BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENS: A HISTORY OF RACE AND RIGHTS IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA
As former slaves struggled to become citizens, they redefined citizenship for all Americans. Birthright Citizens is their story.
Winner of the American Historical Association’s 2019 Littleton-Griswold Prize for the best book in any subject on the history of American law and society.
Winner of the Organization of American Historians’ 2019 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book on civil rights in the United States anytime from 1776 to the present.
Winner of the American Society for Legal History 2019 John Phillip Reid Book Award for the best monograph published in English in Anglo-American Legal History.
Finalist for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora Sterling Stuckey Book Prize.
Finalist for the 2019 PROSE Award for best book in U.S./North American History by the American Association of Publishers.
Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans. 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 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, fulfilling the long-held aspirations of African Americans.
PRAISE FOR BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENS
“Beautifully written and deeply researched, Birthright Citizens transforms our understanding of the evolution of citizenship in nineteenth-century America. Martha 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, Columbia University, 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, 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, Harvard University, 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. Martha Jones takes a novel approach that scholars and legal practitioners will need to reckon with to understand history and our own times.” -Tera Hunter, Princeton University, author of Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century
“Martha Jones shed 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 American wage another unrelenting fight for citizenship.” –Ibram X. Kendi, American University, author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
“In this exacting study, legal historian Martha 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. 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, University of Michigan, author of The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits
“Martha Jones’s ‘history of race and rights’ utterly upends our understanding of the genealogy of citizenship. 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, University of California, Berkeley, author of The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South