and worked for legal change in the late 1840s.
The second half of the book focuses on a set of protest strategies black activists used amid a series of legal and political watersheds during the midnineteenth century. Slavecatchers posed the most urgent threat to black northerners’ freedom. Activists used citizenship to argue for legal protections, including a jury trial for any person alleged to be a fugitive from slavery. Chapter 4 examines that work in the 1830s and 1840s alongside extralegal rescues, which also implicitly demanded legal protections of black freedom. The potency of those multiple forms of black politics led southerners in Congress to push through the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a law that created a substantial new apparatus to arrest black people in the North and ship them into bondage in the South. Similarly, black citizenship politics produced other moments of crisis and opportunity in the next two decades. In May 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney erected a new legal barrier designed to silence African Americans’ arguments about citizenship when he ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that black people could never be American citizens. Chapter 5 traces black responses to Taney’s ruling. Activists denied Taney’s authority, working to ensure that the terms of citizenship remained a ground for debate and a useful political tool. While Dred Scott encouraged some to consider following John Russwurm to West Africa, the Civil War offered profound opportunities to remake black people’s legal lives. Activists sought enlistment and equal pay by presenting themselves as citizens, expecting that that status and their sacrifice would secure their rights in peacetime. Chapter 6 shows how antebellum forms of politics persisted into the Civil War era and how they molded urgent discussions about the content of citizenship and the significance of suffrage.
In June 1866, Congress agreed to the Fourteenth Amendment, which conferred citizenship on black people who were born in the United States and ensured “the equal protection of the laws” to American citizens. This story closes in the aftermath of that measure, as black people experienced the possibilities and limits of citizen status. The vagueness of the Fourteenth Amendment, the brutality of white resistance to black rights, and the failures of legal enforcement increasingly demanded that African Americans continue the work they had done in the antebellum period, struggling to mold the terms of citizenship and make the status meaningful in their lives.
CHAPTER 1
An Integral Portion of This Republic
When John Russwurm announced his support for colonization, Samuel Cornish went immediately to work to refute the claim that black people could not be American citizens. Cornish had left the newspaper business, but in the spring of 1829, he returned to New York City and launched the Rights of All. That paper facilitated black people’s efforts to establish a clear legal position for themselves in the United States. From the late 1820s through the 1830s, in the Rights of All and his subsequent work, Cornish deployed many of the principal strategies of early antebellum black politics. He stood at the forefront of black protest that linked people across the free states. He spoke to black and white Americans and used citizenship to fight disfranchisement and colonization, the central components of black exclusion.
Cornish and other black Americans rejected John Russwurm’s pessimism because they saw possibility in the vagueness of citizenship.1 Black people were citizens because they contributed to American communities, activists argued. Further, they claimed citizen status should provide them with specific rights, in particular equal access to the vote. For Cornish and his colleagues, there was a simple logic to their claims. No definitive legal statement existed to exclude African Americans from citizen status. Activists used that ambiguity to pursue specific legal protections, responding directly to the terms of the laws that excluded them and urging those in positions of power to see black people as part of a community of citizens entitled to rights. Black citizenship politics in the early antebellum period wove together a range of projects—anticolonization, agrarianism, moral uplift, and the pursuit of the vote. Cornish knit together a cohort of black activists whose work helped shape the terms of citizenship as they sought opportunities to live as African Americans.
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Samuel Cornish did essential work to create the political tools black activists used to make public claims about the terms of citizenship. Cornish was born free in the slaveholding society of Delaware in 1795. When he was around twenty years old, he began training for the ministry at Philadelphia’s First African Presbyterian Church. Cornish honed his voice in the church, then spread it in a range of activist work. He was an early advocate of black state and national conventions, a cofounder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and a leader of the New York Committee of Vigilance, which worked to protect free people from slavecatchers.2 In the 1820s and 1830s, Cornish helped to produce a black print culture that was central to activists’ efforts to claim rights through citizenship.
In May 1829, just two months after John Russwurm closed Freedom’s Journal, Cornish introduced the nation’s second black newspaper. His new project presented both subtle and overt opposition to Russwurm’s ideas. Cornish greeted readers of the Rights of All with a masthead quoting Proverbs 14:34: “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.” The first half of that verse had run atop the Journal, and it might have seemed a simple choice for an antislavery minister. But invoking Proverbs 14 conveyed complex meanings beyond an expression of devotion. The chapter begins, “Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands.” Throughout, Proverbs 14 offers guidelines for individuals and communities. Cornish’s chosen masthead linked the new paper to its predecessor and, for readers familiar with the Bible, might have brought to mind his unwise former colleague.3 He launched the Rights of All in direct opposition to Russwurm, who had abandoned the nation that had once been his home and had torn down the activist “house” he had established in the office of Freedom’s Journal.
In a message introducing readers to the paper, Cornish described it as a tool for “the general improvement of Society” and announced his intent to focus on black people, the most “oppressed and afflicted” members of the population. He acknowledged that he could be criticized for having left his post at the Journal, and he encouraged readers and patrons to judge his new venture on its own merit, independent of any earlier work. But he chose to raise the issue of “the late Editor” of Freedom’s Journal, declining to mention Russwurm by name. “To me the subject is equally strange as to others,” he wrote, calling Russwurm’s support for the ACS one of the “novelties of the day.” Cornish concluded that he and “the intelligent of my brethren generally,” were convinced that for most black people, colonization was “in no wise calculated, to meet their wants or ameliorate their condition.”4
From its beginnings, then, Cornish used the Rights of All to marginalize Russwurm and the claim that black people could not be citizens, presenting audiences with African Americans who were determined to change the circumstances of their lives in the United States. He was invested in “this great Republick” and in determining what work he might contribute “towards the improvement of all its parts.”5 When editors from the New York Observer and Chronicle said the new paper resulted from “the change of the ‘Freedom’s Journal’ in respect to African colonization,” Cornish denied their claim, which he called a “gratuitous censure.”6 But it is instructive to read his paper, and with it much of early antebellum black protest, as an extended response to the assertion that black Americans could not be citizens. Colonizationists looked to compensate Africa for her stolen generations with exiled black Americans, but Cornish urged Americans to “do her sons justice wherever we find them.” “Educate this oppressed and afflicted people,” he demanded, “encourage them
