Stranger Citizens

Front matter

Stranger Citizens

Migrant Influence and National Power in the Early American Republic

STRANGER CITIZENS

CHAPTER 5 From Servants to Equals 133 Notes 169

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to everyone who took this project from idea to book and its many stages in between. This book began at the Department of American Studies at George Washington University. There, Terry Murphy spent many hours reviewing and discussing chapter drafts with me, and her willingness to take the time to read and comment with constructive criticism thoroughly enriched this book as we discussed how to think about citizenship and the people who made it. Additional thought and input from Tom Guglielmo and David Silverman also contributed to the strengths of the book, and they encouraged me to demonstrate what mattered about the information that I was finding in primary sources, while ensuring that my claims were backed with strong evidence. Chad Heap and Richard Stott also provided comments and guidance.

I have participated in several reading groups over the years, and they too have provided invaluable comments, insight, and exchange of ideas. In particular, I would like to thank Justin Pope, Mary McPartland, Sara Berndt, Andrea O’Brien, and Richard Boles. In additional to formal reading groups, formal and informal conversations at GW provided numerous insights from related and interdisciplinary fields of study. Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon has given me detailed advice on navigating the process from manuscript to publication, in addition to her careful reading of chapters. Lance Macon provided proofreading. Thanks as well to University of Nevada and Ohio University colleagues. Helpful reading and comments from Debra Nickles, Marguerite Hernandez, and Katherine Jellison helped to improve the manuscript, as did comments from the Ohio University history department’s seminar, where many department members offered advice and insight.

Thanks are also due to scholars outside my home institutions who have taken time to provide comments on my work, including Iona Man-Cheong, Rosemarie Zagarri, Peter Hinks, Saskia Sassen, Ashli White, Dinah Mayo-Bobee, and Erin Aeran Chung.

I HAVE HAD astrong and supportive relationship with Cornell University Press while working on this book. Michael McGandy’s editorial guidance through xi xii Acknowledgments this whole process has been very much appreciated by this first-time author. Thanks also to Clare Jones as well as my anonymous readers, whose constructive criticism and advice have given this book additional scholarly insight. Additional thanks to Elsa Dixler, Ihsan Taylor, and Longleaf Services at UNC Press. A grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that has funded the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot has allowed this book to be published as a digital, open-access book available to all.

Thanks also to those institutions that have provided financial support for this research, and to the people at archival institutions who made their materials accessible. The Columbian College and American Studies Department at George Washington University provided generous financial support and stipends, as did the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Ohio University provided conference funding to workshop draft materials, and the OU Regional Higher Education Faculty Development Committee as well as the OU Faculty Research Support Program provided additional funding to support the publication of this book. The Cosmos Club Foundation funded archival research travel to Belfast and Dublin. Thanks to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland and the John Carter Brown Library for their assistance in locating difficult to find sources. Special thanks are due to the Cornwall Historical Society and Ann Schillinger, from whom I learned much about the Foreign Mission School and the students there.

A version of Chapter 3 of this book previously appeared as “Alien Enemies or Naturalized Citizens? Representations of British-born Residents in the United States during the War of 1812,” in Representation and Citizenship (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016). I thank Liette Gidlow, Richard Marback, Marc Kruman, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.

FAMILY AND FRIENDS have also been a great help and support during this project. Especial thanks to my husband, Greg Brown, whose comments during proofreading helped this book be the best it can be, and who has been there throughout with love and support. Thanks also to Cynthia Owens, Laura Gosling, Ritija Gupta, and Gonzalo Gémez. Finally, thanks to my parents, John and Monica O’Keefe, as well as my sisters Laura and Meaghan, who have been loving and supportive family members throughout this whole process.

