The concept of citizenship underwent a fundamental transformation during the Revolutionary era from a relatively restricted notion centered on the educated and politically active to a more inclusive idea that encompassed all who owed allegiance to the United States. Simultaneously, there was a shift from viewing everyone as subjects of a king to seeing each individual as a citizen of the nation. In some ways these changes resulted from ongoing trends in the Anglo-American world; in other, more fundamental ways they were an outgrowth of the American Revolution and rise of the ideal of equality.

Prior to the 18th century the key element of national identity in the Anglo-American world centered on being a subject of the king. The notion of citizenship, which had antecedents in both the ancient and medieval world, implied civic responsibility and participation in the regular political process. All Englishmen and Anglo-American colonists were subjects and only a limited number of adult males--the aristocracy, large landowners, and a few others--were citizens who were directly involved in the political process and voted. In the beginning of the 18th century, in part as a result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which asserted parliamentary supremacy over the Crown, and in part as a reflection of the Enlightenment's emphasis on nature and reason, Anglo-American ideas on citizenship were in flux and some thinkers--especially the radical Whigs--began to push for an even wider definition of citizenship. In North America the situation was less clear than it was in Great Britain. On the one hand, few aristocrats and members of the upper gentry settled in the British colonies, which theoretically should have limited the number of politically active individuals. On the other, the electorate expanded because it was relatively easy to gain enough property to obtain the franchise. Moreover, many colonial American leaders read the radical Whig ideas and came to see them as apt descriptions of the ideal English constitution. These factors brought more adult European Americans into the political process and potential inclusion as citizens.

If increasing numbers of people came to view themselves as citizens during the colonial period in British North America, many more remained excluded. Immigrants other than from Great Britain posed some problems since they technically owed their allegiance to a foreign power. In 1740 Parliament passed the Plantation Act, which allowed all non-Catholic aliens to become English subjects if they paid a small fee, resided in a colony for seven years, received the sacraments at a Protestant church, swore allegiance to the king, and declared that they were Christians. (Special provisions were made for Jews as non-Christians and Quakers who would not swear oaths). Naturalized foreigners, if they met the other qualifications for voting, could participate in the colony's civil affairs and thus take on the trappings of citizenship. Whether British, foreign, or colonial-born, however, such privileges were not extended to minors, women, and those without property. Although the British government claimed that Native Americans living within the boundaries of the North American colonies were subjects of the king, most Indians were excluded from any notion of civic responsibility to the colonies or the king. Similarly, since almost all African Americans were slaves before 1775, they, too, were subjects but would in no way be considered citizens.

The resistance movement (1764-75) and the Revolutionary War (1775-83) threw the whole issue of national identity and citizenship into a state of turmoil. In many ways the opposition to imperial regulation hinged on the status of colonial Americans as citizens and subjects. If all colonial Americans were merely subjects, then they had best heed the laws of Parliament; if, on the other hand, they were citizens, then they had the right to participate in the decision-making process that governed them. Confusing the issue further, during the 1760s and 1770s the Sons of Liberty, committees of correspondence, and other ad hoc Revolutionary organizations increasingly turned to the populace at large--whether they voted or not--to collect in crowds and express themselves politically. Although the committees might bring the people into the political process under the heading of "inhabitants," ultimately this action awakened a civic consciousness among larger numbers of people--many of whom were propertyless males, but some of whom were women, minors, and African Americans. Whether the leadership of the Revolution liked it or not, more and more people came to think of themselves as citizens, with the rights that went with that word.

Independence complicated the situation even more. First, there was the fundamental division between those who wished to remain loyal subjects to the king and those who supported the Revolution. From the point of view of the Loyalists, Revolutionaries were traitors whose actions had negated their civic rights. The Whig position was more awkward. The Revolutionaries compelled compliance with their cause by insisting on oaths of allegiance and punished those who would not comply by driving them from their homes and seizing their property. However, the Revolutionaries struggled for a rationale for this behavior since they were the ones who had shattered the existing bonds of society. The Second Continental Congress clarified its position on the transition from royal government on June 24, 1776, as it was about to declare independence from Great Britain, by resolving "That all persons residing within the United Colonies, and deriving protection from the laws of the same, owe allegiance to the said law." In other words, by remaining within the bounds of the rebellious colonies--about to become states--each individual owed allegiance to that colony/state and not the king. From this perspective, allegiance and citizenship were created upon the formation of the states. In 1805 the U.S. Supreme Court reiterated this position in McIlvaine v. Coxe by stating "that those residing at the time of the revolution in the territory separating itself from the parent country, are subject to the new government, and become members of the new community, on the ground either of tacit consent evidenced by their abiding in such territory; or on the principle that every individual is bound by the majority." Only in the 1830s did the Court back off from this position and allow that allegiance might have been undecided until the Treaty of Paris (1783).

