Hello,
I'm a recent immigrant to the US, so never learned this stuff in school. I've a great understanding of the immigration process in the present day however very limited knowelege of what it was like back in the days of the founding fathers.
My main question would be, when the US Declaration of Independence was written and the US was no longer a British Colony, did everyone become a citizen? Did people have to apply? Did the founding fathers automatically become citizens? Or did this not become an issue until the Constitution was written?
When immigrants came to Elis Island, they were checked for diseases and send on their merry way, were they given papers, did they automatically become US citizens? What about the people who had already immigrated to the United states - did they become citizens automatically or did they have to naturalise?
I apologies if this is a bit of a silly question, but I've tried googling and don't come up with much, just various acts that were created after the constitution that allowed white immgrants of good moral character to naturalise 2-5 years after continual residency.
Many Thanks!
You've actually shown in the description something of an understanding of the misleading nature of this question. The Declaration served, legally, to sever the political bonds between the United Kingdom and the thirteen colonies; it didn't, again technically, create any sort of institutional framework by which the new nation might choose to organize and govern itself.
The truth is, according to John Ferling, noted academic and historian specializing in the Revolution and the years bookending it, popular American support for the war surged at the outset of hostilities but the citizens' enthusiasm began to wane almost immediately. The Continental Congress had to offer increasingly larger cash and land payments to convince men to see the fight through. They also had to offer manumission to any slaves that served a tour of duty and were honorably discharged (an action the Congress had forbidden when the fighting first begun).¹ My point in saying this is IF citizenship had somehow been bestowed on all free people at the signing of the Declaration, it wasn't really worth much. At least not in the eyes of the white men fighting the war. The Declaration also didn't confer citizenship on black slaves, as they were only granted freedom after satisfying a military obligation.
Furthermore, we must ask ourselves what a 'citizen' is. We don't ask this to be pedantic, but to actually decide what it means for us, and what it meant for the people in that time, to culturally and politically be counted among a group of people in a more or less settled geographic area. Knowing the distance between our conceptions and theirs helps us to understand. If a citizen is an individual sharing an equal amount of prerogative and obligation with the others around them, then neither the Declaration, nor the Articles of Confederation nor even the Constitution made everyone a citizen. Those documents would have made property-owning white males 21 years of age and older citizens. However, if we use a more elastic definition of citizen, then I refer you to the previous paragraph. According to an NPR interview with a Harvard professor, fighting between loyalists and patriots continued even after the armistice, and many loyalists left for Canada.² Also, author Stephanie McCurry tells us there's almost no surviving accounts of women being asked to take oaths of loyalty after the Revolutionary War.³ We can safely presuppose then, that at the end of hostilities, loyalists either left America or (mostly the men) were asked to take an oath of allegiance to the new state governments under the Articles of Confederation. The patriots and soldiers would have done this earlier during the war itself. So, we can say that after a ceasefire was reached, those loyalists that wanted to leave made their way out, those that stayed had sworn their obedience to the new nation and the Articles were adopted, then everyone was 'made' a citizen.
Ferling, John. The Myths of the American Revolution. The Smithsonian Magazine, January, 2010. (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/myths-of-the-american-revolution-10941835/)
Jasanoff, Maya int. by Martin, Rachel. National Public Radio, July 4, 2015. (http://www.npr.org/2015/07/03/419824333/what-happened-to-british-loyalists-after-the-revolutionary-war)
McCurry, Stephanie. Confederate Reckoning, p. 114. Harvard University Press, 2012.