granting and withholding privileges, and more about creating structures that maximize human potential and what they saw as the benefits of republican governance.
Citizenship should enliven, not deaden. This vision of citizenship eschews neoliberal fantasies of a citizenry composed of abstractly equal disembodied individuals in favor of critically and collaboratively constructed citizenship practices. From the perspective of black theorizing, states do not make citizens—active and involved individuals and collectives create citizens. Or, as I argue in my discussion of neighborly citizenship, neighbors do not look for a good neighbor; they make neighborhood. Black writers argued that the state and civic institutions should work to strengthen the “social intercourse” that enables people to practice citizenship rather than allowing “private” racial, gender, or economic interests to create artificial barriers. Like the human body, the body politic could only grow stronger when power circulated evenly among its members, and like the human body (a potent metaphor in early Republican political discourse), it would suffer if this circulation were blocked.
We see this emphasis on citizenship as enlivening and circulatory throughout black print. Hosea Easton’s A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States (1837), for instance, theorizes citizenship as a commons (rather than a private possession) 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
