Army, Black people used the opportunity to demand white society reconsider their limited notions of citizenship. President, began beseeching Black men into the U.S. Once various white Americans, including the U.S. Army to accomplish numerous objectives (for the U.S. citizenship did not include any Black people.Ī critical component of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1863) was permitting Black men to enlist in the U.S. Taney’s opinion, stated that no Black person was (or would ever become) a U.S. Sanford case, including Chief Justice Roger B.

Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott v. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, for instance, negated the citizenship rights of all Black people by making them potential victims of the federal law that protected the “property rights” of enslavers to keep the U.S. In the mid-nineteenth century, white men at the national level made it unequivocally clear that U.S. Thus, Black Pennsylvanians discovered that white men defined state citizenship by only considering racial inclusivity when it was time for tax collections. Even with this racialized and gendered framing of citizenship, Black Pennsylvanians paid taxes per various local and state laws (which was a citizenship duty). The entire state later followed suit in an 1838 revision to Pennsylvania’s constitution by stipulating that only white freemen could vote in the state 2. Fogg case) who refused to recognize the suffrage rights of a landed free Black man, William Fogg. Ultimately, Fogg’s case made it to the state’s Supreme Court Chief Justice James Jordan (in the 1835 Hobbs v. Unfortunately, due to anti-Black views and policies within Pennsylvania, Fogg was denied the right to vote even though he had a legal right to do so. In Pennsylvania, for example, William Fogg (a freeborn Black farmer) tried to vote in a local election in Luzerne County, in 1837 1. When there were any threats (real or imagined) to the status quo that both championed and protected whiteness, those in power sought to deny Black people opportunities to exist in a racially egalitarian society. Many white Americans, especially men, considered citizenship (at both levels) to be a domain that exclusively privileged them. Throughout the antebellum and Civil War era, many Americans had differing (and often competing) notions of citizenship at both the state and federal levels. As President Abraham Lincoln and federal lawmakers legislated their way through emancipation and abolition, a question rose to the foreground: what would freedom mean for Black Americans? Black people asserted that it meant citizenship. At the time of the American Civil War, four million African Americans were enslaved in the United States.

Arthur miller on death of a salesman