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CHAPTER 1

An Integral Portion of This Republic

When John Russwurm announced his support for colonization, Samuel Cornish went immediately to work to refute the claim that black people could not be American citizens. Cornish had left the newspaper business, but in the spring of 1829, he returned to New York City and launched the Rights of All. That paper facilitated black people’s efforts to establish a clear legal position for themselves in the United States. From the late 1820s through the 1830s, in the Rights of All and his subsequent work, Cornish deployed many of the principal strategies of early antebellum black politics. He stood at the forefront of black protest that linked people across the free states. He spoke to black and white Americans and used citizenship to fight disfranchisement and colonization, the central components of black exclusion.

Cornish and other black Americans rejected John Russwurm’s pessimism because they saw possibility in the vagueness of citizenship.¹ Black people were citizens because they contributed to American communities, activists argued. Further, they claimed citizen status should provide them with specific rights, in particular equal access to the vote. For Cornish and his colleagues, there was a simple logic to their claims. No definitive legal statement existed to exclude African Americans from citizen status. Activists used that ambiguity to pursue specific legal protections, responding directly to the terms of the laws that excluded them and urging those in positions of power to see black people as part of a community of citizens entitled to rights. Black citizenship politics in the early antebellum period wove together a range of projects—anticolonization, agrarianism, moral uplift, and the pursuit of the vote. Cornish knit together a cohort of black activists whose work helped shape the terms of citizenship as they sought opportunities to live as African Americans.

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Samuel Cornish did essential work to create the political tools black activists used to make public claims about the terms of citizenship. Cornish was born free in the slaveholding society of Delaware in 1795. When he was around twenty years old, he began training for the ministry at Philadelphia’s First African Presbyterian Church. Cornish honed his voice in the church, then spread it in a range of activist work. He was an early advocate of black state and national conventions, a cofounder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and a leader of the New York Committee of Vigilance, which worked to protect free people from slavecatchers.² In the 1820s and 1830s, Cornish helped to produce a black print culture that was central to activists’ efforts to claim rights through citizenship.

In May 1829, just two months after John Russwurm closed Freedom’s Journal, Cornish introduced the nation’s second black newspaper. His new project presented both subtle and overt opposition to Russwurm’s ideas. Cornish greeted readers of the Rights of All with a masthead quoting Proverbs 14:34: “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.” The first half of that verse had run atop the Journal, and it might have seemed a simple choice for an antislavery minister. But invoking Proverbs 14 conveyed complex meanings beyond an expression of devotion. The chapter begins, “Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands.” Throughout, Proverbs 14 offers guidelines for individuals and communities. Cornish’s chosen masthead linked the new paper to its predecessor and, for readers familiar with the Bible, might have brought to mind his unwise former colleague.³ He launched the Rights of All in direct opposition to Russwurm, who had abandoned the nation that had once been his home and had torn down the activist “house” he had established in the office of Freedom’s Journal.

In a message introducing readers to the paper, Cornish described it as a tool for “the general improvement of Society” and announced his intent to focus on black people, the most “oppressed and afflicted” members of the population. He acknowledged that he could be criticized for having left his post at the Journal, and he encouraged readers and patrons to judge his new venture on its own merit, independent of any earlier work. But he chose to raise the issue of “the late Editor” of Freedom’s Journal, declining to mention Russwurm by name. “To me the subject is equally strange as to others,” he wrote, calling Russwurm’s support for the ACS one of the “novelties of the day.” Cornish concluded that he and “the intelligent of my brethren generally,” were convinced that for most black people, colonization was “in no wise calculated, to meet their wants or ameliorate their condition.”⁴

From its beginnings, then, Cornish used the Rights of All to marginalize Russwurm and the claim that black people could not be citizens, presenting audiences with African Americans who were determined to change the circumstances of their lives in the United States. He was invested in “this great Republick” and in determining what work he might contribute “towards the improvement of all its parts.”⁵ When editors from the New York Observer and Chronicle said the new paper resulted from “the change of the ‘Freedom’s Journal’ in respect to African colonization,” Cornish denied their claim, which he called a “gratuitous censure.”⁶ But it is instructive to read his paper, and with it much of early antebellum black protest, as an extended response to the assertion that black Americans could not be citizens. Colonizationists looked to compensate Africa for her stolen generations with exiled black Americans, but Cornish urged Americans to “do her sons justice wherever we find them.” “Educate this oppressed and afflicted people,” he demanded, “encourage them in agricultural and mechanical persuits, and there will be no difficulty in making them good and happy citizens.”⁷ Many black Americans were outraged at those who seemed to prioritize Africa over their native country. “Mr. Russwurm tells us, he knows no other home for us than Africa,” one black Philadelphian noted. “As his usefulness is entirely lost to the people, I sincerely pray that he may have the honor to live and also die there.”⁸

Cornish often contested Russwurm’s arguments without printing his former colleague’s name. The editors of the Observer had overlooked Russwurm’s claims about citizenship and had thus misrepresented black Americans’ concerns. For Cornish, the Observer’s announcement of his paper was a “gratuitous censure” because it reduced black politics to a reactionary movement against the ACS and ignored the work of claiming and shaping citizenship in the United States. He demanded that those in power “do justice” for African Americans by offering opportunities for education and labor, and he called on black people to seize those opportunities in order to solidify their claims to citizen status. Together, individuals and governments would reshape the terms of African Americans’ lives. He surely hoped that the Observer would reprint his alternative portrait of African Americans’ concerns.

Cornish initiated a public correspondence with the editors of the Observer in the hope of broadening the readership of the Rights of All. The Observer was a weekly paper connected to the Presbyterian Church that did not typically cover black politics, but its editors were sympathetic to colonization and had earlier shown interest in Russwurm and Freedom’s Journal.⁹ By writing about that paper, Cornish spoke to white New Yorkers who were apparently uninterested in the work of changing black people’s lives in the country. Newspapers in places, including Baltimore, Boston, and Norwich, Connecticut, announced the launch of the Rights of All and encouraged Cornish to see the potential reach of his paper.¹⁰ Cornish printed letters from an array of black and white correspondents interested in legal change. Generally, he crafted the paper with a diverse readership in mind and with the goal of widening his subscriber base. He published columns advising African Americans on proper conduct, expecting that black people would read them. But he frequently addressed free black northerners in his calls for more subscribers. Cornish understood that people often read a single copy of a newspaper aloud to an audience of friends and acquaintances. He likely hoped that some of those friends and acquaintances might choose to become subscribers themselves.¹¹ He also printed reasoned arguments against unjust laws, perhaps hoping his words would reach white voters and lawmakers who did not favor racial equality. And in the summer of 1829, Cornish may also have been writing to John Russwurm, who remained in New York making final arrangements for his move to Liberia. Perhaps Cornish held out hope that he might convince his former colleague of the error of emigration.

