only in that the latter could not become president.80 The central change to the dictionary’s definition over the next decades was a racial qualification: “under the word citizen, are included all white persons born in the United States, and naturalized persons born out of the same, who have not lost their right as such. This includes men, women, and children.”81 The 1854 edition then devotes the entire third entry to explaining birthright citizenship’s limits: “All natives are not citizens of the United States; the descendants of the aborigines, and those of African origin, are not entitled to the rights of citizens. Anterior to the adoption of the constitution of the United States, each state had the right to make citizens of such persons as it pleased. That constitution does not authorize any but white persons to become citizens of the United States; and it must therefore be presumed that no one is a citizen who is not white.”82 Texts such as Bouvier’s attempted to prescribe a particular understanding of white citizenship as much as, if not more than, they described citizenship in practice.83 Like Ramsay’s definition, these revisions neglected the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution’s silence on citizenship in general, and other proofs of black citizenship. The revisions demonstrate how racializing citizenship required consistent acts of historical revision, amnesia, and counterfactual narration but also, particularly in the decades when states were revising their constitutions, how racialized citizenship was codified in law only in the wake of black citizens asserting their position as citizens and as white powerbrokers were attempting to consolidate their own positions.
Ramsay’s Dissertation and changes to Bouvier’s Dictionary map a trajectory that first linked citizenship to political rights generally assumed to be restricted to white men but then increasingly linked citizenship to white manhood itself, eliding rights as the third term in the metonymic chain in a way that produced race—whiteness and blackness.84 As states revised their constitutions to restrict political rights to white men and as new states adopted constitutions with even more restrictive black codes, Ramsay’s, Bouvier’s, and others’ assumptions became reality and took on the timeless character of what had always already been. The state of Connecticut’s argument against black citizenship in Crandall v. State of Connecticut (1834), for instance, argued that since voting rights had “been denied to the coloured race generally, it is evidence, that that race were not embraced by the framers of the constitution, in the term citizen.”85
This argument, as the defense for Crandall pointed out, ignored black voting “in Pennsylvania and New-York, (as well as in Maine, New-Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, New-Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, North-Carolina and Tennessee).”86 The defense also attempted to unlink voting and citizenship by citing instances in which people could not vote (naturalized citizens, women, and children) but were nevertheless recognized as citizens. At the same time, their list of states where black citizens could and did vote shows how readily black citizenship practices could be ignored or erased in argument and memory even in the face of historical records.
Other states and attorneys general, following Crandall, argued that because black Americans did not exercise all of the rights of white citizens (never mind that all white men did not exercise all the rights of their fellow citizens across all states), they should not be considered citizens of the United States or, if citizens, a special kind of second-level citizen whose rights other states were not obligated to respect. Instead, these courts and legislatures read claims for black people under the Privileges and Immunities Clause as one state’s encroaching on the jurisdiction of another. Georgia, for instance, justified its detention of black sailors based on both disenfranchisement across several states and laws explicitly preventing marriage between black and white people in states such as Massachusetts. Free black people did not have a claim to all the privileges and immunities of federal citizenship, the state of Georgia argued, because they did not enjoy all the privileges of citizenship in their home states. South Carolina similarly justified the imprisonment of free black seamen through the states’ police powers, arguing that such men would be disruptive to state and national security.87
Definitions like Ramsay’s and Bouvier’s and subsequent legislation and court decisions would seem to confirm Barbara Welke’s assertion that from the ratification of the federal constitution, the “law privileged able white men’s ownership of self, according full personhood and belonging only to those who were able, white, and male.”88 And there’s strong evidence for this characterization, as Welke’s study bears out. Yet, black theorists rarely conceded this assumption as fact. Indeed, black writers from Absalom Jones to Frances Harper would take the absence of racial designations in law literally, forcing states to make presumptions of white citizenship explicit in law.89 If, from the outset of the new republic, white men assumed citizenship as their private domain, black citizens (men and women) would continually argue and act in ways that suggested they assumed otherwise.
When viewed from this position, these “official” delineations of citizenship were neither static nor definitive in this era but rather participated in a broader process seeking to fix these categories and to do so, at least in part, in a way that explicitly curtailed or foreclosed access for all except Anglo-Saxon Protestant men. As the century wore on, whiteness began trumping even property as an indication of citizenship. Bradburn has described this process as “denization,” a procedure that “extended only some rights and privileges of citizens” to black people without considering them “part of the body politic.” Black Americans were not “aliens,” as such, but the state increasingly treated them as partial citizens only, denizens, and their status “remained conditional, and privileges once extended could be revoked.”90 The facts of black citizenship gave way to tragi-comic commonsense assertions that such could never have been the case. Where Ramsay argued in 1789 that since “Negroes” could not vote, they must not be citizens, Chief Justice Roger Taney and Senator Stephen A. Douglas (Ill.), backed by revisionist history, racial science, and popular opinion, would argue in 1857 that black people could not be and were never intended to become citizens; they could never be more than inhabitants because they were not white. And, to riff off Taney, even if they had rights, no white man was “bound to respect” them.
Ramsay’s Dissertation, myriad federal and state judicial decisions, and the 1787 Federal Constitution demonstrate that the codification of white citizenship was a long political and economic process of selective inclusion and exclusion requiring constant institutional and cultural maintenance. This narrative is a familiar one, filled with the duplicity, willful ignorance, and betrayal that characterize the “racial contract’s” institutionalized and “iterative” privileging of white interests at the expense of all others.91 It can fit neatly within contemporary scholarship placing blackness as the negative against which the West defines humanity and can serve as a prelude to a narrative of black agency and resistance.92 And this book at times offers a bit of both.
At the same time, this book’s overarching trajectory suggests a narrative of inverse causality. Neither black reaction nor protest as we’ve generally used the term, inverse causality suggests a dynamic in which white citizens (1) stripped rights away in response to or fear of black citizenship practices and aspirations; (2) structurally created conditions that led to material inequality; and then (3) retroactively used the resultant “condition” to argue that black Americans were never citizens because they did not, could not, and could never have exercised the rights from which white Americans had (just) barred them.93 Reading early citizenship restrictions through inverse causality and denization reorients the action-reaction model we tend to follow that frames black activism as responding to racist policy. Bradburn notes this dynamic in the eighteenth-century context: “As more and more free blacks clamored for access to power, more and more restrictions were placed upon their citizenship.” “Unlike subjecthood,” Bradburn concludes, “citizenship demanded equality—and equality was out of the question.”94 In this sense, U.S. citizenship cannot be untangled from the tensions gradual emancipation wrought across northern states. Though I hesitate to draw a direct causal relation between specific black texts and shifts in documents like Bouvier’s Dictionary, his and others’
