Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship

Abstract

In Remaking the Republic, Christopher James Bonner explores “black citizenship politics,” or the efforts by African American activists in the free states of antebellum America to invoke claims of citizenship in seeking liberty and equality from a society dedicated to slavery and racial caste. He argues that “free black activists in the northern states publicly challenged racial exclusion by calling themselves citizens, invoking the status to claim specific rights” (2). The “malleable nature of American citizenship” (3), he asserts, “provided a space for black politics to operate, enabling African Americans to claim legal protections through citizen status” (4).His six chapters detail Black activists’ efforts to use citizenship politics to resist claims that Black people could never be incorporated equally into the American civic community. They embraced programs of self-help and racial uplift that would belie claims that Black people could never become useful members of a free society, and they asserted a vision of national citizenship, defended at the federal level and buttressed by the claims of national founding documents. Their efforts to define their ideal of citizenship led them to look abroad, where they found examples to both emulate and shun. They contrasted themselves with European immigrants able to leverage their whiteness into political rights, in the process setting forth some of the earliest arguments for birthright citizenship. Their efforts on behalf of fugitive slaves led them to campaigns of civil disobedience that pioneered the “higher law” arguments of political antislavers such as William S. Seward. The Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case highlighted the struggle for federal acknowledgment of Blacks’ rights. Black activists contested Chief Justice Taney’s decision that no one of African descent could be a US citizen, asserting their own understandings of history and national belonging. The Civil War offered an opportunity for African Americans to demonstrate their fidelity to the country, and hence the protections of citizenship. The military service Black northerners offered made potent claims on the national government, which came to rely on the emancipation and recruitment of enslaved African Americans. Ultimately, Bonner claims, the needs of the Union government transformed it into an ally, if often reluctant and imperfect, in the quest for Black citizenship.While stressing their radical qualities, Bonner acknowledges some limitations of citizenship politics. Relying so centrally on citizenship could not prevent Black thinkers from reproducing inequalities, he contends. For them, class-bound notions of bourgeois respectability served as the price of admission into the American civic community. Their gendered focus on “manhood rights” necessarily excluded women, while their critiques of immigrant communities that had successfully leveraged their whiteness into citizenship suggested the limits of their universalism. Indeed, one may question the value of a strategy that relied so heavily on the collaboration of a national government so long hostile to Black rights, and which had converted to abolition so recently, reluctantly, and pragmatically.Further limits might have been illuminated through stronger contextualization. In the absence of analysis of potentially competing traditions, the relationship between citizenship politics and other ideological streams of antebellum Black protest thought remains obscure. How exactly did these thinkers understand their relationship to the land whose citizenship they claimed? To what degree did Black thinkers understand “citizenship” itself to be their aim, and to what degree did they wield it merely as a rhetorical lever to move public opinion? Such questions matter, for a narrow focus on American citizenship risks marginalizing problems previous generations of scholars viewed as central. Bonner asserts that “black northerners experimented with the idea of joining an international community in the late 1840s, but they remained invested in claiming rights as citizens based on their birth within the nation” (91). Yet the thought of prominent Black nationalists such as Martin Delay, who claimed to renounce the nation in favor of a Black state elsewhere, deserve fuller treatment. Similarly, when David Walker appealed to “the colored citizens of the world,” he imagined a civic community flowing beyond US boundaries, defined by a racial identity built upon the very activism Bonner surveys. Against this tradition, readers may wonder if claiming citizenship was as novel, radical, or transformative as Bonner suggests.Despite its tight focus on one element of their protest thought, Making the Republic demonstrates antebellum Black activists’ commitment to imagining a civic community built upon ideals the nation’s founders had failed to meet. Bonner’s footnotes reveal an impressive command of the considerable body of work that has emerged in recent decades around the activism of African Americans in the nominally free states, particularly in the realms of law and constitution. Making the Republic contributes to this literature by detailing efforts to harness the power of the federal government in combatting state measures permitting slavery and racial caste distinctions. He demonstrates how, by calling upon commitments to national founding principles, Black activists sought to shame the nation into prioritizing the protection of individual liberty over the protection of property rights.