The Passport in America: The History of a Document (23 page)

Although the U.S. constitution did not define American citizenship, it did give Congress the authority to define naturalization. Congress did this in 1790, a few months after the ratification of the constitution, when it limited naturalization to free white persons who had lived in the United States for two years; in 1795 it increased the required period of residence to five years.
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In 1802 the residence requirement was reduced back to two years. Eligible aliens who intended to become U.S. citizens could declare their intention to do so before a court official and receive a certificate recording this fact. The uncertain nature of the relationship between these “declarants” and their future nation-state complicated the somewhat ad hoc passport policy that secretaries of state created in the 1820s and 1830s. In a period when fewer than five hundred passports were issued annually, conflicting decisions were often made in the name of the same secretary of state. In 1826 Secretary of State Henry Clay issued a document that entitled a declarant to “all lawful aid and protection… in the case of need.” A year later he stated that only on naturalization did someone acquire the full and same rights as a native-born citizen.
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Perhaps this apparent inconsistency can be explained by the actions of Clay’s predecessor, John Quincy Adams, who issued a passport to a declarant, but not as an “actual citizen.”
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By the 1840s, when
annual passport issuance was at more than a thousand, Secretary of State James Buchanan clarified that a declarant should not be given a passport. A year after issuing the first instructions regarding passport applications, he informed an applicant, “The passport certifies that the bearer
is
a citizen…. His intention to become so may be ever so manifest, and his right to become so at any moment he please may be ever so clear and unquestionable; still, this does not make him one; on the contrary, it renders it certain that he is not one.”
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However, other contexts blurred this distinction for immigrants. By the middle of the nineteenth century, in an attempt to attract new residents, some states and territories allowed declarants to vote in local elections. At the same time the U.S. Senate debated the merits of declarant-alien suffrage.
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Despite this articulation of the passport as a certificate of citizenship, no law prevented U.S. passports from being issued to aliens. When passports were deliberately issued to noncitizens, its function as a letter of protection seemed to trump any burgeoning authority it had to certify citizenship. In most instances, such passports were issued abroad, often with the words “citizen of the United States” crossed out. In the early 1850s, a U.S. official outlined the general chaos around the status of U.S. passports in Turkey owing to the issuance of passports to noncitizens. There were three groups of noncitizens affiliated with the failed Hungarian revolution against the Austrian Habsburgs who were in Turkey with U.S. passports. One was a group that had emigrated to the U.S. but returned with “passports” from U.S. legations, consulates, or other authorities identifying them as “American affiliated citizens.” A second group had received passports from the Constantinople legation “not noticing their nationality at all, but merely describing them as persons ‘emigrating to America.’ “A third and much larger group, numbering in the hundreds, had arrived in Turkey with passports from the consulate in Rome that described them as U.S. citizens. Many of these passports had been purportedly sold or exchanged. In an attempt to halt occurrences such as this, a State Department dispatch threatened diplomatic and consular officials with deprivation of office for issuing such documents to aliens.
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Nevertheless, a year later a new secretary of state issued a personal instruction that permitted aliens to be issued passports under special circumstances; it is unclear whether such a passport would have specifically identified a bearer as a noncitizen.
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In the midst of this inconsistent policy, it seems fewer declarants were being issued passports; at least that is one possible reason for the increase in the use of declarant certificates abroad, often called “first papers.” In an 1852 letter to the minister in London over the increasing use of these
certificates in lieu of a passport, Edward Everett, at the end of his four-month tenure as secretary of state, argued that in most dealings with foreign officials a passport and a declaration of intention would serve the same purpose. He considered that declarants, as bearers of first papers, “had disabled themselves from procuring passports from their own governments,” and therefore that “they seem to have some claim to all aid… we can with propriety give them.”
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Everett did not specify exactly what that was. Other diplomatic correspondence from this period indicates the nature of this assistance while attempting to establish the difference between first papers and a passport. Officials and agents of the U.S. government could endorse a declarant’s certificate as genuine,
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and, if the bearer required protection, offer their “friendly offices,” but they could not “interfere officially.”
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In practice, this distinction between “friendly offices” and official interference only further contributed to the blurred boundaries of the passport and the declarant’s certificate. In these two roles, both documents offered a form of assurance— they allowed someone to be known (as a friend) among strangers.

The passport and declaration of intent reveal the somewhat incoherent nature of official documentation in the mid-nineteenth century. The declaration of intent was a small certificate recording an event, not a document that contained any attempts to identify the declarant beyond a name and signature. In contrast, the passport was a document that officials wanted to be accepted as a certificate, but it was presented in the form of a letter, albeit one with features that were intended to ensure it could be accurately linked to the correct bearer. The addition of a physical description and signature was meant to contribute to the separation of the passport from letters of introduction and court-issued documents such as the declaration of intent. By claiming a practical equivalence between the declaration and the passport, Everett indicated the limited need for, and utility of, the passport as an identification document. A court-issued declaration of intent and a traditional letter of introduction or protection referred to an individual’s identity, but not with the purpose of proving it. If the passport was understood as belonging to this category of document, the attempt to prove identity became a minor function of the passport. This did in fact seem to be the case with most midcentury passports. The most significant role of the passport abroad (one that it shared with the declaration of intent) was apparently to document a personal name, and to endorse the bearer’s character or reputation through a relationship to a known body (the U.S. government), not to articulate citizenship (as an official identity) to an individual. Further, in most
instances when citizens abroad needed their citizenship recognized, it was to obtain travel advice from a U.S. government official.
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Therefore, regardless of attempts to present the passport as a certificate of citizenship, it continued despite changes in its appearance to bear a strong resemblance to letters of introduction or protection.

