The Practice of Citizenship. Derrick R. Spires
essential to the functioning of any society and the livelihood of individuals within that society. “A withholding of the enjoyment of any American principle from an American man,” Easton asserts, “either governmental, ecclesiastical, civil, social or alimental is in effect taking away his means of subsistence; and consequently, taking away his life.”54 We might extrapolate from Easton and others to think about citizenship as a kind of political commoning. As Nelson notes, commoning is “a communal labor in communication, sharing, and meaning-making. It is about the sharing of work and materials: not just the bounty of nature but also the bounty of what people can produce together in local community.”55 In a similar vein, Easton posits citizenship as the process through which communities make meaning and distribute resources, material and immaterial, in a republican government. Easton is not suggesting that lacking citizenship equals a lack of personhood or humanity but rather that citizenship, for him, was the most robust access point for constituting social, political, and economic collectives.56 Enclosing access to this commons, like enclosing access to water, arable land, or an affirmative culture, has very real material effects not just to the individuals or groups excluded but also to the republic as a whole. Refusing access to these networks constitutes an act of violence that makes the perpetrator, in Easton’s words, a “murderer of the worst kind” because such restrictions—for current and potential citizens—create the very material inequalities that were paradoxically used to justify them, stripping individuals and groups of the means of political, material, and social existence.57
And yet, an archive of black writing testifies that attempted murder could result in new forms of living and of articulating life. “Not all subjects lie still in democracy’s graveyard,” Castronovo notes, and Joanna Brooks asks us to consider how the world looks “to one who,” like the biblical Lazarus, “has faced and survived death.”58 Just as Vincent Brown’s Reaper’s Garden invites us to see the political and “social connections and communities of memory” that enslaved people “created through struggle,” black theorists draw our attention to a “purposeful will and action” that didn’t simply index the loss of rights associated with citizenship but rather actively worked to generate new ways of understanding citizenship and being citizens outside rights discourse even as, paradoxically, they argued for rights.59 This legacy included underground economies, vigilance committees, mutual aid societies, institutionalized shadow politics, and myriad informal and ad hoc cultural practices that often supplemented or replaced official citizenship frameworks.60 These citizenship acts help us uncouple citizenship from the state institutions that are the most recognized but not the only medium for organizing them.
Early U.S. Citizenship: Inverse Causality and Denization
By centering early African American print culture, I offer a take on citizenship from the perspective of those our studies often frame as the objects of legislation, excluded, or occupying a position of negation—those whose texts we often place in conversation with dominant discourses in ways that frame them as primarily responding rather than creating. Contrary to this narrative, the writers I study here claimed citizenship as their own. They called white America’s bluff in ways that forced individuals, states, and the federal government to articulate exactly how black Americans were not (supposed to be) citizens. As I discuss in this section, this process required constant forgetting and definitional revisions that were never sufficient. Black citizens simply did not go away.
Before the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship as the federal standard, the United States did not have an explicit or uniform definition of “citizen.”61 In the decades before the Fourteenth Amendment made birthright citizenship the national standard, experiences of citizenship were more state based than federal, and citizens in the early republic were identified more by a shifting catalogue of what they could and could not do within states (e.g., vote, own land, marry) and between states (e.g., freedom of movement and inhabitance) than by categorical federal statute.62 Each state had its own criteria for these rights, privileges, and protections involving gender, inhabitance, economics, age, native status, and increasingly race among the cadre of qualifications. On the federal level, the Constitution’s Privileges and Immunities Clause knit these disparate rules into a patchwork approximating national citizenship.63 By the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, however, popular consensus, if not the law itself, saw black Americans as not fully citizens, neither in the rights-bearing sense nor in the eyes of most of the white citizenry. While individual states might have granted black Americans citizenship rights—the right to vote, for instance—these rights did not travel with them across state lines.
This was not always the case, nor was it an inevitable outcome of the Revolution. The Articles of Confederation defined citizenship explicitly and broadly: “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.”64 The 1787 federal constitution, however, was silent on the subject, in part because slavery and the status of American Indians, women, and others were minefields for the Constitutional Convention but also because the distribution of power between federal and state governments, to the extent that it was settled, was weighted in favor of the states. When the Constitution used the word “citizen,” it did so without definition. The Privileges and Immunities Clause, Article IV, Section 2, was the closest the Constitution came to defining citizens: “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.”65 The document refers to citizens in the requirements for office holding and in defining the role of the judiciary but not in a way that gives insight into who is or can be a citizen or who was or was not a citizen at ratification.66
The Naturalization Act of 1790 attempted to fill in some of the gaps as it clarified whom Congress believed could become a citizen, restricting naturalization to “free white persons.” But it did nothing to clarify the status of those already in the country, at least not in law. Instead, as historian Douglass Bradburn explains, it, along with a similar restriction in the 1792 Militia Act, clearly demonstrated “an awareness” on the part of the federal government “of the type of citizens the act expected to create” and placed people of color in the double bind of not being accepted as native-born citizens and not having a clear institutional way to secure full citizenship.67 Where the Naturalization Act of 1790 “guaranteed that Indians and blacks would not be welcomed as future equal citizens,” the Militia Act of 1792 “effectively ratified” this guarantee by restricting militia service, “one of the most potent symbols of male citizenship in the new American republic,” to white men.68
Against this backdrop, black writers invoked British and U.S. legal history and histories of black civic activity and cited ongoing citizenship practices, noting that changes in law were more akin to gross fraud than a clarification of some original plan. In this sense, documents such as the 1837 “Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens, Threatened with Disfranchisement, to the People of Pennsylvania” were both part of and intervening in a developing but as yet unestablished consensus about who citizens were and what they did. The document itself exemplifies the kind of content we tend to focus on when analyzing black citizenship. The “Appeal,” drafted by Robert Purvis, outlines the legal and historical basis for black citizenship in Pennsylvania with a blistering critique of justifications for black disenfranchisement given during that state’s constitutional convention in 1837–38. They cite black military service during the Revolution and War of 1812, black office holding and taxpaying, moments during the framing of the Articles of Confederation when delegates struck down attempts to affix “white” as a modifier of freeman or free inhabitant, black passport holding, and passages from the Journal of Congress that confirm black citizenship from the nation’s founding not simply as a rhetorical mishap but rather as a deliberate and deliberative decision on the part of the framers.69
The “Appeal” points to an important strain of black theorizing as textual criticism, one hearkening back to Benjamin Banneker’s critique of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia and Jones and Allen’s “refutation” of Matthew Carey’s Short Account (1793), which I will discuss in more detail in Chapter