Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones

Abstract

Reviewed by: Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America by Martha S. Jones Richard D. Brown (bio) Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America. By Martha S. Jones. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii, 248. Paper, $27.99.) Birthright Citizens is an important, path-breaking study that brings readers deep into the subject explored in Henry Louis Gates Jr., et al., The Oxford Handbook of African American Citizenship (New York, 2012). Martha S. Jones's eight concise, gracefully written chapters reveal the complexities of citizenship among free blacks, from the 1790s through adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Although Baltimore and Maryland supply her primary focus, the reach of her study includes the entire United States. Jones takes William Yates's little-known Rights of Colored Men to Suffrage, Citizenship, and Trial by Jury (Philadelphia, 1838) as her point of departure. Yates, a white New York abolitionist, supplied evidence supporting the citizenship of free people of color. Jones, however, reaches beneath "high court opinions and legislative edicts" to probe real life experience so as to reveal "the ideas of former slaves and their descendants" (9). Consequently, Jones demonstrates the ways free blacks asserted and exercised rights commonly ascribed to citizens. The city and state practices Jones investigates possess more than local significance. After all, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the majority Dred Scott opinion, played a prominent role in Baltimore as well as national affairs. If the right to vote was the measure, Jones explains that free blacks were citizens in 1800. However, Maryland legislators erased that right in 1801, denying black suffrage by law. Nationwide, this policy would be imitated and challenged in the first half of the nineteenth century. This dynamic of contestation—the assertion and restriction of rights—is a powerful theme of Birthright Citizens. Jones shows readers a multitude of anomalous cases, as growing numbers of free black men asserted rights to property and freedom of movement. The debate over Missouri's admission to the union brought black citizenship to the forefront of national debate in 1820–21 because Missouri leaders proposed barring free blacks from entering the state—a common slave-state policy. Jones explains how free blacks in Maryland responded. Prompted by white Marylanders' movement to colonize them, people of color in Baltimore focused on citizenship. Since the U.S. [End Page 575] Attorney General, Baltimore's William Wirt, argued publicly in 1821 that the Constitution automatically made every state citizen a U.S. citizen, free blacks turned to him. Yet when they pressed him to defend their citizenship, Jones reports, Wirt declined. Moreover, Octavius Taney, brother of the future Chief Justice, advocated removal of all free blacks from not only Maryland but the entire United States. Maryland's legislature sought to push free people of color out of state. Yet efforts to deny black citizenship encountered obstacles. Black sailors in the U.S. Navy possessed rights and testified against whites in courts martial. In Baltimore courts, blacks defended their property and could even win an assault case against a white. By engaging in legal procedures and seeking court recognition, free people of color asserted themselves as rights holders. Moreover, as they built and incorporated churches, their claims to citizenship achieved a kind of reality. Jones explains, however, that often the exercise of black rights was contingent on white sponsorship. A Baltimore person of color capable of enlisting a prominent white patron could claim—and enforce—rights that no black outsider could. To leave and re-enter Maryland persons of color required certificates, and Jones's examination of the records shows that a white gentleman's endorsement was necessary. Though free blacks asserted their birthright citizenship, in Maryland that citizenship was no better than second class. Jones's careful exploration of "Courthouse Claims" (in Chapter 7) shows how the non-racial aspects of Baltimore's legal procedures commonly recognized the rights of free blacks. Though Maryland law forbade the practice, blacks testified against whites. Insolvency statutes made no racial distinctions, though officials might note them. The Orphan's Court adjudicated the contracts of apprentices and admitted the testimony of black children...