own political needs beyond emancipation, black conventioneers interpreted voting and political participation more broadly as the defining citizenship practices, the rights and rites that connected citizens in a community, and a citizen’s most powerful defense in a republican government. Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker rightly claim, “For keen analyses of the issues outlined and for breadth of research and argument, these addresses are among the outstanding political documents of the period,” reflecting “a cross-section of this community” more than any other aggregate of texts outside of the black press itself.3 And, as work coming out of the Colored Conventions Project at the University of Delaware is beginning to make clear, these conventions represent a host of print and social interactions that we are only just beginning to document, let alone theorize. The black state conventions offer key arguments about participatory politics as a practice of citizenship, and the form itself—a combination of public gatherings and printed proceedings—offers an alternate trajectory for how participatory politics could be enacted. Our tendency to focus on Douglass, Garnet, and other participants individually has obscured how the conventions developed as collective and dialogic institutions in which black political thought emerged not just as an intellectual project but as a set of citizenship practices enacted through print culture. While many scholars quote from these texts for their documentary and evidentiary value, here I foreground the black state conventions as distinct and important political and cultural phenomena, as important as the black press, the slaves’ narratives, and the national conventions to our understanding of early black political and print culture.4
Delegates envisioned these texts as living documents: simultaneously a manifestation of collective black political life and a means for sustaining that life even as states attempted to cut it off. The conventions provide, in the words of the 1848 “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of Pennsylvania,” “a living commentary on the principle that governs American legislation, and controls American justice.”5 John Ernest has described the proceedings of the national conventions in similar terms. They are, Ernest writes, “collective performances designed to be a representative embodiment of an imagined African American community.”6 In addition to this historiographic significance, which is the focus of Ernest’s study, these conventions, both national and local, not only represent an “imagined African-American community” but also telegraph the terms under which that community was and desired itself to be a part of a larger U.S. national community.
Rather than a single act, exclusive property, or individual decision, the conventions figure political participation as a shared, vital, moving substance and invoke tropes of circulation—blood, power, people, water, and texts—to theorize these practices. The 1840 Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the State of New York, for instance, describes the franchise as “the life blood of political existence.”7 Taking my lead from the conventions themselves, this chapter uses circulation as a heuristic for analyzing how the conventions functioned as an archive and repertoire of black citizenship—a constellation of texts and gatherings, beginning well in advance of the actual conventions and continuing well past delegates’ departure from the physical meeting space. As I outline in this chapter’s first section, the emphasis on circulation—in print and otherwise—takes my analysis of the black state conventions well beyond the conventions as singular events or the minutes as self-contained documents. This extended print and public purview also takes us well beyond the view, encouraged in the minutes themselves, of conventions as predominantly male spaces. P. Gabrielle Foreman, Sarah Patterson, and Jim Casey note in their introduction to the Colored Conventions Project that women’s work outside the official delegate structure “illustrate[s] the ways in which Black women challenged traditional beliefs about women’s place in public society.”8 The male delegates to New York’s 1840 convention developed circulation-based theories claiming their right to the franchise as a part of an explicitly rendered manhood citizenship. In so doing, they refused an intersectional critique of citizenship. And yet, just as black men used the convention form to enact participatory politics despite racially ascriptive voting legislation, black women used it and these same theories of circulation to promote gender equality within the convention movement itself and the nation as a whole. I draw on the Ohio conventions in particular as sites where black women placed this gendered and raced production of citizenship in sharp relief.
Reading the black state 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
