Introduction: rights of colored men: debating citizenship in antebellum America; 1. Being a native, and free born: race and rights in Baltimore; 2. Threats of removal: colonization, emigration, and the borders of belonging; 3. Aboard the constitution: black sailors and citizenship at sea; 4. The city courthouse: everyday scenes of race and law; 5. Between the constitution and the discipline of the church: making congregants citizens; 6. By virtue of unjust laws: black laws and the reluctant performance of rights; 7. To sue and be sued: courthouse claims and the contours of citizenship; 8. Confronting Dred Scott: seeing citizenship from Baltimore city; 9. Rehearsals for reconstruction: new citizens in a new era; Epilogue: monuments to men.
Explains the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizenship provision, as a story of black Americans' pre-Civil War claims to belonging.
Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She was formerly a Presidential Bicentennial Professor at the University of Michigan, and was a founding director of the Michigan Law School Program in Race, Law and History. She is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (2007) and co-editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015).
'Beautifully written and deeply researched, Birthright Citizens
transforms our understanding of the evolution of citizenship in
nineteenth-century America. Martha S. Jones demonstrates how the
constitutional revolution of Reconstruction had roots not simply in
legal treatises and court decisions but in the day-to-day struggles
of pre-Civil War African Americans for equal rights as members of
the national community.' Eric Foner, author of The Fiery Trial:
Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
'Birthright Citizens is a brilliant and richly researched work that
could not be more timely. Who is inside and who is outside the
American circle of citizenship has been a fraught question from the
Republic's very beginnings. With great clarity and insight, Martha
S. Jones mines available records to show how one group - black
Americans in pre-Civil War Baltimore - sought to claim rights of
citizenship in a place where they had lived and labored. This is a
must-read for all who are interested in what it means to be an
American.' Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of
Monticello: An American Family
'Birthright Citizens gives new life to a long trajectory of African
Americans' efforts to contest the meaning of citizenship through
law and legal action. They claimed citizenship rights in the courts
of Baltimore, decades before the concept was codified in the
federal constitution - ordinary people, even the formally
disfranchised, actively engaged in shaping what citizenship meant
for everyone. Martha S. Jones takes a novel approach that scholars
and legal practitioners will need to reckon with to understand
history and our own times.' Tera W. Hunter, author of Bound in
Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth
Century
'Martha S. Jones sheds new light on the Dred Scott decision and the
unrelenting African American fight for citizenship with original
and compelling arguments grounded in remarkable research.
Birthright Citizens is revelatory and timely, a book that arrives
as another group of Americans wages another unrelenting fight for
citizenship.' Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning:
The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
'In this exacting study, legal historian Martha S. Jones
reinterprets the Dred Scott decision through a fresh and utterly
revealing lens, reframing this key case as just one moment in a
long and difficult contest over race and rights. Jones mines
Baltimore court records to uncover a textured legal landscape in
which free black men and women knew and used the law to push for
and act on rights not clearly guaranteed to them. Her sensitive and
brilliant analysis transforms how we view the status of free blacks
under the law, even as her vivid writing brings Baltimore vibrantly
alive, revealing the import of local domains and institutions -
states, cities, courthouses, churches, and even ships - in the
larger national drama of African American history. Part meditation
on a great nineteenth-century city, part implicit reflection on
contemporary immigration politics, and part historical-legal
thriller, Birthright Citizens is an astonishing revelation of the
intricacies and vagaries of black struggles for the rights of
citizenship.' Tiya Miles, author of The Dawn of Detroit: A
Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits
'Martha S. Jones's 'history of race and rights' utterly up-ends our
understanding of the genealogy of citizenship. By showcasing
ordinary people acting on their understanding of law's
potentialities, Jones demonstrates the vibrancy of antebellum black
ideas of birthright citizenship and their impact on black political
and intellectual life. Written with verve, and pulling back the
curtain on the scholar's craft, Birthright Citizens makes an
important contribution to both African American and socio-legal
history.' Dylan Penningroth, author of The Claims of Kinfolk:
African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century
South
'This book is both an impressive work of scholarship and a timely
intervention in the current national conversation about US
citizenship. As Jones demonstrates, Baltimore's 19th-century
African American community reveals much about the contested origins
of birthright citizenship and the debate over who exactly is an
'American'. Jones shows how Baltimore's free blacks (including
seamen) worked to acquire the legal knowledge, tools, and access to
define a place for themselves within the community of citizens.
Employing lawsuits to establish a right to sue or be sued enabled
blacks to carve out civic space for themselves. Not everyone in the
struggle remained there; Jones also discusses emigration by those
who tired of this uncertain civic existence. … [This] book is an
essential read for any student of race or law in US history.' K. M.
Gannon, Choice
'Birthright Citizens reminds us that historical memory played an
important part in the process of retaining and recovering
citizenship … [It] is a remarkable history of creative struggle …'
Robert J. Cottrol, The Journal of American History
'Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum
America tells the fascinating story of African American citizenship
from the perspective of black Baltimoreans. Martha S. Jones's
pathbreaking study details how this form of lived citizenship
differed from the legal and constitutional citizenship being
discussed in antebellum legal opinions and contemporary
scholarship.' Mark A. Graber, American Historical Review
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