it clarified. The attorney general wrote: “I am of the opinion that the constitution, by the description of ‘citizens of the United States,’ intended those only who enjoyed the full and equal privileges of white citizens in the State of their residence.” It followed that because free Black Virginians were not full and equal citizens of their state, they could not be citizens of the United States. They were instead, in Wirt’s view, mere residents. But he also left the door open to the idea that if a Black person’s home state deemed them a citizen—as did some Northern states, such as Massachusetts and New York—they might also be citizens of the United States. Wirt answered the Norfolk official’s question, but he did not settle much else.10
Congress was similarly muddled in its thinking about Black citizenship. In 1820, the western territory of Missouri was admitted as a new state. In what became known as the Missouri Compromise, Congress decided that slavery would be permitted in Missouri but prohibited in all other parts of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36°30ʹ parallel, a surveyor’s line that arbitrarily delineated North from South. But soon a second disagreement erupted when lawmakers in Missouri proposed a constitution that flat-out barred “free Negroes and mulattoes” from the state.11
Debate on this restriction gave Congress a chance to say whether the Constitution guaranteed to Black Americans, as citizens of the various states, equal rights under the Privileges and Immunities Clause. It was clear that Missouri could not, for example, bar citizens from Ohio from entering. The proposed prohibition against Black migration to Missouri might violate this principle, but only if Black Americans were citizens. If Congress found Missouri’s proposal to be in violation of the Privileges and Immunities Clause, it would be a roundabout way of affirming Black citizenship.
Members became mired in disagreement and deliberated for many weeks. In 1821, Representative Josiah Butler of New Hampshire and Representative John Floyd of Virginia faced off on the House floor. Butler argued that in Northern states such as Massachusetts, the “rights of the colored citizens…are as sacred as those of the white citizens.” In Butler’s view, Black Americans were unequivocally citizens of the state and, by implication, entitled to constitutional protection. Floyd deemed such a proposition unthinkable and mocked Butler: “Who is there that believes [Black Americans] ever had any rights but such as the indulgence of the States permitted?” He went so far as to assert that Black Americans’ privileges could at any time be rescinded. Free Black people could even be enslaved, without cause or process: “Could not the States now seize their persons, and make them slaves?”12
Eventually Congress allowed the ban on Black migration to Missouri to remain but still admonished the new state that it must not pass any law “by which any citizen, of either of the states in this Union, shall be excluded from the enjoyment of any of the privileges and immunities to which such citizen is entitled under the constitution of the United States.” Congress self-consciously drew no color line when drafting this provision. Still, life for prospective Black migrants to Missouri was, in the end, no less harrowing than it had been before congressional review.13
Lawmakers again and again fumbled when called upon to settle the question of Black citizenship, leaving the country’s elite politicians, merchants, lawyers, and philanthropists to devise their own approach. Their most popular “solution” was known as “colonization,” a plan to remove Black Americans from the United States. The American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816, committed to preserving the United States as a white man’s country by ensuring that Black Americans would not become citizens. The ACS recruited supporters, raised funds, won public appropriations in some places, and built a network that made colonization one of the largest political movements of the time. Some colonizationists encouraged the abolition of slavery, while others agreed with the organization’s open espousal of anti-Black racism. Some Southerners opposed colonization, fearing that it might succeed in manumitting enslaved people but then not live up to removing them from the country. Still, the ACS managed to attract supporters across lines of region and party.14
In 1822, just one year after Congress allowed a ban on Black migration to Missouri, the ACS established the West African colony of Liberia. Promising migrants economic independence, political autonomy, and citizenship, the society outfitted ships, organized expeditions, and did all it could to encourage Black people to leave the United States. The society worked hand in hand with state lawmakers friendly to its cause; these legislators pressured free Black Americans into self-exile by enacting local statutes, termed Black laws, that restricted their work, movement, and public gatherings. With life in the United States too onerous, the thinking went, Black Americans might give in to the enticements of Liberia. In some states, lawmakers proposed new laws that would require free people of color to leave by threat of force, or which predicated manumission by owners on an enslaved person’s agreement to leave the country once free. Over the next two decades, more than four thousand Black people would go to Liberia.
* * *
—
It fell to Black activists to fight for citizenship and resist colonization, and with that the Colored Convention movement was started. At the inaugural gathering in 1830, Black men came together from New England, the mid-Atlantic, and as far south as Virginia to discuss the rise of Black laws and the prospect of leaving the United States. Among them were delegates from Ohio who were being driven out of their state by discriminatory Black laws. The way forward was not yet clear. Without a way to ensure their equality, some delegates urged resettling in Canada, where Black Americans might be guaranteed that “no invidious distinction of colour is recognised…there we shall be entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of other citizens.”15
Baltimore delegate Hezekiah Grice returned home from the Philadelphia convention determined to fend off exile. He organized the Legal Rights Association, which aimed to prove that Black Americans were citizens. His associate William Watkins, an educator and commentator in the anti-slavery press, summarized the association’s argument, one rooted in the Declaration of Independence:
This imperishable document, whose attributes are truth, justice, and benevolence, has declared to the world that liberty, in the full sense of the word, is the birth-right of “all men”; (consequently, of every colored man in the Union;) that we are not only “born free,” but have, by virtue of our existence, “certain rights,” which are emphatically termed “inalienable.”16
Watkins asked whether the Constitution had incorporated the Declaration’s ideals: “The Declaration of Independence is our advocate, and we hope it will yet be ascertained, whether or not the Constitution of the U[nited] States secures to us those rights which the Declaration so freely accords.” This thinking led Watkins to probe the depths of the nation’s morals:
Why, I emphatically ask, should we not enjoy those rights which all must confess have been wrested from us without the shadow of a crime? What evil could possibly accrue from the adoption, by the white people of this nation, of a liberal, just, and humane policy towards three hundred thousand of the home-born citizens of the United States?17
While Watkins made his case in newspapers, the same argument animated the deliberations during the second national colored convention, held in 1831.18 There, a resolution recommended that “the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States, be read in our Conventions; believing, that the truths contained in the former are incontrovertible, and that the latter guarantees in letter and spirit to every freeman born in this country, all the rights and immunities of citizenship.”19 The claim to birthright citizenship had gained traction, and Black activists would grow only more resolute.
