Quitting the Nation: Emigrant Rights in North America

"This is a fascinating book that may seem to be on a very narrow, even abstruse, topic, but which overturns one notion that we have about the first half of the 19th century, that everybody wanted to be an American. America was drawing in all sorts of immigrants; the United States was expanding its borders and Americans moved outwards and claimed more territory. But the point Eric is making is that for Americans in the first part of the 19th century, the right to leave, the right to emigrate from the United States, was a really critical thing. If you have the right to leave, it means that the United States is truly a democratic republic and not an oppressive regime. That was an issue that was really important in this period, when there were lots of British seamen who jumped ship and latched onto American ships and declared themselves American citizens. The British government didn’t accept that as a real thing, so they would sail up alongside American ships, and if they saw anybody they knew was formerly in the British navy or formerly served on a British merchant ship, they would say, ‘You, you, and you, you’re being impressed into the British Navy.’ So the right to leave a regime and join another one was really critical. “People of the time would have seen it the same way that we see politicians today invoking the Almighty to justify a political position” One of the points that Schlereth makes about Texas is that Americans who went to Mexico were not merely half-way giving up their American citizenship, or thinking that they were the advanced guard for expansion, which is how partisans of Manifest Destiny interpretation have viewed immigration to Texas for a long time. Instead, he’s saying: this was a heartfelt belief that they were exercising their right as Americans not to be American any more. That’s what’s so counterintuitive about this. ‘I had the privilege of growing up in this place that is so free that I’m able to leave.’ He rolls into this interpretation other things as well, including the way that free blacks were able to emigrate to Canada. About 5000 went to Canada and Haiti in the first part of the 19th century. They saw this as an exercise of a privilege that they had won through freedom. Those same free blacks were very much against the forced emigration of free blacks to Liberia. Does that make sense? It may sound like it’s only tangentially connected to Manifest Destiny, but to my mind it flips on its head our whole notion of the United States expanding. This is a way of trying to put things into context, to show how Americans had a very different sense of what it meant to be an American than what we imagine they thought."