The Passport in America: The History of a Document (27 page)

Outside of citizenship law, the attempt to enforce the documentation of citizenship according to the 1856 Act created another category of dubious citizens.
The act described the secretary of state, and diplomatic and consular officials specified by him, as the only people who could issue passports. Prior to 1856 a number of state governors and mayors, along with notary publics like Nones, had issued passports. Despite this, in 1857, in response to Taney’s Dred Scott ruling the Massachusetts senate passed an act that allowed the commonwealth to issue passports “to any citizen whatever his color may be.”
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In contrast to this deliberate action the officials who issued passports outside the authority of the secretary of state appeared to do so out of ignorance of the law or confusion over what constituted a passport. In most cases a mayor or governor expressed surprise or regret when they received a letter from the State Department pointing out the legal implication of a rhetorical flourish or an elaborately designed document.
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These passports tended to be deemed illegal owing to a combination of their appearance and the request for safe passage they contained. In many cases, local officials perceived a passport as a formal letter of introduction, and even if they modeled the documents they issued on the national passport, they did not consider any type of passport dependent on specific evidence of citizenship, nor did the people who carried these documents on their travels.

In 1889 John Jagger, a resident of Minnesota, walked into the U.S. legation in Vienna with a document that he believed provided “all the evidence necessary to establish his right to consideration as an American citizen”; instead, it made that claim, if not questionable, at least unverifiable. In this case, the diplomatic agent who declined to endorse a document issued by the governor of Minnesota admitted that, while it did not purport to be a passport, the document did “appear susceptible [under the 1856 act] to criticism as an instrument in the nature of a passport.” When he informed Jagger that he did not have a passport, and, therefore, the consulate could not endorse his document, the Minnesotan seemed “surprised to hear this and remarked that he had intended to get a passport at Washington but that his friends in St. Paul told him the Governor of Minnesota would give him a paper which would answer the same purpose and he had therefore applied and got this document.”
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In response to a letter from the State Department, the governor of Minnesota wrote that he never intended his letter to be a passport and in the future would make it clear to people requesting such a letter that it was simply a “certificate of good citizenship,” and that if they wanted a passport, they needed to apply to Washington.
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Because many people understood a passport in this manner, such an explanation would probably confuse them or fail to convince them they did not already possess a passport, as was apparently the case with Jagger. His confusion over the document he carried
was seemingly grounded in the belief that a passport served as a letter of introduction and, possibly, a letter of protection, but not a certificate of citizenship. Such a “passport” introduced and endorsed an individual—it did not provide proof of a legal identity; it allowed bearers to be known by name and reputation while they traveled abroad and carried with it the request for safe passage. In the words of the document Jagger carried, he was a “worthy and respected citizen,” which is in keeping with the governor’s description of the letter as a “certificate of good citizenship.” It more than likely made sense that such a “passport” would be issued locally, where a greater possibility existed that reputational knowledge could provide whatever form of evidence would be required.
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Citizens like Jagger had yet to learn the institutional purpose of a U.S. passport as a certificate of citizenship and, therefore, to recognize who had the authority to issue a passport that verified the legal category of U.S. citizenship.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, citizenship as an important identity for most travelers remained somewhat of a novelty, which could also only perpetuate an understanding like Jagger’s of the passport and its relationship to identity. Passport regulations were “visibly relaxed” throughout Europe from the mid-1850s.
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Demands for passports at borders practically disappeared, leaving the passport system to function (if at all) as a registration system. Under this arrangement a traveler could, on occasion, expect a request to register with local officials upon arrival in a town; registration systems often relied on the incorporation of tavern keepers into the state apparatus through the threat of fines.
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The potential for inconvenience in this unpredictable system meant that by the 1870s, while guidebooks primarily listed passports as useful at post offices and banks, or to obtain entrance to museums, they urged travelers to carry them, because a passport could still be demanded at any time.
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What remained of the passport system functioned as it had in early NineteenthCentury Europe—in an arbitrary manner heavily informed by social bias. The majority of U.S. citizens who increasingly traveled abroad as tourists thus did not need the passport they carried unless they were going to Russia or Turkey. They found them useful, however, for geting the attention of U.S. officials abroad. This was rarely for “protection,” but for assistance in the form of travel advice from officials, or to gain an invitation to ‘society.’
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In this context the passports epistolary form could only foster a perception that the passport was a document akin to a letter of introduction.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the State Department’s difficulties in positioning the passport as a certificate of citizenship came to center on an intensification of the demand for evidence of loyalty to the United States. The lack of a legal definition of what constituted loyalty and therefore an indication of what was required to prove loyalty created problems for officials who attempted to document citizenship in a consistent and standardized manner. In this void the State Department utilized the secretary of state’s right to exercise discretion in issuing passports, following its interpretation of the 1856 Act.

