“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 1. Purvis and others were especially attentive to records like the Congressional Journal, convention proceedings, and records of debates as sources for and objects of interpretation as they theorized citizenship, developing in the process a robust archive. In particular, they note a reference to “citizens of the United States, as are free persons of color” in a December 21, 1803, resolution on “American seaman.”70 Over twenty years later, in the wake of the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision (1857), James McCune Smith would return to these documents along with their roots in Roman citizenship. “[I]n the absence of any definition of the word [citizen] in the Constitution,” Smith argues, “the word must bear the meaning which language itself attaches to it … when it expresses the relation of the individual to the general government.” He enumerates the rights associated with Roman and U.S. citizenship, noting that free black citizens exercised them all. He, like the Pennsylvania appealers before, then sets out to define citizens by way of the rights they exercise and the responsibilities they hold: “the possession of all or any of” these rights “constituted citizenship on the part of the individual holding them.”71 Readings such as the 1837 petitioners and Smith’s engaged historical and contemporaneous legal writing to expand, rather than contract, citizenship’s parameters and to refuse the calculus by which white whim gained the force of timeless law.
Like many of the texts in this book, the 1837 “Appeal’s” materiality—its circulation and literal presence on the table at the convention—was key to its intervention. The “Appeal” was read during Pennsylvania’s Reform Convention in 1837, sparking a prolonged debate among delegates (almost twenty pages), first over printing and distributing the “Appeal” to the convention and then over questions including the petitioners’ status as citizens, what some delegates saw as the “Appeal’s” “injurious” language, and the implications of accepting the “Appeal” for Pennsylvania’s relation to slaveholding states. Some delegates took issue with the document’s tone, calling it “a mere argumentative paper” with “nothing in its character which entitled it to receive any special attention,” a document that contained language “not very courteous … indeed, for petitioners.”72 These comments prompted Thaddeus Stevens (Adams County) to counter, “When a petition was couched in language respectful to the body to which it was presented, they were bound to receive it. Was this memorial, then, to be rejected? He would never give his vote for that. Such a memorial, coming from white men, would not be considered offensive.”73 For Stevens, it seemed clear that to some of his fellow delegates, the document’s “respectful” nature hinged on the racial identity of the petitioners, which itself was under question and admittedly artificial, as “probably many of those who signed the memorial are as white as many of us, although they do not rank according to the technical terms of ‘white’ and ‘black.’”74 The debate highlights the degree to which notions about racial hierarchy colored the reception of political acts and even whether or not an act would be received as political at all. The convention eventually decided at least to print and distribute the petition (fifty-six for, forty-five against), though it kept the language restricting voting rights to white men.
This moment of claims making through print circulation, like so many instances on scales small and large, was a civic and textual act that called those in power to recognize and admit how central black citizens and their claims were to national politics and the very definitions of republicanism and freedom.75 As one delegate to Pennsylvania’s constitutional convention put it, the “Appeal” “involved questions of the utmost importance not only to the character of our deliberations, but to that of the State, and to the Union itself, of which it forms an important part.”76 While the “Appeal’s” content articulated the sham of Pennsylvania’s disenfranchisement of black citizens, debates over its formal status as a petition, appeal, or memorial, as well as the debate over how the convention should accept it, if at all, had ramifications for the nature of representation and the relation between government and the governed more broadly.77 The stakes involved not just whether or not black men could vote on the same terms as white men but also the meaning of citizenship altogether.
In contrast to the histories and practices that documents such as the “Appeal” and Smith’s “Citizenship” excavated, some of the earliest attempts to define U.S. citizenship quickly began linking those rights and social markers that identified the citizen to white men, in principle if not yet in law, through historical amnesia and outright fabrication. David Ramsay’s 1789 A Dissertation on the Manners of Acquiring the Character and Privileges of a Citizen, for instance, used “Negroes” as a foil for differentiating between sovereign citizens and mere inhabitants:
Negroes are inhabitants, but not citizens. Citizenship confers a right of voting at elections, and many other privileges not enjoyed by those who are no more than inhabitants. The precise difference may be thus stated: The citizen of a free state is so united to it as to possess an individual’s proportion of the common sovereignty; but he who is no more than an inhabitant, or resident, has no farther connection with the state in which he resides, than such as gives him security for his person and property, agreeably to fixed laws, without any participation in its government.78
Ramsay builds on a generally understood connection between citizenship and the specific set of rights and social practices associated with sovereignty and collective governance: citizens were sovereign, voting was a sign of sovereignty, and, therefore, anyone who voted was implicitly a U.S. citizen. But he does so in a way that fixes the range of people who could conceivably perform these practices, suggesting that “Negroes” (along with women, children, and American Indians) were and could only be inhabitants without a share in collective sovereignty. The fact that at the time Ramsay was writing, free black people (“Negroes”) could and were legally voting in every state except Georgia and his own South Carolina, and so were in fact citizens by Ramsay’s own definition, was less important in practice than the conventional wisdom that black people, a priori, were not “original citizens” and were, in fact, the negative against which citizenship gained clarity.79 Being “Negro,” free or otherwise from Ramsay’s perspective, precluded them from being part of the original contract, so citizenship was something they would have to be given with the consent of and always contingent on white sovereigns’ sufferance.
These assumptions were codified as historical fact, as the definition of “citizen” developed in subsequent texts such as the United States’ first legal dictionary, John Bouvier’s A Law Dictionary, Adapted to the Constitution and Laws of the United States of America (1839). In 1839, Bouvier’s Dictionary defined citizen without racial ascription: “One who, under the constitution and laws of the United States, has a right to vote for representatives in congress and other public officers, and
