We are Americans. We were born in no foreign clime.âŠ
We have not been brought up under the influence of other, strange, aristocratic, and uncongenial political relations. In this respect, we profess to be American and republican. With the nature, features and operations of our government, we have been familiarized from youth; and its democratic character is accordant with the flow of our feelings, and the current of our thoughts.âŠ
We call upon you to return to the pure faith of your republican fathers. We lift up our voices for the restored spirit of the first days of the republicâfor the great principles then maintained, and that regard for man which revered the characteristic features of his nature, as of more honor and worth than the form and color of the body in which they dwell. For no vested rights, for no peculiar privileges, for no extraordinary prerogatives, do we ask. We merely put forth our appeal for a republican birthright.
âConvention of the Colored Inhabitants of the State of New York, To Consider Their Political Disabilities, âAddress to the People of the State of New York,â August 1840
One hundred thirty-four men representing thirty-three of New Yorkâs fifty-seven counties issued this manifesto, which became the exemplary black political text of the antebellum era. Their unprecedented gathering built on a statewide drive for âequal suffrageâ in the nationâs premier electoral arena. Probably authored by the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, a twenty-four-year-old fugitive and now a well-educated Presbyterian minister, their âAddressâ set the terms for the next generation. Aimed at white Whigs and ex-Federalists for whom Jacksonian Democracy meant mob rule, it mixed familiar patriotic tropes with nativist disdain for those âborn in foreign climesâ who had brought with them âstrange, aristocraticâ habits. The âappeal for a republican birthrightâ reminded New Yorkers that black men voted in the Empire State from 1777 until 1821, when most were disfranchised by a âfreeholdâ property qualification, meaning real estate worth $250. Above all else, however, Garnet evoked a declension from âthe pure faith of your republican fathers.â With supreme audacity, he claimed for black men the Revolution itself, âthe first days of the republicâ and âthe great principles then maintained,â before modern corruption set in.1
Yet this first statewide black convention, the dozens of conclaves it inspired over the next twenty years (statewide meetings from Maine to California, including ten in New York), and the movement represented at those conventions, are now largely unknown, eclipsed by stories of slave resistance and the Underground Railroad. Consider the best-known speech by a black American in this period, Frederick Douglassâs 1852 âWhat to the Slave is the Fourth of July?â: âWhat have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? ⊠I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.⊠The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.⊠This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.â Douglassâs antipatriotic excoriation has been quoted dozens of times as the authentic voice of black alienation. How could it be otherwise? How could black people declare âWe are Americansâ as long as slavery drove the nationâs economy, laws, and politics? From that perspective, Garnetâs 1840 address seems irrelevant or deluded. What kind of ârepublican birthrightâ could a slave hope to share?2
In defiance of the notion that slavery defined African Americans, northern free men of color, led by self-emancipated slaves like Garnet and Douglass, made the claim âWe are Americansâ over and over. Douglassâs 1852 oration was a provocation, one of the things he did best. By then, he was an international celebrity whom even Negrophobes flocked to see. Speaking to whites in Rochester, he pressed upon them the republicâs inevitable damnation while slavery persisted. They wanted Douglassâs lash, and they got it, in high style. But his views speaking to his peers one year later conformed exactly to the terms Garnet set out in 1840. In July 1853, Douglass presided at the Colored National Convention in Syracuse, and chaired the committee that drafted its address âto the People of the United States.â This document repeated the 1840 language almost verbatim, with a dollop of aggressive Protestantism for good measure: âWe are Americans, and as Americans, we would speak to Americans. We address you not as aliens or exiles ⊠[but] as American citizens asserting their rights on their own native soil.⊠We ask that, speaking the same language and being of the same religion, worshipping the same God, owing our redemption to the same Savior, and learning our duties from the same Bible, we shall not be treated as barbarians.â3
To make sense of these addresses, we must stop thinking of men like Douglass as simply defiant fugitives and firebrand agitatorsâthe way they portrayed themselves for popular consumption, on the lecture circuit in countless towns and dozens of âslave narratives.â We should see them instead as they knew themselves: as leaders of an embryonic political class several thousand strong, ambitious for office, practical men focused on issues of organization, program, alliances, and advancementâon politics, in sum.
