The Introduction lays out the theoretical and political stakes of the book. It shows how abolitionist white radicals saw enslavement as a diseased part of the national body that had to be lopped off. Through an exploration of political speeches, cartoons, song-sheets, sermons, fiction, and poetry, the author shows how the amputated bodies of Civil War veterans represented the possibility of a new kind of nation that had Black citizenship at its core.

Chapter 3 focuses on Anna E. Dickinson, a little-read but in her time central abolitionist and antiracist activist, lecturer, and novelist. A riveting speaker who was a major voice for Radical Republicans, Dickinson toured the country addressing mixed-gender audiences on abolition, women’s suffrage, the right for unions to organize, and antiracism. Dickinson’s first novel, What Answer? (1868), follows an interracial couple, William Surrey and Francesca Ercildoune, from their first meeting in 1861 to their deaths in 1863 at the hands of a New York Draft Riot mob. It ends with a climactic scene in which Francesca’s brother, Robert Ercildoune, accompanied by a white friend. attempts to vote in a local 1865 election and is barred by racist poll-goers. The novel takes on issues raised by the debates around the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment that were raging while Dickinson was writing What Answer? Both the Amendment and the novel take as their central theme Black citizenship, without which the losses of the Civil War, represented by the many amputee characters in the book, would have been in vain.

The introduction begins an exploration of abolitionist jurisprudence and the judges who practiced it. It explains the difference between emancipation and abolition and the way the book uses and builds on existing abolitionist theory. It maps the books argument: that legacies of slavery survive in private law, which modern abolitionists have missed.

Traditionally, white radical Republicans like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens have been given the main credit for the work of Reconstruction that culminated with the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments. This chapter shifts the focus to consider the work of Frederick Douglass and other Black activists in contesting the racist president Andrew Johnson and applying pressure to the Republicans to bring about the full citizenship and enfranchisement of African Americans. Douglass had a dramatic 1866 meeting with Andrew Johnson in the White House, and he continued to apply pressure to Johnson and the Republicans over the next several years. The chapter considers some of Douglass’s most important Reconstruction writings, including his essays in the Atlantic Monthly, his great 1867 lecture “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” and the 1881 version of his Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

Locating a pedagogical impulse in the Reconstruction texts of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James Madison Bell, and Albery Whitman, Stephanie Farrar’s “Stories of Citizenship: The Rise of Narrative Black Poetry during Reconstruction” identifies an emergent form of Black poetry pioneered in Reconstruction that has previously gone essentially unrecognized: long narrative verse that thematizes and analyzes the formation of Black citizenship. In laying claim to a form deeply linked with both national identity and whiteness, the chapter suggests that Black writers seized the cultural power of narrative verse to force a reckoning with the ongoing impact of slavery and the new mechanisms of racial hierarchy that replaced it. It draws attention to the form’s multiscalar cultural work as an analysis of, history of, didactic model for, and even enactment of modes of citizenship for Black Americans, and it illustrates the special role of the AME Christian Recorder in promulgating this poetry as an instrument of Black nationalism, attempting to counter attacks on black social and political life during Reconstruction and to theorize the conditions and components of freedom itself.

Beacons of Liberty starts with Madison Washington, the enslaved man who led a famous shipboard slave rebellion in 1841, and Mary Ann Shadd, the first black woman newspaper editor in North America. Their stories introduce the importance of international free-soil havens to the U.S. anti-slavery movement. Free-soil havens abroad were places where slavery had either been curtailed or abolished by law or by local practice. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century they emerged in places like Haiti, West Africa, Upper Canada, Mexico, and various new republics throughout Central and South America. Over five decades characterized by changing social conditions and evolving geopolitical relationships within and beyond the United States, international free-soil havens were often defined in very different ways by different people. The Introduction to this book explores what international free soil came to represent for slaves, free black people, and white reformers with impressive ideological diversity regarding the question of black freedom.

This first chapter traces how the emergence of free soil in Sierra Leone, Haiti, and Liberia captured the attention of American reformers in the early nineteenth century amidst growing concern about free African Americans’ social welfare and economic prospects in the United States. Reformers, activists, and potential migrants debated whether the migration of free and recently freed black men and women would improve or degrade the conditions of individual migrants, whether it would help or hinder the black communities left behind, and whether it would positively or negatively affect the overall progress of general emancipation. Reviewing the information available to them, they debated whether to encourage the voluntary “emigration” of free people to Haiti, to support the typically involuntary “colonization” of former slaves to West Africa, or to oppose free-soil relocation schemes altogether. In the process, advocates of each position honed their ideas of what freedom meant, where it could be achieved, and who could enjoy it.

examines the development of Black citizenship, beginning with a stark reminder that blacks had no access to national citizenship rights in the antebellum period, even though there were more than 435,000 free Blacks living in the United States at the time of the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott ruling. The Framers’ Constitution had accommodated the interests and demands of slaveholding states at the time of ratification and thus gave much greater power to states than the federal government in setting citizenship rights. The constitutional framework structuring black citizenship changed significantly after the Civil War, as new forms of regressive state citizenship emerged against the backdrop of Reconstruction and decades of Jim Crow, followed by rapid changes in the Civil Rights period that continues until today. Throughout this chapter, the authors train their focus on the role of the Constitution and courts in defining and constraining Black citizenship rights, as well as the role of parties and social movement actors in propelling legislative action toward rights expansion and contraction.