ABSTRACT
The Justice and Jurisprudence: An Inquiry Concerning the Constitutional Limitations of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and the discussion of African-American fiction and essays throughout this chapter, suggest how deeply "American" African Americans felt themselves to be and how difficult it must have been for any other "nationalism" to take a foothold in their community in the nineteenth century. Throughout the nineteenth century, blacks were creating other narratives about their sojourn in America. In fact, to understand black bourgeois attitudes toward citizenship at the end of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to recognize that a shift in reference had taken place in the African-American community during reconstruction. Throughout the antebellum period, African Americans praised the natural law sentiments of the Declaration and deplored the compromises visited on their lives by the constitutional provisions protecting slavery. It was the post-Reconstruction return of these assertions to the forefront of a national consciousness that threatened African-American citizenship.
