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Citizenship

U.S. citizenship is a complex relationship between individuals and the state. It consists of protections that the state provides to citizens who, in turn, support and maintain the state. While U.S. citizenship was grounded in ideas about natural rights and human equality, it has always been an unequal institution. Citizenship was originally extended to free Americans, not all of whom enjoyed equal access to the rights, protections, obligations, and opportunities that the designation offered. Since the 18th century, citizenship and its benefits have been withheld and extended based on national origin, race and ethnicity, gender, religious affiliation, sexuality, and wealth or affluence. Nevertheless, Americans—immigrants and citizens—have worked to equalize access to citizenship and the enjoyment of its benefits. This history of these actions has shaped modern, multicultural America.

Foundations of U.S. Citizenship

The U.S. Constitution, as well as the original state constitutions, defined the legal category of U.S. citizenship in the 1770s and 1780s. Citizenship was something originally offered by the states, but both state and federal law defined the rights, liberties, obligations, and opportunities that citizens enjoyed. These included social rights and liberties, such as free speech and religious liberty, political rights like voting and office holding, economic rights and freedoms such as property ownership and prohibitions on the seizure of property, opportunities to own land or attend public schools, and obligations, which included service in the military and on juries.

The status of “citizen” was extended to all members of the new United States, but only a select group of men enjoyed the full benefits of citizenship. Early Americans believed that only free men with property had sufficient liberty to lead, serve, and build the new republic. Other members of society were not entirely free; women presumably deferred to their husbands, wage-workers to their employers, and servants and enslaved people to their masters. Their seeming lack of complete liberty provided justification to suspend the full range of benefits granted to citizens. These divisions would have a long-lasting effect on unequal citizenship in the United States.

Citizenship in the 19th Century

The first significant change in U.S. citizenship came in the early 19th century through a grassroots effort. The movement for universal white manhood suffrage gradually succeeded in all states, beginning with Delaware in 1792 and ending in North Carolina in 1854. The men behind these movements were wage earners who often did not own enough property to meet state voting qualifications. They reformed franchise laws by arguing that they had property in their labor and thus were sufficiently free to vote. They built this argument by contrasting themselves to unfree, enslaved laborers. They also contrasted their race with that of enslaved people, thus tapping into broader, popular changes in ideologies about racial difference. Revolutionary-era Americans had believed that the degraded state of enslaved people was due to the circumstances of their lives and could be improved with the guarantees of freedom and opportunities of citizenship. Increasingly, during the 19th century, Euro-Americans came to believe that racial differences were indicators of lesser and inherent characteristics, moral fiber, or mental capacity. This biological racism held that differences were immutable. When rallied in support of white manhood suffrage, this racial ideology justified the elevation of the civil status of white men and eroded that of free blacks. Thus, states that granted suffrage to white men often restricted voting for black men. By 1860, almost all African American men were disenfranchised.

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