Becoming a Citizen: Reconstruction Era Regulation of African American Marriages

Because the status "citizen" had both legal and moral content for nineteenth-century republicans, the transition of Black people from slave to citizen was not something the larger culture regarded as self-executing upon ratification of the Thirteen and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Rather, even to progressives of this era, citizenship was something that had to be cultivated in Black people. In this article, the author aims to show how the institution of marriage was viewed as one of the primary instruments by which citizenship was both developed and managed in African Americans.