STRANGER CITIZENS

Introduction

S MIGRANTS TO THE United States in the late eighteenth century,

Adam Donaldson and Benjamin Maingault had much in common:

both arrived in bondage. They both obtained freedom at the end of their indentures. Both of them attempted to exercise rights of citizenship, but found that either official or public hostility impeded their ability to do so: Maingault, a man of color, found his right to vote challenged in a Philadelphia election in 1807, while Donaldson, a British subject, was required to register as an “alien enemy” with the federal government during the War of 1812, and faced being ordered to move forty miles away from tidewater—an order that applied to all British subjects engaged in commerce. Both men were able to influence their application and recognition of their legal rights and their treatment by the government. They differed, though, in how their rights were threatened. Donaldson, a white man, lost his status during a period of temporary national crisis. For those Americans who saw Maingault as a danger, however, the crisis was ongoing: they continually had to ensure white control of public participation in American politics, and exclude dangerous racial others from the polity.’

The experiences of Donaldson and Maingault illustrate the way migrants affected the development of citizenship in the early American republic. Although neither drafted legislation, they nonetheless engaged with the political process at a time when citizenship and its rights were acquiring definition in law and capturing the interest of the American public. Citizens began to acquire new rights, and foreign migrants new penalties, but the extent to which different citizens might be able to exercise rights was open to debate. Donaldson successfully lobbied for different treatment by mentioning his American-born wife, despite a legal tradition of coverture that made his wife a British subject. Maingault exercised the franchise and voted, a right increasingly associated with citizenship, despite white hostility. Maingault pushed for his rights even as white Americans sought to curtail them. Their actions, and those of other foreign migrants, demonstrate how the development of a national citizenship occurred during this early period, gaining form through definition against its legal opposite, the alien.

IN THIS TIME, geopolitical lines and concepts were not firmly set; early America was a vast, disparate place where identities and political relationships remained in flux, and citizenship was in its own process of acquiring shape and meaning.” What citizenship meant to Americans and in the broader Atlantic world was open to debate, and ideas and people from far-away places connected and worked to mold new forms of citizenship, both as a legal category and as an idea that circulated in public discourse. The relationship between citizens, their communities, and the state was still uncertain: people residing in the United States did not necessarily envision or seek the path to a nation-state where each citizen had a direct relationship to the central government. Individuals could be citizens of a town, a nation, or all the republics in the world. Additionally, citizenship itself competed with legal personhood as the category from which rights would derive from the state. Moreover, the development of citizenship was a participatory process that was affected by everyone who attempted to define or exercise citizenship and legal rights. Some people, such as President John Adams and Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, wielded considerable power in the formation of citizenship but others, such as Benjamin Maingault, were still able to affect the rights associated with citizenship. For those like Maingault, however, it was no easy task.

Although national citizenship would be fully forged in the crucible of Civil War and Reconstruction, it began to grow in importance in the decades immediately after US independence. This growth of national citizenship resulted in a shifting of rights away from legal personhood, a change that came at the expense of noncitizens with officially foreign allegiance residing in the US, be they foreign migrants, former Loyalists, or American-born women married to either: they all were legally designated as aliens. The extent to which a decentralized—but strong—state functioned in the years after US independence is an important historical question. Although local governments exerted considerable power over their inhabitants, one of the important ways a strong state emerged in these years was around the citizen/alien divide at the national level. That process included not only policing the nation’s borders, both geographically and in the public sphere, but also the national government's exercise of its new powers, controlling and forcibly resettling noncitizen populations. Noncitizen migrants began to experience increasing penalties as citizenship during this period grew in meaning and power. Rather than accept their subordinate status, migrants pushed to secure what legal rights they could. In doing so, they gave shape to the rights that became a part of citizenship as well as those retained by legal personhood. From the initial drafting of laws to the enforcement of those laws in local communities, migrants pushed for their rights and interests.’

During this early formative period after independence, citizenship rights were forged from the creation of alien legal penalties such as compulsory registration, deportation, and forced internal removal—the term “alien” has a history as well. These new penalties resulted not only from the Federalist vision of a powerful national government and the need to safeguard it against foreign infiltration and corruption—Democratic-Republicans justified some of these penalties as necessary during a state of national emergency. Other penalties reflected the growing consensus among white Americans that people of other races should be excluded from citizenship.‘ Citizens retained privacy, freedom from banishment, and the right to stay in their places of residence, as well as a right to due process. Powers of deportation and internal removal may seem “natural” powers for an emerging modern state, but Federalists, concerned about the spread of revolutionary violence in the Atlantic world, also sought to link the right of free speech with citizen status as part of their desire to safeguard the public sphere from alien participation. These new and national alien penalties were among the first linkages that occurred between the nation-state and citizens. The strong citizen-alien divide that emerged during the early American republic provided a framework for the further development of citizenship as the font from which rights would spring, rather than legal personhood.

