Jones notes
Martha Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) ISBN: 9781316604724 – 18
Post 1
Jones’s study is significant because it draws attention to the complex experiences of black people in a country that did not recognize their rights. More importantly, it explores how these parties used the existing legal systems and political discourse to assert their views and position. Hence, it is impossible to ignore how the source documents how black people used their insights and knowledge of existing laws and petitions to protect themselves in an era where the Fourteenth Amendment was not yet established. Hence, before this change in law covered this population, there was a need to find alternative ways of using the law and political elements to protect black people’s lives. Furthermore, I believe the author based the study on Baltimore because it offers several examples of how black people fought the oppressive tendencies of American law. For instance, the source mentions people like James Jones, George Hackett, and David Pratt, who used petitions and the court’s authority to fend off oppressive patterns by creditors. Such actions showed how legally conscious African Americans were and their ability to use this knowledge to advocate for their rights (Jones 118). Thus, while many other locations had black people pursuing such efforts, Baltimore was a good example because several parties were engaged in such action. Therefore, basing one’s study on this area would offer significant insight into these events. Besides, these arguments of how black people engaged with the law to protect their rights exemplify their agency in asserting their belonging to the US.
In addition, they showed agency in their place in the nation by presenting the birthright citizenship argument. Essentially, black people actively argued for the in-depth assessment of the constitution and its declarations regarding citizenship. Through this movement, they pushed for reconsidering the racial elements that often undermined the rights described in the constitution. Such arguments would eliminate the ideology that black people were nothing more than slaves. (Jones 34). Instead, attention could be drawn to the fact that members of this community were people protected by a constitution whose details rendered them citizens by birthright. When the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, this matter became less vague, allowing black people an opportunity to secure their place in society (Jones 153). In addition, it offered them a better position to fight for their rights as US citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment laid the foundation for establishing anyone born in the US as a citizen by birthright. Hence, they were protected by the law and had the same rights as any other citizen. While such a declaration was still difficult to implement in a racially divided community, it gave black people a stronger footing by which they could fight for their rights and position within the nation.
I found Jones’ work relevant to contemporary society because it lays the foundation for understanding the plight of black people in a history that continually disfavored them. Furthermore, it portrays this community as strong-willed individuals with the intellectual acuity to know what they want, assess the constitution and use it to argue their position in legal cases. Such insights can inspire similar attitudes among modern African Americans, who have better access to knowledge and opportunities, pushing them to find ways to use the law to facilitate change in society and lay a better foundation for future generations. Besides, the insights provided in this reading align with those made in Blight’s biography of Douglass in that they both assess how black people’s prospects in American society changed through empowerment and implementation efforts to use
Post 2
When reading Jones’s Birthright Citizens, one cannot help but acknowledge the timeliness of her text within the context of Black people’s on-going struggle for political and judicial justice. In her text, Jones relates antebellum Black men and women’s struggle for and assertions of their rights and citizenship to contemporary predatory lending targeting minority communities (Jones 157-60). However, it is also worth noting the parallels between the circumstances described in Jones’s text and other contemporary conditions such as the on-going fight against the suppression of minority voters, with the ACLU stating limitations such as required “documents to prove citizenship or identification, onerous obstacles for voter registration drives, or limiting the window of time in which voters can register…disproportionately impact people of color, students, the elderly, and people with disabilities” have resulted in widespread “advocacy and litigation efforts aimed at protecting our fundamental right to vote,” thus reflecting the political and legal consciousness of racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and other minority/marginalized communities in twenty-first century America (ACLU).