Second, throughout the war, into the 1780s, and even beyond, it remained unclear whether citizenship would be rooted in the individual state or in the national government. One measure of this confusion can be seen in the fact that states set up the initial procedures for naturalization. Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, and Vermont spelled out the method whereby an immigrant became a citizen in their constitutions. Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia relied on legislation to articulate naturalization procedures. The result was a hodgepodge of laws that set varied residency requirements. In Pennsylvania an immigrant had to wait only one year before he became a "free denizen," while in neighboring Maryland the immigrant needed to be a resident for seven years before he had the same rights as a "natural born subject of this state." (As these provisions indicate with their reference to "free denizens" and "subjects of this state," the language of citizenship had not become fully developed during the 1770s and 1780s.)

To make the situation even more confusing, neither the Articles of Confederation nor the U.S. Constitution defined citizenship. Both documents, however, included some mention of citizenship. The Articles stipulated that "the free inhabitants of these states (paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted) shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several states," and the Constitution included a similar provision by asserting, "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the Several States." The Constitution did have other provisions concerning citizenship, including preventing anyone not born in the United States from becoming president and indicating the number of years an immigrant had to be a citizen before he could be elected to the Senate or the House of Representatives. The issue of defining citizenship remained unclear until the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War.

On both the state and national level, however, Revolutionaries furthered the idea of citizenship by guaranteeing the rights of individuals with written declarations. Several state constitutions had their own Bill of Rights protecting a host of liberties and thereby infusing even those who did not vote with a belief that they as citizens were protected by government. Central to this development was freedom of the press, which, as the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776 made clear, was "one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty," and which ensured an informed citizenry. Although the Federalists initially opposed a Bill of Rights for the government under the Constitution, they agreed to the first 10 amendments as a price for getting the document ratified (see Constitution, ratification of). These declarations on the state and national level increased public awareness about the rights of citizens as they applied to nearly everyone in society.

During the 1790s and into the 1800s, citizenship became a partisan issue. The Federalist Party and the Democratic-Republican Party approached citizenship differently, especially when it came to laws concerning naturalization. Leaders in the Federalist Party tended to follow British thinking concerning nationality--and hence citizenship. They held that national origin was at the core of citizenship and pushed for laws that made it more difficult for immigrants to become citizens. The Democratic-Republicans saw nationality and citizenship as more a function of allegiance and residence. The first naturalization law passed by Congress in 1790 was relatively lenient, allowing an immigrant to become a citizen after two years of residence. In 1795 Congress extended the waiting period to five years, and in 1798, during the height of the crisis over the Quasi-War (1798-1800) with France, the Federalist Party pushed the immigrant's wait until 14 years--an action that fit their ideological approach to citizenship and also suited their political interests since the Federalist Party believed that most immigrant citizens voted for the Democratic-Republicans. After Thomas Jefferson became president, a Democratic-Republican-dominated Congress in 1802 reduced the waiting period back to five years.

Besides the laws concerning immigration, there were other political debates that centered on citizenship. Several members of the embryonic Federalist Party challenged the election of Swiss-born Albert Gallatin to the Senate in 1793, claiming he had never completed the naturalization process in any one state and therefore did not meet the nine-year citizenship rule to qualify for the Senate. Gallatin had arrived in the United States in 1780 and had thereafter moved from state to state until 1785, when he settled in Pennsylvania. In the meantime, he began but did not complete the process of becoming a citizen of Virginia. Gallatin responded by declaring: "Every man who took an active part in the American Revolution, was a citizen according to the great laws of nature and reason" regardless of the letter of the laws passed regarding naturalization. Claiming to be "one of the people," he argued he was a citizen and should not be kept from his seat in the Senate. In part reflecting the partisanship that was beginning to permeate the national government, and in part reflecting the ambiguous and conflicting notions of citizenship, the Senate refused to seat Gallatin.

