Remaking the Republic

Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

Christopher James Bonner

• Editorial: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780812296860
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Afroamerikanische Geschichte

Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person attained the status, and the particular privileges citizenship afforded. Indeed, as late as 1862, U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates observed that citizenship was "now as little understood in its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and speculative criticism as it was at the founding of the Government."Black people suffered under this ambiguity, but also seized on it in efforts to transform their nominal freedom. By claiming that they were citizens in their demands for specific rights, they were, Christopher James Bonner argues, at the center of creating the very meaning of American citizenship. In the decades before and after Bates's lament, free African Americans used newspapers, public gatherings, and conventions to make arguments about who could be a citizen, the protections citizenship entailed, and the obligations it imposed. They thus played a vital role in the long, fraught process of determining who belonged in the nation and the terms of that belonging. Remaking the Republic chronicles the various ways African Americans from a wide range of social positions throughout the North attempted to give meaning to American citizenship over the course of the nineteenth century. Examining newpsapers, state and national conventions, public protest meetings, legal cases, and fugitive slave rescues, Bonner uncovers a spirited debate about rights and belonging among African Americans, the stakes of which could determine their place in U.S. society and shape the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

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 in agricultural and mechanical persuits, and there will be no difficulty in making them good and happy citizens.”⁷ Many black Americans were outraged at those who seemed to prioritize Africa over their native country. “Mr. Russwurm tells us, he knows no other home for us than Africa,” one black Philadelphian noted. “As his usefulness is entirely lost to the people, I sincerely pray that he may have the honor to live and also die there.”⁸

Cornish often contested Russwurm’s arguments without printing his former colleague’s name. The editors of the Observer had overlooked Russwurm’s claims about citizenship and had thus misrepresented black Americans’ concerns. For Cornish, the Observer’s announcement of his paper was a “gratuitous censure” because it reduced black politics to a reactionary movement against the ACS and ignored the work of claiming and shaping citizenship in the United States. He demanded that those in power “do justice” for African Americans by offering opportunities for education and labor, and he called on black people to seize those opportunities in order to solidify their claims to citizen status. Together, individuals and governments would reshape the terms of African Americans’ lives. He surely hoped that the Observer would reprint his alternative portrait of African Americans’ concerns.

Cornish initiated a public correspondence with the editors of the Observer in the hope of broadening the readership of the Rights of All. The Observer was a weekly paper connected to the Presbyterian Church that did not typically cover black politics, but its editors were sympathetic to colonization and had earlier shown interest in Russwurm and Freedom’s Journal.⁹ By writing about that paper, Cornish spoke to white New Yorkers who were apparently uninterested in the work of changing black people’s lives in the country. Newspapers in places, including Baltimore, Boston, and Norwich, Connecticut, announced the launch of the Rights of All and encouraged Cornish to see the potential reach of his paper.¹⁰ Cornish printed letters from an array of black and white correspondents interested in legal change. Generally, he crafted the paper with a diverse readership in mind and with the goal of widening his subscriber base. He published columns advising African Americans on proper conduct, expecting that black people would read them. But he frequently addressed free black northerners in his calls for more subscribers. Cornish understood that people often read a single copy of a newspaper aloud to an audience of friends and acquaintances. He likely hoped that some of those friends and acquaintances might choose to become subscribers themselves.¹¹ He also printed reasoned arguments against unjust laws, perhaps hoping his words would reach white voters and lawmakers who did not favor racial equality. And in the summer of 1829, Cornish may also have been writing to John Russwurm, who remained in New York making final arrangements for his move to Liberia. Perhaps Cornish held out hope that he might convince his former colleague of the error of emigration.

His work set the tone for later black editors who would similarly address an array of topics and target a range of black and white audiences.¹² In general, black newspapers needed an interracial readership for financial stability. Editors and contributors also understood that, through print, they might change the minds of those in the power structure who remained prejudiced as well as shape conversations and policy regarding African Americans. And people like Cornish reached a far broader audience than a list of subscribers indicates because of the ways ideas circulated in antebellum print culture.¹³

Cornish subtly attacked Russwurm throughout the Rights of All, including in a message encouraging black Americans to follow the example of Jewish people in London who petitioned Parliament for legal equality. “Americans we truly are, by birth and feeling,” Cornish wrote. He urged black people to assert more forcefully their desire for legal protections in the United States. He commanded his readers, “Let no man talk of impossibility; with God, all things are possible.”¹⁴ Many black activists expressed similar optimism rooted in their Christian faith. To Cornish, the pessimistic Russwurm did not belong in a community of black Christian men and women. Cornish’s criticism was indirect, but his target was clear. In August 1829, with Russwurm making final preparations to leave the country, Cornish wrote, “Any coloured man, of common intelligence, who gives his countenance and influence, to [Liberia] … should be considered as a traitor to his brethren, and discarded by every respectable man of colour.”¹⁵ Protesting the ACS and, by implication, Russwurm, he offered an alternative vision of black Americans’ future and laid the foundation for black citizenship politics.

