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 Brian Alberts (bio) Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship. By Carrie Hyde. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 320. $46.50 cloth) Professor Carrie Hyde tackles the fascinating and nebulous question of early American citizenship with her recent book, Civic Longing: the Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship. Between 1776 and 1868, no central legal precept specified what constituted a citizen of the United States, leaving disparate groups—particularly marginalized populations—to argue not just the conceptual boundaries of citizenship but also the very parameters governing its definition. Through case studies and in-depth textual criticism, Civic Longing explores how literary and imaginative works influenced an ostensibly legal concept to not only help define the traits and allegiances of a citizen, but also negotiate them. Naturally, Hyde’s first chapter is an overview of the legal evolution of citizenship that culminated in the Fourteenth Amendment’s emphasis on territory (as opposed to birth in the case of slavery), enumerated constitutional rights, and voluntary status. In doing so, she emphasizes the ambiguities, assumptions, and choices that gave “ample interpretive leeway” to such a construction and spends the remainder of the book inserting the necessary extralegal, interpretive, and uneven considerations that helped fill the interim legal void (p. 29). In doing so, Hyde argues [End Page 219] not only for greater inclusion of literary sources in historical analysis but also the complication of a historiography that has typically treated citizenship as a clearer concept than it actually was. Her arguments consist of three parts: first, that any analysis of “citizenship’s emergence” in the United States must include extralegal perspectives, if only because many of those conceiving of and idealizing citizenship were themselves legally marginalized; second, that citizenship’s definition depended on the active theorization that took place within fictional and imaginative writing genres; third, that a lack of legal definitions did not stop Americans from sustaining images of citizenship, especially by the “‘negative civic exemplars’— expatriates, slaves, traitors, and alienated subjects” imagining or living it from outside perspectives (pp. 9–10). Indeed, she points out how these groups gave particular import to the question. Chapter two examines the contributions of Christian theology to American citizenship, using works by Harriet Beecher Stowe to demonstrate that notions of heavenly citizenship, even those emphasizing estrangement from worldly political affiliations, were ultimately linked to debates over secular political membership. Chapter three uses Daniel Webster’s and Frederick Douglass’ competing interpretations of the 1841 slave revolt aboard the Creole to examine ideas of natural law, arguing that as in Christian theology, explications of higher law were in effect circular—they attempted to break out of the trappings of political systems in order to seek change within those systems. Chapter four examines the intentional fictionality of romance literature, specifically works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, to show its reformist power as an apparently neutral (though hardly apolitical) commentary on political allegiances. Finally, chapter five discusses how the various extralegal discourses mentioned earlier coalesced during the Civil War to create a “newly secularized form of Christian nationalism,” with citizenship upheld as a “transcendent sacred ideal” (p. 156). In complicating the historiographical narratives surrounding early American citizenship and demonstrating the significance of [End Page 220] literary works as interpretive commentaries, Hyde is largely successful. Additional examples demonstrating the influence of these conceptual shifts in the wider application of citizenship around the United States, however, would have fully cemented the historical import Hyde assigns to her case studies. For example, her excellent breakdown of Frederick Douglass’ treatment of the Creole revolt, a specific event, would have benefitted from a stronger relation to the long-term trend of fugitive slaves escaping to Canada. Yet overall, Hyde’s work is a compelling look at a provocative conceptual realm. Brian Alberts BRIAN ALBERTS teaches history at Purdue University and researches mid-nineteenth century German immigration to the Midwest through the lens of the brewing industry. Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society