Indeed, Birthright Citizens is an insightful and relevant text revealing how Black men and women factored into state- and nation-wide discussions on citizenship and asserted their citizenship through legal and political means to affirm their rights. Jones centers her study on antebellum Baltimore, a city situated less than a day’s journey away from the nation’s Washington, D.C. and located at the crossroads of the North, South, and the Atlantic world. Throughout her book, Jones centralizes the legal, political, and personal agency of Black men and women in antebellum Baltimore. For instance, Jones details how Black men and women were able to utilize the legal system to assert and preserve their rights. She writes, “For men like [George] Hackett, [David] Pratt, and [Jonathan] Trusty, the struggle for rights was one waged with the weapons that were legal papers.” Though African Americans endured “racialized marking[s] [that] functioned to distinguish and contain the legal agency of African Americans,” men such as James Jones utilized petitions to ward off aggressive creditors while “more prosperous men, like Hackett and Pratt, used paper and the authority of the court” to receive and extend credit and pursue debt forgiveness, illustrating a legal consciousness among Black people that translated into legal and judicial settings (Jones 118).
These assertions of agency and citizenship also manifested within a national context, with discussions on birthright citizenship urging a legal and political examination of the Constitution and the very nature of U.S. citizenship. Jones writes, “men like San Francisco’s William Yates wrote for newspapers, engaged in the vernacular study of law, debated in political conventions, and conducted themselves like rights- bearing individuals, all the while pressing for a radical redefinition of citizenship” and were “tied to a broader culture of race and rights,” effectively partaking in and initiating nation-wide conversations on citizenship, the rights of citizens, and the role of the state in preserving these rights that would manifest in conversations surrounding female enfranchisement (Jones 9, 68, 152). Jones contends that these were important conversations in the antebellum era, as understandings of citizenship were rather contentious and unstable, given that “citizenship had a piecemeal quality in antebellum America, defined only as needed,” inspiring free Black Marylanders to “study law” in order to garner a sense of citizenship and rights as antebellum Baltimorean “lawmakers found it nearly impossible to fix the status of free black Marylanders. Instead, they put in place a piecemeal scheme of requirements and restrictions aimed at curbing the very mobility and independence that life in the port city might invite….[Black people’s] rights and status, confused and uncertain, relied on no single text, ruling, or statute” (Jones 12, 24). This definition of Black citizenship and rights did narrow after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, as it guaranteed birthright citizenship, though black laws continued to pervade the legal and political systems of Baltimore, Maryland, and the United States, as noted in restrictions on “spreading incendiary matter among black Marylanders” and a failed effort to “free all persons imprisoned under laws related to slavery” (Jones 149). Nonetheless, the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment was a watershed moment in U.S. history that mostly resolved the precariousness surrounding birthright citizenship and “put African Americans…on a new footing before the law” (Jones 153).
Post 3
Birthright Citizens explores how black men and women navigated law and society to obtain rights in America pre Civil War, while challenging racist ideologies embedded in American society and the politics of America. I read this book in relation to the Douglass book where Blight navigated how Douglass and other black activists reacted to and experienced pre, during, and post Civil War and reconstruction. Jones expands on the Blight book where Jones reveals how black people during the pre Civil War era fought for their birthright citizenship in America through law and emphasizing the racist ideals immersed in American law and society. Emigration was a topic that Jones touched base on multiple times throughout her work where many black activists’ opinions on emigration varied. This reminded me of the Douglass book where Frederick Douglass faced the debate of emigration where he did not support the movement of black people out of the country, but understood why black people wanted to leave America. Jones expands on this debate that Douglass faced by demonstrating how emigration became embedded in American law and how black people responded to this topic. Jones noted that black activists organized against emigration where they would hold “public meetings” (38) to encourage black people to stay in America and fight for their rights.
Jones showed how black seamen observed laws during duties and experienced specific sea laws that applied to them and gave them certain rights as seamen. Through traveling, seamen also gained new insights of how freedom worked in other areas rather than the United States and Baltimore. Jones described a black sea man, George Hackett, observing Rio and how “Free people of color in Rio were citizens by law.” (56) Black sea men such as George Hackett gained opportunities to see what a future would look like with citizenship and when they would head home, they would bring these ideas to black activists to distribute throughout American communities to fight for citizenship.
