Citizenship is a central category of belonging and participation in liberal systems of government. Its inclusions and exclusions, the demands of its subjects and the rights that are conferred with it function as focal points in attempts at defining the meaning of democracy – a system that in contemporary debates is often declared to be in crisis. In the United States of America, those debates regularly refer back to the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and its social, political, and economic aftermaths as a foundational period for the nation’s understanding of its citizenry. On June 23 and 24, 2022, the Professorship of North American History at Erfurt University hosted the workshop “Dis-Cover Fellow Citizens: Voluntary Engagement in the Early Republic and Antebellum America”, coordinated by PIA HERZAN (Erfurt) and JÜRGEN MARTSCHUKAT (Erfurt), to illuminate conceptions of citizenship and voluntary civic engagement emerging after the nation’s inception. The workshop was organized by the subproject “Voluntariness as Political Practice: The Emerging United States and American Citizenship” of the interdisciplinary Research Unit “Voluntariness”, funded by the German Research Foundation (FOR 2983).

It is almost impossible to write a history of the early United States without accounting for its continuous territorial expansion westward. At the same time, histories of voluntary engagement and citizenship in the Early Republic (c.1780-1830) tend to focus on the already settled Northeast of the young nation. JESSICA CHOPPIN RONEY (Philadelphia, PA) addressed that historiographical imbalance in her presentation “Tocqueville by Way of Turner: The Significance of the Frontier to American Civil Society” through the juxtaposition of two of the most influential theorists of United States democracy and citizenship in the nineteenth century. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1835), posited the voluntary civic associations he encountered when traveling New England as a central source for the formation and constant regeneration of democratic society. Frederick Jackson Turner, on the other hand, highlighted the process of westward movement and the separatism, self-sufficiency and attempts at self-government of white settlers as formative and regenerative sources for United States society in his 1893 essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History. As Roney pointed out, both represent important origin stories in the social and cultural imaginary of the nation, but the former has proved far more influential as it regards the role of voluntarism and democracy in the United States’ society. In reframing that historical narrative, Roney points out that Tocqueville had a significant blind spot in his analysis: the voluntarism exhibited by white settlers moving westward, often violently and extralegally expropriating indigenous lands while at the same time forming expansionist associations aimed at providing for their own self-determination and self-sufficiency, was at times in opposition to the United States federal government itself. These settlers, venerated by Turner but often feared as security threats and exponents of a ‘tyranny of the majority’ by the political elites in the East, ultimately sparked the assumption of state-making power by the federal government against the voluntariness of frontier settlement. Therefore, Roney contented, while Tocqueville pointed to the relationship between voluntary civic associations and democracy, taking Turner into account adds a necessary third element to the equation of voluntariness and citizenship in the Early Republic: the facilitation of white supremacy and expropriation through voluntary westward expansion. In his commentary on Jessica Choppin Roney’s presentation, VOLKER DEPKAT (Regensburg) pointed to Tocqueville’s distinctly European perspective on voluntariness and elaborated on the Founders’ complicated view on the ‘tyranny of the majority’, specifically that of James Madison. Furthermore, he put Turner’s and Tocqueville’s interest in self-sufficient but associative individuals into focus and asked the audience to go beyond dichotomies of East and West when thinking about influential political thought on the Early Republic. The subsequent discussion revolved around a number of questions, specifically where else voluntariness could be located, whether there were regional differences in its conception, and how the understanding of voluntariness in its relationship to citizenship might have changed throughout the nineteenth century.

In most democratic polities, casting one’s vote stands at the nexus of voluntary action and citizenship as well as the rights and duties associated with it. In the second talk of the day, “First Reconstruction: Black Politics in the Early Republic,” VAN GOSSE (Lancaster, PA) told the complicated, conflicted and, in light of the current state of voting rights in the United States, at times eerily contemporary history of Black political participation in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States. Despite common perceptions of the time period in both public and academic histories, he argued that the Early Republic allowed for plenty of spaces for Black political power both in formal processes such as voting and in active voluntary civic engagement. Black men (gendered conceptions of citizenship still very much applied) constantly pushed for genuine republican citizenship and were often successful in doing so. Owing to the United States’ federalist constitution, the possibilities of Black participation varied from state to state and between different localities. Therefore, understanding the political system of the United States after independence as a coherent ‘White Republic’ motivated by pure racialism, Gosse contended, misses the complexities of power inherent in the politics of (dis-)enfranchisement and therefore necessitates compartmentalized case studies rather than nationalized narratives. Moving from New England and New York to Ohio and then further to Pennsylvania, Gosse encountered localities where Black men could always vote, where they gradually gained suffrage, and where they lost it, respectively. In each case, these processes were fundamentally tied to local party politics, to Black demographics and to Black political organization as they related to the contest for power. This complicated and often contradictory history suggests, Van Goose argued, that the question of Black citizenship and voting rights cannot be pressed into easy narratives of progress and therefore remains without conclusion, even today. SEBASTIAN JOBS (Berlin) asked in his comment what that history tells us about the meaning of voting for Black people in the Early Republic, specifically what role the voluntary and performative act of voting played in the subject formation of Black men as democratic citizens. Furthermore, he advocated for a shared causality of racist ideology and practical politics in understanding the history of (dis-)enfranchisement in the United States. In the following discussion with the audience, the conversation returned to racialized definitions of citizenship and questioned why the history of the franchise is being told as one of incremental progress rather than conflicts, successes, and failures with differing temporalities and geographies.

