Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship by Carrie Hyde

Abstract

Reviewed by: Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship by Carrie Hyde Kevin Butterfield (bio) Keywords citizenship, slavery Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship. By Carrie Hyde. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 308. Cloth, $46.50.) What are we to make of the fact that Attorney General Edward Bates, writing during the Civil War, was utterly and justifiably perplexed as to "what constitutes a citizen of the United States?" The meaning of citizenship was, for Bates in 1862, "as little understood in its details and elements, and the question as open to argument and to speculative criticism, as it was in the beginning of the government" (1). Only with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, could Americans finally see citizenship in their own nation as a codified, clarified concept. Carrie Hyde has stepped into this field of uncertainty in a provocative and ambitious study of the contested possibilities of citizenship in the early United States. She explores how and why Americans turned to speculative traditions like theology, natural law, and fictional literature in order to create and defend wholly new notions of what citizenship ought to mean. And this really is her key point: Nebulous and imprecise definitions of citizenship "did not inhibit its cultural idealization; it actually facilitated it" (19). In a stratified, post-Revolutionary United States in which slavery, dispossession, and oppression were daily realities for many of its inhabitants, the lack of legal specificity of what was meant by the term citizen created powerful opportunities for imaginative and often radically more inclusive visions of American belonging. Hyde's first chapter is the most law-focused section of the book, laying the groundwork for the claim that incoherence and open-endedness in Americans' conceptions of citizenship before 1868 gave writers an especially open field in which to aspire, critique, and challenge. The author's [End Page 162] strengths lie in her close reading of literary texts, which means that her account of the diverse array of laws governing citizenship and alienage is relatively abbreviated and superficial compared with, say, James Kettner's still-definitive work on The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978). But it also means that, when Hyde does turn her interpretive eye to words that lay at the heart of these questions, fresh insights abound. Roger Taney's tortured originalism in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) gets an incisive reading, for instance, in part because she situates Taney's words as being, themselves, suggestive and speculative. In fact, Taney serves as evidence that speculation and creativity could just as easily work against inclusivity as for it. Somewhat strangely, though, Hyde never addresses at all what exactly the case was about. To be sure, readers of this journal hardly need any reminder of who Dred and Harriet Scott were and why the suit mattered. But the omission of even a brief mention that this was a case in which enslaved people were suing for their freedom is a sign that this book is—and of course was always intended to be—rewarding only for those with a firm knowledge of the period. For those readers, though, the book is exceptionally rewarding. Each of the final four chapters dives deeply into how vague legal and constitutional descriptions of citizenship afforded particularly salient opportunities for Americans to raise new possibilities or even to challenge the existing order. Chapter 2 considers the simple fact that one of the most common uses of the word "citizen" in the Founding era had nothing to do with an earthly polity at all. Rather, it concerned affiliation in the kingdom of God. It was at this time that translations of the New Testament began to find in Philippians 3:20 a reference to the idea that, for Christians, "our citizenship is in heaven." (Previous translations had referred to "conversation," not citizenship, in the heavenly realm.) Critiques of our world founded in this Christian estrangement from mundane things like political life "provided a way of authorizing visions of citizenship that exceeded the racialized, gendered logic of the still-emergent juridical citizen," though they could of course also serve to reinforce "existing...