The Federalist Party also raised questions about citizenship during the debates over the Louisiana Purchase (1803). By this time the Federalist Party was in the minority and struggling to maintain its presence in national politics. The Louisiana Purchase Treaty provided that all of the current inhabitants--hitherto Spanish subjects or French citizens--would have full citizenship within the United States. This stipulation violated the naturalization law and, to the Federalist Party leaders, seemed to go beyond the constitutional treaty-making power. From their point of view, if the national government had the right to arbitrarily add citizens from foreign nations, then it could simply pass legislation conferring citizenship on anyone and everyone it wanted and thereby overwhelm political opponents and further weaken the voice of regions like New England where the Federalist Party remained strong. The Federalist Party may have had a valid argument, but it had little impact on the treaty's final ratification.

By the early 1800s the idea of citizenship, despite being contested politically, was becoming intimately attached to nationality. The French Revolution (1789-99) contributed to this development by seizing upon the term citizen as a new label that asserted the equality of mankind. This practice leaped across the Atlantic Ocean and was embraced by the Democratic-Republican Party in the 1790s. Even women were included in this new identity as "citizeness." Although members of the Federalist Party detested the notion that all inhabitants were "citizens," the term became more and more prominent as the nation moved away from a discussion of "free denizens" and "subjects of this state" to a rhetoric that centered on the rights and obligations of citizenship.

Although members of the Federalist Party rejected the French revolutionary rhetoric, they took a dramatic step to extend the definition of citizenship with legislation in 1796 to protect seamen born in the United States from impressment into the British navy. These documents--called protections--were certificates issued by magistrates in any U.S. court that provided the name of the sailor, his place of birth, and a description. They became official when signed by the sailor, a magistrate, and a witness. Whether intentional or not, Congress had extended its protective umbrella to some of the poorest men in the country and infused them with the identity of citizens. This extension of citizenship became contested ground in foreign affairs. The State Department emerged as an active agent in protecting U.S. citizens abroad--mainly poor sailors--not only against impressment by Great Britain but also from seizure by the Barbary States. Under the Jeffersonians the national government also defended naturalized citizens when the British insisted that nativity should dictate nationality.

Citizenship expanded with the extension of suffrage to more European Americans. Vermont provided for universal white manhood suffrage in 1777, and Kentucky did the same when it became a state in 1792. Over the next couple of decades, as voting rights were extended in state after state, the idea of citizenship spread--even to the few African Americans who could vote.

But the idea of citizenship during the early republic was not limited to those who participated in the political process. Without a king, the notion of being a "subject" dissolved, and in its place rose a sense of being a citizen, regardless of gender and sometimes even regardless of race. Although republican motherhood may have been fully developed only among the upper echelons of society in the United States, the idea that women were the special repositories of virtue responsible for training the next generation of republican citizens meant that women had a civic role that allowed them to claim citizenship. Indeed, this identity reached downward in society to anyone who had any rights and independence. When a young servant girl in New York was asked where her mistress was, she responded that she had no mistress--only slaves had mistresses--and that she was a female citizen.

Although most African Americans remained excluded from any notion of citizenship--despite their bizarre inclusion in calculating representation in the Constitution under the three-fifths clause--some free blacks did vote and asserted their rights as citizens. It was even possible for some African Americans to sue for their freedom based on the Declaration of Rights in the Massachusetts constitution of 1780. Possibilities of citizenship for African Americans, however, remained limited, and several states, especially but not exclusively in the South, denied rights to both free and slave African Americans.

Throughout the early republic, despite the dramatic changes in the understanding of citizenship, Native Americans were not considered citizens of the United States, with a few exceptions in the areas settled the longest by European Americans. All Indians did not become citizens until the Native American Citizenship Act of 1924.

Bibliography:

1) Richard D. Brown, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)

2) James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978)

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