2025/06/01 by M. Scott Heerman · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #Asian American and Pacific Histories #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jaaf001
openalex publication_date 2025/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In 1848 and 1853, respectively, two Black men illegally enslaved in Cuba sought out the U.S. consul in Havana as a potential ally in their legal petitions for freedom. John Lytle and Ben Newton claimed consular protection based on their free birth on U.S. soil. Upon arriving at the consular office in Havana, Newton identified himself as “a man born free in a civilized country,” declaring, “I was born free in the city of Charleston.” The U.S. consuls, for their part, recognized these men as U.S. subjects and elected to “extend [them] the protection of the American flag.” This was perhaps unexpected, because the consuls who handled their respective cases were southern proslavery Democrats, not champions of Black rights. The men's cases, therefore, posed a dilemma. Neither consul wanted to bestow citizenship protections to the African American men who could, in turn, lobby for rights when they returned to the United States. Yet they also did not want to place the men beyond consular jurisdiction and render them stateless, forsaking U.S. sovereignty over the two individuals. In search of a solution, State Department officials, both on the ground and in places of power in Washington, D.C., relied on a legal category between citizen and alien, maintaining a division between the rights of citizens and the protections that native-born individuals could access. This outcome allowed the consuls to confer practical benefits to Lytle and Newton, assert U.S. power over them abroad, and simultaneously maintain the color line domestically.1