#  Subjects and Citizens, Patriots and Pirates: Expatriation, Naturalization, and the Problem of Allegiance in the Revolutionary Atlantic World 

 



Douglas BradburnIn the United States in the 1790s, problems that had challenged traditional boundaries of belonging and allegiance in the Atlantic world were exacerbated when numerous American citizens began claiming a “natural right of expatriation”—a right to shed their American citizenship and participate as privateers and partisans for the French Republic. Others rejected such notions as characteristic of the worst enthusiasms of the revolutionary age, as visionary abstractions that destroyed the notion of national community entirely, and as claims that threatened to make the American people nothing more than “A band of Miserable Algerines.” British common law practice and British Admiralty policy complicated the matter even further by denying that a British subject could ever escape the responsibilities of perpetual allegiance, even by naturalization in another country. In fact however, the US population swelled in the 1790s with immigrants claiming to have abandoned their subjecthood—British and otherwise—for the promise of American citizenship. The controversies over the supposed “natural right of expatriation” in the young republic became closely linked to an international debate between “the rights of man” and the friends of order—between the advocates of Tom Paine and Edmund Burke. In the end, the polarization sparked by the controversies over expatriation in the United States helped shape the American law and policy of naturalization, as Americans confronted the problem of building a national community from the mingling of Atlantic refugees, expatriates, and aliens. By exploring a series of court cases involving such claims at all levels of jurisdiction in the United States, this essay analyzes the complex and often competing understandings of allegiance and national belonging that helped order and define the mingling of peoples in the Atlantic World.**\[WP# 04CR012\]**