Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Studies in Legal History)

Birthright Citizens tells how African American activists radically transformed the terms of citizenship for all Americans. Before the Civil War, colonization schemes and black laws threatened to deport former slaves born in the United States. Birthright Citizens recovers the story of how African American activists remade national belonging through battles in legislatures, conventions, and courthouses. They faced formidable opposition, most notoriously from the US Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott. Still, Martha S. Jones explains, no single case defined their status. Former slaves studied law, secured allies, and conducted themselves like citizens, establishing their status through local, everyday claims. All along they argued that birth guaranteed their rights. With fresh archival sources and an ambitious reframing of constitutional law-making before the Civil War, Jones shows how when the Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the birthright principle, the aspirations of black Americans' aspirations were realized.

• No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures)
• The Captive's Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (Slaveries since Emancipation)
• Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management
• Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
• The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War
• The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era
• One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
• The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution
• Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas (Gender and Slavery Ser.)
• Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Politics and Culture in Modern America)