His work set the tone for later black editors who would similarly address an array of topics and target a range of black and white audiences.¹² In general, black newspapers needed an interracial readership for financial stability. Editors and contributors also understood that, through print, they might change the minds of those in the power structure who remained prejudiced as well as shape conversations and policy regarding African Americans. And people like Cornish reached a far broader audience than a list of subscribers indicates because of the ways ideas circulated in antebellum print culture.¹³

Cornish subtly attacked Russwurm throughout the Rights of All, including in a message encouraging black Americans to follow the example of Jewish people in London who petitioned Parliament for legal equality. “Americans we truly are, by birth and feeling,” Cornish wrote. He urged black people to assert more forcefully their desire for legal protections in the United States. He commanded his readers, “Let no man talk of impossibility; with God, all things are possible.”¹⁴ Many black activists expressed similar optimism rooted in their Christian faith. To Cornish, the pessimistic Russwurm did not belong in a community of black Christian men and women. Cornish’s criticism was indirect, but his target was clear. In August 1829, with Russwurm making final preparations to leave the country, Cornish wrote, “Any coloured man, of common intelligence, who gives his countenance and influence, to [Liberia] … should be considered as a traitor to his brethren, and discarded by every respectable man of colour.”¹⁵ Protesting the ACS and, by implication, Russwurm, he offered an alternative vision of black Americans’ future and laid the foundation for black citizenship politics.

Colonization was part of a broader project of restricting black people’s unfettered movement and access to space in the United States.¹⁶ Pennsylvania lawmakers proposed two measures in 1832, one that would limit protections available to alleged fugitive slaves and the other to outlaw new black migration into the commonwealth.¹⁷ Activists turned again to print culture for their response, collecting signatures on a petition against those measures.¹⁸ James Forten delivered their message to the state legislature. Born free in 1766, Forten ran a profitable sail-making shop in Philadelphia, had served on a privateer during the American Revolution, and had previously organized in opposition to an effort by lawmakers to outlaw new black migrants in the 1810s. In 1832, Forten and his fellow activists delivered their petition to state lawmakers and had it published, convinced that their concerns were meaningful beyond the population of free black Pennsylvanians.

Forten reminded lawmakers that their state constitution declared that all men were “born equally free and independent” and that, under its terms, “every man shall have a remedy by due course of law.”¹⁹ The petitioners denied that free black people endangered the state and vehemently rejected the prevailing argument that they had “promoted[ed] servile insurrections.”²⁰ The petitioners might have chosen Forten as their representative because he had made a specific, memorable contribution to the nation by fighting in the Revolutionary War. His personal history reflected African Americans’ emotional ties to the nation, the less tangible but no less powerful feelings that bound people to their home. “They feel themselves to be citizens of Pennsylvania [and] children of the state,” Forten explained.²¹ The phrase conjured an image of activists throwing themselves on the mercy of the legislature, asking that the state reciprocate their feelings. But it also charged the state for dereliction of its duties. They made an emotional appeal designed to change the law, arguing for a citizen status that imposed responsibilities on individuals as well as on the government. From the petitioners’ perspective, it was no more just for Pennsylvania to reject James Forten than it was for a mother to abandon her infant. Citizenship should bind American people and governments in a web of obligations. Perhaps the strength of that appeal pushed lawmakers to reconsider. Perhaps logic moved legislators, convinced that it would not benefit their state to exclude people like Forten who had fought to create the nation. Pennsylvania officials rejected the proposed law to bar black migration into the state.²² But white northerners would continue to promote similar exclusionary measures that threatened black people’s claims to rights as citizens.

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Forten’s military service was part of a history that refuted the idea that African Americans had little to offer society as prospective citizens. Colonizationists and those who wanted to bar black people from particular states argued that African Americans were disproportionately poor, violent, and immoral. The personal histories of people like Forten helped refute those ideas. Activists argued that people who offered useful contributions to their communities were entitled to citizen status. In 1832, the Pennsylvania petitioners presented data that denied charges of black poverty, including evidence that African Americans were only 4 percent of the 549 people who had received poor relief from the state in 1830, far less than their 8 percent of the state’s population. Forten estimated that African Americans paid more than enough in taxes to support poor black Pennsylvanians, and he noted that many black people turned to African American benevolent societies for relief rather than seeking state aid. The petitioners said black Pennsylvanians owned more than $100,000 in real property and that many worked in skilled mechanical trades despite prejudice that limited their opportunities for apprenticeships.²³ Black self-sufficiency was a foundation for claims to legal protections.

Because African Americans were valuable members in their communities, black removal would harm people across the nation. Samuel Cornish built the Rights of All around the argument that African Americans were important, enthusiastic contributors to the United States. In July 1829, when government officials gathered to amend New York City’s charter, Cornish encouraged them to provide equal employment opportunity in the city. “The pursuit of an honest living,” he hoped, “will be secured to all our citizens.” He printed an editorial the morning the officials planned to meet in which he emphasized black people’s desire to work in specific jobs for their own benefit and to help their city develop. “Our colored citizens have uniformly been denied License as Car[t]men and porters,” Cornish wrote. As he sat at his desk drafting that editorial, Cornish must have imagined lawmakers traveling through lower Manhattan on their way to the meeting: perhaps some would pick up an unfamiliar newspaper or overhear a discussion about the opinionated black editor and be convinced that black people were essential workers for the city. Cornish wanted people to reexamine their ideas about black Americans and about citizenship as a legal status. It was likely no coincidence that he published this message just as the New York Workingmen’s Party emerged in the city, a group of white laborers who organized to secure political and economic power. He wanted to capitalize on extant discussions about the relationship between work and formal political rights.²⁴ He outlined a capacious citizenship that would have appealed to many readers, one defined by individuals’ contributions to their communities. He sought job opportunities for black Americans in ways that aligned with his political goals.²⁵

New York in the 1820s was a city on the move, where cartmen and porters performed critical tasks. They transported lumber, sand, and other building supplies, and they carried groceries and household goods between shops and residences in the expanding city. Licensed cartmen decided who could join their guild, and by tradition, they were entitled to the freemanship, a remnant of colonial law that provided political privileges, including voting rights, in recognition of a person’s work.²⁶ Cornish’s demand that black New Yorkers have access to jobs as cartmen asked lawmakers to connect black people to a new legal status. African Americans wanted to do the hard, necessary work that made the city grow. In return, Cornish sought black access to a specific job that had historical ties to formal political power. In this message, he crafted a citizenship that gave political weight to black labor, connecting it to rights through the city’s legal traditions. He asked the city to enact a law that would limit the influence of prejudice and make employment opportunities and formal political voice available to working black New Yorkers.

