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240 Conclusion Fictions of Free Travel The geopolitics of freedom and slavery revealed in and exacerbated by the freedom suits discussed in this book helped to consolidate the profoundly American understanding of personal liberty as freedom of movement, an understanding that persists to this day. Black and white abolitionists had long couched their protests against punitive black exclusion laws such as the Negro Seamen Act in terms of a constitutional right to free travel, and the legacy of the territorialization of freedom and slavery ensured that the question of this right would remain a flashpoint in U.S. legal culture throughout the nineteenth century. The Liberator repeatedly referred to the “privilege of locomotion, under the American Constitution” to condemn these proliferating antiblack regulations, as it traced back the “privileges and immunities” of state citizenship to its “original comprehensiveness ” in the Articles of Confederation: “The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse among the people of the different States in this Union, the free inhabitants of each 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 people of each State shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other State” (art. 4). Abolitionists insisted that this “right of free entrance into any of the states of the Union is the very first among the privileges of citizens,” regardless of race.1 These conflicts over the freedom of movement were explicitly about the question of black citizenship and black belonging in the United States. A self-professed “liberal minded Englishman” numbered the restrictions on the freedom of movement of free blacks among the principal “il-liberal acts” of the “white citizens” of the United States, contrasting such restrictions to the liberality that greeted white foreign travelers: “thousands of Foreigners, can land here and travel to any part of the union without Conclusion 241 molestation, [yet] your own citizens are compelled to prove that they are free.”2 What did citizenship mean if slave states continued to disregard the right of black northern citizens to travel freely throughout the nation? Frederick Douglass’ Paper further expounded on this constitutional right to free interstate travel: “By the constitution of the United States, every free citizen has the right to traverse the whole length and breadth of the Union as freely as if every part of it was his home.”3 Douglass sought to counterbalance the pervasive racialist narratives of disaffiliation that deemed free blacks to be permanent sojourners in the nation and denied that any form of citizenship extended to them. Given this identification of citizenship with the freedom of movement, abolitionists and reformers sprung into action when the U.S. State Department revealed its “customary” practice of denying passports to free blacks seeking to travel abroad. The State Department habitually refused to grant free blacks the documentation that legitimated movement beyond national borders, as it made U.S. citizenship intelligible through racial categorizations .4 The first of a number of black passport disputes captured headlines in the summer of 1849, while Harriet and Dred Scott’s freedom suit was making its way to the Missouri Supreme Court.5 Secretary of State John Clayton rejected the application of Henry Hambleton, a freeborn Pennsylvania citizen, on the grounds that “passports are not granted by this Department to persons of color.”6 Copies of Clayton’s letter rejecting Hambleton’s application—what the Liberator styled as that “villainous document”—began appearing in newspapers both north and south of Mason-Dixon, as the proposed Fugitive Slave Bill before Congress further aggravated sectional hostilities.7 Northern newspapers generally denounced this “refusal of passports to any of our citizens, whether colored or otherwise, as an infamous outrage.”8 Douglass’s North Star declared, “The secular papers are discussing , with an earnestness which indicates the strength that the anti-slavery feeling had acquired, the refusal of Secretary Clayton to give a passport to a colored freeholder of Pennsylvania who desired to go abroad.”9 These antebellum disputes over the volatile relationship between black citizenship and the freedom of movement and choice rehearsed the struggles over black civil liberties that emerged fully in the era of emancipation, culminating in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The right to travel abroad is tied to the ability to obtain a passport, which held out the surety that the bearer possessed a country of origin to which he or she would later return.10 Passports...

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