Introduction

Whereas the federal government encouraged higher levels of immigration during the Civil War to build a stronger army, during the “reconstruction period” that followed the war, marked by the effort to reintegrate the southern and northern states, immigration priorities were changing again. The return of nativist southern politicians to Congress resulted in a stronger anti-immigration movement and debates over how to change immigration laws to reflect the abolishment of slavery.

The source for this chapter includes excerpts of the 1870 Naturalization Act, which, for the first time in history, enabled nonwhite individuals to become naturalized citizens of the United States. Prior to this, the immensely impactful Fourteenth Amendment already fundamentally changed U.S. immigration law by establishing that all persons born or naturalized in the United States were permanent citizens, no matter where they lived. The amendment also gave the federal government sole power to determine who could become citizens and prohibited any state government from restricting citizenship. The 1870 Naturalization Act followed logically from this, asserting that, because persons of African descent were now U.S. citizens, it was now legal for immigrants of African descent to become citizens. This did not make a significant difference at the time, as few new African immigrants came to the United States, but it was a major factor in later efforts to limit the immigration of nonwhite persons into the United States.

Topics covered in this chapter include:

“An Act to Amend the Naturalization Laws and to punish Crimes against the same, and for other Purposes.” LOC. Library of Congress. Forty-First Congress, Sess. II. 2018.

The Color of Citizenship Post-War Immigration Policy (1870–1875)

In the wake of the Civil War, as America struggled through the difficult Reconstruction Period, the nation faced an advanced citizenship challenge, transitioning millions of former slaves into citizenship while redefining the nation’s economic identity.

At the time, immigration laws fell under the authority of two separate domains: immigration and nationality. Immigration policy governed the economic and procedural practices surrounding the act of immigration itself, whereas nationality law, drafted by a separate congressional committee, set rules about naturalization and citizenship.

That the Southern states had always been big on state’s rights is true, and this was because the Southern states feared that a stronger central government would outlaw slavery. They thus argued, for years, that the central government didn’t have this authority and that only a state government could decide to abolish immigration. With the South temporarily absent from the legislature, the federal government expanded its powers and, specifically, passed laws stating that no state government could pass laws that violated citizenship rights as defined by the central government. In the 1870s, Congress and the courts struggled to determine how changes in nationality law, brought about by the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) and the end of slavery would impact immigration.

The Naturalization Act of 1870 Source Document Excerpt

The Fifth and Sixth Section of the bill created a municipal system to protect against voting fraud, including ordering the circuit courts in cities with more than 20,000 residents to appoint two individuals, residents of the city, one from each party, to oversee elections and vote counting. The provision was intended, in part, to address the voting rights issues that Congress knew would arise as the freed black population began to express their newly acquired citizenship in upcoming elections.

But, it was the Seventh Section of the bill that had the most lasting impact on immigration policy, stating simply:

The Naturalization Act of 1870 Source Document Excerpt

That such a momentous change was expressed in so simple a manner might seem strange, but, the underlying principles of the clause were also fairly straightforward. From that moment on, citizenship was not only available for African slaves and their children, but to all people of African descent, whether born in the United States or abroad. This did not fundamentally change the racial mix of America’s immigrants, however, because, for many years few African natives chose to migrate to the United States. That this did not occur makes sense as those who did still faced extreme prejudice and even violence in many parts of the country from the many white Americans who feared and thus were hostile to Africans as well as African Americans.

Inequality Endures

The Fourteenth Amendment was a major victory for the abolitionists and, of course, the former slaves and their children who glimpsed, for the first time, a more egalitarian potential future within the United States. However, the Fourteenth Amendment failed to extend the promise of citizenship to others who had likewise been marginalized under the existing hegemony and, at least in one case, appeared to make matters worse.

Women’s rights was a slow-burning background movement in the United States for many years and intensified in the urban expansion of the mid-1800s. In general, the women’s suffrage movement (women’s right to vote) and broader women’s rights movement took a back seat to abolition during the Civil War. Many women who had aims of gender equality saw parallels with the way that women and African Americans had been denied rights and feminists played an important role in the abolitionist movement that achieved a major success with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. However, pioneer women’s suffrage advocates like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were among a group of women who lobbied against the Fourteenth Amendment when the text of the bill was revealed. Their objection was based on the Second Section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which concerned voting rights, and said:

The second section of the Fourteenth Amendment was the first time the word “male” had been introduced to the Constitution, and women’s rights activists like Anthony and Stanton felt betrayed by the overt insult of dividing the populace by gender even as the new amendment opened up the possibility of equality for African men. This drove a wedge between former allies, with the suffragettes accusing male supporters of the Fourteenth Amendment of betraying the spirit of their shared battle over the past decade, and Fourteenth Amendment supporters feeling that the feminists had betrayed the cause of racial equality. In 1869, the year after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, Stanton and Anthony split from the American Equal Rights Association, which had advocated both for women’s and black people’s rights, to found the National Woman Suffrage Association. They also used their new association to create and publish a new women’s rights publication, The Revolution, each issue of which bore the tagline, “Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less!”⁶⁰

Stanton and Anthony also broke from their former allies over the Fifteenth Amendment, a simple modification to the Constitution framed in the following way:

Again, Stanton, Anthony and their supporters opposed the amendment because it did not also specify that rights could not be abridged for persons of any sex or gender. In 1871 and 1872, women attempted to vote despite state laws prohibiting the practice. It was part of a strategy known as the New Departure, in which the women hoped to challenge state laws using the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Virginia Minor was one of those pioneering women who attempted to vote in 1872 in her home state of Missouri. Minor was denied and sued the state, taking the issue all the way to the Supreme Court where, in 1874, the Supreme Court was asked to rule on whether or not the Equal Protection Clause necessitated providing women citizens with the right to vote.

The U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Morrison Waite heard the case in 1874 (Minor v. Happersett) and ruled that the Constitution did not guarantee the right to vote to citizens, and thus that the Fourteenth Amendment did not extend this right to all citizens unless empowered to vote by other laws. The court’s ruling in Minor v. Happersett was a major blow to the women’s rights movement of the time and essentially demonstrated that the New Departure strategy had failed. Though the Supreme Court refused to recognize voting rights as a function of basic citizenship, the Fourteenth Amendment had established this connection, but only for males. Undeterred, the Suffragist movement only intensified after their demoralizing defeat with regard to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, though their ultimate victory was still half a century away.⁶²

Conclusion

While the 1870 naturalization law opened citizenship to persons of African descent, the language of the law and the amendments that preceded it dealt a blow to women’s rights advocates as, for the first time, the law said that citizenship rights were only available to “males” of white or African descent. Women’s rights supporters, who had been an active and important group in the anti-slavery movement, therefore, campaigned against the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the 1870 Naturalization Law, arguing that the laws and amendments should not be used to exclude women from citizenship rights.

In terms of public opinion, the end of slavery was very contentious. The anti-slavery movement had, for several decades, been trying to influence public opinion through pamphlets and informational brochures criticizing slavery as an immoral institution, and a majority of Americans approved of the abolishment of legal slavery. However, there was no similar majority in favor of integrating white and African American society. The end of slavery was, therefore, the beginning of “segregation,” a long-term cultural and legal effort to limit the rights and citizenship benefits afforded to African Americans motivated by those who felt integration would damage or negatively impact white society.

Discussion Questions

Works Used