Here and elsewhere, Cornish used traditionally male work to claim rights through citizenship. He spoke from the context of male-dominated public politics of the nineteenth century. Indeed, although these activists thought in transformative ways about people’s legal statuses, in many cases, they elided or obscured questions about women’s rights. To some extent, Cornish and other black male activists worked for change within the limits of accepted American ideas about political power. In his direct response to legal restrictions imposed on black men, he seemed uninterested in the possibility that women should engage in formal politics.

As they demanded work opportunities, black activists also spoke extensively about issues of morality. They used personal uplift programs to pursue legal change. As northern state lawmakers enacted laws that gradually ended slavery, they also imposed limits on black freedom, including, for example, measures that disfranchised black people and excluded black men from state militias. White northerners worried that the horrors of slavery had rendered black people unfit for freedom. Black activists looked to alleviate those concerns through a series of programs aimed at their “moral improvement.” They worked to spread Christianity, literacy, and standards of personal conduct among freed people. They promoted specific virtues such as temperance, religious devotion, frugality, and industriousness.²⁷ Activists made arguments about citizenship in conjunction with that moral reform work. Uplift programs reflected concerns about morality and the desire to eliminate the legal restrictions on black northerners’ freedom. Black activists’ moralizing was part of their efforts to use citizenship in pursuit of specific legal changes.²⁸

As he designed the layout for the first issue of the Rights of All, Cornish gave prominent place to a statement that linked morality, labor, and citizenship. Directly beneath his introductory statement, he copied an article from the Boston Courier that celebrated agrarian life, and he offered comments in support of that message. Rural landowners lived enviably independent lives, he said, vastly different from the geographic and economic restrictions urban residents felt. A farmer could “have the happiness to see his offspring [become] useful and virtuous citizens,” but Cornish anticipated that a city dweller would more likely raise “fashionable vagabonds.” He echoed a common concern that black people cared more about ostentatious displays of wealth than about the work necessary to earn it. Cornish argued that families who had the means should display their “respectability” by embracing an agrarian lifestyle: leaving cities, purchasing land, and preparing their children “for an investment in the right of soil.” A number of black New Yorkers had already made new homes in the countryside, and he hoped others would follow suit, “until our portion of city dissipation is transformed into country respectability and usefulness.” Cornish’s concerns about respectability and personal conduct reflected Christian beliefs that many black northerners shared. And even readers who disliked Cornish’s tone might have been glad to read the editor’s concrete plan for black people to escape the challenges they faced in cities. He closed one call for black agrarianism with an advertisement for 12,000 acres of land being sold in hundred-acre plots “in a fertile county in the state of New-York,” available at a price of 20 shillings an acre. People in towns and cities could form associations to purchase plots, he suggested.²⁹ Writing from his Manhattan office, Cornish took hold of the notion of agrarian virtue to advance his political ends. Farming could offer black people a path to citizen status and then onward to legal protections. Cornish rhetorically opened a place for black Americans in a citizenry defined by morality and useful work.³⁰

Cornish’s was one voice in a chorus of free black people who promoted moral improvement and connected legal protections to a person’s contributions to a community. For instance, a group of women who established the African Female Benevolent Society in Troy, New York, in 1833, declared that through divine principles of human equality, they were “entitled to the same rights and privileges” as “our fellow beings who differ from us in complexion alone.” They would embrace “such virtues as will render us happy and useful to society” to contest the legal manifestations of prejudice.³¹ Society members chose Elizabeth Wicks to speak at the organization’s first anniversary. As she reflected on their work in the previous year, Wicks declared, “My friends, I think I see an opening in behalf of our oppressed race.”³² She urged action, asking young people not to let their “youth be wasted away without improvement and utterly lost to every valuable and noble purpose.” Wicks reminded her fellow society members of the broad significance of their work, saying, “Let our minds travel south and sympathise with the present state of the two millions of our brethren who are yet in bondage.” She encouraged New York’s black women to think of their moral reform work as an antislavery crusade.³³ The Society published Wicks’s address and their constitution together in a pamphlet, hoping that other black women in Troy would read about and join their efforts. Wicks and her fellow black women demanded legal change, working against racial prejudice and against the arguments of other activists that suggested men should lead the charge of black protest. They were undiscouraged by Cornish’s gendered politics and convinced that they could use moral improvement as a path to legal protections, regardless of prevailing ideas about who should possess rights.

Black people connected their uplift politics across a broader geography when they launched the American Moral Reform Society (AMRS) in 1835.³⁴ At their annual meeting the following year, AMRS members proclaimed that education was “the most valuable blessing that we, as a people, can bestow upon the rising generation.” Speaking at that gathering, William Watkins added to education “moral training,” arguing that together, those programs could remedy “the universal depravity of the human heart” and its influence on the nation’s laws.³⁵ Born in Maryland in 1801, the son of a free black minister, the precocious Watkins established a school for black children when he was only nineteen. He did the dangerous work of black politics in a slave state and remained attuned to the concerns of African Americans beyond Maryland’s borders.³⁶ Watkins believed that individuals’ character shaped their communities. “It is unquestionable,” he declared in 1836, “that those children who are early taught to remember their Creator … to fear God and keep his commandments … will be far more likely than others, in adult life to be good citizens and exemplary christians.”³⁷ A citizen must be morally upright, he said. Watkins and other delegates to the AMRS meeting laid a foundation in personal conduct for the nebulous legal status of citizenship. By creating a society dedicated to moral reform, black people implicitly argued that they were capable of being good citizens because they were so concerned with morality. Further, making personal conduct a foundation for citizenship denied claims that there was an insurmountable racial barrier to the status.

