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Cited by 271Race, History, and American SocietyColonialism, slavery, and tradeAmerican Constitutional Law and Politics

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 236 of the 238 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 27 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America

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Jones, Martha S.·2018·Cambridge University Press eBooks
DOI 10.1017/9781316577165
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Abstract

Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, and black Americans' aspirations were realized. Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans.

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TL;DR

Martha S. Jones argues that antebellum free African Americans, especially in Baltimore, developed and pressed claims to birthright citizenship through a vernacular legal culture of courthouse appearances, conventions, and newspapers, ideas that anticipated the Fourteenth Amendment. The book is built around William Yates's 1838 treatise *Rights of Colored Men* and the author's discovery that two different men named William Yates stood behind the era's black rights activism.

Key findings

  • Free people of color claimed an "unassailable belonging" grounded in birthright citizenship; no legal text expressly provided for it, but their ideas anticipated the Fourteenth Amendment, which along with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 affirmed that the US-born were citizens independent of "race, color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude."
  • Rights were secured through performance: "rights holders were those who did what rights holders did." Black Baltimoreans traveled between states, gathered in religious assemblies, sued and were sued, testified, and secured persons and property — "the rights they inhabited became the rights they held."
  • Yates's treatise held that citizenship is distinct from political rights and "strikes deeper" than the vote; it rested on four principles, including that free people of color were citizens under Article 4, section 2, clause 1 and entitled to its "privileges and immunities," and that denial of the vote did not make one a noncitizen.
  • After *Scott v. Sandford* (1857), "nothing changed in Baltimore": residents continued to exercise rights, Maryland's high court declined to adopt Dred Scott's reasoning and affirmed free people of color's right to protect persons and property, and a legislative push for reenslavement or expulsion failed after black Baltimoreans lobbied against it.
  • Baltimore was the nation's third largest city and home to the nation's largest free black community, "some 25,000 residents"; on the eve of the Civil War nearly half a million people, mostly US-born, lived with rights subject to political whim.
  • The author resolves a historiographic confusion: Charles Wesley treated Yates as a pioneering black historian, John Myers assumed he was white — Myers was correct. The treatise writer was a white antislavery agent; a second William Yates, born a slave in Virginia, purchased his freedom, worked as a porter at the Supreme Court, moved to San Francisco, and wrote for the *Elevator* under the pen name "Amigo."

Methods

  • A history of race and rights told "through a series of disruptive vignettes," linking ordinary black litigants to better-remembered lawyers, judges, and legislators; the author frames rights as a process by which black Americans "imagined, claimed, and enacted their relationship to law," drawing on Bonnie Honig's account of outsider rights claims.
  • Sources are "shardlike courthouse records — dockets, minute books, and case files" from Baltimore, read alongside newspapers, political conventions, and legislative and high-court debates; the study is grounded in a local legal culture framed by jurisdiction.
  • Structure: chapters 1–4 trace legal consciousness among black Baltimoreans; chapters 5–7 examine their turn to the local courthouse (church property disputes, black laws, insolvency, apprenticeship and habeas corpus); chapter 8 treats the era of *Scott v. Sandford*; the conclusion looks at early Reconstruction.

Limitations

  • Stated by the author: grounding the book in the perspective of black activists gives it "a selective and sometimes partial view of the era's citizenship debate"; *Corfield v. Coryell* (1823), later deemed influential, is "outside the scope of this book" because there is no evidence it influenced thinking about free African Americans in Baltimore.
  • Stated by the author: this is "not... a story of unbridled agency in a triumphalist sense" — inhabiting rights and comporting oneself like a citizen "only sometimes secured justice," and "just as often, just ends remained elusive."
  • Evident from the text: the excerpt is the book's introduction, so the evidentiary detail behind its claims (individual case files, chapter-level findings) is not shown here; the author also notes that the antebellum equation linking rights and citizenship "was never fixed," and that courts, commentators, and treatise writers disagreed and changed their minds, leaving no settled answer to whether black Americans were citizens.

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Crossref · 10.1017/9781316577165

Cites

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Citations

Cites

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Metadata

Authors
Jones, M. S.
Affiliations
Johns Hopkins University (US)
Corresponding author
Jones, Martha S.
Venue
Cambridge University Press eBooks
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Published
2018-06-25
DOI
10.1017/9781316577165
OpenAlex
W4211237095
Semantic Scholar
e07ae6eb08088e55462821ec8b15f4fe090f79b0
Cited by
271
References
238
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 40 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 22 · 2021: 67 · 2020: 65 · 2019: 26 · 2018: 4
FWCI
41.14
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
Locations
Cambridge University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Race, History, and American Society
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Colonialism, slavery, and trade
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › American Constitutional Law and Politics
Keywords
birthright citizenship, African American citizenship, freedmen, Dred Scott decision, Fourteenth Amendment, national belonging, African American activism, antebellum United States, civil rights

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