In addition, migrants themselves participated in the shaping of citizenship: in trying to develop a state that limited citizenship to men like themselves, American lawmakers, politicians, and judges ran into resistance. They had to contend with alternative understandings put forth by migrants, as well as more practical attempts to secure entry, residence, and life without government surveillance, regulation, and harassment. Migrants lobbied Congress, successfully defeating a proposed blanket ban on the entry of any French citizens to the United States. Migrants resisted deportation, argued against internal removal, and provided alternative definitions of who was a citizen and who was an alien. At times, especially when they were able to mobilize popular political ideologies in their favor, they succeeded in changing enforcement policies. They explored different conceptions of citizenship: white political radicals advocated a transatlantic revolutionary republicanism, and some people of color emphasized a possibility of a more racially egalitarian citizenship. Migrants’ racial status upon entering the United States, however, also determined what claims they could successfully make and what strategies they chose to pursue in attempting to obtain citizenship rights. Migrants whom Americans were willing to accept as white could take many of the benefits of citizenship for granted, while migrants whose racial reception placed them outside the category of white people needed to work hard to obtain what rights of citizenship they could. This is in contrast to a view that assumes that nativists successfully drafted, passed, adjudicated, and enforced their laws without intervention, lobbying, influence, or resistance from the migrants against whom these laws were directed. Such views miss the important role of migrants themselves in shaping the legal development of citizenship: change came because of actions across a broad political, legal, and social spectrum, showing that migrants’ effects on citizenship were not confined to a narrow area of working as close allies of the leaders of political parties, or as key swing voters in events such as the election of 1800. Rather, all sorts of independent forms of organizing to push for reform as well as daily interactions with American society helped to create and change citizenship in the early American republic.’

Furthermore, an examination of the role of foreign migrants in the building and defining of citizenship in decades after US independence shows the rich varieties and understandings of citizenship that were possible and contested in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in contrast to growing dominance of a male democratic citizenship of the mid-nineteenth century. Some migrants embraced a revolutionary citizenship that extended beyond national borders, while others advocated for a citizenship that was closely tied to a more local elite status. Still others used local citizenship in a longer early modern tradition of crowd action, contrasting a citizenship of rights with a citizenship of practical community mobilization and solidarity. Similarly, migrants’ advocacy for citizenship was often, but not always, grounded in liberalism: for women in particular, Scottish Enlightenment understandings of citizenship were more useful for white binational couples where American women married foreign men. These ways that migrants imagined, used, and deployed citizenship differed from the ways that other ordinary people in the United States theorized and made citizenship. In particular, as the historian Martha S. Jones has shown, native-born African Americans engaged in both an intra-community practice as the nineteenth century unfolded and a broader antebellum push for citizenship. This push was part of the continuous (and at times, radical) transformation of citizenship during the middle of the nineteenth century, as the country shifted toward a democratic citizenship more closely tied to the nation-state, and as political conflicts over race led to the military conflict of the Civil War, followed by Reconstruction.§

In contrast to the continuous struggle for African American citizenship in the nineteenth century, the construction of the citizen/alien divide was a discontinuous one: migrants grappled with policy makers during periodic crises of ethnicity, particularly white ethnicity. The effect was similar to later crises that limited liberal citizenship and excluded suspect migrant populations. In the years after US independence, the Alien and Sedition Acts and the War of 1812 would result in attempts to temporarily strengthen the power of national citizenship and penalize suspect noncitizens. In addition to these temporary crises, migrants from outside of Europe had to navigate a society where race was seen as continually in crisis by many white Americans. Migrants fought to secure status through engagement not just with the courts, but with the federal executive branch as well. Their claims and assertions could blunt the force directed at them, redirecting and reshaping power and citizenship, even when they seemed to be in very marginalized positions.’

