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      Circulating Citizenship in the Black State Conventions of the 1840s

      We have launched into a new position. Our fathers sought personal freedom—we now contend for political freedom.

      —“An Appeal to the Colored Citizens

      of Pennsylvania” (1848)

      The equality of political rights, which is the first mark of American citizenship, was proclaimed in the accepted presence of its absolute denial.

      —Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (1991)

      Behind the mask of deference lies the authentic demand.

      —Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories (2010)

      In the decade after the State of Pennsylvania’s 1838 constitution disenfranchised its black citizens, black Pennsylvanians signaled a more aggressive approach to citizenship and activism. While the 1848 Convention of Colored Citizens’ distinction between personal freedom and political freedom understates the political nature of the previous generation’s work—which included sending petitions to state and federal governments, founding black mutual aid societies and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and initiating the National Colored Convention Movement—the comparison does signal a change in citizenship practices between the 1790s and the 1840s. By the 1840s, voting had become one of the central citizenship practices and means of policing the civic imaginary: it was a symbol of fellow citizenship among the men who voted and a reminder that those men (variously defined by race and class) and women not allowed to vote were not only inferior but also under the power and protection of those who did.¹ As Judith N. Shklar notes, political rights in the form of voting emerged as “the first mark of American citizenship,” and that mark was quickly consolidated with and encoded through whiteness.²

      This chapter examines the black state conventions of the 1840s as political documents central to an understanding of citizenship practices in the antebellum United States. Recognizing the changing significance of voting in national civic discourse and their own political needs beyond emancipation, black conventioneers interpreted voting and political participation more broadly as the defining citizenship practices, the rights and rites that connected citizens in a community, and a citizen’s most powerful defense in a republican government. Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker rightly claim, “For keen analyses of the issues outlined and for breadth of research and argument, these addresses are among the outstanding political documents of the period,” reflecting “a cross-section of this community” more than any other aggregate of texts outside of the black press itself.³ And, as work coming out of the Colored Conventions Project at the University of Delaware is beginning to make clear, these conventions represent a host of print and social interactions that we are only just beginning to document, let alone theorize. The black state conventions offer key arguments about participatory politics as a practice of citizenship, and the form itself—a combination of public gatherings and printed proceedings—offers an alternate trajectory for how participatory politics could be enacted. Our tendency to focus on Douglass, Garnet, and other participants individually has obscured how the conventions developed as collective and dialogic institutions in which black political thought emerged not just as an intellectual project but as a set of citizenship practices enacted through print culture. While many scholars quote from these texts for their documentary and evidentiary value, here I foreground the black state conventions as distinct and important political and cultural phenomena, as important as the black press, the slaves’ narratives, and the national conventions to our understanding of early black political and print culture.⁴

      Delegates envisioned these texts as living documents: simultaneously a manifestation of collective black political life and a means for sustaining that life even as states attempted to cut it off. The conventions provide, in the words of the 1848 “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of Pennsylvania,” “a living commentary on the principle that governs American legislation, and controls American justice.”⁵ John Ernest has described the proceedings of the national conventions in similar terms. They are, Ernest writes, “collective performances designed to be a representative embodiment of an imagined African American community.”⁶ In addition to this historiographic significance, which is the focus of Ernest’s study, these conventions, both national and local, not only represent an “imagined African-American community” but also telegraph the terms under which that community was and desired itself to be a part of a larger U.S. national community.

      Rather than a single act, exclusive property, or individual decision, the conventions figure political participation as a shared, vital, moving substance and invoke tropes of circulation—blood, power, people, water, and texts—to theorize these practices. The 1840 Convention of the Colored Inhabitants of the State of New York, for instance, describes the franchise as “the life blood of political existence.”⁷ Taking my lead from the conventions themselves, this chapter uses circulation as a heuristic for analyzing how the conventions functioned as an archive and repertoire of black citizenship—a constellation of texts and gatherings, beginning well in advance of the actual conventions and continuing well past delegates’ departure from the physical meeting space. As I outline in this chapter’s first section, the emphasis on circulation—in print and otherwise—takes my analysis of the black state conventions well beyond the conventions as singular events or the minutes as self-contained documents. This extended print and public purview also takes us well beyond the view, encouraged in the minutes themselves, of conventions as predominantly male spaces. P. Gabrielle Foreman, Sarah Patterson, and Jim Casey note in their introduction to the Colored Conventions Project that women’s work outside the official delegate structure “illustrate[s] the ways in which Black women challenged traditional beliefs about women’s place in public society.”⁸ The male delegates to New York’s 1840 convention developed circulation-based theories claiming their right to the franchise as a part of an explicitly rendered manhood citizenship. In so doing, they refused an intersectional critique of citizenship. And yet, just as black men used the convention form to enact participatory politics despite racially ascriptive voting legislation, black women used it and these

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