Usually, politics consists of two interlocking activities: speaking, in person and via printed texts, and assembling, to act together through voting, rallying, canvassing, and lobbying. This chapter focuses on the former, on antebellum African Americansâ political speech, for two reasons. First, because the study of discourse (what people say to or about their political friends and enemies) is the quickest way to get at the premises of their practice. Second, because a common discourse was the only truly national component of black political culture before Reconstruction, when black men first entered Congress. I call this discourse âblack republicanism,â meaning a version of American republicanism, the lingua franca of all who operated within the public sphere. As Daniel Walker Howe underlines, âRepublicanism was a paradigm for understanding political life and a vocabulary for explaining it.â Everyone âspoke the language of republicanism. Every group interpreted it in a distinctive way and claimed to be its rightful heir.â To position themselves within the national family, African Americans needed to prove that they were, save a few details of phenotype, identical to other Americans. They could not afford the separateness of the Quakers or the Jews, the nationâs two recognized ethnoreligious minorities. The only vehicle for their claim was a republicanism incorporating the distinctly American notion of birthright, meaning citizenship defined entirely by nativity and thus common ownership in a country. But birthright alone was not enough, so black men added their own ascriptive Americanism, a quasi-ethnicity made up of Protestant evangelicalism, speaking English, and military service, all the attributes marking them off from recent Irish and German immigrants. Together, these assertions of inclusion based on native birth, nativism, and âcolored patriotismâ constituted the positive ideology of black republicanism. This chapter examines how over time these tropes forged a reliable synthesis available to black men and their white allies as a vernacular politics focused on voting and electoral participation.4
There is one more piece to the argument, hard to comprehend in retrospect. Antebellum persons of color did not share todayâs overriding focus on race. When they declared âWe are Americans,â they meant it without qualification, as an unremitting assault on assertions of difference between them and other native-born citizens. Backed by an elite cohort of whites, and sometimes even by ordinary white men, African Americans confronted the new scientific racism by deriding the notion of race as no more than a foolish obsession with âcomplexion.â Their republicanism was emphatically nonracial, in ways that confound our contemporary understanding of blackness and whiteness. And as we shall see, noting the possible permutations of any manâs complexion, whether âyellow,â âblack,â âtawny,â or âdark,â was a key weapon in black republicanismâs arsenal.5
âOf Aliens and Nativesâ
Black republicanism germinated in the distinctly American assertion of birthright citizenship, and the special authority the new republic conferred on the native-born. Birthright citizenship has a complex history in Anglo-America. Its roots are feudal, in the equal status assigned to all His or Her Britannic Majestyâs subjects, as famously defined by William Blackstone in 1765: âThe first and most obvious division of the people is into aliens and natural-born subjects. Natural-born subjects are such as are born within the dominions of the crown of England, that is, within the ligeance, or as it is generally called, the allegiance of the king; and aliens, such as are born out of it.â Even more well-known was his assertion that the âspirit of liberty is so deeply implanted in our constitution, and rooted even in our very soil, that a slave or a negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws; and so far becomes a freeman.â This passage is commonly cited for its antislavery content, but its key affirmation is the civil equality of subjects.6
The free people of color gained distinct advantages from subjectshipâs basis in English common law, how that legal category evolved in British North America, and the emergence of a historically unprecedented conception of citizenship during and after the Revolution. At each stage in this process, juridically recognized and widely accepted precedents ignored race, emphasizing either religious affiliation, as in the transnational categories of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, or the centrality of jus soli, the birthright of the native-born. Taken together, these precedents pointed toward citizenship for free black men as âChristiansâ (meaning Protestants) born in America, regardless of how that logic offended many whitesâ social, cultural, and political sensitivities.7
The original law of subjectship, as codified in Calvinâs Case (1608), asserted an irrevocable relationship between the monarch and all born under the kingâs authority, mandating both obedience (âligeanceâ) and an entitlement to protection. In England, however, the native-born were privileged over everyone else. Well into the nineteenth century, English law recognized a hierarchy of legal rights and privileges âbetween natural-born subjects, naturalized subjects, and âdenizens,â all of whom were members of the community in some senseâ (a denizen being âa sort of halfway member who ranked above the alien yet somewhat below the native-born or naturalized subjectâ).8