Jones also described laws in Baltimore that required free black men to acquire gun licenses and travel permits where black activists noted the gun license and travel permits represented “self-sufficiency and self-protection.” (91) and that “the Second Amendment extended to free people of color.” (91) These laws were utilized by free black people who went to the court and sought out these small, but important “freedoms” to ask for travel permits and gun licenses. During these proceedings, specifically with travel permits, free black people asked permission from white men to give permission to obtain a travel permit where “white supporters signed their names expecting that they would carry weight with the court and give the permits authority.” (101) showing how free black people established allies with white people to gain small bits of “freedom.” By including stories of black men and women who challenged and took advantage of the courts, Jones’ work successfully reveals how free black people “are what drove lawmakers to refine their thinking about citizenship.” (9)
Post 4
This is the second of Martha Jones’ works that I have read thus far in my time as a graduate student. I was personally blown away by it and how it shaped my perception of black legal and political engagement in the Antebellum period. Before reading this, I had largely viewed the period as a kind of prologue, a building up to the cataclysmic decisiveness of the American Civil War and the birth of the modern US government. Rather, Jones points us toward a rich debate and legacy of engagement on the part of blacks who occupied an incredibly precarious and uncertain position. Viewed from this perspective, defining moments such as Scott v. Sandford and the passage of the 14th Amendment are relocated as very late happenings in what was a debate that had already been raging for decades. I remember reading somewhere before about the Dred Scott decision and how it was certainly no coincidence that Roger Taney hailed from the state (indeed the city) with the largest population of free blacks in the Union, since the ruling was largely tailored specifically at eliminating the legal recognition of just such persons. What I had not considered was how the subjects of that decision had already participated with such a degree of agency, going so far as to successfully push back against the implications of the Scott decision and secure some legal recognition in local and state courts. All of this lends to a picture of antebellum black Americans who, rather than simply being denied or handed citizenship via proclamation, actively engaged with civic responsibility and sought the recognition that went with that. They developed a consciousness in an attempt to carve a definitive answer to the question of whether or not they were ‘citizens’ in the true sense of that word. Both Jones and Foner invite us to view the assertion of citizenship as very much a bottom-up phenomenon. Jones’ work also made me think of the reading on Douglass and how he sought a sense of place for blacks in the United States. It seems that this was a common sentiment among free blacks more generally, and I found it interesting that this fight for legal recognition at times found itself in opposition to explicit attempts to literally deport free blacks from the US.
Post 5
The fundamental import of Jones’ work deals with the concept of jus soli, or birthright citizenship, for blacks, particularly “freed blacks,” and those from the more freely granting liberties states in the North, within the decades prior to the Civil War. A freed black man’s civil rights in Northern states, for example, were not a fundementally transferred in the “Southern” (slave) states. This is the heart of Jones’ narrative, as she highlights the incrediblly fluid and clearly not fully articulated citizenship “rights” that only black men were forced to navigate…especially if he ventured into a Southern state. A freed black man was on guard that he could be sezied, on the pretext of petty “violations,” and sold back into slavery…his believed citizenship meaningless. Jones points out one freed black man’s dealing with these “black laws,” a barber named Thomas Harvey. Simply for traveling outside the state of Maryland, he could be fined “$50 per week penalty for every week he was out of the state…[as he] faced the propsect of being sold into slavery.” (101) These kinds of unfair but “legal” considerations speak to the lack of true citizenship rights, of genuine agency, that blacks possessed. Another example, which I thought that showed the “meat” of her book was that of a seamen, a black freed man named Horton, who wanted shore leave within a slave territory, a dangerous attempt on his part, to be sure, as Jones cautions, since it “left people of color presumptive slaves.” (34)
In this logic, a freed black man’s freedom was not immutable, his citizenship inviolate, but rather wholly conditional and, unfortuately, ephemeral…something that just wasn’t applicable to white men. As Jones remarks, citizenship, and all that term suggests, was for black men “circumscribed in ways that the citizenship of white men was not.” (29) When a white man traveled from the North into states in which slavery existed, he didn’t lose his citizenship, far from it, there were no conditions placed upon him in this regard, e.g., a white man from New York, who was a citizen, was still a citizen in South Carolina with all of his rights in tact. This was the bedrock of the Consitution. Yet this is where Jones’ book brings out an important point. Did the Constitution and the right of citizenship extend to blacks? As Jones shrewdly describes in Chapter 8, and the infamous Dred Scott decision, it did not! The haunting issue of slavery never left their sides.
