or any other marginalized group contribute to the common weal if their children were given the advantage of formal instruction under conditions in which success was expected? Narrative demonstrates that this community of black citizens, finding freedom during the crisis, has proven itself more than ready for the task of republican citizenship.
At the same time, however, Narrative and the “Address” speak to a community’s disillusionment upon realizing that, despite demonstrating their collective public spirit and responsibility in terms that their erstwhile white judges should have recognized and honored, no amount of “proof” would be sufficient to overcome impediments that had nothing to do with black capacity and everything to do with white power. Again, this offers a distinct contrast to nascent gradual emancipation programs. Benezet’s patronage form of gradual emancipation involved registering, supervised labor, and training so that freedpeople “might gradually become useful members of the community” and “become industrious subjects” over time.178 Jones and Allen’s call to educate black children with the same “prospects” as white children directly contradicts Benezet’s assumption that newly freed slaves and, more important, their children would require any kind of supervision, patronage, or management beyond those already provided for free white citizens. They reject both the long timeline assumed in Benezet’s and similar gradual schemes and the implication that formerly enslaved people owed some form of service to either their former masters or the state. Instead, “Address” suggests that the state, enslavers, and “those who approve of the practice” owe reparations for their sanctioning enslavement.
Seizing the platform that Carey’s Account provided, Jones and Allen take the opportunity to extend their public liberties into spheres that were otherwise out of reach. They present neighborliness as a citizenship practice animated by a real sensibility that creates the permeable civic space. They then mobilize this political argument in the service of an antislavery appeal and call for structural readjustments that would ease the transition between enslavement and citizenship. Narrative reveals the extent to which black print production can reflect the inner workings of black counterpublics, but it also suggests that even in such spaces, black writers sought and found ways to assert authority, not just presence, within civil society. Despite Jones and Allen’s efforts, however, the coming decades were characterized more by decline and retrenchment than progress, with even white supporters basing that support on the need for “racial surveillance.” This trend would lead both men to reconsider their future in the United States and to give serious consideration to emigration projects.179
Still, Narrative had an effect. On April 4, 1794, about four months after Narrative’s first printing, Carey issued a pamphlet ostensibly in response to a flyer by “Argus” accusing Carey of opportunism, but he also pointedly confronted Jones and Allen’s Narrative. By then, Carey’s fourth edition had replaced his quotes from Lining about black immunity with a paragraph debunking the theory, and in the fifth edition, he had changed the section accusing black workers of extortion from the “vilest of the blacks” to “some of those who acted in that capacity [as nurses], both coloured and white.”180 As Brooks and others have noted, however, Carey re-presents the error of black immunity as a boon for white Philadelphians: “The error that prevailed on this subject,” he writes, “had a very salutary effect; for at an early period of the disorder, hardly any white nurses could be procured; and, had the negroes been equally terrified, the sufferings of the sick, great as they actually were, would have been exceedingly aggravated.”181 Even as Carey recants an earlier mistake, he does so in a way that takes away from the merit of black workers.
Jones and Allen’s words also continued to resonate with the coming generation of black activists. David Walker builds on their notion of world citizenship and piety in his Appeal; Hosea Easton picks up the Samaritan formula in his A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States (1837), arguing that only by acting “the part of the good Samaritan” can the nation “open an effectual door through which sympathies can flow, and by which a reciprocity of sentiment and interest can take place”; and Robert Purvis cites events during the fever in his 1837 defense of black suffrage in Pennsylvania, asking, “Does this speak an enmity which would abuse the privileges of civil liberty to the injury of the whites?”182 Purvis’s words seem to echo Jones and Allen’s. Each case references 1790s Philadelphia as a touchstone in the theoretical and historical development of black citizenship.
Narrative combines two central threads that subsequent chapters will unfold in more detail: black writer’s engagement with the critical political concerns of their day as a function of their own lived experiences and how the texts they produce navigate a web of publics and audiences.183 Neighborliness does not eliminate interests or disagreement altogether. Indeed, a neighborly approach to citizenship requires a mode of participatory politics that maximizes contact and exchange between citizens to ensure that one citizen’s neighborliness does not turn into unilateral oppression. Narrative itself signals the importance of deliberation to neighborly institutions through Jones and Allen’s constant references to their own deliberations, among themselves and with the mayor, during the crisis. It is to the role of participatory politics in citizenship that The Practice of Citizenship now turns. Activists in the coming years become even more focused on formal political participation, but as the black state conventions reveal, the results are also more paradoxical. As the next chapter demonstrates, negotiating the contending imperatives of practical political ends, contemporary political discourse, and the need to persuade an increasingly hostile white public produced performative texts that provide a meta-commentary on the nature of U.S. citizenship.
CHAPTER 2
Circulating Citizenship in the Black State Conventions of the 1840s
We have launched into a new position. Our fathers sought personal freedom—we now contend for political freedom.
—“An Appeal to the Colored Citizens
of Pennsylvania” (1848)
The equality of political rights, which is the first mark of American citizenship, was proclaimed in the accepted presence of its absolute denial.
—Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (1991)
Behind the mask of deference lies the authentic demand.
—Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories (2010)
In the decade after the State of Pennsylvania’s 1838 constitution disenfranchised its black citizens, black Pennsylvanians signaled a more aggressive approach to citizenship and activism. While the 1848 Convention of Colored Citizens’ distinction between personal freedom and political freedom understates the political nature of the previous generation’s work—which included sending petitions to state and federal governments, founding black mutual aid societies and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and initiating the National Colored Convention Movement—the comparison does signal a change in citizenship practices between the 1790s and the 1840s. By the 1840s, voting had become one of the central citizenship practices and means of policing the civic imaginary: it was a symbol of fellow citizenship among the men who voted and a reminder that those men (variously defined by race and class) and women not allowed to vote were not only inferior but also under the power and protection of those who did.1 As Judith N. Shklar notes, political rights in the form of voting emerged as “the first mark of American citizenship,” and that mark was quickly consolidated with and encoded through whiteness.2
This chapter examines the black state conventions of the 1840s as political documents central to an understanding of citizenship practices in the antebellum
