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of interpretation as they theorized citizenship, developing in the process a robust archive. In particular, they note a reference to “citizens of the United States, as are free persons of color” in a December 21, 1803, resolution on “American seaman.”⁷⁰ Over twenty years later, in the wake of the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision (1857), James McCune Smith would return to these documents along with their roots in Roman citizenship. “[I]n the absence of any definition of the word [citizen] in the Constitution,” Smith argues, “the word must bear the meaning which language itself attaches to it … when it expresses the relation of the individual to the general government.” He enumerates the rights associated with Roman and U.S. citizenship, noting that free black citizens exercised them all. He, like the Pennsylvania appealers before, then sets out to define citizens by way of the rights they exercise and the responsibilities they hold: “the possession of all or any of” these rights “constituted citizenship on the part of the individual holding them.”⁷¹ Readings such as the 1837 petitioners and Smith’s engaged historical and contemporaneous legal writing to expand, rather than contract, citizenship’s parameters and to refuse the calculus by which white whim gained the force of timeless law.

      Like many of the texts in this book, the 1837 “Appeal’s” materiality—its circulation and literal presence on the table at the convention—was key to its intervention. The “Appeal” was read during Pennsylvania’s Reform Convention in 1837, sparking a prolonged debate among delegates (almost twenty pages), first over printing and distributing the “Appeal” to the convention and then over questions including the petitioners’ status as citizens, what some delegates saw as the “Appeal’s” “injurious” language, and the implications of accepting the “Appeal” for Pennsylvania’s relation to slaveholding states. Some delegates took issue with the document’s tone, calling it “a mere argumentative paper” with “nothing in its character which entitled it to receive any special attention,” a document that contained language “not very courteous … indeed, for petitioners.”⁷² These comments prompted Thaddeus Stevens (Adams County) to counter, “When a petition was couched in language respectful to the body to which it was presented, they were bound to receive it. Was this memorial, then, to be rejected? He would never give his vote for that. Such a memorial, coming from white men, would not be considered offensive.”⁷³ For Stevens, it seemed clear that to some of his fellow delegates, the document’s “respectful” nature hinged on the racial identity of the petitioners, which itself was under question and admittedly artificial, as “probably many of those who signed the memorial are as white as many of us, although they do not rank according to the technical terms of ‘white’ and ‘black.’”⁷⁴ The debate highlights the degree to which notions about racial hierarchy colored the reception of political acts and even whether or not an act would be received as political at all. The convention eventually decided at least to print and distribute the petition (fifty-six for, forty-five against), though it kept the language restricting voting rights to white men.

      This moment of claims making through print circulation, like so many instances on scales small and large, was a civic and textual act that called those in power to recognize and admit how central black citizens and their claims were to national politics and the very definitions of republicanism and freedom.⁷⁵ As one delegate to Pennsylvania’s constitutional convention put it, the “Appeal” “involved questions of the utmost importance not only to the character of our deliberations, but to that of the State, and to the Union itself, of which it forms an important part.”⁷⁶ While the “Appeal’s” content articulated the sham of Pennsylvania’s disenfranchisement of black citizens, debates over its formal status as a petition, appeal, or memorial, as well as the debate over how the convention should accept it, if at all, had ramifications for the nature of representation and the relation between government and the governed more broadly.⁷⁷ The stakes involved not just whether or not black men could vote on the same terms as white men but also the meaning of citizenship altogether.

      In contrast to the histories and practices that documents such as the “Appeal” and Smith’s “Citizenship” excavated, some of the earliest attempts to define U.S. citizenship quickly began linking those rights and social markers that identified the citizen to white men, in principle if not yet in law, through historical amnesia and outright fabrication. David Ramsay’s 1789 A Dissertation on the Manners of Acquiring the Character and Privileges of a Citizen, for instance, used “Negroes” as a foil for differentiating between sovereign citizens and mere inhabitants:

      Negroes are inhabitants, but not citizens. Citizenship confers a right of voting at elections, and many other privileges not enjoyed by those who are no more than inhabitants. The precise difference may be thus stated: The citizen of a free state is so united to it as to possess an individual’s proportion of the common sovereignty; but he who is no more than an inhabitant, or resident, has no farther connection with the state in which he resides, than such as gives him security for his person and property, agreeably to fixed laws, without any participation in its government.⁷⁸

      Ramsay builds on a generally understood connection between citizenship and the specific set of rights and social practices associated with sovereignty and collective governance: citizens were sovereign, voting was a sign of sovereignty, and, therefore, anyone who voted was implicitly a U.S. citizen. But he does so in a way that fixes the range of people who could conceivably perform these practices, suggesting that “Negroes” (along with women, children, and American Indians) were and could only be inhabitants without a share in collective sovereignty. The fact that at the time Ramsay was writing, free black people (“Negroes”) could and were legally voting in every state except Georgia and his own South Carolina, and so were in fact citizens by Ramsay’s own definition, was less important in practice than the conventional wisdom that black people, a priori, were not “original citizens” and were, in fact, the negative against which citizenship gained clarity.⁷⁹ Being “Negro,” free or otherwise from Ramsay’s perspective, precluded them from being part of the original contract, so citizenship was something they would have to be given with the consent of and always contingent on white sovereigns’ sufferance.

      These assumptions were codified as historical fact, as the definition of “citizen” developed in subsequent texts such as the United States’ first legal dictionary, John Bouvier’s A Law Dictionary, Adapted to the Constitution and Laws of the United States of America (1839). In 1839, Bouvier’s Dictionary defined citizen without racial ascription: “One who, under the constitution and laws of the United States, has a right to vote for representatives in congress and other public officers, and who is qualified to fill offices in the gift of the people.” The entry distinguished between “natural born” and “naturalized” citizens only in that the latter could not become president.⁸⁰ The central change to the dictionary’s definition over the next decades was a racial qualification: “under the word citizen, are included all white persons born in the United States, and naturalized persons born out of the same, who have not lost their right as such. This includes men, women, and children.”⁸¹ The 1854 edition then devotes the entire third entry to explaining birthright citizenship’s limits: “All natives are not citizens of the United States; the descendants of the aborigines, and those of African origin, are not entitled to the rights of citizens. Anterior to the adoption of the constitution of the United States, each state had the right to make citizens of such persons as it pleased. That constitution does not authorize any but white persons to become citizens of the United States; and it must therefore be presumed that no one is a citizen who is not white.”⁸² Texts such as Bouvier’s attempted to prescribe a particular understanding of white citizenship as much as, if not more than, they described citizenship in practice.⁸³ Like Ramsay’s definition, these revisions neglected the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution’s silence on citizenship in general, and other proofs of black citizenship. The revisions demonstrate how racializing citizenship required consistent acts of historical revision, amnesia, and counterfactual narration but also, particularly in the decades when states were revising their constitutions, how racialized citizenship was codified in law only in the wake of black citizens asserting their position as citizens and as white powerbrokers were attempting to consolidate their own positions.

      Ramsay’s

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