The discontinuous nature of the interplay between the nation-state, migration, and citizenship is in contrast to a view of migration and citizenship policies as a gradual American political development in the structure, functioning, and power relations of the state. This discontinuous exertion of federal power appeared despite a lack of executive bureaucratic capacity that forced officials to improvise. To accomplish their aims, these officials relied on partisan allies outside the government to engage in surveillance, secured the cooperation of merchants to assist in “voluntary” expulsion of refugees, and worked in cooperation with local officials such as county sheriffs to ensure enforcement of regulation of migrants. Outside entities in the form of formally organized pressure groups have played a significant role in the development of the state and its regulatory apparatus, but informal organizing and individual actions have contributed to the development of citizenship as well. Officials had to contend with crowds attempting to enforce different ideas about citizenship, or contend with individuals asserting rights and status in a one-on-one setting.*

Background: Theories and Practices of Citizenship

Although migrants had many different ways of conceptualizing and asserting citizenship, they had to confront ideologies that dominated popular and official understandings of political culture in the United States. The American Revolution had transformed British colonists into American citizens, both through a grueling, years-long war, and through a political reordering that emphasized citizens’ rights to selfrepresentation while also limiting access to full citizenship for outsiders and subordinated groups. In the American Revolution, individuals’ own relationship to the sovereign state also changed: before the Revolution, all colonists were the king’s subjects. During the Revolution, the inhabitants of the rebellious colonies were faced with a choice: did they remain loyal subjects, or choose to become citizens? Political status and membership itself became a mutable, changeable relationship. Citizenship also shifted away from a personal relationship akin to the lord-vassal bond of protection and loyalty to an idea of community membership in which the state granted rights to its citizens, and perhaps others within its borders. Naturalization also reflected this view: did people seeking to naturalize share the values of the community, and a commitment to republicanism? Citizenship could also be more exclusive than subjectship in other ways: enslaved people retained a political identity as subjects of the monarch, although from a hostile white perspective in the new republic they were (almost completely) socially dead and devoid of an official identity?

Among the most dominant understandings of citizenship post-independence was republicanism. Differences in republican citizenship were related to questions of race, gender, and socio-economic status. Americans associated citizenship with the economic independence of the head of a household. Other household members received their citizenship status from the head of household, who was implicitly white and male. Americans often saw citizenship as part of the political public sphere in contrast to the private household sphere: the head of household represented himself and his dependents in the public sphere. Through his citizenship, he (ideally) both forged the laws that formed the social contract, and obeyed the sovereign state. Within his household, he was sovereign and held authority over his wife, children, other dependents, servants, and slaves. The members of his household had no independent political authority of their own: they were represented in the public sphere by the head of the household. This was the conception of citizenship that those facing exclusion had to engage with; they could argue that they fit the criteria for citizenship, or they could seek to change how citizenship functioned in the United States. This republican concept of citizenship was an ideal that encountered numerous practical difficulties, and the idea of fitness for citizenship itself was subject to change."

Although republicanism emphasized patriarchal control over women and others in the household, and was seemingly validated by the law of coverture, marriages—and therefore women’s citizenship—could be more complex in practice. Under coverture, a woman took her husband’s citizenship status; if he was a citizen, so was she. If she married someone who was not an American, she took her foreign husband’s citizen or subject status. Women held an independent legal status only if they headed a household on their own, which was usually the case only in widowhood, but during the War of 1812, British men emphasized that their wives were “American.” Their seeming challenge to the tradition of coverture was possible because of a mix of understandings that allowed them to make claims for different treatment without destabilizing American gender-based hierarchies. Migrant men used this apparent contradiction to emphasize their American-ness in several ways: they included ideas about women’s normative roles as transmitters of culture, (white) women’s responsibility to counsel and instruct their husbands and sons on the duties of patriotic citizens, women’s daily connections to their communities, and wives’ roles as deputy husbands, standing in the husband’s place when he was unable to do so."

