A liminal citizenship: Race, slavery, and the law in the early republic, 1776-1813

“A Liminal Citizenship: Race, Slavery, and the Law in the Early Republic, 1776-1813” follows the path of abolition through the early Republic to understand how white American legislators, politicians, and intellectuals created a class of citizenship for Black Americans that was compatible with the racial hierarchy of the new nation. It explores how white state builders who were otherwise honest opponents of the expansion of state authority were fine to see powers vested in the state for the sake of controlling and limiting Black freedom, and in so doing began a long history of turning the instruments of state violence against non-white communities. This project begins in the aftermath of the American Revolution, seeing in it a moment of tension between efforts at expanding freedom and citizenship and reinforcing the white supremacy that ungirded the colonial project. Following the history of successful abolition, this dissertation travels first to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania where the end of slavery was accompanied by the signing of new laws and policies to limit and control Black freedom after emancipation. From there this project moves to explore how other states, notably New York and Delaware, built on the foundation of liminal citizenship and bent increasingly more pernicious tools of state violence to the end of reinforcing white rule. Through an analysis of prison records, pardons, and petitions, this project understands Black liminal citizenship as something both enforced by the state and leveraged by Black Americans to secure freedom and standing in the new Republic. This story ends in the migration of liminal citizenship into the west, where new racial exclusion efforts developed out of the legacy of liminal citizenship in the northeast. All along this path from revolution to western expansion, I argue that the utility of Black liminal citizenship and its empowerment of the state to control Black freedom, served the interests both of white elites seeking to reinforce their own power, and white democrats who sought to expand suffrage into the broader working white population, culminating in the successful extension of the franchise in the nineteenth century, even as Black rights were stripped away. This work operates at the transition point between the racial categorizing that defined the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the classification of citizenship which followed the Jacksonian period in the mid-nineteenth century. In doing so it examines how the roots of contemporary racial divides emerged not just from the plantation economies of the south, but the free states of New England and the northwest, and understands the long struggle for Black liberation in the context of a specifically American liminal citizenship.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

History

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Day, Thomas

Contributors dc:contributor

• Hogarth, Rana
• Asaka, Ikuko
• Morrissey, Robert
• Rabin, Dana

• Slavery
• Race
• Law
• United States
• Revolutionary War
• Citizenship

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Thomas Day

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120297

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F120297