Legislating Citizenship of the Heart

Stephen David Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012).

Stephen David Kantrowitz presents a unique periodization of the nineteenth century to explain the legacy of black activists in attempting to form a positive understanding of citizenship. He traces their efforts to break down restricting racism from the emergence of such activists in the early 1930s through the Civil-War era and into the post-Reconstruction years. Such racism, he argues, limited colored citizens’ ability to realize inclusive, heart-felt citizenship in nineteenth-century America. Kantrowitz creates a holistic understanding of the antislavery movement as a part of a larger movement for a positive understanding of black citizenship. The “colored citizens” Kantrowitz focuses on aimed to change the meaning of the word “citizen” from a legal term to a ticket for inclusion and brotherhood within the “white republic.” Their efforts, according to Kantrowitz, were not successful in remaking the nation into one of tolerance and inclusion, but did however leave the nation forever changed.

The strongest and arguably the most interesting theme of More Than Freedom for scholars interested in the United States’ long history of inequality is Kantrowitz’s musing on the definition of citizenship adopted by black activists. In biographical vignettes, Kantrowitz considers black activist’s vision of citizenship in continuous conflict with the United States’ legal framework for citizenship. His geographical focus on Boston, Massachusetts reveals the discrepancy between the legal understanding of citizenship as a category that afforded Americans (including free blacks) the benefits of inclusion in a liberal democratic republic and the lived experience of America’s free colored population. Black activists, however, sought more than the equality supposedly owed them as a result of their ill-defined citizenship. Kantrowitz argues that they wanted also to be accepted as brothers of their white counterparts. Because of their goal to attain benefits likened to the French understanding of fraternity through citizenship, abolition in 1865 was not considered the end of their struggle. As Kantrowitz explains, “‘Abolition,’ essential but insufficient, was too small a box to contain their aspirations.”[1] He brings up a question that we can and should examine in our present, but also in historical studies of other eras and places: What is the relationship between rights and belonging?

Kantrowitz aptly argues that colored citizens’ involvement in labors beyond the political arena, including religious and fraternal organizations, proves their understanding throughout the Reconstruction years that obtaining important legal rights did not grant them the universal, sentimental “citizenship of the heart” they sought. Kantrowitz’s argument that their dreams of inclusion and brotherhood were squelched by the turn of the twentieth century is a necessary one, but not a new understanding of the failures of Reconstruction. He does make a seemingly creative argument that the end of slavery was not, for black activists and their white antislavery counterparts, the main goal. He reveals great agency in his subjects, who allegedly spurred the Civil War and abolition as a means to their end; a more emotional, shared understanding of being American. Kantrowitz places black activists, and at times, white antislavery advocates in a movement that goes beyond abolition, as read by Ted Maris-Wolf.[2] One interesting result of Kantrowitz’s aim in placing colored citizens at the center of the broader movement is that he reads certain events in American history understood by many scholars as demeaning for blacks in a new light. For instance, he understands the passage of the fugitive slave law as a galvanizing moment in the movement for citizenship of the heart.[3] This turn in understanding certain events is one that may seem troubling to historians interested in preserving the memory of American legislation as a marker of racial inequality and, often times, brutalizing for African-Americans.

Ultimately, the American perception of citizenship as a legal category persisted throughout the turmoil of the Civil War and for almost a century after. The prevalence of this understanding of citizenship brings up a question for the historian that Kantrowitz’s subjects faced in the nineteenth century: Can tolerance, belonging, or dignity be legislated? If not (as we see is the case in More Than Freedom’s pages), how can the hearts and minds of people in a country committed to a legal formation of society be won?