during the ratification of that state’s 1838 constitution. His editions and the discourse of U.S. citizenship must be considered in relation to the political movements occurring in the intervening years (women’s rights, workers’ rights, and the focus of this book, the black state and national conventions) that forced representatives of the law to clarify, again and again, a restrictive definition of citizenship and associated concepts and to deny, again and again, the histories and practices that Purvis and others kept in circulation.
Chapter Outline
Using the interpretive insights of Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, the black state conventions, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and the countless contributors to the black press as guides, The Practice of Citizenship is organized around five interrelated citizenship practices and the stylistic and perspectival schemas each practice cultivates: neighborly contact, the free circulation of civic energy, economic representation, critique, and revolution. This listing is not meant to be comprehensive but rather suggestive of key concepts that emerge from the archive I’ve assembled. Together, these chapters offer a diachronic and synchronic narrative of black theories and practices as each chapter takes up a specific site that constitutes black theorizing’s repertoire. It argues for the specificity of each moment in terms of historical context, geographic scale, and the exigencies of needing to persuade a wide range of audiences, from hostile white auditors to ambivalent black citizens to fellow black activists with opposing views. At the same time, black theorizers often thought of these practices as scalable. Neighborly citizenship, for instance, is not just about local interactions but rather models an ethics for institution building and for how institutions should facilitate citizenship’s work.
Though each chapter focuses on a specific citizenship practice, these practices are mutually constituting and always simultaneously in play. One requires the other to create a viable polity: neighborliness depends on circulation and critique to give it boundaries; economic citizens should behave not as individual agents in an ostensibly liberal market but ethically, as participants in a collective neighborhood. Yet writers emphasize one approach over another in response to political and historical moments of crisis and change. There were more possibilities for citizenship when Jones and Allen formed the Free African Society in 1787 than when Robert and Thomas Hamilton founded the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, and black theorists’ tactical shifts reflect that declension. The black state conventions emphasized voting rights as crucial to citizenship in the 1840s in the wake of multiple states ratifying constitutions restricting voting to white men. Many of these same writers continued advocating for formal rights into the 1850s, but they also shifted focus to the need for more dramatic political reconstruction in light of states rejecting their claims and after passage of the Fugitive Slave Law (1850) and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854). Jones and Allen’s foregrounding of neighborliness—what I define in Chapter 1 as the ability of fellow citizens to engage each other on terms of mutual responsibility and good faith through “real sensibility”—in the 1790s speaks to their sense of hope that the young nation could hold to the promises of equality and commonwealth they saw articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and abolitionism. The rapidity with which the two former slaves rose to prominence in Philadelphia gave them an attenuated hope in a generally progressive trend, despite many setbacks. But the moment did not last, not in Jones and Allen’s day and not across subsequent decades. By 1860, calls for neighborly citizenship might have seemed misplaced in light of an ascendant capitalist citizenship and the sense that the current world would need to be dismantled completely before any kind of democratic society could be constructed. And yet, this is precisely when Harper returns our attention to the potential power of “real sensibility” and the power of the word—spoken and written—to spark substantive and revolutionary realignments.
Many of the texts and scenes I draw from constellate around Philadelphia and New York as the setting or point of origin, in part as a reflection of the two cities’ status as print centers. And yet, as Gardner has noted, periodicals such as the Christian Recorder, Douglass’s Paper, and the Anglo-African Magazine might have been produced in Philadelphia and New York, but their correspondents and circulation went well beyond these confines.95 Indeed, though the Anglo-African Magazine was based in New York City, contributors such as Harper were not. At the same time, my selection of these texts is not an argument for a cohesive or homogeneous black print public.96 Instead, it reflects my sense that citizenship theorizing was always simultaneously local and contextual in nature and at the same time aware of and pointed toward larger audiences that, as I discuss in Chapter 3, McCune Smith invoked in terms of the “Republic of Letters.”97 By focusing tightly on specific literary historical flashpoints, The Practice of Citizenship does the necessary work of providing context for understanding both the continuities and differences in what comes after. My approach here has been shaped by Elizabeth McHenry’s work on black readers in Forgotten Readers (2002), an interest in micro-history, and how lessons learned from micro-histories of black texts might be applied at varying spatial and temporal scales. By drawing attention to theorizing as a process, rather than a goal, to citizenship as constantly under construction, rather than something possessed, The Practice of Citizenship nevertheless also offers a model for thinking across multiply configured periods without losing this specificity.98
I end with 1861, because the moment just before the Civil War represents a time of intense theorizing that often gets overshadowed by what comes after in much the same way that Dred Scott v. Sanford overshadows events of 1856, including “Bleeding Kansas” and Margaret Garner’s killing of her daughter. Indeed, while a potential Thirteenth Amendment that explicitly prevented Congress from interfering with state enslavement laws was on its way to ratification, a literary explosion was occurring in black periodicals, where writers were producing fiction, poetry, and essays at a blistering pace. I want to capture the tensions between possibility and disappointment from this prewar perspective—as if emancipation and the Reconstruction amendments had not and perhaps would never happen—and from a moment when all signs pointed toward the permanence of enslavement and increasing racism.99 Chapter 1 examines competing accounts of Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow fever epidemic to outline neighborliness as the ethical foundation for the citizenship practices articulated throughout The Practice of Citizenship. Building on the notion of an “expressive language of conduct,” Jones and Allen’s 1794 Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People clarifies neighborliness as a form of sensibility made material through concrete actions. The neighborly focus on being a good neighbor rather than on identifying the good neighbor creates fellow feeling independent of other forms of association—familial, racial, economic, national, and so on. Narrative’s vignettes in the style of the parable of the Good Samaritan flesh out neighborliness as a citizenship practice robust enough to promote mutual aid yet open enough to promote more democratic engagement.
Jones and Allen published Narrative, in part, as a direct response to Matthew Carey’s A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (1793, 1794), which accused black Philadelphians of theft during the epidemic. Yet, Carey’s Account provided not only an occasion to go to print but also a foil against which to stage their account of black citizenship practices. The two restage scenes from and in the style of Account as a way to narratively dismantle its racial and economic assumptions. More than a response to Carey’s immediate claims, however, Jones and Allen’s articulation of neighborly citizenship provides the grounding for their plan for emancipation, an “experiment” in institutional neighborliness that would educate the children of slaves as full citizens.
Chapter 2 positions the black state conventions of the 1840s as central to our understanding of citizenship and the operation of participatory politics as a citizenship practice more generally. Through readings of convention proceedings from New York (1840), Pennsylvania (1841, 1848), and Ohio (1848,
