1790: The Color of Citizenship and Benjamin Banneker

1700-1799: Free and Enslaved Blacks in North America
Written By Stephanie Brizee

Big Idea

In 1790, Congress passed the Naturalization Act, which denied U.S. citizenship to any Black man or woman, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free. Black Africans continued to assert their human rights and rights as citizens and highlighted their role as significant contributors to the development of the United States.

What’s important to know?

  1. U.S. Citizenship Defined by Race: With the passage of the Naturalization Act of 1790, all Black individuals were barred from citizenship in the United States.

  2. Black Defiance of White Prejudices: Benjamin Banneker was a brilliant mathematician, astronomer, and writer who helped survey the boundaries for the new capitol, Washington, D.C. He also challenged Thomas Jefferson to explain how he could argue for the freedom of the colonists (i.e., the inalienable rights of mankind), while enslaving so many of them.

1: U.S. Citizenship Defined by Race

Even before all of the States had ratified the Constitution, the young Republic faced the question of who had a right to citizenship in the new country.

Congress passed the Naturalization Act in 1790 which limited citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person” who had been in the United States for two years.” (Kerber, 1997, p. 834). 

Imagine of the U.S. 1790 Naturalization Bill

H. R. 40, Naturalization Bill

Image Source: U.S. Capitol Visitor Center

This acts kept all slaves and free Blacks from citizenship. Historian Linda Kerber wrote of this, “By racializing the qualifications for newcomers, the first naturalization statute recalibrated the relationship to the political order of the free blacks and free whites who were already resident in it and set strict limits on future access to citizenship” (p. 841).

The racial qualifications required for citizenship revealed in, yet another poignant way, the underlying racists ideas and ideologies upon which early American laws were based.  

“By racializing the qualifications for newcomers, the first naturalization statute recalibrated the relationship to the political order of the free blacks and free whites who were already resident in it and set strict limits on future access to citizenship.”
— Linda Kerber

2: Black Defiance of White Prejudices

Woodcut of Benjamin Banneker, 1795

Image Source: Wikipedia

Benjamin Banneker was a free Black man who lived in Maryland (close to current day Ellicott City) during the eighteenth century. Born into a free family, he was taught to read and write as a young boy and even attended a one-room schoolhouse down the street for a period of time. His curiosity led him to craft his own wooden clock that kept perfect time (Bedini, 1969, p. 8).

Through his connections with a local Quaker family, when he was 52 he was hired to be the assistant surveyor for the engineer responsible for plotting the boundary lines of the soon to be developed nation’s capitol, Washington, D.C. He was paid for his work and recognized as an important contributor to the effort. The Georgetown Weekly Ledger noted of Banniker’s work his “abilities, as a surveyor, and an astronomer, clearly prove that Mr. Jefferson’s concluding that race of men were void of mental endowments, was without foundation” (p. 24).

Upon his return to his farm, he finished writing an almanac for the year 1792. While it was being prepared for printing, Banneker sent a hand-written copy to Thomas Jefferson with an introductory note. In this note, he clearly challenged Jefferson to live up to the ideals he had so eloquently espoused during the revolution.

Benjamin Banneker’s Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia Almanack and Ephemeris, for the Year of our Lord, 1792.

Image Source: Library of Congress

“How pitiable is it to reflect, that altho you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of those rights and privileges which he had conferred upon them… that you should at the Same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves” (Banneker, 1791, National Archives).

Abolitionists in Maryland published his almanacs. In the following years, Banneker published quote a few more almanacs and included with them commentary and philosophical thought, some related to the enslavement of Africans and others to political matters of the day. While White political leaders denied Black people citizenship and justified this position by denigrating their intellectual capabilities, Benjamin Banneker called them out for their hypocrisy and chosen ignorance to the realities of the capabilities of Black Americans.

Think about It!

Black History and Citizenship

The first two-hundred years of Black experience in North America – from their arrival in 1619 to 1799 – had transformed old European ideas of the inferiority of Black people into structured cultural and political norms. Legal statues, political practices, and social mores aligned to ensure that Black Americans inhabited a different plane of existence from White Americans.

History books have told the story of the founding of America from the perspective of White people. Most Americans when asked about the founding of the U.S. will talk about men such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Black men and women appear in the narrative at the appropriate points as “slaves,” “runaways,” “plaintiffs,” or “freed.” As Nikole Hannah-Jones (2021) described it, “We were not actors but acted upon. We were not contributors, just recipients. White people enslaved us, and white people freed us. Black people could choose either to take advantage of that freedom or to squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing” (xvii).

As James Baldwin so wisely said, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history” (Baldwin, reprint, 2017). Understanding our history is critical to understanding ourselves. It is also critical to understanding the debates we are engaging in today about the nature of citizenship and what it means to be an American..”

Your Turn

How have ideas about race and citizenship impacted U.S. history? How does our understanding of history influence how we view these issues?

Stephanie Brizee
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1787: The U.S. Constitution and Black and White Founders
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1800: Abolitionism - the Fight for Human Rights