“The Premise of Our Founding”: Immigration and Popular Mythmaking

Perhaps the most well-known example of restrictive policymaking in the early republic is the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. Legislated amidst growing partisanship and Francophobia, the acts significantly narrowed access to citizenship and granted President John Adams the extraordinary power to deport any migrants considered a threat to national security. Yet, as many recent works now acknowledge, the xenophobic sentiment underlying this moment was certainly not new. Since the Revolution itself, migrants faced barriers to their settlement, rights, and citizenship across several states in the Union. In Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York, naturalized citizens were barred from political office; a policy that their national representatives later tried to enshrine in the U.S. Constitution in 1788 and again by amendment in 1798. Perhaps most tellingly, to the Connecticut legislature, it was this restrictionism that remained “an object so important to our national independence.”[4] Despite this transformation in the historiography, popular narratives of immigration at the founding remain largely unchanged. As several contributors to the JER’s roundtable on the Revolution at 250 show, this phenomenon is hardly unique to this particular field. Despite the influx of new pathbreaking work on the founding era, T. H. Breen notes, little “seems to have affected in more than a superficial way the books on the American Revolution that dominate the popular market.”[5] As a consequence, Leslie Harris adds, “the most acclaimed works for the general public on the Revolutionary era and the ‘Founding Fathers’ laud the positive aspects of the era” and, perhaps most significantly in this case, “the visionary reach of the Founders in terms of expanding the basis of citizenship.”[6] For immigration histories, this issue also extends well beyond the dissemination of popular books. Indeed, mythmaking continues to be reproduced, and often repurposed, in contemporary American political culture more generally.[7]