Whereas men used their wives to advocate for citizenship, women seeking to act as citizens on their own confronted growing postrevolutionary challenges to women’s personal political activity. White women faced significant barriers to political participation, and women of color even more so. Women of color faced governments and publics much more hostile to their assertions of citizenship throughout the Americas, although the revolutions of the late 1700s would offer windows of possibility. The tenuousness of citizenship for women of color was consequently tied to their engagement with revolutionary governments and their quests for documentation of free and therefore citizen status. For white women, their citizenship was tied to the documents controlled and recorded by white men, and coverture therefore served as a check on white women’s informal exercise of authority and independence in daily matters.”

Although citizenship held an inclusive promise for members of the nation, citizenship could also be exclusionary. As the relationship between citizen and nation grew, outsiders felt their exclusion more keenly. Revolutionary nation-states saw threats to their nascent government, and the emergence of the American nation-state meant that when noncitizens appeared to be the embodiments of those threats, they could be subject to social exclusion, surveillance, loss of political and economic rights, restrictions on freedom of movement, and violence. People who were citizens or subjects of another sovereign state were aliens, and possible agents of a foreign power. As such, they could be targets of xenophobia, and new nation-states attempted to put greater restrictions upon them, especially in time of war. Public panics and rumors could have still greater negative effects: arrest, detention, expulsion, and/or execution. What the state did not do could be accomplished by crowd action, which not only might receive tacit approval from elite men, but crowds would sometimes be led by them. Race, gender, and class status also served to divide the polity. In the United States, elite white men defined who deserved full citizenship and rights: themselves. Threats from below in the form of people of color, women, and the lowly seemed to be sources of corruption, effeminacy, and mob justice. Consequently, these people did not deserve equal political, economic, social, or legal status: to give them equality was the sign of impending downfall of the virtuous republic.”

IT IS IMPORTANT to keep in mind that not everyone arriving in the United States necessarily intended or wanted to become a citizen, either in a formal legal sense or in a broader informal sense of joining a culture and community. Many people traveled to the United States for economic reasons, while others were fleeing violence, and many of them planned to return to their places of origin instead of staying permanently in the United States. Among the people arriving, those encountering a hostile reception sometimes rejected citizenship, preferring their attachment to another polity or nation-state, while others who received a warmer welcome nonetheless viewed themselves in a state of exile, and hoped to return to their place of origin. Of course, those making these choices about becoming citizens also developed and engaged with their own conceptions and meanings of citizenship, even as they rejected a local, state, or national American citizenship. For these reasons, I mostly use the term “migrant” rather than immigrant, unless referring to a person who has clearly stated an intention to permanently settle in the United States.

Background: Early Naturalization Laws

Although migrants influenced naturalization, citizenship, and the legal rights increasingly associated with citizenship, they nonetheless had to engage with the existing legal framework and laws directed at them. At the national level, the most important among these were the comity clause of the of the Articles of Confederation, which became formally effective in 1781, the Naturalization Acts of 1790 and 1795, and the 1798 package of legislation known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, which included the Naturalization Act of 1798, the Alien Act, and the Alien Enemies Act. At the national level, naturalization law varied in its provisions during the Confederation and early federal periods.

In the 1780s, after Great Britain formally recognized US independence, the status of citizenship during the Confederation period was relatively unclear, but was more clearly articulated at the state and local than at the national level. The Articles of Confederation contained a comity clause that required states to recognize one another’s citizens. The patchwork of state naturalization laws and procedures varied considerably: some states required only one year’s residence, while others required legislative acts. It was possible, under the comity clause, for one state to naturalize another state’s aliens.”

The new US Constitution contained a provision to “establish an uniform rule of naturalization,” which Congress passed in 1790, though it was not clear to what extent national and state citizenship might overlap or conflict. As originally drafted, the Naturalization Act of 1790 would have granted the rights of citizenship in stages, but concerns about conflict with state naturalization laws ultimately led simply to a grant of full citizenship rights after two years of residence in the United States. The most important change in the final version, however, was the new law’s restriction of the right of naturalization to whites only. These new federal naturalization laws would continue to coexist with state laws for some time. This coexistence appeared in inconsistent court decisions: in 1817, the Supreme Court in Chirac v. Chirac ruled in favor of Congress’s sole authority over naturalization, but the court partially reversed its decision in the 1830 case of Spratt v. Spratt, returning naturalization to the state of uneasy coexistence between state and federal government."*

Legislators viewed migrants through several different lenses. Their mercantilist views held that migrants would benefit the nation as either human capital who would invest in the economic future of the nation, or whose labor would support that growth. In keeping with this view, legislators also believed that European migrants would assist in the ongoing expropriation of Indian lands along the frontier, whose agricultural production would further support the American economy.”

