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This dissertation is a study of free African American politics, in the cities of Baltimore and Philadelphia, between 1817 and 1863. At the heart of this black politics were efforts to assert the right of free African Americans to citizenship in their native United States. Claims on the ambiguous notion of citizenship were important to free blacks both as a means of improving their own lives and as a way to combat slavery. The dissertation begins with the organized black protest against the founding of the American Colonization Society. The contest over the notion, advanced by the ACS, that free blacks were not truly American, or that they could not ever be citizens in the land of their birth, powerfully shaped the language and tactics of black politics. The dissertation ends with the enlistment of black troops in the Civil War, a development which powerfully shaped subsequent arguments for full black citizenship. It argues that in this period, free African Americans developed a rhetorical language of black nativism, the assertion that birth on American soil and the contribution of one's ancestors to the American nation, had won for African Americans the right to be citizens of the United States. This assertion was made even more resonant by the increasing levels of white immigration during this period; African Americans pointed to the injustice of granting to white immigrants that which was denied to native born blacks. This discourse of nativism served as a means of weaving the fight for black citizenship into the fabric of American politics. The dissertation also argues that the cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore were part of a distinctive borderland where the issues of slavery and black citizenship were particularly explosive, and where free African Americans, therefore, found themselves with significant political leverage. / History

This paper seeks to understand how the Seventeenth-century Lenape Indians were pushed off their Delaware River land by Europeans, starting with the so-called good colonists: the Swedes and Finns. From the time of earliest Lenape and European contact in the 1630’s through mid-century, the Lenape held power in their homeland, Lenapewhittuck, along the Delaware River. By 1700, English colonizers had succeeded in removing many Lenape from this area. A closer examination of this period reveals how the Swedes and Finns of New Sweden who in some current historiographies are promoted as ‘good colonizers,’ were anything but as they acted in their own self-interest through their focus on daily survival and individual land acquisition around the Delaware River. Their presence created conditions that attracted increased numbers of European colonizers to the area, and these colonizers through the creation of a market in land pushed the Lenape away from their homeland. Recent historiography has revealed how the Seventeenth-century Lenape Indians were a powerful group who controlled their land. By understanding the Lenape in this way, Swedish and Dutch accounts of Indian and European violence and peacemaking coalesce to reveal Lenape power in the region. ‘Seeing’ Lenape power reveals how the creation of a European land market along the Delaware was key in tipping this balance in power that ensured Lenape departure. Swedish and Finnish possession of the area, when combined with the ability to securely own the land one farmed and pass that land to heirs, invited increasing numbers of settler colonists into the area. Translated land treaties made between the Lenape, the Dutch, and the Swedes and later English land survey deeds provide evidence of the establishment of a market in land along the Delaware River. Court records from the 1650’s recorded land transactions that demonstrate the incursion of individual European settler colonists through a newly established economic condition: individual land ownership. As more Europeans entered the area to possess land through their understanding of land use, these individual settler colonists challenged former Lenape land ‘sale’ treaty terms that had included the condition of shared usufruct rights. Overtime, this understanding changed as European land owners grew to regard their possession of land as ownership, to the exclusion of other Europeans and the Lenape. / History