The Matter of Citizenship
To the editor:
The matter of citizenship was as confused in 1776 as it is today, or is it as confused today as it was in 1776? In 1776, “citizenship” in the American colonies meant being a loyal British subject, without full rights of citizenship. Those who were disloyal were rebels, traitors, insurrectionists, colonists, cowards, fools, or perhaps “deranged” Patriots. Colonists who wanted independence from Britian thought of themselves in terms of shared allegiance by colony: Virginians, Marylanders, South Carolinians, etc.
Patriots did not like Britian’s treatment of naturalized citizenship and stated such in the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin, for one, openly worried in his 1751 Observation Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc. that German immigrants, “Palatine boors,” would “Germanize Pennsylvania.” “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.” He softened his criticism as he realized their industriousness, frugality and skilled craftsmanship. But in that essay Franklin worried that the complexion of the world would change what would become America. “All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the New Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.”
A loose sense of citizenship persisted through the Continental Congress in which signators represented colonies. The sense of citizenship during the Articles of Confederacy was “a firm league of friendship.” Article IV of that document guaranteed the rights of “free inhabitants” to associate, move, trade, and engage with one another. That theme continued into the debate over the Constitution which was ratified by representatives of states and then by the majority vote of the states themselves. These documents did not use or define the term citizen, but their operationalization favored white males (of Western European origin) with property and position. Representative government was enacted by those people, despite a broader sense of “people”: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” We love the terms we the people, but in 1787 they probably meant much less about rights of citizens than we think today. From the era of the Declaration to the ratification of the Constitution, African slaves, Native people, and Women were adrift as “citizens.”
In 1789, Article 1 of the Constitution charged Congress with establishing “a uniform Rule of Naturalization.” In 1790, the United States decided it needed to establish a sense of citizenship and enumerate its population. The Constitution had defined, through compromise, enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. The Naturalization Act of 1790 established the rules for citizenship: Free white persons (Western Europeans) who had lived in the country for two years and exhibited good character. This act granted national citizenship to children of such people who were born abroad to U. S. citizens.
So, who are “we the people”? On the eve of secession, Alexander Stephens, who became vice president of the Confederacy, said on March 21, 1861, in Savanah, Georgia that the cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery. He wove the philosophy of human inequality into the narrative of the constitution of the Confederacy as justification for secession. “The new (Confederate) constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”
The Confederacy’s ”foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
As Stephens’ sentiment inspirited the Confederacy, is it true that those who fought for the Confederacy fought for these claims? Do the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution speak as loudly against white privilege as they do to protect people of African slavery? How do We the People speak to and about ourselves?