like those of Fox and Gibson that denied black suffrage and the possibility of black citizenship pushed activists to pursue a legal relationship with the federal government as a way to potentially supersede state legal restrictions. When Fox invoked laws in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Ohio, he encouraged black people to seek change beyond a state judge’s authority. His decision pushed black activists to challenge a patchwork of state-level exclusion with a higher legal power. Most important, Fox and Gibson bolstered black activists’ efforts to use citizenship in their work. In their decisions, judges like Fox and Gibson confirmed that black citizenship politics was potent, that citizen status was key to how governments conferred and protected individual rights, and that the terms of citizenship were unstable and therefore contestable. Judges and lawmakers embodied the oppressive force of state governments in the period but at the same time revealed the potential for influencing the meaning of citizenship that could include ideas from both white lawmakers and black activists.
Black activists, though, had their own disagreements about the nature of citizenship in a federal system, and the complexities of African American identity in a slaveholding nation shaped their discussions about political strategy. In August 1838, for example, a debate between Samuel Cornish and the black minister and educator Lewis Woodson connected tensions over identity to ideas about government power. In their discussion, printed in Cornish’s Colored American, the men agreed that free black people were too concentrated in cities. But while Cornish encouraged people to move west and integrate rural communities, Woodson (writing under the pseudonym “Augustine”) called on African Americans to build their own society in the hinterlands. Woodson had been born free in Virginia in 1806, and his experiences in that slave state might have shaped his program of black separatism and self-sufficiency.23 Writing to Cornish, Woodson declared that he intended to purchase lands “from the Congress of our native country” to use for separate black settlements. He scoffed at Cornish’s rebuttal that the plan amounted to “colonization magnified.” Woodson agreed with Cornish that black people should strive to “possess the inalienable rights of American citizens”—he saw citizenship as an important aim because it could be connected to a broad set of legal protections. But Woodson argued citizenship should be just that, a legal relationship, while Cornish felt that it ought to entail emotional bonds, “an identity of interest” among individuals. Woodson pointed out that people in different states or regions often felt little connection to their neighbors, and he argued that black people might embrace a separate racial identity that would not amount to a rejection of a place in the United States. “Men may be American citizens without having any intercourse with each other,” Woodson wrote. Neither residency nor race could exclude black Americans from citizen status, which he said should be a simple result of their birth in the nation and the fact that they had “contributed to the general welfare.”24 Both Cornish and Woodson embraced the possibility of a citizen status that would connect black Americans and the federal government. But Woodson was not concerned with a status that would represent bonds of identity or love, which Cornish suggested were essential to gaining federal protection.
These debates among black activists and white lawmakers were particularly urgent in the early 1840s, as Texas moved to the center of American political discussions. Debates over Texas annexation raised questions about the very shape of the nation and what geographic change might mean for national principles. In 1838, John Quincy Adams, then a Massachusetts congressman, spoke against Texas annexation, arguing that the “gag rule” that blocked discussion of slavery had silenced significant opposition to proposals to add Texas to the union. Adams felt that the principle of the nation as “a compact of the People” might crumble if Congress voted to annex Texas without representing the breadth of American opinion on the issue.25 Meanwhile, President John Tyler laid the groundwork for Texas annexation as early as 1841, and by 1843, cabinet officials publicly promoted annexation as a way to defend the country against antislavery British influence. By alleging British conspiracy, they framed expansion south and west as essential to national interests and identity, not simply a concern of southern states.26 Other northerners echoed Adams’s concerns, as in a Massachusetts meeting in which people argued that annexation endangered the republic. “ ‘Domestic tranquility,’ ” they said, “will not be promoted by the increased strength of its great disturbing cause.” Texas seemed poised to determine whether the country would remain half slave and half free, to make a definitive statement on “what the country itself shall be.”27
The extent to which the physical shape of the nation and its defining characteristics were up for debate in the late 1830s and early 1840s gave particular currency to black people’s arguments that citizenship should first and foremost connect individuals to the federal government. When activists called themselves citizens of the United States or appealed to federal authority, they made themselves part of urgent conversations about what constituted the United States, who belonged in the country, and how its government should relate to individual Americans. Black activists spoke a language that was familiar and important to lawmakers and others when they made their arguments about the terms and content of citizenship in a dramatically changing nation.28
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As they argued that citizenship should connect them to the federal government, African Americans worked to build a broad political community that transcended state and local boundaries. They worked simultaneously to forge a black American community and an American citizen status. Beginning in the late 1820s, a handful of New Yorkers sought to represent the free black populace, hoping to unite African American voices and address their shared concerns. Understanding that their arguments about citizenship could affect all free black Americans, they wanted their statements to emanate from a coalition that crossed state borders. Unity was a central idea in their politics, but activists disagreed about the form a coalition should take and the ideas that should motivate its work.
Black newspapers and national conventions were two of the most powerful tools activists used to create a black American political community. Cornish’s work at the Rights of All emphasized the power of political unity. Faced with the financial challenges of sustaining a newspaper in the early antebellum period, Cornish’s investors called for support from a broad community of “people of colour” who might fill their subscription rolls. Encouraging people to feel connected to one another could make the paper financially stable and further black protest by tapping the energies and ideas of a larger body of potential activists. In 1829, Cornish and his colleagues argued that the Rights of All was “the only channel of communication which we have with the whites—the only voice by which we can speak to our brethren at a distance.” They understood that newspapers were crucial political tools for uniting people and amplifying their statements to lawmakers and the voting public.29
Calls for a wider black political coalition seemed especially urgent in response to the American Colonization Society’s alarming vision of forced removal. Activists had launched the national convention movement in 1830, and delegates to that first meeting made clear the ties that bound them to the nation. They denounced the ACS as the “African Colonization Society,” denying its organizers’ claims to represent black Americans. They also established their own “American Society” of free black people and announced its chief goal as “improving their condition in the United States.” They undercut the push for emigration to Liberia by calling for a black settlement in Upper Canada—present-day Ontario—not as a permanent home for African Americans but as a means to alleviate the prejudice and economic inequality that resulted from overcrowding in northeastern urban centers.30
The ACS’s removal programs, which were organized at the state level, gave rise to shared concerns that brought free black people together across state borders. African Americans recognized that ACS supporters would not be satisfied with simply removing black people from Maryland or Ohio. Activists identified black American political concerns and worked beyond state borders by traveling and exchanging information. These were central political tactics in demanding a national citizen status that would offer legal protection from injustices like forced removal. In 1833, Nathaniel Paul, a black minister based in Albany, New York, leaned on an image of
