The Chain and the Rope

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

9-2024

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197680995.003.0008

Abstract

This chapter revisits some of the core stories of American constitutional history — slavery to freedom, noncitizenship to full inclusion, from the First Reconstruction to the Second, and state-based citizenship to national rights. It argues that one can see all this in the case of a putatively enslaved woman named Jane Johnson who, in Philadelphia in 1855, with the help of several Black porters and a white abolitionist, walked away from the man who claimed her as property. In the subsequent contests involving the man who wanted to reclaim her as his property, there was little talk of freedom, equal citizenship, or national rights. Instead, the arguments in court gradually focused on something that was asserted to predate the American colonies, that had traveled across the Atlantic to the New World — republican citizenship for the white men whose lives were involved in her case. In that world, the chapter argues, there was little room for a Black woman’s claim to equal citizenship and belonging to be heard — although her voice does briefly break through. The chapter poses a difficult question about constitutional history. Is the main story one of change over time in which the unrighted acquire rights and citizenship in an expanding nation, or is it story of deep-seated continuity where local hierarchies persist even through revolutionary changes in the formal constitutional order? Glass is suggesting that it is easier to see change, but that the stories of persistence are also there in the archive if we are discerning enough to see them.

Disciplines

Constitutional Law | Law | Legal History

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