Watkins described for his audience a man named Henry Blair, who Watkins presented as a model black citizen. Blair was also a free black Marylander who had recently patented a mechanized corn planter and had his device exhibited in the nation’s capital. According to Watkins, Blair held himself to a high moral standard, and his invention revealed black people’s intellectual capacity. Watkins conjured for his audience an image of Blair standing beside his device, “triumphantly refuting” ideas of black inferiority. So long as black people worked to become “more intelligent, more useful, more respectable,” none could say they were unfit for life in the United States.³⁸ Blair’s intellect and morality were mutually reinforcing traits. “The attractions of the gaming table and the ale house are not, in [Blair’s] view, to be compared with those to be found in his own domicil—in the rich volumes of a well selected library.” Black people thus educated and morally restrained would “cease to grovel … [and] command respect and consideration from all who respect themselves and whose good opinions are worth having.” Blair offered a lesson for black Americans. “Give the rising generation a good education,” Watkins declared, “and you instruct them in, and qualify them for, all the duties of life—you make them useful citizens and productive christians.”³⁹ Morality and intellect were inseparable, and improvement in both realms suited black people for citizen status in the United States.

Watkins hoped that his address, published separately from the AMRS proceedings, could influence those who doubted “‘that all men are created equal.’ ”⁴⁰ His was part of a tradition of proclaiming equality in print, a history in which words produced real change. He spoke to fellow reformers and to white opponents of racial equality. Watkins, along with Samuel Cornish and Elizabeth Wicks, suggested that black people could enjoy citizen status if they pursued moral improvement and education. Their arguments laid foundations for people to claim legal protections through citizen status. Their vision of citizenship placed the power for change in black people’s hands, working to ensure that prejudice could not prevent African Americans from securing legal change. Activists thus made arguments about the social foundations of citizenship as a step toward using the status to claim rights.

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Moral uplift challenged the advocates of colonization and specified the responsibilities of an American citizen. From that foundation, activists outlined the rights citizenship should entail, focusing particularly on formal political participation. Black New Yorkers pursued uplift politics in direct response to state restrictions on black suffrage embedded in the 1821 constitution. When a delegate to that year’s constitutional convention proposed to limit the franchise to white men over age twenty-one, he sparked a heated debate over the terms and significance of civic participation. John Ross favored disfranchising black men because “they are a peculiar people,” who were “seldom, if ever, required to share in the burdens or defense of the State.” Others echoed Ross’s doubts that black people would reliably promote the common good as voters.⁴¹ Delegates voted against that proposal, but it made black suffrage a question for debate. They appointed a committee to define new qualifications for voting, and its membership included many who had supported the sweeping racial exclusion. Committee members proposed a “freehold qualification” requiring black New Yorkers to own $250 in real property in order to vote.⁴² One delegate worried that under the proposal, “37,000 of our free black citizens, and their posterity, for ever, shall be degraded by our constitution.” Prejudice would prevent many black New Yorkers from earning the wealth required to vote, others observed. But the measure passed, in part because men like Martin Van Buren believed that the property requirement “held out inducements to industry” among black New Yorkers.⁴³

Black activists thus understood the promotion of moral uplift and industrious labor as ways to refute the arguments that had been used to disfranchise them. And they understood that they might use citizenship to claim formal political rights. When Cornish and Russwurm announced Freedom’s Journal in 1827, they intended to “urge our brethren to use their right to the elective franchise as free citizens.”⁴⁴ They framed suffrage as a fundamental aspect of citizen status, and they did not mention the freehold qualification, which they saw as an illegitimate denial of an essential right. In August 1828, Russwurm published the voting regulations in states from Maine to Mississippi. “In every case,” he concluded, “voters are required to be citizens of the United States, by birth or naturalization.”⁴⁵ Linking suffrage and citizenship would open the polls to black Americans if they could claim citizen status through their personal conduct. Uplift ideology emerged from conservative ideas about personal conduct, but activists deployed it in radical challenges to the exclusionary legal order and in pursuit of formal political rights. If they showed people like Martin Van Buren the myriad ways they contributed to their communities as well as the extent to which they were diligent and frugal, they would solidify their claims to suffrage. Just six months before Russwurm decided to emigrate, he seems to have agreed with Cornish that through uplift ideology, citizenship could offer a path to black rights.

But Russwurm ultimately grew tired of talking about citizenship and demanding black suffrage, leaving the project to Cornish and the Rights of All. Cornish made the radical claim that delegates to the 1821 Constitutional Convention had acted “very wrong and illegally.” “A State has the right of appointing qualifications of its voters,” he said, but it was illegal to make color one of those distinctions, just as it was illegal “to require of A. six feet stature, and not require of B. the same.”⁴⁶ This was a transformative vision of the law for the young republic, a claim that discrimination on the basis of natural traits was fundamentally unjust. In his pursuit of suffrage, Cornish made a sweeping argument in favor of racial equality before the law.

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.

Lawmakers in northern states deprived black people of specific rights and, as in Pennsylvania, tried to enact laws to bar African Americans from living in their states. Activists recognized that they could use uplift politics to oppose residency restrictions in the same ways they pushed for equal voting rights. Black New Yorkers’ struggles for suffrage paralleled fights against laws that restricted black movement and residency. In 1807, Ohio enacted a law requiring black emigrants to pay a $500 bond within twenty days of entering the state. Lawmakers justified the law with claims about personal conduct, arguing that the bond was insurance against the criminality, poverty, and general misconduct they anticipated of African Americans. The law lay dormant for two decades, but in 1829, officials began planning to enforce it, perhaps fearing a black population boom.⁴⁹ On hearing that news, a black man in Pittsburgh wrote to Samuel Cornish to denounce the measure, which he saw as a product of southern influence. The author, who chose to remain anonymous, thought Ohioans were appeasing white southerners who had moved to the state but disliked seeing black people thriving as “husbandmen, mechanics, and labourers.” The law had been unenforced so long, he wrote, precisely because it reflected the concerns of a prejudiced minority. African Americans had cleared and cultivated the Ohio territory on which white southerners settled, but once the landscape was tamed, state officials were happy to exclude black people. Ohio’s law seemed to reflect federal policies of Indian removal, and the Pittsburgh writer encouraged policymakers to reconsider enforcing a measure that would “tarnish the fair-escutcheon of our national character.”⁵⁰ Like Cornish, the anonymous author worried about black people having access to a physical place in the United States, and he made clear that in both past and present, black people had done essential work in building American communities. The letter, written in Pennsylvania about an Ohio law and then printed in New York, asserted black people’s Americanness, reflecting their political community that spanned the free states. Black northerners recognized that an exclusionary law in Ohio could set a dangerous legal precedent for the free states. They developed shared political approaches to confront their common concerns.

