Citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States was an
ever-moving target. The Constitution did not specify its exact
meaning, leaving lawmakers and other Americans to struggle over the
fundamental questions of who could be a citizen, how a person
attained the status, and the particular privileges citizenship
afforded. Indeed, as late as 1862, U.S. Attorney General Edward
Bates observed that citizenship was "now as little understood in
its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and
speculative criticism as it was at the founding of the Government."
Black people suffered under this ambiguity, but also seized on it
in efforts to transform their nominal freedom. By claiming that
they were citizens in their demands for specific rights, they were,
Christopher James Bonner argues, at the center of creating the very
meaning of American citizenship. In the decades before and after
Bates's lament, free African Americans used newspapers, public
gatherings, and conventions to make arguments about who could be a
citizen, the protections citizenship entailed, and the obligations
it imposed. They thus played a vital role in the long, fraught
process of determining who belonged in the nation and the terms of
that belonging. Remaking the Republic chronicles the various ways
African Americans from a wide range of social positions throughout
the North attempted to give meaning to American citizenship over
the course of the nineteenth century. Examining newpsapers, state
and national conventions, public protest meetings, legal cases, and
fugitive slave rescues, Bonner uncovers a spirited debate about
rights and belonging among African Americans, the stakes of which
could determine their place in U.S. society and shape the terms of
citizenship for all Americans.
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