Citizenship - An American Story
Review of James H. Kettner's "The Development of American Citizenship" (1978)
James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), pgs. 416.
Tensions surrounding citizenship and what it means to be a member of a nation are not new things. In fact, in the United States they have a much older and longer history than commonly assumed. One example will suffice.
In the nineteenth century there was a constant and underlying conflict in the early American Republic over whether African Americans were in fact citizens. James H. Kettner (1944-2002), a former professor of history at the University of California Berkley, notes: “In practice, [African Americans] were under the authority of the government; nevertheless, in half the nation [they were] fully excluded from membership in the sovereign community.” (351)
Kettner traces throughout his book how the tensions of citizenship, including those related to African Americans, fluctuated throughout the first three centuries of European settlement in what is today the United States. He closes his book by arguing that “not logic, but force” settled many of the questions of citizenship. It was the victorious Union armed with new constitutional amendments detailing who qualified for citizenship that brought “a fundamental coherence to the law.” (351) It was the blood and fire of war, combined with the tension filled debates prior to the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments that helped create a more solidified and cohesive definition of citizenship for the nation. While this closing argument is fascinating, more intriguing is the compelling work Kettner does to show how Americans came to tie citizenship into the most heated debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This exploration is at the heart of the book.
Kettner’s prize winning book The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870 (1978) is a transatlantic narrative, tying the debates and conflicts over citizenship in the United States to the much older debates within England. Contests surrounding the arrival of new immigrants, the role of race, ethnicity, and religion all are themes dealt with in Kettner’s dense and detail packed study. Drawing heavily from judicial arguments in both England and the United States, Kettner illustrates how the concept of citizenship was far from static, but instead was constantly debated and changed as the experiences of the Americas (particularly the lack of European populations) led to a greater openness for the arrival of Protestant, European immigrants.
Kettner argues that the American Revolution pushed the new states to view citizenship as less tied to blood and soil and more associated with a contract between the citizen and the nation. With the adoption of Lockean ideas of a social contract, which inherently signal that both the citizen and the government had mutual obligations to one another, Americans debated more strenuously how much of the older English common law ways of delineating citizenship should carry into the United States. Decades of jurisprudence, in Kettner’s narrative, were essential in shifting through the tangled aftermath of the revolution as part of the population (the Loyalists) refused to accept an American identity.
Kettner does particularly well at highlighting the challenges of the dual-citizenship mode of the United States where the new Americans were both citizens of their states and also citizens of the nation. Tension between these two citizenships often featured in cases such as when South Carolinians threatened to ceceed from the Union due to policies favored by Andrew Jackson. Inherent in this debate was the conflict of whether South Carolinians should be loyal first to their state or to the larger national union of states (a concept that would not be resolved until the Civil War).
Kettner also excellently shows the fluxuations in support for antislavery on the national scale and the complications of free Black citizenship. He rightly points out that it the Revolution spurred antislavery thought, however, this declined as fears of slave revolts and southern investment in cotton led to a retrenchment of proslavery in half of the nation. Interestingly, in his tenth chapter Kettner details how through the 1830s slave states acknowledged the right of enslaved people to be free if they crossed into free states, something that by the 1850s southern jurists fought vehemently against (perhaps best seen in the Dred Scott decision).
Fascinatingly he shows that prior to the 1850s there were numerous examples of courts declaring the right of free people of African descent to be citizens and vote. Another important note that I feel supports Sean Wilentz’s contention that the Constitution was made intentionally vague on slavery to allow for antislavery was his note that the Confederate Congress at the start of the Civil War made sure to explicitly state that people of African descent could not be citizens. As noted throughout the book, ctizienship was a contested space because the Constitution refused to declare what it in fact defined citizenship. This contested space opened opportunities for antislavery to have countless successes despite the power of slavery in the United States following the Cotton Boom of the 1820s.
This constant conflict over the issue of the free Black American vote is compelling as it demonstrates that the ideas of race, racial boundaries were not fully entrenched in the laws or statutes of the United States. Often, at least in my readings over the past several months, it appears that laws can be seen more as reactionary to what some lawmakers see as a problem. What is crucial for historians is understanding several aspects of the law. By how many votes did the law pass? Was there significant opposition? Was the law enforced? The passage of racialized and discriminatory laws throughout the United States is a fact. Yet, what is unclear is the extent to which these laws were upheld or enforced and whether they were undermined by other laws or court decisions. This naturally will require more work in political history type documents (court cases, legislative debate records, and vote tallies), but ultimately this will create a more honest narrative that can help us understand not only how discrimination became a huge part of American society, but also how people resisted and pushed against laws that enshrined immoral and sinful conduct.
I was surprised that Kettner hardly touched on the mass migrations of the 1840s, particularly the tensions caused by the arrival of thousands of Catholic Irish escaping the famines ravaging Ireland. Know Nothings clearly had different ideas of citizenship and succeeded in gaining numerous state houses in the North. How they failed to appear in this study was perplexing to say the least. Furthermore, conflicts with other groups in the 1850s-1870s, such as the Latter-day Saints of Utah, was another realm where debates over the definition of citizenship was missed.
This book is not a light read by any means, but it contains valuable information for those seeking to understand the development of the idea of citizenship from the perspective of those in the courtrooms. This book fails to capture the broader cultural beleifs, but does show how those connected with the law made sense of a world turned upside down by the American Revolution. This book, though with some issues, has much that is commendable to those seeking to understand the role of American citizenship.
Robert Swanson
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