In this legal order, free black men born in British North America could only have been subjects at the time of the revolutionary separation. They had no other possible identity, however much slave-state (and sometimes free-state) jurists and legislators strained to create one out of nothing after 1820. Thereforeâand this was the crucial leap of republican faithâthey became citizens with all the other âinhabitantsâ who had heretofore been British subjects. At least that was how Garnet, Douglass, and dozens of other black men asserted their citizenship after 1790, the earliest form of âoriginalismâ in American political discourse.9
Their argument gained force through how subjectship itself was radically simplified in the thirteen settler colonies strung along the Atlantic. Their legislatures and courts âmoved toward a new understanding of the ties that bind individuals to the community,â reversing the English focus on an alienâs existing allegiance by birth, privileging instead his choice of a new allegiance that was âvolitional and contractual.â Through a squatterâs rights revision of the common law, colonial assemblies promulgated much looser definitions of subjectship, enacting âgenerous naturalization policies that promised aliens virtually the same rights as Englishmen.â Desperate to attract new members, especially young men, these precarious statelets voided the three-part distinction between the native-born, denizens, and naturalized persons which remained central in British law, and regularly granted political rights to foreigners, sometimes even Catholics and Jews, so that âthe distinctions between the various categories of subjectsâstill quite real in the mother countryâbegan to soften and blur.â In British North America, immigrants made an easy transition from aliens with full property rights to naturalized subjects with full political rights. Periodically, particular colonies enfranchised whole groups of Protestant foreigners (Huguenots or German Moravians), and men of foreign birth held high offices out of reach in England. British authorities tolerated these colonial aberrations, just as they accepted that a much higher proportion of men voted than at home. To regulate the promiscuous granting of equal rights to immigrants, a 1740 Act of Parliament declared that seven years of continuous inhabitance âin any of His Majestyâs colonies in America,â accompanied by the usual oaths to prove Protestantism (Jews and Quakers exempted), would guarantee subjectship, with âthe certificates of naturalization issued under this statute ⊠recognized in all courts throughout the British Empire.â Almost 7,000 persons gained subjectship in this fashion, with lists sent to the Board of Trade each year, mainly from Pennsylvania. By midcentury, therefore, âEnglandâs hierarchical ranking of natives, naturalized aliens, and denizens [had] collapsed in Americaââthey were subjects all, including those of a darker hue.10
The second instance of black men benefiting from white menâs politics came during the Revolution. As the provisional American governments separated from Great Britain, they necessarily avoided distinguishing between different groups of subjects. The Founders could not afford to permit anyone under their fragile dominion to opt out of the new category of âAmericans.â All Americans were required to transfer their âligeanceâ as subjects; thus all Americans (other than slaves) became citizens, whether born in England, or creoles born of English parentage, or people who had arrived freely (or not so freely, as indentured servants) from somewhere other than England. A single, inclusive nationality was asserted on June 24, 1776, when Congress created American citizenship by revoking allegiance to the king, declaring âthat all persons residing within any of the United Colonies, and deriving protection from the laws of the same, owe allegiance to the said laws, and are members of such colony.â Underlining the capaciousness of this new citizenship, in 1781 Congress welcomed âall such foreignersâ deserting from the British forces, and specified in Article Four of the Articles of Confederation that âthe free inhabitants of each of these states (paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted) shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states.â11
It is impossible to read these stipulations covering âall personsâ and âthe free inhabitantsâ as implicitly excluding one complexion or phenotype. Nonetheless, many scholars have presumed or implied that the refusal to exclude people of color by inserting the word âwhiteâ was an accident or oversight. That argument was easily disposed of at the time of Dred Scott. Republicans from Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Curtis to Abraham Lincoln pointed to incontrovertible evidence that during the 1770s and 1780s (but not the 1790s) the Founders rejected attempts to racialize American citizenship. In February 1859, during a House debate over admitting Oregon as a state, the Ohio Republican John A. Bingham asked the rhetorical question âWho, sir, are citizens of the United States?â and answered, âFirst, all free persons born and domiciled within the United Statesânot all free white persons, but all free persons,â adding that it would be useless to look âin the Constitution of the United States, for that word white; it is not there.â He then made the central point, that âthe omission of this wordâthis phrase of casteâfrom our national c...