During the decades before the Civil War, black conventions, which commonly described themselves as gatherings of “colored citizens,” condemned colonization and promoted the principle of “birthright citizenship” (language used by the black abolitionist Martin R. Delany in 1852). “Nothing could be plainer,” insisted the National Convention of Colored Citizens in 1843, “than that native free born men must be citizens.” Free blacks seized upon the Constitution’s requirement that the president be a “natural born Citizen” to argue that American citizenship derived from place of birth, not ancestry
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