Stranger Citizens

Migrant Influence and National Power in the Early American Republic

John McNelis O'Keefe

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781501756092
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501756535
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Stranger Citizens examines how foreign migrants who resided in the United States gave shape to citizenship in the decades after American independence in 1783. During this formative time, lawmakers attempted to shape citizenship and the place of immigrants in the new nation, while granting the national government new powers such as deportation.

John McNelis O'Keefe argues that despite the challenges of public and official hostility that they faced in the late 1700s and early 1800s, migrant groups worked through lobbying, engagement with government officials, and public protest to create forms of citizenship that worked for them. This push was made not only by white men immigrating from Europe; immigrants of color were able to secure footholds of rights and citizenship, while migrant women asserted legal independence, challenging traditional notions of women's subordination.

Stranger Citizens emphasizes the making of citizenship from the perspectives of migrants themselves, and demonstrates the rich varieties and understandings of citizenship and personhood exercised by foreign migrants and refugees. O'Keefe boldly reverses the top-down model wherein citizenship was constructed only by political leaders and the courts.

Thanks to generous funding from the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and the Mellon Foundation the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Chapter 1

Refugees Push Back

We did and do now reside . . . in Vine St. No. 167 [Philadelphia] and do intend to fix ourselves as long as by complying with the laws of the United States, we [should] find in this continent the safety peace and protection which has been heretofore granted us.

— Landing Reports of Aliens, No. 161, Marie Dominique Jacques D’Orlic and Marie Laurence Carrere D’Orlic, January 14, 1799

IN PHILADELPHIA IN THE summer of 1798, the French refugee Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de St. Méry recorded in his diary that President John Adams and Secretary of State Timothy Pickering had “made a list of French people to be deported” and, much to his surprise, Moreau de St. Méry himself was on that list. During his time in the United States, after fleeing France in 1794, Moreau de St. Méry had run a bookstore in Philadelphia and cultivated a small circle of French intellectual friends in exile. Perhaps he did associate with US Republicans, and wore a tricolor ribbon, but he was no French spy. Not without friends in high places, Moreau de St. Méry inquired through Senator John Langdon “to find out what I was charged with.” In his diary, Moreau de St. Méry wrote down Adams’s supposed reply: “Nothing in particular, but he’s too French.”1

The exchange between Adams and Moreau de St. Méry represents an important shift in the decline of alien legal rights that coincided with the rise of national citizenship in the 1790s. When Congress passed the Alien Act in 1798, the executive branch of the federal government gained the power to deport aliens—without a trial. But doing so also invited aliens like Moreau de St. Méry to issue a challenge to that law: was he not a person entitled to his legal rights? How could he be deported without having been charged with a crime? Adams’s supposed reply also reveals a new way in which citizenship was being equated with nationality: Moreau de St. Méry hadn’t done anything, but his birth within the French colonial empire and possession of whatever other qualities Adams deemed to be “too French” meant that he did not belong among the community of American citizens, and ought to be deported. Sensing a hostile climate, Moreau de St. Méry opted to join the many ostensibly voluntary migrants repatriating to the French empire, under pressure from Adams and Secretary of State Timothy Pickering.2

THE ALIEN AND Sedition Acts and related 1798 laws were an attempt to forge a national citizenship, but that national citizenship as it came to be was not necessarily one that fully reflected Federalist ideals. One of the key elements in the nationalization of citizenship occurred through the creation of specific rights of citizenship at the national level. These rights were carved out of alien penalties and responsibilities, even if it was not necessarily Federalists’ intention to create national citizenship specifically in this way. The passage of the laws was part of the process of the formulation of national citizenship; it was driven by nativist fears, but altered in its legal form by the lawmaking process and political opposition. This linkage between legal rights and citizenship preceded the strong relationship between them that emerged from the conflicts of Civil War and Reconstruction. 3

Migrants from the French empire were a part of this process of the creation and enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Acts and, with those laws, changes to citizenship and its associated rights. This chapter, in demonstrating the role of migrants in shaping the laws and their enforcement, critiques the approach of Rogers Smith, who has used a top-down model focused on actions of lawmakers and judges: Smith’s work draws on national debates, laws passed by Congress, actions taken by federal appointees governing Western lands, and the influence of the courts. In contrast, this chapter, and this book more generally, emphasize the role of the migrants themselves in affecting the development of citizenship and its rights. It does not deny the power of political elites, and shows that they not only tried to shut foreign migrants and nonwhite people out of citizenship, but they placed further penalties on aliens by carving out rights of citizenship. Nonetheless, migrants were able to push back, most notably in preventing a blanket ban on the entry of French citizens. Migrants also worked to affect the law in their everyday engagement in public, and also with the government officials with whom they interacted. These engagements showed differing deployments of citizenship and rights-based claims: they included an assertion of cultural citizenship (“the right to be different”) that included a liberal right to act in support of the French Republic as part of a broader right to be politically active. They also showed the deployment of a form of social contract wherein obedience to the law came with a reciprocal right of residence and asylum. Finally, French migrants also asserted a narrow citizenship that included legal rights for naturalized citizens, even though many of them rejected cultural integration.4