Challenges to citizenship law from individuals and, directly and indirectly, from states further complicated the boundaries of the official identity that federal officials sought to stabilize and verify with a passport. In the decades preceding the Civil War, free African Americans attempted to exploit the tension between federal and state citizenship and occasional inconsistencies in State Department policy to obtain U.S. passports to support their citizenship claims. They took the State Department’s assertion that a passport was a certificate of citizenship at face value. This linked the passport to the murky antebellum right of states to declare individuals citizens of the United States.
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These passport applications were partly intended to contrast the ease with which free African Americans could get forms of citizenship from some states with the lack of recognition from the federal government.
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The strategic nature of these applications is even more apparent given that only in 1856 did Congress give the State Department sole authority to issue passports. Prior to this legislation, governors, mayors, and notaries public could legally issue passports. Within these contested practices of documentation, the State Department in fact did issue free African Americans a document that identified them as citizens, albeit not a passport. Black sailors received a seaman’s protection certificate that stated the bearer was a “Citizen of the United States of America.” Introduced at the end of the eighteenth century, these documents were regularly used until 1940. It is estimated that many thousands of them were issued to free black sailors from 1796 to 1868. As a runaway slave, Frederick Douglass escaped disguised as a sailor and carried a borrowed seaman’s protection certificate to “prove” that he was a freed slave.
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In 1847 in a letter to an applicant Secretary of State James Buchanan wrote department policy was to issue “free negroes” a special certificate, not a regular passport.
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This did little to discourage free African Americans from applying. Harry Hambleton, “a respectable colored man from Pennsylvania,”
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unsuccessfully applied for a passport in 1849. However, his case was successfully used by abolitionists to highlight the contradictions
between states and the federal government over African-American citizenship. Once the letter of refusal from John Clayton (Buchanan’s successor) was made public, sympathetic newspapers criticized the decision. The
New York Evening Post
labeled Hambleton a citizen of the United States; another newspaper supported this, citing the certificate of nativity the state of Pennsylvania had issued him on the grounds of his birth in the United States.
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Supporting his right to a passport, the abolitionist
National Era
castigated the State Department’s policy as “purely arbitrary, without warrant from the Constitution, and in conflict with the sovereignty of every State which chooses to recognize colored persons as citizens.”
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In another article the newspaper argued that without a passport Hambleton would be identified as an “outlaw,” as most foreign officials would not accept the undocumented claims of a “colored person” to be a citizen.
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Clayton further angered abolitionists in the one instance in which he held that an African American was entitled to the protection of U.S. and foreign officials while abroad—a “person of color… in the service of diplomatic agents” could be offered the protection the U.S. government requested for its citizens in a passport. To Clayton’s opponents, this statement reinforced the belief that “wherever the colored man goes he must carry with him the badge of slavery to receive the protection of the Americans.”
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In attacking both Clayton’s rejection of passports for free African Americans and his outline of an exception, the escaped slave and abolitionist William Wells Brown argued, “None but an American slaveholder could have discovered that a man born in a country was not a citizen of it.”
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In a letter generated by Hambleton’s application, Clayton was explicitly asked if he was a slave owner. The secretary retorted that he was not “though I do not perceive of what importance it can be to know.”
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By this point Clayton’s original letter to Hambleton had become the center of a controversy for President Zachery Taylor who had recently been elected representing the anti-slavery Whig party.
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In the course of the controversy it became known that in the 1830s the State Department had issued passports to two free African Americans that identified them as U.S. citizens. In one case, Reverend Peter Williams in 1836, Clayton brought forward the former department clerk who issued the passport to state that this was a bureaucratic error as the application did not identify Williams as a “person of color”; Williams was the first African American Episcopal priest.
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Bureaucratic error could not explain the second case. In 1834 Robert Purvis, a “wealthy free man of color” from Philadelphia, received a passport but only after applying a second time after he had initially received
the alternative certificate Buchanan described. When reapplying Purvis got a reputable and politically connected white Philadelphian to write a letter arguing for his right to receive a passport. The letter writer contended the refusal contradicted State Department policy of issuing passports to black sailors before invoking Purvis’s wealth and light complexion. In claiming the issuance of this passport did not constitute a precedent Clayton explained that the then secretary of state understood Purvis to be “a gentleman, a man of property, of scarcely perceptible African descent.” He therefore stated Purvis had been issued a passport, “but not as a colored man.”
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Clayton’s articulation of this decision shows not only the racial underpinnings of U.S. citizenship law, but also the ongoing importance of the body as evidence of identity in excess of any claim made in a document and, with it, the seeming redundancy of the “complexion” category in the passport’s physical description. While abolitionists had argued that without a passport Hambleton would be identified as an “outlaw,” their interest in the symbolic potential of a passport perhaps overemphasized not only its necessity abroad but also its practical usefulness. The “badge” a “colored man” carried in his “complexion” could potentially undercut any authority a passport could have to verify a claim to citizenship, his body identified him as democracy’s “Other.”