For instance, a group of African Americans met in Pittsburgh in 1831 to protest colonization, passing a series of resolutions that reflected their concerns about wider legal developments across the North. They declared themselves citizens because they had been born in the United States. “We are just as much natives here as the members of the Colonization Society,” they announced. Bonds of affection tied them to their state and nation. “Here we were born—here bred—here are our earliest and most pleasant associations—here is all that binds man to earth, and makes life valuable.” They had met to denounce the ACS and to solidify their claims to political rights. As “freemen … brethren … countrymen and fellow-citizens,” they were “as fully entitled to the free exercise of the elective franchise as any men who breathe.”⁵¹ These activists worried about Pennsylvania lawmakers’ attempts to ban black migration into the state. But they also worried that legislators might take inspiration from other northern states and enact further restrictions of black freedom. Black men in Pennsylvania had the right to vote in 1831, but these activists felt the need to defend their access to the polls. They saw legal developments in New York and Ohio in the 1820s and anticipated that black disfranchisement might sweep across the free states. The Pennsylvanians invoked the nation’s founding in their resolutions, pledging “to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” asserting the national significance of their local politics. Black people across the United States were entitled to rights because of their personal histories in the nation, they argued. Black disfranchisement in New York, like proposed residency restrictions in Ohio and Pennsylvania, unjustly excluded black people from American communities. Activists challenged those exclusions together, simultaneously claiming that as citizens, they were entitled to physical communities and a role in governing structures through the right to vote.⁵²

In 1837, state lawmakers realized black Pennsylvanians’ fears by taking steps to disfranchise black men. Together, legislators and judges outlawed black voting in the state. While Pittsburgh activists had hoped their protest statements would have meaning across state borders, the process of their disfranchisement reflected the locality of much of antebellum law and the ways the lawmakers could use the vagueness of citizenship to further black exclusion. That process began in 1837 in Bucks County, about forty miles north of Philadelphia, after close races for county auditor and commissioner. The defeated candidates contested the results, claiming that the victors had received “between 30 and 40 votes” from black county residents “who, it is believed, had no legal right to vote.” Two angry white men sparked the process of statewide disfranchisement in their effort to suppress a few dozen black people’s votes. County judge John Fox presided over the suit and agreed with their complaint, ruling that black suffrage required the support of positive law. The state constitution held that “in elections by the citizens, every freeman” over age twenty-one who had resided in the state at least two years and paid taxes could vote. Fox said those provisions did not include black people.⁵³ While Fox heard that case, state lawmakers met to consider updating the 1790 constitution. During a convention lasting ten months, delegates agreed to insert the word “white” into the list of voter qualifications. They added an additional qualifier to deny black suffrage, skirting the thorny question of black people’s legal status that Judge Fox had raised. The proposal passed with a decisive majority of votes, 77–45, and the legislators inserted the racial qualifier into the amended constitution sent to voters in February 1838.⁵⁴

Black activists focused their protest on the proposed constitutional change. Hoping to influence the vote, a group of Philadelphians met on March 14 in a South Philadelphia Presbyterian church, where they chose Robert Purvis to present their criticism. Purvis had been born free in South Carolina in 1810 and moved to Philadelphia as a child. His father worked in antislavery politics, which likely influenced Purvis, who by the early 1830s worked closely with the radical white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Purvis had also resisted colonization programs in the state.⁵⁵ He and his fellow committee members worried that in addition to losing the vote, disfranchisement might encourage efforts to force black people out of Pennsylvania. They cherished voting as a “check upon oppression,” without which they would be “thrown upon the mercy of a despotic majority.” “Our expatriation has come to be a darling project with many of our fellow citizens,” they noted. Voting would ensure black people had a formal political voice as they struggled to secure a physical place in the United States. “We assert our right to vote at the polls as a shield against that strange species of benevolence which seeks legislative aid to banish us.”⁵⁶ The activists invoked an earlier meeting when hundreds gathered in Philadelphia to protest the ACS. Their address, they said, “was adopted with a unanimity and spirit equaled only by the memorable meeting of 1817.”⁵⁷ Anxious about the ramifications of disfranchisement, they took the opportunity to make larger arguments about connected injustices and in pursuit of a clearer set of legal protections.

Activists built their challenges to disfranchisement and colonization around claims to citizen status. They reminded white voters “in almost every State we have been spoken of, either expressly or by implication, as citizens.” In 1790, Benjamin Franklin, then president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, said the organization was designed to prepare freed people “for the exercise and enjoyment of CIVIL LIBERTY.” “Are we now to be told,” Purvis asked, “that BENJAMIN FRANKLIN did not know what he was about, forasmuch as it was impossible for a colored man to become a citizen of the commonwealth?”⁵⁸ Purvis argued that “civil liberty” was equivalent to citizenship and that it must include suffrage. He and his colleagues exploited gaps in the law, crevices into which they could insert their voices and ideas, spaces to make arguments through citizenship. While citizen status did not have a specific meaning, it had been key to the ways lawmakers framed the relationship between individuals and governments as early as the nation’s founding. Precisely because of its vagueness, black activists could open discussions about rights by using the language of citizenship.⁵⁹

Like their colleagues in other states, Pennsylvanians emphasized the ways they contributed to their communities as a foundation for their claims to citizen status and formal political rights. They were “tax-paying colored men” and their ancestors had “bled to unite … TAXATION and REPRESENTATION.” They used ideas about personal uplift to dispute the claims of people like Judge John Fox, who said that black people had been historically and must remain “a degraded caste.” Like Judge Fox, the black Pennsylvanians invoked a broad range of legal precedents that further emphasized their contributions. For instance, a New York legislator had opposed suffrage restrictions in his state because black soldiers had fought in American wars. They offered a litany of contributions they felt entitled them to citizen status and political rights. “The very fact that we are deeply interested for our kindred in bonds,” they proclaimed, “shows that we are the right sort of stuff to make good citizens of.” And by working so diligently to hold onto the franchise, black activists were defending the United States as a republic. “When you have taken from an individual his right to vote, you have made the government, in regard to him, a mere despotism.” The threat reached beyond a concern with black voting; disfranchising some was “a step towards making it a despotism to all.”⁶⁰

At heart, Purvis and his colleagues urged white Americans to see black people as citizens and treat them as people deserving legal protections. They reached back to the Articles of Confederation, which had denied only “paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice … all privileges and immunities of free citizens.” Significantly, the Continental Congress had rejected a proposed racial qualifier for that article. And on the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, “no change was made as to the rights of citizenship”—the status was no more exclusive than it had been under the Articles. Black politics thrived on formal legal statements that presented citizenship as a significant legal status with uncertain terms. State and federal authorities connected citizen status to rights without narrowing or specifying them and made them available to individuals, with few explicit limits on access. The citizenship that existed in formal law offered room for black people’s political maneuvering. Despite their forceful arguments, however, Pennsylvania voters approved the new constitution by a narrow margin in October 1838.⁶¹