In the first talk of the second day, DEIRDRE COOPER OWENS (Lincoln, NE) put forth the nineteenth-century abolitionist and activist Harriet Tubman as a visionary embodying an alternative understanding of citizenship and democracy. Part biographical, part intellectual history, Owens, in her talk “Reshaping Freedom: How Harriet Tubman’s Abolitionism Impacted Notions of Citizenship”, found her subject to be at the center of questions regarding race, gender, spirituality, and citizenship. The process of writing Tubman’s history itself, Owens explained, illuminates the fundamental racism and violence of the archives – where Black voices are seldom preserved and often distorted. Furthermore, as enslaved people were quite intentionally kept illiterate, oral history became ever more important for African Americans to maintain an understanding of their past and presence. This holds true for Tubman, herself an escaped slave, who never learned to write or read during her long life of activism, but nevertheless left a lasting legacy, one that has to be told through those fragments that remain. That history, Owens contended, reveals profound insights into the potentialities and possibilities of Black citizenship and, ultimately, Black freedom. Tubman, who had been disabled while still enslaved, learned to express vulnerability in her reliance on other women and a broader community – both inspired by the West African cosmology of her ancestors and an optimism deriving from her Christian beliefs. As Tubman escaped slavery and in effect replicated that experience repeatedly by going back to the South saving others, she fostered what Owens terms a “Spiritual Cartography:” “The mental drawing of liberatory maps based on a Protestant God-centric human relational sense of being to one’s environment.” Helped by “Fugitive Logic,” a form of knowledge based in understanding and connection, Harriet Tubman enabled herself and others to resist the disabling logic inherent in slavery by using their environments as an advantage in a communal quest for freedom. Tubman’s notion of citizenship, fundamentally inspired by her own mission to free the enslaved of their shackles, was further manifested in her role as an institution builder. Through her voluntary civic engagement – successful efforts at community organization and relief for escaped enslaved and poor people – she built a lasting legacy that symbolized her own conception of freedom and citizenship, one rooted in belief, communalism, and mutual aid. In Tubman’s thought and practice, as a woman, a Black person, a formerly enslaved person, and an individual that remained poor throughout her life, Deirdre Cooper Owens recovered a liberatory spirit that remains powerful even today. NINA MACKERT (Leipzig) focused her commentary on the importance of Harriet Tubman’s sense of communalism in forging a notion of citizenship that moves beyond dichotomies of independence and dependence while dissolving the discursive links between freedom and ability. Through her ‘Cosmology’, Tubman might enable us to envision citizenship as a collective of human and non-human agents based in community and anti-hegemonic understandings of personhood. In the following, wide-ranging conversation with the audience, the themes of mobility, the Black voice in the archive and epistemology as well as ability and gender in their relationship to citizenship were again fruitfully discussed.

In the concluding discussion round of the workshop, the panelists and commenters from the audience picked up many of the threads of the preceding talks and conversations. It was contended that voluntariness functions as an ambivalent normative category. In liberal discourse, it has been venerated as the natural way of human action. But it is also ripe with exclusionary and ableist implications, especially when it regards the taxonomies of race and gender. Despite, or because of that fact, it has been deeply engrained into United States society and culture. At the same time, as it did in the discussions described above, it can enable debates around agency and individual choice and thereby offers spaces for the reconceptualization of voluntariness as a communal idea that moves beyond the often narrow limits of republican citizenship towards emancipatory presents and futures.

The workshop “Dis-Cover Fellow Citizens: Voluntary Civic Engagement in the Early Republic and Antebellum America” generated fruitful discussions on the nexus of citizenship and voluntariness in the United States after independence. The range of perspectives that emerge when historians of North American history move beyond the state – without losing sight of it – was a central theme illuminated during the event. Be it white settlers moving west, Black men fighting for the vote and voting, or a formerly enslaved woman freeing others and building institutions – all of them made their own sense of citizenship, democracy, and voluntary engagement. Though their envisioned futures differed significantly – white settler republics, true multiracial republican citizenship, a spiritual cosmology rooted in communalism – each of them, in their own way, in turn shaped and remade voluntariness and democracy. This then signifies the central importance of adjusting the historians’ perspective towards actors that have been obfuscated from view as they were excluded from historical narratives of voluntarily engaged citizens, thereby redefining the historiographical parameters of civic and political participation in the early United States.

Conference Overview:

Jessica Choppin Roney (Temple University): Tocqueville by Way of Turner. The Significance of the Frontier to American Civil Society
Comment: Volker Depkat (Universität Regensburg)

Van Gosse (Franklin & Marshall College): First Reconstruction. Black Politics in the Early Republic
Comment: Sebastian Jobs (Freie Universität Berlin)

Deirdre Cooper Owens (University of Nebraska-Lincoln): Reshaping Freedom. How Harriet Tubman's Abolitionism Impacted Notions of Citizenship
Comment: Nina Mackert (Universität Leipzig)

Final Discussion Round. Civic Engagement and Voluntariness in the Early Republic and Antebellum America
Moderation: Pia Herzan / Jürgen Martschukat (Universität Erfurt)
Panelists: Jessica Choppin Roney / Deirdre Cooper Owens / Van Gosse