Legislators wrestled, though, with a liberal view that citizenship was mutable and theoretically open to any independent white person who believed in republicanism. Legislators acted on a belief that a short residence in the United States would acculturate monarchists to the American political system, but when the French Revolution and the wars it generated resulted in the arrival of both republican radicals and ultra-monarchist aristocrats, legislators became concerned. In 1795, despite the emergence of the first party system, both Federalists and Republicans agreed that it was necessary to extend the residency requirement for naturalization to five years. Each party saw radicals from either the democratic left or the aristocratic right as a political danger from which republicanism needed to be shielded."

In 1798 divisions over naturalization law became more partisan. Federalists noticed that recent migrants, particularly from Ireland, had been increasingly gravitating toward the Republican Party. When the diplomatic furor surrounding the XYZ affair resulted in widespread public alarm about radical migrants, Federalists swung into action and passed the series of laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act targeted defamatory publications aimed at

Federalist leaders. The Naturalization Act of 1798 lengthened naturalization requirements to fourteen years of residence and instituted compulsory registration in federal courts for all white aliens. The Alien Act allowed the president to deport aliens he deemed dangerous, along with requiring incoming vessels to report alien arrivals. The Alien Enemies Act contained provisions allowing, in the event of a declared war, for the detention and “removal” of aliens over fourteen years of age either via the federal courts or by federal marshals.”

Following the election of 1800, immigrant activists hoped that the Republican Party would act swiftly to end the Naturalization Act’s fourteen-year residency requirement and return to a shorter one. Neither Congress nor President Jefferson moved swiftly, and it was not until April 14, 1802, that a new naturalization act was passed. This act was a return not to the two-year requirement but to the stricter five-year requirement of the 179s act, and stated that immigrants would first have to file a declaration of intent to naturalize, and then wait three years for naturalization itself. Migrants who did not file a declaration of intent in their first two years of residence would have to wait longer than five years. The 1802 act also retained the port data-gathering provisions of the 1798 act, and additionally required formal documentation, no longer relying on immigrant and witness testimony for arrival and declarations of intent. The 1802 act also meant that those immigrants who had experienced the barriers of the 1798 act would have to, in effect, wait an additional eight full years before being able to naturalize. Immigrants continued to lobby and send petitions but faced resistance, and Congress did not pass a law amending the 1802 act until March 26, 1804. Federal naturalization law experienced no further changes until the War of 1812; on July 30, 1813, Congress passed legislation allowing immigrants eligible for naturalization prior to the declaration of war to naturalize, as well as those who had declared their intent to naturalize.*°

Demography of Migration during the

Period of Atlantic Revolutions

Toward whom was naturalization law directed? Migrants came from many places, and those places varied over time as economic and political conditions pushed people to emigrate from their places of origin. In the years immediately preceding the American Revolution there was significant migration from Northern Europe to the United States. Britain’s agricultural revolution and landlords’ rising rents dislocated people in Scotland and Ireland who sought to resettle elsewhere. Many Irish immigrants were also Protestant dissenters: they

Introduction Il were not members of the official, tax-supported Church of Ireland (equivalent to the Church of England) but were often Presbyterians, Quakers, or members of other Protestant sects. Similarly, German religious minorities sought to emigrate to the United States. Many migrants could not pay for their passage and relied on the system of indentured servitude, agreeing to serve a master who would select them upon arrival, with some room for negotiation. Indentured servants received no wages during their term of service, but contracts often stipulated a requirement for education for younger migrants, and usually came with “freedom dues,” which in the late 1700s generally included clothing and tools to work in a trade.”