This “freedom,” at least for a Northern black was always in question, tacitly ready to be assaulted for freed blacks citizenship rights by existing instituitonal structures within the Southern states, e.g., the legislative system who created inequitable “black laws,” (96) and the police who were state sanctioned to enforce these restrictive citizenship rights when crossing state lines where the chains of a slave mentaility was evident, and the judiciary to grant “legal cover” to discriminatory practices. Freed blacks were not actually free, when mired in the misguided States’ Rights assertions in the South. This is the clever drama of Jones’ book. They were in a continued liminal state, of transversing an in-beween trajectory in establishing a fundamental identity.
She chose Baltimore for a couple of reasons, I believe. One, Balitmore had one of the largest black populations in the country, and two, even though Maryland was not a typical Southern State, it did have slavery within its borders. As she says, it was “a place between North, South, and the Atlantic world.” (1) This is important for her choice because of it close proximity to the Federal capital and the optics of a progressive nation on a journey of emancipation. And ultimately leads to a final question, was slavery a national, socio-political issue, forever tainting the American Dream, or simply the remants of a decaying social order in a regional social topography…the highly visible plantation system? Jones book helps answer that.
Post 6
Jone’s work, Birthright Citizenship: A History of Race and Rights in Antebllum America looks through the lens of legal history to discuss the fight for establishing and defining citizenship for free black men particularly looking at Baltimore, Maryland. This analysis displays that the process of defining citizenship for this community went through a process of relying on community, using the court system, and enacting freedoms/rights generally associated with citizenship before gaining lawful citizenship. In this process, it is clear that citizenship and all that was entailed in free blacks ability to exercise rights such as freedom of movement, establishing communities, and acting within the court system followed a process that began at the individual level and moved up towards the community and national lens.
For my discussion, I would like to take a crack at two of Dr. Rosa’s opening remark question. First, on why Jones chose to look at Baltimore. Without much context, my best guess is that it was chosen because it was a city that sits within the borderland between the north and south, was a major city meaning documentation was more in depth, and has an interesting history in terms of adopting laws related to citizenship as mentioned by Jones. Maryland as a state was slow to adopt and enact rights of citizenship for free blacks. The demographic and geographic nature of Baltimore to me would make it a good representation of the diverse nature of American political thought as I think it would be difficult to make the same kinds of generalizations about the growth of defining citizenship if this was a more northern or more southern city that was representative of the drastically different lifestyles.
For the second question, I would like to look at this works relevance to today. I think there are a few lenses used by Jones that display that Jones work reflects much of what is important today. First, the focus of looking through the legal lens and the importance of the court system. Recently, we have had some major decisions made by the American court systems that continue to define rights, autonomy over personal choice, and define the ways in which our political system functions in ways that I think parallel the nature of court use displayed by Jones as a means of defining a way of life. Second, the importance of defining social constructs within our society is a prevalent idea that remains important. To build on the lens of legal studies and the courts, the ways in which we define rights, freedoms, citizenship, privacy, and due process, and democratic values remains a constant battle within our political system and changes dependent upon who is in power and through societal shifts that either progress or regress our understanding of those who are different from ourselves. I think considering the ways in which we define important constructs within our way of life will remain relevant for as long as the idea of natural rights is a part of the American social construct.
Post 7
Birthright Citizens, by Martha S. Jones, traces the development of citizenship and suffrage for black Americans. She follows the issue from the divergent state laws of the early 1800’s to the reaction to the Dred Scott decision.
Jones relies heavily on surviving documents concerning black activists of the antebellum period from Baltimore, Maryland. Jones begins with the 1838 treatise on citizenship, Rights of Colored Men. Jones believes this is the first book working out a definition of citizenship for free black Americans, not bound by slavery. The author, William Yates, was nearly lost to history. Jones provides a scant biography of Yates. Making Article 4 of the Constitution his basis, Yates lays out his thesis, that black people enjoy citizenship separate from voting rights. Even in places where only property owners or whites could vote, Yates asserts a black citizenship supercedes voting rights. Yates makes a powerful claim that innate citizenship provided immunity to expulsion or forced emigration (pp 4).
