In 1958, then-U.S. senator John F. Kennedy published the first version of his influential book A Nation of Immigrants.1 Kennedy’s account, written to hasten the passage of long-overdue immigration reform, solidified the mythology of the United States as a land of arrival for those looking for democracy, economic security, and the so-called American dream. It reflected a national mythology that centers the U.S. as the most desired destination. In his book Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America, historian Eric Schlereth turns this mythology on its head, viewing the U.S. not as a place of destination but as a place of departure. As such, he provides a much-needed corrective to the historical record and enhances our understanding of the legal history of citizenship and migration.
Schlereth’s account focuses on the pivotal era between the American Revolution and the Civil War, when citizenship rights were both highly contested and minimally regulated. The American Revolution itself, as Schlereth reminds us, was fought in part over rights to emigrate from Great Britain and ultimately to expatriate to the new American republic. Colonists seeking independence rejected the English legal tradition of “perpetual allegiance,” which assumed that subjects could not choose to give up their allegiance to the King. Rejecting perpetual allegiance was simple, but deciding what would replace it was not. Was it possible to have a free right of emigration and expatriation from the fledgling United States without threatening the future of the political union, or embroiling the country in unwanted foreign conflicts? How should the new nation regulate the loss of citizenship, and what should be the obligations of those seeking to give it up? These were among the questions that individuals, courts, legislators, and the press took up in the decades after the founding and which Schlereth explores in fascinating detail.
Those who chose to leave the United States and establish new communities in other lands did not have to go far: in the early republic, the United States bordered Spanish territory to the southwest and British territory to the northeast. The proximity of these colonial powers made it easy for Americans to declare allegiance elsewhere, which they did in the tens of thousands prior to the Civil War.
Law had an important part to play in these debates, but it was rarely the leading edge. As Schlereth shows, eighteenth-century legal theorists embraced a right of emigration but were fuzzy on the details. As he notes of international law at this time, “[t]he liberty to leave existed with certainty whereas the conditions that permitted lawful departure seemed open to debate.” (P. 16.) Congress tried and failed multiple times to adopt legislation relating to emigration and expatriation during this period. States like Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Virginia issued the strongest support in their state constitutions, treating the right to leave as a natural right, but they were not uniformly followed by other states. The absence of clear legal guidance meant that individuals led the way in shaping what emigration rights would mean, rather than being themselves led by law. Ultimately, it was the people who decided to use what they saw as their core right to change allegiance who shaped the law itself.
Schlereth’s account includes fascinating stories about many of these migrants. He draws on a rich trove of documents, including diaries, administrative logs, newspaper accounts, recruitment plans, and legal records, with a particular focus over time on the Spanish colonies of Upper and Lower Louisiana, the British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, and the Mexican states of Coahuila and Texas.
In each of these places, Schlereth uncovers a historical record of willing and enthusiastic migration. Those embracing the right to leave came from many sectors of American society, although the freedom to emigrate was oftentimes influenced and/or greatly limited by race, gender, and class. White propertied men had much greater access to free movement in general and could legally make decisions on behalf of those in their household. When Virginian and Revolutionary War veteran Peter Bryan Bruin moved to Natchez in 1788 in search of better land and opportunity, he brought with him his wife, children, and 20 enslaved persons. Bruin took the oath of allegiance to Spain and eventually became an official in the Spanish colonial government, but the record is silent as to whether those accompanying him would themselves have freely chosen to change their allegiance. Schlereth’s account includes many examples of men like Bruin, but he also uncovers stories of other migrants without access to the privileges of white race and/or male gender who openly embraced emigrant rights. We meet, for example, Mary Ann Shadd, a free Black woman who departed from Delaware to Canada West in 1851, attracted by the promise of fertile lands and civil and political rights for the Black population, and became an influential writer, editor, and recruiter for others to follow in her footsteps.
Individuals like Bruin and Shadd embraced a right to emigrate and were largely able to do so free of constraint by either sending or receiving countries. But as Schlereth shows, their departures caused anxiety and confusion, especially when the countries were themselves in conflict. Identifying where someone belonged and whether, for example, they would be liable for violating domestic or international law was a fraught endeavor when nation-states could not agree on the individual’s citizenship. But efforts to constrain emigration and expatriation rights in the U.S. consistently met with failure, as lawmakers were faced with the fact that tens of thousands of persons had already embraced this right and were steadfast in defending it.
For scholars of legal history, Schlereth’s account provides a fascinating example of how the exercise of a perceived right can, itself, eventually lead to the embrace of that right in law. Ultimately, the federal government rejected the idea of “collective expatriation” as practiced by states in the secessionist South in forming the Confederacy but embraced a right of individual emigration in the Expatriation Act of 1868. After reading Quitting the Nation, we understand this Act as the culmination of decades of tens of thousands of individuals choosing to shift their allegiances and defending their ability to do so.
In an insightful epilogue, Schlereth draws comparisons to today’s gaps in the legal landscape. A right to emigrate implies a right not just to leave but also to choose a new country of allegiance, but contemporary border policing and legal barriers make that choice all but impossible for most migrants. Individuals fleeing climate disasters all over the world overwhelm systems of refugee law that are outdated and ineffective in managing human movement. Time will tell whether these emigrants will, themselves, force a new reckoning in the law by exercising what they see as their human right to find a safe place to live.