* * *

In the early antebellum period, black northerners experimented with a range of arguments, demanding that lawmakers see black people as essential to American communities and, therefore, entitled to rights as citizens. For instance, some activists insisted that if racist laws pushed black people out of the country, Americans would lose valuable members of their communities. Black Ohioans, facing a bond requirement to live in their state, wrote to Samuel Cornish in 1829 that they had begun to consider abandoning the country and settling in Canada. Cornish helped explain their feelings to readers. “If the general government will see with indifference the rights of any part of her citizens so trampled upon,” he argued, “I see no reason why, the injured party should not in disgust, forsake the land of their birth and nativity.” If they were pushed to emigrate, black Ohioans would “give their strength and influence to a more righteous power.”⁶² The potential of voluntary black emigration here became a threat about the costs of black exclusion.

At other times, Cornish said black exclusion would tarnish the nation’s reputation and limit the republic’s radical egalitarian potential. Exclusionary laws would “trifle with the guarantees of our excellent constitution.” Black equality was essential to the United States’ survival and prosperity as a republic, he argued. Black protest was thus critical for all Americans. The young nation was fragile, he wrote ominously, and it was “threatened with internal national feuds.” State laws that flouted constitutional principles might shred the delicate national fabric. “If the proper authorities do not check this evil disposition,” Cornish declared, “while in embryo we soon shall have 21 Independant Republicks or petty Kingdoms.”⁶³ Ohio’s proposed residency restriction might be a step toward national dissolution. Cornish and the black Ohioans expanded arguments about how black people contributed to their communities. By this logic, when they confronted racially biased laws, black activists were defusing threats to the nation. Cornish’s paper displayed black people’s contributions in action, spurring the effort to help the republic fulfill its destiny as a beacon of representative government for the world.

Cornish had to shutter the Rights of All in late 1829 due to financial difficulties, a common challenge black editors faced. For much of the next decade, he focused on the ministry, only occasionally writing to other newspapers about legal and political matters he felt were urgent. But in 1837, he reentered the publishing world, still convinced that a newspaper was a valuable way to highlight black people’s contributions and to claim rights through citizenship. On March 4 of that year, he printed the first issue of the Colored American. The black proprietors of the Weekly Advocate had decided to change their paper’s name and invited Cornish to lead it because of his editorial experience. With the new title, they declared the foundation of their politics: “we are Americans,—colored Americans, brethren.”⁶⁴ They claimed a place in the nation while acknowledging that blackness made their experiences distinct; it was an argument about the essential complexity of the United States. Cornish and his colleagues challenged their legal exclusion by normalizing blackness in the nation.

Under the title, the paper bore the familiar masthead “Righteousness Exalteth a Nation.” Cornish planned to continue the work he had done at the Rights of All. The paper’s offices stood on Frankfort Street, near the recently constructed New York City Hall, and across the street from the Democratic Party’s political machine at Tammany Hall. Perhaps Cornish sat at a desk there and thought about the pernicious influence the party of slaveowners bore in northern state lawmaking. In the paper’s first issue, he called on Democrats to think in new ways about the terms of American citizenship, invoking the nation’s past to support his claims.⁶⁵ He printed two messages in which Andrew Jackson called on free black men to defend New Orleans during the War of 1812. Jackson, then a U.S. Army general, asked African Americans to join hands with their “white fellow-citizens” and spoke to concerns that crossed the lines of color. His words refuted claims that black people did not belong in the United States. Cornish continued his history lesson with extracts from the debates at New York’s 1821 Constitutional Convention, during which a number of lawmakers suggested that black Americans were citizens and therefore entitled to equal access to the polls.⁶⁶ Those items filled the paper’s front page, offering prominent endorsements for black citizenship politics.

As he had in the Rights of All, Cornish suggested to black readers ways to prove their value to American communities, emphasizing in particular that agricultural work could be a foundation of claims to citizenship and rights. He had written that “every constituent must become perfect, as far as human perfectibility goes, before the body politic can be made perfect,” and in the 1830s, he continued to advocate personal improvement as a means to broader societal progress.⁶⁷ He again urged black people to turn to agriculture in order to secure legal rights as citizens. In April 1837, for instance, he noted the unmatched fertility of American soil; any “sober and industrious” person could reap a rich harvest. “Morally culpable is he who can ‘eat the bread of idleness’ ” while living so close to such potential, Cornish wrote. “In our large cities, we are passed by as not at all incorporated in the body politic.” As they left crowded cites and took up farming, black people would “exert a powerful influence in different communities.” With only a small financial stake and “fixed determination,” black farmers would become “lords of the soil.” African American farmers would exhibit their self-sufficiency in a new realm by cultivating America’s “fertile garden,” enabling them “gain some influence in [their] own country.”⁶⁸

Again and again, Cornish insisted that black people remake their legal lives through agriculture.⁶⁹ In June 1838, he reprinted the message from the Rights of All in which he had offered farmland for sale in western New York and urged readers to move and help make their children “useful and virtuous citizens.”⁷⁰ He then copied an item from a newspaper called the Buckeye Ploughboy that said farmers possessed unique virtues, including the intelligence to “discharge in a proper manner the duties of a citizen.”⁷¹ Cornish’s correspondents also endorsed black agrarianism. A reader who called himself “Franklin” offered specific instructions for black people looking to become independent farmers. Traveling through western territories, Franklin had seen a number of European immigrants returning east from Kentucky and Ohio. Having discovered cheap land in those states, those immigrants had decided to work menial jobs in eastern cities until they saved enough money to buy property in the West. Franklin calculated that if a black man earned $25 each month as a porter and spent $100 per year on room, board, and clothing, he could save enough in one year to buy good western agricultural land. That man’s diligence and self-control would secure “the respect and confidence of the best part of the community,” while others remained trapped in a cycle of grueling work, extravagant spending, and debt. Franklin imagined a future in which thousands of old, black farmers relaxed in their comfortable homes and regaled their children with fireside tales of the thrift and industry that had allowed them to own the land on which they sat.⁷²