During the period of the early American republic, citizenship and nationality were not so intertwined as they are in the present. Citizenship was both a narrowly defined legal status indicating a subordinate relationship to a representative government, and also a marker of integration into the political sphere of the citizen’s local American community. Nationality was an emerging cultural concept of membership in a broader community, the nation. Many elite Americans worried that significant differences among the inhabitants of the United States could jeopardize the nationalizing project. In the late 1790s, elite Americans agreed that “national characteristics” should define American-ness, but disagreed as to what criteria should qualify individuals for membership in the nation. Federalists chose to emphasize birth within the borders of the United States and white racial status. Republicans tended to emphasize a belief in republicanism and American political institutions, but agreed in equating whiteness with American-ness. Conflicts between liberals and nativists were inflamed by the Atlantic revolutions of the 1790s, and in 1798, Federalist lawmakers embarked on a legislative program that they hoped would strengthen national citizenship and exclude dangerous foreigners from the polity. Republicans worked to alter that program, and in the process also contributed to the creation of a national citizenship that accorded rights to citizens and assigned legal penalties to aliens.5

White migrants from the French empire were active participants in shaping the laws of citizenship that were formed in 1798. Moreau de St. Méry was part of a body of people who had migrated to the United States as a result of the Haitian and French revolutions, and who carried with them different ideas of citizenship and its relation to the nation. Through every step from conception, debate, passage, interpretation by the executive, and attempts at enforcement, the laws—and with them the processes of naturalization and the definition of citizenship—changed. Migrants from the French empire were among those who influenced those changes. Although these laws were driven by Federalist nativism and molded by the Republican opposition, French migrants actively lobbied and influenced the laws throughout the process. French migrants intervened to prevent the US government from forbidding them entry, countered hostile descriptions of themselves in the press, often refused to comply with compulsory alien registration, and attempted to influence the naturalization process.6

Citizenship, particularly during this period, was not necessarily national. Some migrants asserted liberal ideas of citizenship that were associated with political ideals more than national identification. Others asserted a kind of multicultural citizenship that incorporated national difference into the definition of citizenship. And some asserted the local citizenship preferred by native-born Republicans.7 But the move toward national citizenship tended to eclipse these other options, even as they were asserted. In 1798, national citizenship began to supersede local citizenship while the two maintained an uneasy coexistence.

In 1798, concern over the possibility of war with France and the possible presence of foreign sympathizers and spies caused Federalists and other Americans to scrutinize the foreign migrant population in the United States for signs of disloyalty and danger. French migrants who openly expressed Republican sympathies found themselves the targets of both official and informal public hostility. Coupled with provisions in the Naturalization Act of 1798 that required all white aliens to register with the federal government, many French migrants would be compelled to respond and offer a defense of their beliefs and their presence in the United States.8

French National Characteristics: Cutthroats, Religious Danger, Licentiousness, the Tricolor, and Anti-Jacobinism

The naturalization laws that emerged in the 1790s, which ultimately began to create a US national citizenship, fed in part on fears of French national character. They were related to the emergence of a particular form of nativism—here defined as “the attitude, practice, or policy of protecting the interests of native-born or existing inhabitants against those of immigrants”—a form that saw French migrants as a particular threat to the nascent republic of the United States. Federalist nativism especially saw French migrants as a cultural and political threat to American people and the American political system. French migrants were repeatedly stereotyped in nativist press coverage of local encounters as lawlessly violent, irreligious, sexually licentious, and politically dangerous. Francophobic views in the 1790s were associated with members of the Federalist Party rather than Republicans, who tended to see the French Revolution in more positive terms.9

Francophobia in the 1790s United States drew on anti-Jacobin accounts of the French Revolution. In particular, Federalist newspapers chose to emphasize a supposed French thirst for lawless violence and bloodshed, adherence to non-Protestant beliefs, and sexual licentiousness. These alleged tendencies were symbolized by the tricolor cockade worn by not only (non-Royalist) French migrants, but also by adherents of the Republican Party in the US.

