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235 [฀7 ] White Citizen, Black Denizen the racial ranks of american citizenship i am one of that unfortunate race of men, who are distinguished from the rest of the human species, by a black skin and wooly hair. . . . can it be contended that a difference of colour alone can constitute a difference of species? . . . are we not entitled to all the same rights, as other men?—A free negro, 1789 The mass of mankind in this country may be divided into two classes— free people and slaves; but the class of free people includes many who are not citizens. The same mass may be divided into three classes— citizens, aliens, and denizens; the latter description of persons being those who are admitted to some portion of the rights and privileges of citizens, but not all those rights and privileges. such of the free negroes in our country, as are not aliens, may be denizens, but none of them, it is apprehended, are citizens. . . . The free negro who would claim all the privileges and immunities of a citizen in another state, must show a right to all those privileges and immunities in his own. —Congressman Alexander Smyth, Virginia, 1820 on June 22, 1807, the longest day of the year, an incident three leagues west of the mouth of the chesapeake Bay nearly precipitated a war between Britain and the United states. The Hms Leopard attacked the unprepared U.s. frigate Chesapeake, the captain of the Chesapeake having refused to allow the British to search his ship for deserters from the royal navy. after a warning shot, the Leopard systematically disabled the Chesapeake in less than twenty minutes —before the americans could even load and run out their guns. once the Chesapeake had struck her colors, the British seized four sailors , three of whom were american citizens. The Chesapeake was left to limp ingloriously back to Hampton roads, in full view of the British fleet, which was anchored in american waters at Lynnhaven Bay. its rigging and sails in tatters, with eighteen wounded sailors and three the citizenship revolution 236 corpses, the ship arrived in port with three and a half feet of the bay in the hold.1 The anger of the american citizenry spread along with the news of the British audacity, from norfolk to the mississippi, as the country was roused at the insult to american sovereignty, honor, and independence . of particular concern was the fate of the three dead sailors and the four men seized by the British ship. Their loss represented a symbolic slap at every american citizen, and the cry of vengeance animated the hundreds of public resolutions passed in the days and weeks following the “British outrage.” The writers of one such remonstrance characterized the British seizure of the “four american citizens” as an “unprovoked cold-blooded, and dastardly attack” in which “a series of unprincipled depredation and robbery is crowned by inhuman murder, riotous devastation, and atrocious insult.”Their anguish, enlivened by a deep sense of sympathy “with our suffering fellow-citizens,” demanded immediate “retaliation.”2 it did not, apparently, matter that two of the sailors were black. if nations are partially “imagined communities,” the american people at that moment of crisis—even the slaveholding president Thomas Jefferson—were able to imagine the black sailors as representative citizens of the american nation. and even if imagination failed, law dictated the passionate reaction, for in international law all black americans, whether slave or free, were considered to be citizens of the United states. if the seizure of the men was another British impressment of american citizens, of any color,3 the act was a clear violation of international law and american sovereignty.4 But, in domestic law, the status of non-enslaved black americans was strikingly distinct from that of white citizens; in fact, these men would probably not have been considered citizens at all. consider the options of the two black sailors, William Ware and Daniel martin, if they had chosen to make a life in the Virginia chesapeake instead of enlisting on the frigate Chesapeake. What rights and privileges would these martyrs of american honor have possessed as free men in the Virginia of 1807? first, as “mulattoes,” they were considered in Virginia law as “free negroes”; they were not white—a distinction with considerable implications . free blacks, in the Virginia state codes, were closely regulated in their property and their persons, unlike any similar laws relating to all whites. as such, the...

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