By January 1839, Cornish appeared to grow frustrated with the long and as yet fruitless struggle for political rights. He seemed anxious and exasperated as he noted that black northerners bore the burden of defending the nation’s principles. “On that portion of us, nominally free, is flung the necessity of battling for freedom.” African Americans felt “a love of home which is stronger than death,” and their emotional ties spurred their protest. “If we falter, or yield, or basely desert our home in its peril,” Cornish continued, “not only will republicanism cease in this Union, but God-like principle will be checked in mid-career.” He concluded by explaining why black people remained so dedicated to reforming the nation’s laws: “We are not temporary sojourners in a foreign land, nor aliens seeking citizenship, nor slaves begging for liberty—no! we are an integral portion of this Republic, bred and born with it, a portion too on whom rests the onus of proving that this as well as any other form of government, in having the power of adjusting its radical defects, contains the elements of its own duration.”⁷³ The nation’s laws were damaged but not beyond repair. Enacting a vision of citizenship that included black people and entailed political rights was critical for the republic because African Americans had done so much to preserve the nation’s ideals. They were citizens because they were born in the nation, because they had helped to build it, and because they insisted on improving it. If state lawmakers continued to deny black suffrage, they would chip away at the fragile foundations of republicanism as a form of government. Black people were integral to the nation in part because their legal status would embody either the fundamental flaws or the highest ideals of the republic.

Black activists continued to declare that they could be citizens by proclaiming themselves integral to the United States and seeking new ways to contribute to American communities. They exhibited their value in their states and in the nation and at the same time argued for specific legal protections. Their claims gave substance to the idea of the citizen, which they said entailed the obligations to work and to defend the nation’s ideals as well as rights of formal political access. The citizen status they constructed was available to black Americans. They made these claims at an urgent moment, as westward expansion, Indian removal, and the entrenchment of slavery threatened to make the United States an exclusionary empire in which power was reserved to white men. Black activists suggested that national progress need not be defined by slavery and racial exclusion, that African Americans could play a critical role in fostering the growth of the United States.⁷⁴

Those activists were locked in struggle with a vocal faction of white writers who continued working to remove black people from the United States. In 1836, Pennsylvania lawyer John Denny published An Essay on the Political Grade of the Free Coloured Population, using law and history to argue that black people did not belong in the United States. John Marshall, the long-serving chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, reviewed Denny’s manuscript and wrote, “The sentiment it conveys, appears to me, to be perfectly sound”; that endorsement served as the book’s preface. With Marshall’s support, Denny proceeded to examine African Americans’ rights before and after the ratification of the Constitution, a thin legalistic veil for what was in essence a colonizationist tract. He offered his own definition of citizenship to exclude African Americans. Black activists sometimes claimed rights through a constitutional clause declaring citizens of one state must have “all privileges and immunities of citizens” in any other, but “the term citizen is no where defined in the Constitution,” Denny noted. Given the legal restrictions black people faced, “it would certainly be a perversion” to call them citizens, he argued. “It appears not a little strange” that more black people had not emigrated to Liberia.⁷⁵ “He is tempted there by all the high privileges of political and civil liberty.” Black politics was high-stakes work because people like Denny were pushing for their legal exclusion and ultimate removal from the country, and legal authorities like John Marshall endorsed those projects. Colonizationists used the vagueness of the law to justify black removal, demanding that activists resist an American citizenship defined by whiteness.

But in the ways they challenged colonization and disfranchisement, black activists built their own racialized version of citizenship. They endorsed a restrictive standard of conduct in order to secure black legal belonging. People would earn citizen status by performing a set of behaviors dictated by uplift ideology. African Americans had to allay racist anxieties about black freedom to prove themselves worthy of citizen status in order to secure legal protections. For instance, Purvis and his fellow Pennsylvanians called for a single standard of conduct to determine black and white suffrage. But they accepted the idea that lawmakers could limit suffrage based on personal conduct. “We do not ask the right of suffrage for the inmates of our jails … but for those who honestly and industriously contribute to bear the burdens of the State.”⁷⁶ Accused or convicted criminals were far from the only people who might justifiably be denied rights. “We would have the right of suffrage only as the reward of industry and worth. We care not how high the qualification may be placed. All we ask is that no man shall be excluded on account of his color.”⁷⁷ Black activists in New York and Pennsylvania confronted voting restrictions by arguing that citizenship must secure political rights and economic opportunity. They built a narrow path for black people to secure rights. Their arguments helped perpetuate stereotypes that African Americans were predisposed to poverty or crime. Making personal conduct a barrier to the franchise echoed the belief that African Americans had to be prepared for freedom and legal protection. Activists’ arguments about how African Americans should work to earn citizen status perpetuated the ideas that had produced the extant, unequal racial order. The citizenship activists built remained qualified because it required qualification.

* * *

A number of black people heeded the calls for uplift and agrarianism in order to confront disfranchisement and change their legal status. Those changes took concrete form in upstate New York on land belonging to the wealthy white abolitionist Gerrit Smith. In 1846, Smith chose to give 3,000 black New Yorkers land to settle in the Adirondacks. He hoped to create an agrarian community in which African American men would attain the $250 of real property necessary to vote. Smith was an abolitionist at heart, and he believed the settlement would help “loosen the b[o]nds of the enslaved.” Black activists Theodore S. Wright, Charles B. Ray, and James McCune Smith agreed to work as agents to recruit settlers. Any black person between the ages of twenty-one and sixty who did not already own land and was not a “drunkard” would be eligible for a 40- to 60-acre plot.⁷⁸ Gerrit Smith expressed serious concerns about drinking among black New Yorkers. “I am grieved to learn, that intemperance has made such havoc among the colored people of this State,” he wrote. “Vain, and worse than vain, will be my grant of land to a drunkard.” He asked his agents to send a message to the settlers that would “inculcate the deepest abhorrence of intoxicating drinks.” Smith and his agents made absolute temperance a prerequisite for pursuing political rights in the Adirondacks.⁷⁹

Wright, Ray, and McCune Smith included their patron’s remarks in their message recruiting potential settlers. They urged applicants to see the Smith Lands as an opportunity to improve “the heart of an almost free state” and to amend its “nearly equal laws.” Once the settlers began to till the soil, the inherent nobility of farming combined with the creation of interracial agrarian communities would elevate black New Yorkers in the minds of white observers. The land grants were an opportunity for a “practical vindication of our claims to manhood.”⁸⁰ By cutting timber, building homes, and clearing land, taking on all of “the labour and privations incident to pioneer cultivators,” black people could embody a masculine American ideal and assert their place in a community of self-sufficient landowners.⁸¹ Black New Yorkers would enter the formal political community by owning land, and they would claim a place in an American cultural community by moving west and conquering the wilderness. That process demanded “the labour of self-denial”—thrifty habits to sustain new rural communities—including above all “TOTAL ABSTINENCE FROM ALL INTOXICATING DRINKS.” “The grant to you is free, untrammelled, unconditional,” the agents lied.⁸² Wright, Ray, and McCune Smith sought a specific type of person for the settlement, crafting a citizenship that included the vote and mapping a path to that status on the narrow route of thrift, industry, manliness, and temperance.