Conflicting views regarding French migrants in the United States borrowed from a number of traditions as well as American reactions to the events of the French and Haitian revolutions. Many Americans sympathized with white refugees from the Haitian Revolution, as well as those from the French Revolution. Yet many colonists had also long viewed France as a source of luxury, decadence, and atheism. A longstanding anti-Catholic tradition had centered on the role of France as the preeminent Catholic power in the eighteenth century. France was seen as the source of attempts to impose absolute monarchy and abolish traditional Anglo-American political liberties. The French Revolution upended these traditional views by disassociating France from Catholicism because of the Revolutionary government’s disagreements with the Catholic Church and the Jacobin de-Christianization of France. While some Americans viewed the French Revolution as a source of political liberty, others saw it as a source of lawlessness and violence. If some Americans continued to admire France, an increasing number (even Republicans) began to suspect French migrants of harboring characteristics dangerous to the new republic.10

US criticism of the French Revolution began in earnest after the September Massacres in 1792, when Parisians seized and executed prisoners in an attempt to prevent counterrevolutionary activity during a period of military reverses and foreign invasion. Conservatives were alarmed by the revolution’s mob violence and disregard for due process. In their eyes, France had ceased to be a civilized nation. The arrival in the US of European radicals, along with the public celebration of French revolutionary violence, including 1793 reenactments of the beheading of the French King Louis XVI and demonstrations of the guillotine in Philadelphia in 1794, caused conservatives to fear that revolution and mob violence could spread to the United States. These fears were further amplified by alarmist reports in the Federalist press. Although much alarm was directed at local Republicans and radicals from the British Isles, articles describing French Republicans attempted to describe a type of danger embodied by supposed French national qualities.11

First among these was a delight in lawlessness and violence. In one instance in June 1798, a concerned Philadelphian wrote to Fenno’s Gazette of the United States reporting a truly shocking scene: a fire had broken out at the Philadelphia jail, and while the citizens of Philadelphia were attempting to put it out, they were obstructed by “some scoundrel Frenchmen” who displayed “the most open remarks of exultation at the alarming situation.” The writer came to what was the most obvious conclusion for him: “They were doubtless of the infernal Jacobin brood.” And really, what could “be expected of a Frenchman” who had “been received with open arms into a hospitable asylum” and yet wore a tricolor emblem, the “ensign of bloodshed, carnage, and malice?” Surely, such a man possessed “a soul ripe for murder, treasons, plots and dark conspiracies.”12

Connecting the propensity for violence with the threat of importing revolutionary political change, the Philadelphia-based newspaper Porcupine’s Gazette carried a story about a “Frenchman” who had been brought before a court for allegedly claiming that President John Adams’s “head would be off in 6 months time” to be replaced by Thomas Jefferson, and that “If no one else could be found” that the Frenchman himself “would be the executioner.”13

Similarly, the aforementioned Frenchmen who confounded the attempted extinguishing of the city jail fire shared a disregard for lawful institutions. Such activities might be viewed with greater suspicion when those same jails were used to imprison French privateers, who themselves also showed a flagrant disregard for American law and legal institutions. In one instance, an American sea captain who had just arrived in Baltimore encountered by chance the commander of a French privateer who had seized the American’s ship. According to one newspaper account, the Frenchman, when confronted by the American captain, replied “Heh, that is nothing,” and also “had the impudence to make him a low bow,” prompting to the American sea captain to have him “immediately lodged in jail, to shew whether it was nothing or not.” However, these jails did not always succeed in holding French privateers. Readers were warned of an escape made from the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, jail, where two French privateering sailors had escaped, along with a runaway slave on the same day.14

No news story involving French residents in the United States in 1798 captured the attention of readers more than a dramatic murder-suicide that took place in New York. Newspapers from Maine to South Carolina covered it, as well as non-English-language papers. Federalist readers encountered a very different version of story than the one that appeared in Republican papers, ascribing the violence of the event to the French national character rather than presenting it as a tragedy of domestic violence not unique to any ethnicity. Monsieur and Madame Gardie were refugees from Saint-Domingue; M. Gardie wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Refugees Push Back
• Chapter 2 Virtual Citizens
• Chapter 3 Married to an Alien Enemy
• Chapter 4 Citizens Not Denizens
• Chapter 5 From Servants to Equals
• Conclusion
• Notes