Colonization was part of a broader project of restricting black people’s unfettered movement and access to space in the United States.¹⁶ Pennsylvania lawmakers proposed two measures in 1832, one that would limit protections available to alleged fugitive slaves and the other to outlaw new black migration into the commonwealth.¹⁷ Activists turned again to print culture for their response, collecting signatures on a petition against those measures.¹⁸ James Forten delivered their message to the state legislature. Born free in 1766, Forten ran a profitable sail-making shop in Philadelphia, had served on a privateer during the American Revolution, and had previously organized in opposition to an effort by lawmakers to outlaw new black migrants in the 1810s. In 1832, Forten and his fellow activists delivered their petition to state lawmakers and had it published, convinced that their concerns were meaningful beyond the population of free black Pennsylvanians.

Forten reminded lawmakers that their state constitution declared that all men were “born equally free and independent” and that, under its terms, “every man shall have a remedy by due course of law.”¹⁹ The petitioners denied that free black people endangered the state and vehemently rejected the prevailing argument that they had “promoted[ed] servile insurrections.”²⁰ The petitioners might have chosen Forten as their representative because he had made a specific, memorable contribution to the nation by fighting in the Revolutionary War. His personal history reflected African Americans’ emotional ties to the nation, the less tangible but no less powerful feelings that bound people to their home. “They feel themselves to be citizens of Pennsylvania [and] children of the state,” Forten explained.²¹ The phrase conjured an image of activists throwing themselves on the mercy of the legislature, asking that the state reciprocate their feelings. But it also charged the state for dereliction of its duties. They made an emotional appeal designed to change the law, arguing for a citizen status that imposed responsibilities on individuals as well as on the government. From the petitioners’ perspective, it was no more just for Pennsylvania to reject James Forten than it was for a mother to abandon her infant. Citizenship should bind American people and governments in a web of obligations. Perhaps the strength of that appeal pushed lawmakers to reconsider. Perhaps logic moved legislators, convinced that it would not benefit their state to exclude people like Forten who had fought to create the nation. Pennsylvania officials rejected the proposed law to bar black migration into the state.²² But white northerners would continue to promote similar exclusionary measures that threatened black people’s claims to rights as citizens.

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Forten’s military service was part of a history that refuted the idea that African Americans had little to offer society as prospective citizens. Colonizationists and those who wanted to bar black people from particular states argued that African Americans were disproportionately poor, violent, and immoral. The personal histories of people like Forten helped refute those ideas. Activists argued that people who offered useful contributions to their communities were entitled to citizen status. In 1832, the Pennsylvania petitioners presented data that denied charges of black poverty, including evidence that African Americans were only 4 percent of the 549 people who had received poor relief from the state in 1830, far less than their 8 percent of the state’s population. Forten estimated that African Americans paid more than enough in taxes to support poor black Pennsylvanians, and he noted that many black people turned to African American benevolent societies for relief rather than seeking state aid. The petitioners said black Pennsylvanians owned more than $100,000 in real property and that many worked in skilled mechanical trades despite prejudice that limited their opportunities for apprenticeships.²³ Black self-sufficiency was a foundation for claims to legal protections.

Because African Americans were valuable members in their communities, black removal would harm people across the nation. Samuel Cornish built the Rights of All around the argument that African Americans were important, enthusiastic contributors to the United States. In July 1829, when government officials gathered to amend New York City’s charter, Cornish encouraged them to provide equal employment opportunity in the city. “The pursuit of an honest living,” he hoped, “will be secured to all our citizens.” He printed an editorial the morning the officials planned to meet in which he emphasized black people’s desire to work in specific jobs for their own benefit and to help their city develop. “Our colored citizens have uniformly been denied License as Car[t]men and porters,” Cornish wrote. As he sat at his desk drafting that editorial, Cornish must have imagined lawmakers traveling through lower Manhattan on their way to the meeting: perhaps some would pick up an unfamiliar newspaper or overhear a discussion about the opinionated black editor and be convinced that black people were essential workers for the city. Cornish wanted people to reexamine their ideas about black Americans and about citizenship as a legal status. It was likely no coincidence that he published this message just as the New York ...