Introduction: Immigration in the Civil War Era

While recent immigration scholars have turned most of their attention to the twentieth century, many historians are also reexamining immigration policy in the mid-nineteenth century. Alison Clark Efford, in a recent review essay in this journal, reflects on how nineteenth-century immigration historiography is marked by an “imperial framework in which the government of the United States endeavored to control new groups of people and bring them into the polity on a variety of terms.” This trend, she continues, emphasizes the “disputed and changing boundaries of federal power” and the “diverse statuses held by US residents, showing that inconsistency and hierarchy were persistent features of governance” rather than “exceptions to the rule.” This special issue, although it is not based on the theme of empire, takes up several of these questions, especially the relationship between slavery and immigration; the balance between state and federal policy; the connections among race, birthplace, and citizenship; and the international dimensions of US immigration policy during and after the Civil War.¹

The articles in this issue are part of an emerging body of scholarship on slavery, immigration policy, and citizenship in the nineteenth century.² Historians examining nineteenth-century immigrants increasingly draw from this historiography, rather than the classic social history texts.³ Since Gerald Neuman’s seminal 1993 call to examine the “lost century of American immigration law,” scholars such as Anna O. Law, Hidetaka Hirota, and Kunal Parker have published exceptional legal histories of nineteenth-century immigration policy.⁴ Of course, this is just one trend in the recent historiography of immigration in the Civil War era. Historians continue to produce important studies of migration and settlement, the rise and decline of political nativism, immigrant participation in the Civil War, and other well established themes. The four articles presented here complement rather than challenge this larger body of work.⁵

Before the Civil War, Congress played almost no role in regulating the admission of immigrants. Local and state governments developed their own policies for regulating the mobility of foreign paupers, free black people, and visiting seamen, exercising their police power to regulate public safety, health, and morality.⁶ Constitutional debates over immigration policy pitted the police power of the states against the commerce power of the federal government. Under the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, Congress had the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.”⁷ But how far did this power extend? If it covered movement between the states as well as into the country, Congress could potentially regulate the movement of free black people—which was under tight local control, both in the South and in the North—as well as the immigration of foreigners. It could even potentially regulate the interstate slave trade. The political implausibility of using the commerce power in this way did not prevent abolitionists from supporting the idea. Questions concerning the regulation of foreign immigrants, in short, were inherently tied to questions about the domestic system of slavery and racial hierarchy. Invalidating the power of Massachusetts or New York to control the arrival of immigrant paupers through taxes and bonds, for example, jeopardized state laws based on the same police power that regulated the movement of free black people.⁸

Until the 1870s, towns and states regulated the admission of foreigners. In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), the Supreme Court determined that navigation was a form of commerce, opening the possibility for federal control over immigration as well as interstate travel. If the federal government could regulate shipboard conditions, however, this power ended and local police power began when the immigrants arrived in port. Precisely when that transition occurred—at the moment a vessel arrived in a harbor, or after the passengers came ashore—remained a matter of judicial dispute. The Supreme Court ruled in New York v. Miln (1837) that states, under their police power to protect the general welfare, had the right to require reports from ship masters detailing alien passenger arrivals. The majority decision upheld New York’s police power over immigrants, a move that reassured...