Willis Augustus Hodges was among those who heeded the call to the Smith Lands, continuing his lifetime of movement in search of opportunity. Hodges was born in 1815 to free parents in the Tidewater region of southeastern Virginia. As a child, his family endured a series of violent attacks by armed bandits. “No free person of color … was safe in person or property,” he wrote.⁸³ Hodges said that “the friends of the American Colonization Society” had perpetrated those attacks in order to compel black Americans to emigrate. He felt connected to his “native land” and refused to leave the United States, but he did want to escape the South. Hodges moved to Manhattan in 1833, where he was disappointed to find so many black people struggling to support themselves with work in menial service occupations. He quickly recognized how difficult it was to find more gainful employment. One afternoon, he lost his job as a laborer on a ship, but being too embarrassed to go home in the middle of the day, he volunteered to shovel fertilizer with a group of cartmen, a decision that brought him a bit of good fortune. The head cartman noticed Hodges at work and helped him find a steady job as a porter, a position he held for five years.⁸⁴

“I had never been able to read much,” Hodges declared, but he was inspired by abolitionist lectures he heard in New York, and he subscribed to three newspapers, including the Colored American.⁸⁵ He also organized African Americans in the developing community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to take part in black state conventions held in the early 1840s. Hodges spoke at the 1841 convention in Troy, where he praised the virtues of agrarian life in contrast to the limited opportunity available in the cities. That same year, he helped organize the Williamsburg Union Temperance Benevolent Society and served as its first president.⁸⁶

Hodges plunged into political work in the 1840s, deciding to publish a newspaper of his own to claim an independent public voice. In 1846, New York voters faced a referendum on the property qualification for black suffrage, and Hodges joined the struggle against disfranchisement. A white editor of the New York Sun urged readers to reject any change, arguing that black men’s voting would be a step toward racial intermarriage. Hodges responded to the editor, but the Sun charged $15 to print his argument, then placed it in a corner of the paper reserved for advertisements. “The Sun shines for all white men, not black men,” the editor explained. Hodges connected with Thomas Van Renesslear, a black activist who had previously worked on antislavery newspapers, and together they launched the Ram’s Horn on January 1, 1847.⁸⁷ Only one issue of the paper survives, and it includes an announcement signed “W. A. H.” for a meeting of the New York Emigration Association, intended to organize black settlement on the Smith Lands. Hodges believed the land grants “must eventually prove a blessing or a curse,” though he leaned toward the former. Once they moved upstate, settlers would contribute “timber, leather, iron, furniture and clothing” to markets for trade. “There too,” he added, “our young men and women who are now the victims of vice and idleness, would have regular employment under those who have an interest in their future happiness.”⁸⁸ Hodges preached the virtue of rural life, encouraging people to leave cities like New York and even smaller towns like Utica and Troy. He became “convinced that something besides ‘speechifying’ … had to be done if we wanted our rights.” After a series of meetings, Hodges forged a “little band” with eight black families, left Williamsburg, and settled on a 40-acre tract in the Adirondacks.⁸⁹

Hodges made his home in Franklin County and later reported that while living there, he was elected to the position of town collector. A New York law of 1845 prohibited any property qualification for officeholding. Owning land might have allowed Hodges to vote for himself and some of his fellow black settlers to cast ballots as well. But his election points to the odd legal reality that it was easier for a black man to hold office in 1840s New York than it was for him to vote.⁹⁰ Hodges’s election provided a direct form of political engagement and affirmed his legal position in the state and the nation. Settling on the Smith Lands allowed him to secure that place.

Willis Hodges’s story brings together histories of black agrarianism, anticolonization, uplift, and the pursuit of formal political rights. His life stands at the nexus of those critical aspects of black citizenship politics in the early antebellum period. Hodges illuminates the legal possibilities of black life in the mid-nineteenth century. Activists made potent arguments about citizenship and took action that secured political rights. But his experience was peculiar in many respects. Rare fortune opened the door for his achievements: his free parents helped him secure a formal education, he had disposable income that allowed him to relocate to and move within New York, and he had a helpful white man recommend him for a job as a porter. Only through those opportunities did Hodges achieve something like the citizenship that people like Samuel Cornish had so long tried to build. Leaving the city allowed him to own land, contribute his labor to a community, and find an avenue to formal political participation. But what Hodges secured was a contingent citizenship; it was not a status available equally to African Americans.⁹¹ Black people crafted citizenship through a struggle for specific rights based on the terms that had conferred those rights on narrow a subset of white men. Hodges’s achievements, particularly his election to local office, could obscure the exclusion that characterized black people’s lives. Surpassing the state’s legal standard for black suffrage did not directly confront the inequality at the heart of the state’s law. Instead, Hodges assumed the burden of his blackness and asked other African Americans to do the same, to navigate the world under the legal weight of their race. The citizenship that activists constructed and the legal rights Hodges attained involved adopting a specific, regimented way of life, embracing a set of restrictions that might, in return, produce certain privileges and protections.

FIGURE 1. Willis Augustus Hodges, from I. Garland Penn, ed., The Black Press and Its Editors (1891). Hodges earned a place in this collection because of his work as a newspaper editor. But his life also reflects the many other avenues for black citizenship politics that people pursued outside of the realm of print culture.

Hodges’s outstanding accomplishments emphasize the challenges African Americans faced as they sought legal protections in American communities. His experiences reveal the boundaries of a citizen status that black people had to earn through contributions that white Americans only reluctantly permitted or acknowledged. Citizenship was useful to black people because it was being constructed in public debate, but existing legal structures constrained the terms of that debate. Given the barriers that stood between black people and the legal lives they imagined, it is worth reflecting again on John Russwurm and the way he explained his move to Liberia. Black people might achieve a great deal in the United States, as Willis Hodges had. Individuals could experience a meaningful kind of legal belonging. But given the constant hurdling, given the terms under which they may be grudgingly admitted into the political community, perhaps John Russwurm was right to say black Americans could never truly enjoy their citizenship. As African Americans fought against racial exclusion, they built their own set of barriers to membership, crafting a citizenship that was less than freedom and that reproduced inequalities. Those restrictive arguments continued to shape black protest in the years to come.