The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States

A powerful analysis of how regulation of the movement of enslaved and free black people produced a national immigration policy in the period between the American Revolution and the end of Reconstruction.

Today the United States considers immigration a federal matter. Yet, despite America's reputation as a "nation of immigrants," the Constitution is silent on the admission, exclusion, and expulsion of foreigners. Before the Civil War, the federal government played virtually no role in regulat...