Remaking the Republic
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Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person attained the status, and the particular privileges citizenship afforded. Indeed, as late as 1862, U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates observed that citizenship was «now as little understood in its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and speculative criticism as it was at the founding of the Government.» Black people suffered under this ambiguity, but also seized on it in efforts to transform their nominal freedom. By claiming that they were citizens in their demands for specific rights, they were, Christopher James Bonner argues, at the center of creating the very meaning of American citizenship. In the decades before and after Bates's lament, free African Americans used newspapers, public gatherings, and conventions to make arguments about who could be a citizen, the protections citizenship entailed, and the obligations it imposed. They thus played a vital role in the long, fraught process of determining who belonged in the nation and the terms of that belonging. Remaking the Republic chronicles the various ways African Americans from a wide range of social positions throughout the North attempted to give meaning to American citizenship over the course of the nineteenth century. Examining newpsapers, state and national conventions, public protest meetings, legal cases, and fugitive slave rescues, Bonner uncovers a spirited debate about rights and belonging among African Americans, the stakes of which could determine their place in U.S. society and shape the terms of citizenship for all Americans.
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Remaking the Republic
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Cornish published specific critiques of state laws that presented barriers on a path to justice. His editorial seeking opportunities for black men as “cartmen and porters” not only reflected ideas about the freemanship but also responded directly to the text of New York’s 1821 constitution. Article II, Section 1 of the constitution established basic qualifications for voters—male citizens, twenty-one years old, residents in the state for at least six months, and had paid a property tax. The constitution also allowed any man to vote who had been exempted from taxation, performed militia duty, been exempted from the militia because he was a fireman or had worked in building public roads. At the end of that list, the constitution declared that “no man of colour” could vote without meeting the $250 property requirement.47 White men’s work offered them a variety of routes to the polls; labor was critical to lawmakers’ ideas about voting and citizenship in the early antebellum period. And so when Samuel Cornish promoted black agrarian selfsufficiency or called for people to do useful work in their communities, he demanded rights in the terms state lawmakers had established. Talking about specific kinds of men’s work delivered a targeted attack on black exclusion. Disfranchisement was unjust because black men were walking the very paths to suffrage that lawmakers had built for white men. Cornish was redefining the community, pushing lawmakers to think of “men of colour” within the category of “male citizens” that comprised the electorate.
Searching for an example that connected personal conduct, citizen status, and suffrage, Cornish turned to the government of British Honduras, the Central American colony that would become Belize. He quoted the white editor of the New York Albion, who was surprised that “the coloured population there seems to have equal privileges with the white, and are actually struggling with them for political ascendancy.” Any person, black or white, who had been born in the colony and possessed $3,000 worth of property could be elected to the colonial legislature. While Cornish might have disagreed with the property qualification, the fact that it was universal reflected the truth of human equality. “Why should there be any distinction among the worms of the dust,” he wrote, “the occupants of Jehovah’s footstool, save that which results from merit?” Christianity decreed all men to be equal and offered a foundation for their personal conduct. “Cultivated minds and sanctified hearts, would so qualify our brethren in Honduras for the exercise of their rights, as to leave the Albion, no cause for surprise.” He concluded, “The same causes … will produce the same effects in this country.”48 Protestantism was central to Cornish’s political ideology, as it was for many northern black activists. He put his faith to work, advocating “sanctified hearts” because they showed people’s fitness for political rights.
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