LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

political processes. While the state enfranchised “every FREEMAN” who met particular qualifications, it did not necessarily include African American men, such as William Fogg, who happened to have been free. When Pennsylvania adopted her constitution, “the term freeman had a peculiar and specific sense, being used like the term citizen, which supplanted it, to denote one who had a voice in public affairs.” In 1682, Gibson noted, English law had detailed the terms of the status of “freeman,” which included the franchise. Because being a freeman meant far more than simply being free, Gibson argued, “it is difficult to discover how the word freeman … could have been meant to comprehend a coloured race.” In a twist on Corey’s and Bradburn’s arguments, Gibson also invoked U.S. law in support of his opinion, arguing that the Privileges and Immunities Clause was an insurmountable obstacle to black suffrage in the state. To claim that William Fogg was a citizen of Pennsylvania or was entitled to political rights would “overbear the laws imposing countless disabilities on him in other states.” Gibson closed with a sympathetic air. Whatever lawmakers may desire, they were obligated to look beyond “considerations of mere humanity” to recognize that state laws had been crafted by people who opposed black rights. He declared himself “bound to pronounce that men of colour are destitute of title to the elective franchise.”¹⁹

      Gibson invoked multiple levels and generations of government to bolster his argument, and perhaps most strikingly, he interpreted a federal restriction of state laws through measures that state lawmakers had passed. He claimed that popular concerns and the mandates of state legislatures limited the ability of the U.S. Constitution to confer legal protections on a marginalized group. Society, he suggested, bound law on both the federal and state levels. Gibson thus defined citizenship in a way that excluded free African Americans and allowed him to deny that they could vote in Pennsylvania. But he did so without clarifying what level of government had the power to define and regulate citizen status.

      As John Gibson declared that William Fogg should not have voted, his colleague John Fox, a Pennsylvania district judge, issued a similar ruling against black suffrage. Fox decided that a few dozen black men who voted in Bucks County should not have been permitted to do so. He concluded that slavery in the past and legal restrictions in the present meant that no free black person should be recognized as either “a citizen [or] a freeman” according to the state constitution. The 1790 state constitution had equated the terms, setting out qualifications for “elections by the citizens,” in which “every freeman” who met the bar could vote. Fox decided to exclude African Americans from both statuses, covering all bases in his quest to disfranchise black men. Like Gibson, he invoked restrictions from other states. As early as 1829, he noted, Illinois and Massachusetts had prohibited interracial marriage. More telling, Fox thought, was Ohio’s legislative effort to forbid black people from taking up new residence in the state. Those and other measures indicated that African Americans, although free, remained “an inferior and degraded caste.”²⁰ One could not reasonably conclude that any member of that group should be allowed to hold office, and because the Pennsylvania constitution linked citizenship to officeholding, one must recognize that black people were not citizens.²¹ Fox’s ruling expanded a narrow question of black suffrage in a local election to make a broad argument that denied the possibility of African American citizenship.

      Both of these decisions indicate that Americans saw the imprecise definition of citizenship as an important legal tool for their efforts to align their society with their racial ideas. What is striking is that this imprecision was as important to people like Amos Daley and George Bradburn, who sought physical protection for black sailors, as it was to Judges Fox and Gibson, who wanted to legalize black exclusion. More than an uncertainty, more than a problem, the ambiguous concept of citizenship could be a cudgel that lawmakers wielded against black Americans. The same uncertainty that made particular kinds of black politics possible enabled white supremacist lawmaking and urged black activists to use citizenship to challenge their exclusion.

      Still, the law in the antebellum period was not simply a force that acted against black people’s interests. Judges like Gibson and Fox denied black people legal protections in part because African Americans were working so ardently to secure them and because, in some cases, they succeeded. In the early nineteenth century, for instance, hundreds of enslaved people sued for freedom in Missouri courts. As in the later case of Dred Scott, slaveowners in the state often traveled and brought their human property beyond Missouri borders, sometimes sojourning for months in free territories. Enslaved people in the Midwest had opportunities to learn the legal culture of the region and could find ways to move themselves closer to freedom. African Americans filed nearly 300 freedom suits in the St. Louis County Circuit Court in the fifty years before Dred Scott’s case, and more than one-third of those suits resulted in emancipation. These were moments when black people acted in formal legal spaces and secured recognition of legal personhood, when the law declared individuals to be entitled to basic protections, including control over their own body.²² These cases mark the opportunities black people had to use the law, but what these claimants secured was neither equality nor a formal citizen status. Although the many freedom suits reveal that black exclusion was not absolute in the antebellum period, the possibility of a legal hearing would not satisfy free black Americans. They were working to establish a clear standard of access and an equal set of protections, rights, and privileges through citizenship.

      Legal decisions like those of Fox and Gibson that denied black suffrage and the possibility of black citizenship pushed activists to pursue a legal relationship with the federal government as a way to potentially supersede state legal restrictions. When Fox invoked laws in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Ohio, he encouraged black people to seek change beyond a state judge’s authority. His decision pushed black activists to challenge a patchwork of state-level exclusion with a higher legal power. Most important, Fox and Gibson bolstered black activists’ efforts to use citizenship in their work. In their decisions, judges like Fox and Gibson confirmed that black citizenship politics was potent, that citizen status was key to how governments conferred and protected individual rights, and that the terms of citizenship were unstable and therefore contestable. Judges and lawmakers embodied the oppressive force of state governments in the period but at the same time revealed the potential for influencing the meaning of citizenship that could include ideas from both white lawmakers and black activists.

      Black activists, though, had their own disagreements about the nature of citizenship in a federal system, and the complexities of African American identity in a slaveholding nation shaped their discussions about political strategy. In August 1838, for example, a debate between Samuel Cornish and the black minister and educator Lewis Woodson connected tensions over identity to ideas about government power. In their discussion, printed in Cornish’s Colored American, the men agreed that free black people were too concentrated in cities. But while Cornish encouraged people to move west and integrate rural communities, Woodson (writing under the pseudonym “Augustine”) called on African Americans to build their own society in the hinterlands. Woodson had been born free in Virginia in 1806, and his experiences in that slave state might have shaped his program of black separatism and self-sufficiency.²³ Writing to Cornish, Woodson declared that he intended to purchase lands “from the Congress of our native country” to use for separate black settlements. He scoffed at Cornish’s rebuttal that the plan amounted to “colonization magnified.” Woodson agreed with Cornish that black people should strive to “possess the inalienable rights of American citizens”—he saw citizenship as an important aim because it could be connected to a broad set of legal protections. But Woodson argued citizenship should be just that, a legal relationship, while Cornish felt that it ought to entail emotional bonds, “an identity of interest” among individuals. Woodson pointed out that people in different states or regions often felt little connection to their neighbors, and he argued that black people might embrace a separate racial identity that would not amount to a rejection of a place in the United States. “Men may be American citizens without having any intercourse with each other,” Woodson wrote. Neither residency nor race could exclude black Americans from citizen status, which he said should be a simple result of their birth in the nation and the fact that they had “contributed to the general welfare.”²⁴ Both Cornish and Woodson embraced the possibility of a citizen status that would connect black Americans and the federal government. But Woodson

Скачать книгу