Jones claims the Yates book was instrumental to forming an intellectual bedrock for black legal protections. She says his value was lost after the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizenship at the national level (pp 5.). Jones uses Yates to show serious thought was being given to black citizenship decades before the Civil War.
Jones describes the various networks providing information to black Americans that sprang up in the nineteenth century. Newspapers were a major network. Reading them was beneficial, but the business contacts provided by advertising also drew people together. Jones closely follows an advertising agent for the Freedom’s Journal newspaper named Charles Hackett, and his son George Hackett. The story of the Hackett family depicts the multiple attempts to define citizenship, and how ordinary people struggled with a system rigged against them.
An early attempt to establish citizenship in the courts was reported by the the Freedom’s Journal. The Cuffe brothers of Massachusetts won a court case in 1780 defining citizenship as a prerequisite to taxation. (pp 23). Newspapers collected stories like this, and spread them to other states. Small victories in northern states inspired people further south. Information was transmitted from the small literate business class to many others.
There were few attempts to define citizenship for blacks at the national level. One of the first was the census of 1790. The census categorized people as white men or women, and all other men and women. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited new citizens as only white. After the 1820’s, many laws came into being that limited black travel. Maryland, at the center of the nation geographically and socially, became a bellwether for black legal rights. (pp 25).
A major debate erupted in congress over the admission of Missouri as a state in 1820. Missouri attempted to come into the Union as a slave state, and proposed a state constitution that barred free black people from entering it. Northern politicians rejected this idea, southern politicians endorsed it. A southern state, so close to slave owners, could serve as a destination for escaped slaves. After spirited argument, Missouri was allowed to enter the Union as a slave state. But this debate foreshadowed later problems.
I noticed on page 29 that Jones cites a move in Albany, New York to rework the state constitution concerning voting rights. Jones, at the top of page 29, cites a Republican Party faction as driving the push for expanded voting rights. This confused me, as the Republicans did not enter national politics until the 1850’s. Maybe she is referring to a New York state party I do not know about, maybe it is just a simple mistake. If anyone knows more, please tell me.
Circling back to last week’s biography of Frederick Douglass, the issue of emigration divided Baltimore’s black activists in the 1830’s. Haiti, Canada, and Liberia were possible destinations, with Haiti actively recruiting American born black workers. A Baltimore newspaperman named Hezekiah Grice was involved with the resistance to emigration. The emigration debate crystallized arguments for black American citizenship.
In Chapter 3, Jones relates George Hackett’s seafaring time. On the ocean, Hackett learned about laws in different areas. He also took a turn in the navy onboard the USS Constitution. Hackett’s experience provided fuel for later claims of legal representation.
In Chapter 4, Jones developes the resistance and rejection of emigration. Trinidad and British Guiana were hungry for field hands, and the people of Baltimore were tempted to depart. Black people began to fear this idea, when politicians began to toy with the idea of ejecting their black citizens. “Even in a state that granted African Americans a baseline degree of citizenship, activist guarded against the possibility that they might be removed from the state and from the nation. An an argument that was largely grounded in state citizenship was extended to encompass national citizenship as well.” (pp 63).
Key to the black struggle for legal rights was the fact that blacks were not barred from the courts in Maryland (pp 26). Many novel attempts to gain recognition came through litigation. The sixth and seventh chapters relate the many times that black people used court cases to establish rights, sometimes in the face of “black laws” that sought to contain them.
Jones closes her book with an anecdote about facing Chief Justice Roger Taney’s ghost in the Baltimore Courthouse and Law Museum. Her book is not personal, until the last chapter. In last week’s reading, we were asked to separate the art from the artist. That gets difficult when the author inserts herself directly into the story. Then again, this lends a book about two-hundred-year-old court cases some emotional heft. I understand why authors do things like this.