Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship by Christopher James Bonner (review)

The U.S. Constitution, Christopher Bonner reminds us in the opening to this essential book, mentions the word "citizen" or "citizens" eleven times (4), and yet, just what it means by those terms and who is to be considered a "citizen" was frustratingly ambiguous and would remain so for decades after the nation's founding. While this ambiguity provided reason to deny the rights of citizenship to free African Americans, it also presented opportunity, an opportunity seized upon by free Black writers and orators who, in the early decades of the republic capitalized on this ambiguity in order to stake their claim on American citizenship. Recent years have seen an outpouring of scholarship on this struggle for Black citizenship rights in the antebellum United States, which has taught us a great deal about how African Americans fought, and sometimes succeeded, in securing specific rights they broadly envisioned as the rights of citizens. Bonner's book is an essential contribution to this growing scholarship.

To capture the sweep of Black politics in this era, Bonner looks to the abundant printed record of the public discourse of Black citizenship. He makes excellent use of printed accounts of speeches, meetings, and conventions and draws on the rich Black and abolitionist newspapers of the early nineteenth century. In contrast to other scholars who have focused in on a particular place in order to consider the granular details of the struggle for Black citizenship rights, Bonner pulls back the lens in order to provide the larger picture of the free Black activists of the North. What emerges is a vast network of men and women, contesting the status of free Black people, pushing to be considered as citizens in the land of their birth.

The book takes up the story in the 1820s with the debate over African colonization and proceeds through six thematic but loosely chronological chapters, concluding with the legal transformations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The first chapter considers the struggle for suffrage, which Black activists argued was an essential right owed them as American citizens. At the same time, these same activists challenged the claims of colonizationists that free Black people did not belong in the United States at all. From here the book moves on to consider the connections between Black politics and the debates over the westward expansion of the United States. Bonner offers a particularly insightful chapter on the engagement of Black activists with the European revolutions of 1848. At a time when many Black abolitionists felt alienated from the land of their birth, the revolutionary struggles unfolding across the Atlantic allowed them to imagine "new kinds of communities with new criteria for belonging," communities "defined by an individual's work toward human liberation" (75). Ultimately, though, most Black activists continued to see the land of their birth as their true home and fought for the American citizenship they believed they were owed. From here, Bonner moves on to a persuasive consideration of the importance of claims of citizenship for the protection of fugitive slaves. Black abolitionists saw security as a fundamental right of citizens, and argued that jury trials and other legal protections for accused fugitive slaves were therefore guaranteed by the Constitution. Next, Bonner shows us how Roger Taney's Dred Scott decision was a response to the protest tactics of African Americans which in turn spurred Black activists to renew their struggle for the very rights that Taney claimed they could never possess. Finally, the book carries the story through the tumultuous years of the Civil War, when Black service in the Union armed forces, and the pivotal contribution of that service to the defeat of the Confederacy, left African Americans with perhaps their most persuasive argument for the citizenship rights they had long claimed.

Central to Bonner's picture of this struggle for Black...