The framers did not include a definition of American citizenship in the Constitution.19 The meaning of citizenship in the United States received serious attention for the first time following the emancipation of millions of people from slavery, in the mid-1860s. The Supreme Court had by that time already issued its odious opinion in the Dred Scott case (1857), determining that those whose ancestors were brought as slaves to the United States could not “become a member of the political community.”20 That decision lent constitutional authority to a strand of American nativism that has surged at other moments in U.S. history, and is still reflected in laws and jurisprudence concerning American citizenship.21 To reckon with Dred Scott, “radical” Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress had to override the decision through legislation. They would do so, at nearly every turn, by likewise overriding the vehement racism and vetoes of President Andrew Jackson.22 As one historian noted: On the eve of the Civil War, nearly half a million people, the majority of them born in the United States, lived with their rights always subject to political whim and their belonging always subject to the threat of removal. We might say that they were not unlike today’s unauthorized immigrants and their children, at least to the degree that free people of color then were also a community that lived through episodes of punitive legislation and efforts to force their exile.23 The legal definition of citizenship would continue to be forged though an ignominious parade of political and popular confrontations with American racism, gender and religious hierarchies, and other forms of discrimination.24 For example, the Reconstruction Congress seethed with racist prejudice against Chinese immigrants, which infused some of the earliest sustained deliberations on the basic mechanics of American citizenship.25 Decades later, in Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court affirmed that children born to Chinese immigrant parents in the United States are U.S. citizens by birth, just as any other child born in the United States.26 Native Americans, already confined to U.S. government reservations, fell subject to the Dawes Act of 1887, trading new land allotments, covering ever-shrinking territory, for a statutory pathway to citizenship and coerced renunciation of tribal membership.27 In reality, as Rogers M. Smith observes, “Only the citizenship of white men and the quasi-citizenship of corporations remained intact as Reconstruction closed.”28 In the decades after Reconstruction, Southern states instituted a “new caste system,” through a matrix of racial segregation laws that came to be known as Jim Crow.29 The 1873 Supreme Court decision in the Slaughter-House Cases laid the groundwork for Jim Crow, by determining that the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment referred only to those rights explicitly spelled out in the Constitution, and that the clause was unenforceable with respect to the vast majority of individual rights guaranteed by state governments. The Slaughter-House Cases also undermined women’s suffrage efforts, and were cited in Susan B. I. History and Context 21