The Right to Remain: Migration and Citizenship in the Antebellum US

• In Event: Structuring Migration, Mobility, and Citizenship

Abstract

Everyone is familiar with the freedom of movement invoked in US immigration policy, but what about the right to remain, to set roots in a place of one’s choosing? Using federal and state migration and remain laws, and federal Indian law and homestead acts, the paper examines the ability of enslaved and free Black people, Native Americans, and white people to stay where they wanted in the early republic and nineteenth century before the Reconstruction Amendments. I argue that the level of government that the federal system assigned one’s right to remain also dictated the type of coercion a group faces. Before the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments, subnational governments and localities controlled both international and domestic migration and the right to remain. Buttressed by the police powers doctrine, states erected many barriers to interstate migration against free Black people including exile laws, bans from the state, or legal disabilities and administrative burdens for the right to remain in a jurisdiction. The right to remain for Native people who sought to stay on their ancestral lands was controlled by the federal government. The paper concludes that the ability to resist coercion is also contingent on the type of coercion used against a group’s right to remain. Was it state-level laws or was one’s right to remain challenged by the administrative capacity of the US government and at the end of the US Army’s bayonets?

Author

• Anna O. Law, CUNY Brooklyn College