The Practice of Citizenship
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In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does. In The Practice of Citizenship , Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 «Afric-American Picture Gallery» appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine , and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass. Reading black print culture as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced, Spires reveals the degree to which concepts of black citizenship emerged through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. From petitions to Congress to Frances Harper's parlor fiction, black writers framed citizenship both explicitly and implicitly, the book demonstrates, not simply as a response to white supremacy but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs.
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The Practice of Citizenship
Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States
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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.
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