1790: The Naturalization Act
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.
Historian Linda Kerber (1997) noted that the Constitution addressed the issue by defining the “boundaries of citizenship [in] enunciating the obligations not to commit treason and not to harbor fugitive slaves. (The traitor seeks to undermine the citizenry; at the other extreme, the fugitive seeks to blend into it.)” (p. 834).
H. R. 40, Naturalization Bill, March 4, 1790
Credit: U.S. Capitol Visitor Center
In 1790 Congress passed the Naturalization Act, which restricted citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person” who had been in the United States for two years.
This effectively kept all slaves and free blacks from citizenship. Kerber wrote of this act, “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.
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 dark skin into a structured cultural norm. Legal statues, political practices, and social mores aligned to ensure that Black Americans inhabited a different plane of existence from white Americans.