this is a fascinating non-fiction account of how black people made efforts to be seen as, and actually be, citizens throughout the 19th C., before and after the Civil War. There is lots of information (mostly new to me), and it is written in a very readable manner. ( )

Uses stories of Baltimore’s free Blacks to explore the complicated ways in which they used citizenship claims and rights claims to reinforce each other, before and even sometimes after Chief Justice Taney declared in the Dred Scott case that Blacks could not be citizens. For example, they pointed out that white women were citizens even though white women couldn’t vote or hold property (in many places) by themselves. Black people filed petitions; they litigated; they made claims in the papers and in the streets. Those tactics didn’t always succeed, and there wasn’t always agreement about the best course of action (including leaving Maryland for the North, or Canada, or even Liberia), but they did claim the status of rights-bearing people. ( )

Very engaging reading. Martha Jones uses antebellum Baltimore with a sizable and growing population of free African-Americans as the focus of her work. In that cosmopolitan trade center in the border slave state of Maryland, she looks at how free blacks carried themselves as rights-bearing, using the law to secure types of legal rights in the face of one of the strongest state movements to deport free blacks outside the country and to encourage emigration with restrictive and disabling black laws. While considering the civic performance of everyday free blacks, Jones also attends to the larger context of the world of legal thought where black abolitionists and other’s laid claim on a theoretical basis to citizenship based on native birth. The quest for recognition that citizenship was theirs by virtue of native birth, of course, was only vouchsafed with enactment of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution after the Civil War.

If I have any hesitations about the book, it is the lingering suspicion that upon occasion it seems to me Jones hangs rather too much on slender reeds. Jones rigorously searches for further background on some of the situations she writes about, but there is often little more to go on than the barebones of legal pleadings and rulings in trial courts and commissions. Perhaps the mere usage of the courts to gain licenses or redress for injuries or to protect property is sufficient to support Jones’s thesis that “free” African-Americans used the law and the courthouse as if they had rights that white people were bound to respect before, during, and after the Dred Scott decision purported to (or was interpreted as) settle the question of their citizenship status.

All in all, an enlightening read marred only by some poor copy-editing thar failed to supply missing words and correct misspellings. ( )