At the end of the century, long term State Department employee Alvey Adee summed up how the discretionary policy of passport issuance had evolved: “Discretion has been generally confined to requiring full establishment of the citizenship of the applicants, and of the conservation, in good faith, of the character of citizenship, to the end that the statute may be obeyed and that passports may issue to none but citizens.”
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The citizenship verified in a passport was therefore not determined solely through claims to birth in the United States or naturalization but also through the behavior of citizens when abroad. Officials primarily defined this “full” citizenship through loyalty in relationship to the passport as document that promised official assistance and, if necessary, protection while the bearer traveled abroad (“his right to protection as a citizen abroad will depend on his purpose to fulfill the obligations of good citizenship, whereof allegiance is the highest”).
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For State Department officials, the right to protection existed within a liberal conception of citizenship as a reciprocal and active relationship between citizen and state; “if the applicant has no intention of performing the duties of an American citizen he has no just claim for a certificate of such citizenship.”
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In the context of this policy loyalty was more easily defined for citizens who applied in the United States. The State Department took their U.S. residence as evidence of loyalty, which continued to be verified through an oath of allegiance. However, this criterion produced a particularly vexing problem when “citizens” applied to renew a passport while abroad. The exercise of discretion in passport renewals for U.S. citizens living abroad long term, particularly naturalized citizens residing in their country of birth, produced another type of dubious citizen. The origin of the word “dubious,” the Latin
dubius
, meaning moving alternately in two opposite directions, from the word
duo
, conveys the doubtful loyalty that department officials perceived in these “citizens.” The State Department came to understand long-term
residence abroad as potential evidence of reduced allegiance, and therefore a questionable entitlement to the protection offered by the passport. These “dubious citizens” only became visible when they sought to renew their U.S. passport while abroad.
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Thus, in large part passport policy developed through diplomatic and consular correspondence, particularly in response to actual and potential consequences of claims to protection that U.S. officials received from citizens living abroad, not from the short-term travelers for whom the passport was thought to exist.

The State Department’s association of protection with loyalty caused passport policy to become intertwined with broader attempts to define expatriation in a world of increased mobility. Government and legal officials read the 1868 Naturalization Act as granting citizens the right to expatriation through the “abandonment of perpetual allegiance” even if this right was not intentionally exercised through long-term residence abroad.
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However, the act did not outline how citizens could expatriate themselves, voluntarily or otherwise.
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In 1873, in a long letter, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish informed President Ulysses Grant this gap in the law produced “much doubt and correspondence” for the State Department and its diplomatic and consular officials, especially in response to the “constant occurrence” of naturalized citizens who had permanently returned to their former homeland.
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That many of the applications to renew expired U.S. passports only originated as part of an attempt by the applicant (and his sons) to avoid the military service his former homeland required of its citizens only encouraged such misgivings.

In attempting to determine loyalty in applications from long-term foreign residents, officials decided that expatriation did not require an explicit renunciation of citizenship; citizens could expatriate themselves through the “silent withdrawal” of long-term residence outside of the United States.
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This raised the question of when absence from the U.S. became long-term and therefore turned into an exercise of the right to expatriation. The State Department determined that it was after two years; hence in 1873 it extended the validity of a passport to two years. This time frame was based on naturalization treaties the U.S. had signed with individual countries. However, Fish argued in his letter to Grant that in the absence of a specific law, this did not “relieve the decision in each case of much embarrassment and of much doubt”; it would be another thirty years before Congress passed a law defining expatriation.
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The absence of any law outlining the criteria for expatriation hindered the already hesitant attempts to document citizenship as an administrative fact within clearly defined bureaucratic practices of objectivity and standardization.
The documentation of identity relied on a stable and fixed identity, or, to be more precise, it produced a stable and fixed identity, to allow for verification. The frustration within the State Department stemmed from the concern that, without standardized criteria for determining citizenship, the passport could not gain authority as a reliable certificate of citizenship. Lacking this, the issuance of passports came to depend on the particularities of specific case, which meant in those cases it relied on more “localized” forms of identification in contrast to the ongoing attempts within the United States to centralize its issuance. In the absence of standardized criteria, the department came to believe that each application had to be considered on its own merits, hence the potential for “much embarrassment” and “much doubt.” With loyalty and expatriation positioned as critical to a citizenship defined beyond the fact of birth or naturalization, the issuance abroad of a passport as a certificate of citizenship pushed passport policy into the realm of subjective judgment.

Determining each case on its own merits meant that the evaluation of citizenship beyond the “fact” of either birth or naturalization became the responsibility of U.S. officials abroad. The manner in which consular and diplomatic officials were appointed did not guarantee confidence in their judgment—in fact such officials frequently inspired as little confidence as notaries did in domestic passport issuance. According to one senior department official, there were two classes of inefficiency within the diplomatic and consular service: the first was a lack of natural qualifications and experience, and inadequate professional education; the second was apathy and indifference.
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Consular and diplomatic officials were not appointed on the basis of a merit system.
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For all intents and purposes, they were appointed on the basis of proximity—in the case of consuls, proximity to a specific geographic location, and for diplomats, proximity to political influence and wealth. Most consuls were “commission merchants” who were appointed by the government to assist in the expansion of U.S. trade. Few consulates were established on the initiative of the federal government. Instead, when a merchant arrived at a port to discover a lack of U.S. representation, he lobbied for an appointment in the name of U.S. trade, frequently also in an attempt to increase the local prestige of his own name. While consuls did not always have the responsibility to issue passports they did have to assess whether a passport holder was entitled to aid and protection and the exact nature of that aid and protection. Diplomats were appointed on the basis of political connections. Wealth was a prerequisite for these ministers and consul-generals. The U.S. government tended not to own any residences abroad; therefore, in the first few weeks of their appointment, ministers (from 1893 the United States
appointed ambassadors) and consul-generals looked for whatever accommodation they could afford. As a consequence of this system of appointment, people with no training and limited knowledge frequently made judgments on the status of citizenship applications. This arguably became less likely after the introduction of merit systems for the diplomatic and consular services early in the twentieth century, though these reforms were more immediately successful in the consular service.
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A lack of any books that outlined citizenship law, especially as it related to the issuance of passports in consulates or embassies, compounded this ignorance; hence the importance of Hunt’s 1898 digest of passport policy.
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This was further exacerbated by a reluctance on the part of some secretaries of state to issue circulars, owing to fear of having to deal with the correspondence such documents generated from consuls and diplomats “eager” to understand the applicability of the new rules to their purportedly unique situation.
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