Cambridge University Press Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Studies in Legal History)

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. Review '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 hi