Kevin Kenny - The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States

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To my teachers

writing a book is a collaborative process. The author draws on the expertise and generosity of others and tries to share something useful in return. In the ten years I spent writing The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic, I was fortunate to receive advice, criticism, and encouragement from many friends and colleagues. My editor at Oxford University Press, Susan Ferber, pushed me hard and patiently to clarify my argument. The three anonymous reviewers assigned by the Press provided detailed and demanding critiques of the manuscript. I would also like to thank Jeremy Toynbee and India Gray. Rosanna Crocitto, Michael Crocitto Kenny, Ciaran Kenny, and Brian Malone read successive drafts and offered invaluable suggestions and emotional support. I am deeply grateful to Hidetaka Hirota for his insightful commentary and criticism at every stage of the writing. Particular thanks go to Tyler Anbinder, Katherine Carper, Eric Foner, Amanda Frost, Andrew Gerstenberger, Steven Hahn, Kate Masur, Lucy Salyer, and Michael Schoeppner, all of whom generously took the time to read my work and offer detailed comments. Bryan Willits, my research assistant, edited drafts of each chapter, checked the citations, collected the illustrations, read the proofs, and provided sound intellectual advice. For their help with various aspects of the book, I thank Eugenio Biagini, Marion Casey, Enda Delaney, Hasia Diner, Owen Dudley-Edwards, Elizabeth Ellis, Philip Erenrich, Gary Gerstle, Miriam Nyhan Grey, Caroline Heafey, Martha Hodes, Madeline Hsu, Owen Crocitto Kenny, Patrick Kenny, Anna Law, Erika Lee, Heather Lee, June Lloyd, Maddalena Marinari, Mae Ngai, Maureen OLeary, Guy Ortolano, Ann Ostendorf, Virginia Reinburg, Franziska Seraphim, and Nicholas Wolf.

I started writing The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic at Boston College and finished writing it at New York University. I would like to thank the students in my US immigration classes at both universities. We worked through a lot of the ideas in this book together. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the Advisory Board of Glucksman Ireland House and Deans Susan Antn, Thomas Carew, Una Chaudhuri, Caroline Dinshaw, and Antonio Merlo of the Faculty of Arts and Science at NYU.

While I was writing this book, I presented papers at seminars at Cambridge University, Edinburgh University, New York University, and Oxford University, and on panels organized by the Organization of American Historians and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. I am grateful to everyone who attended these events. Parts of the argument appeared in a different form in the Journal of American History and the Journal of the Civil War Era, whose editorsBen Irvin, Kate Masur, and Gregory Downshelped me understand the issues at stake and how to write about them. The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic was completed with the support of a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which gave me valuable time to write.

I dedicate this book to the historians who taught me about the nineteenth-century United States when I came to New York City as an immigrant.

As ever, my deepest debt, and not one I will try to express in words, is to the Crocitto Kennys Rosanna, Michael, Owen, and Luna.

in the united States today, the federal government controls immigration by deciding who to admit, exclude, or remove. Yet in the century after the American Revolution, Congress played only a very limited role in regulating immigration. The states patrolled their borders and set their own rules for community membership. In the Northeast, they imposed taxes and bonds on foreign paupers. In the Old Northwest (todays Midwest), they used the same methods to exclude and monitor free black people. Southern states policed the movement of African Americans, both free and enslaved, and passed laws imprisoning black sailors visiting from other states or abroad. These measures rested on the states sovereign power to regulate their internal affairs. Defenders of slavery supported fugitive slave laws but resisted any other form of federal authority over mobility across and within their borders. If Congress had the power to control immigrant admissions, they feared, it could also control the movement of free black people and perhaps even the interstate slave trade. Immigration, in other words, presented a political and constitutional problem in a slaveholding republic.

The Civil War and the abolition of slavery removed the obstacles to a national immigration policy. In two cases heard in 1875, Henderson v. New York and Chy Lung v. Freeman, the Supreme Court declared that the era of state immigration control was at an end. Yet it would be a mistake to think that, in the absence of slavery, Congress would have regulatedlet alone restrictedEuropean immigration earlier. Following the example set by the states, Congress might have excluded vulnerable newcomers, just as it did when it passed the first general immigration act in 1882. But nobody before the end of the nineteenth centurynot even the Know-Nothings in the 1850swanted to restrict European immigration numerically. Some nativists in the antebellum era called on Congress to extend the waiting period for naturalization

The catalyst was the arrival in the United States of significant numbers of immigrants from China. Starting in the 1870s, the federal government excluded Chinese laborers on antislavery grounds, deploying techniques of registration, punishment, and deportation first used to police free black people in the antebellum South. To justify these measures, the Supreme Court ruled in the Chinese Exclusion Case of 1889 that the federal governments power over immigration was inherent in national sovereignty and required no constitutional justification. This book explains how the existence, abolition, and legacies of slavery shaped immigration policy as it moved from the local to the federal level over the course of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it reveals the tangled origins of the national immigration policies we take for granted today.