Born in the USA
The Civil War brought freedom to four million enslaved people. However, in January 1866, the meaning of that freedom under the law remained nebulous. The 13th Amendment, which states had ratified in December 1865, outlawed slavery. In 1857, however, the U.S. Supreme Court had in Scott v. Sandford denied citizenship to African-Americans, even those born in the United States. To Senator Lyman Trumbull (R-Illinois), the status quo—freedom without citizenship—smacked of continued involuntary servitude. The formerly enslaved born in America deserved birthright citizenship, the same as any white American enjoyed, Trumbull reasoned, and he vowed to make that reasoning a reality.
On January 5, 1866, Trumbull introduced S-61, a bill to grant citizenship to all freed slaves born in the United States. He expected Congress to pass this bill, formally known as “An Act to protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their Vindication,” and President Andrew Johnson to sign it into law.
However, citizenship proved a more divisive issue than Trumbull had envisioned, and in a controversy with echoes into the present, Congress spent months heatedly debating who deserves to be an American.
was unsettled. Foreign-born immigrants became citizens by naturalization, a process the first Congress codified in 1790 that was limited to white persons and activated only after a five-year wait. Immigrants’ children born in the United States, however, enjoyed citizenship by virtue of , “right of the soil,” regardless of parental nationality. also called birthright citizenship, had originated in England and had emigrated to the colonies with the first settlers from that nation. Still, the issue was not clear-cut, since neither the Constitution nor any statute expressly recognized or defined birthright citizenship. was assumed to be the law, its theoretical and practical contours vague.
