With its ratification in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment became the touchstone on birthright citizenship to which many of those aspiring to national belonging in the United States would turn. The application of the amendment’s birthright provision was not without controversy. Even the fine points of birthright were subject to dispute, as was apparent when the first black member of the Senate, Hiram Revels, arrived to take his seat in 1870. Had Revels been a citizen for the requisite nine years? Perhaps not, some argued, if his birthright was set in place only with the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification in 1868. Revels was seated, and the debate over his eligibility as senator signals an important shift. None of his opponents doubted that Revels was a citizen. His birthright was undisputed; the only question was when that right had vested, and the answer was that the Fourteenth Amendment made black American citizens beginning with the dates of their birth on U.S. soil. Erased was any suggestion that black men and women were still subject to arbitrary exclusion, banishment or removal, as antebellum lawmakers had strongly suggested. Still, the Fourteenth Amendment would not serve as an uncompromised weapon against inequality during the last decades of the nineteenth century. As Gary Gerstle explains in his essay for this issue, forces lined up, including those consistent with white supremacy, to limit the amendment’s meaning for black Americans.
What Congress did next helps us see how the constitutionalization of birthright citizenship still left unresolved critical facets of national belonging, even for black men and women. A nagging vestige of the pre–Civil War legal regime remained. The Naturalization Act of 1790, still in effect, limited eligibility for citizenship to free white persons: future black immigrants and longtime residents of the United States were not made citizens by way of the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright provision. Charles Sumner proposed striking the word “white” from the act. But this prospect met with opposition from those who feared that such a change would open the door to more than the naturalization of black immigrants: it might also make Chinese immigrants eligible for citizenship. The revision’s final language extended naturalization laws to “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” No new provisions regarding Chinese immigrants were included in the 1870 law, leaving a small opening through which they might win naturalization as white persons. By 1882, however, the first of the Chinese exclusion acts closed this door tight, making explicit that Chinese immigrants would remain aliens.