Early US citizenship law restricted naturalization to free White persons

Evidence

Franklin’s speech and a torrent of Quaker emancipation petitions aroused a bitter boxing match over slavery in the First US Congress. It carried on for months after Franklin’s death on April 17, 1790. Black people were “indolent, improvident, averse to labor; when emancipated, they would either starve or plunder,” one congressman argued, defending the interests of southern planters who were dependent on slave labor. Blacks were “an inferior race even to the Indians,” another insisted. A northern congressman held that southerners would never submit to a general emancipation without civil war. As they argued over slavery, congressmen paused to unite for the first Naturalization Act on March 26, 1790, which limited citizenship to “free white persons” of “good character.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 318

Categorization

• XREF: The Naturalization Act — racist policy codified while congressmen simultaneously debated whether Blacks were naturally inferior — exemplifies policy-before-idea sequencing; ties to A Midwife’s Tale’s era of early US nation-building. — connects to: Common law tradition barred no aliens from jobs until 1880s legislation — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 268
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 318