“They Are Their Citizens and Must Submit to Their Government”: Citizenship and the Creation of the Federal Government, 1776–1787

The American War for Independence scrambled the concept of political allegiance and belonging. In James H. Kettner’s apt phrase, “subjects became citizens.” Where British law denied the possibility that a subject could renounce the obedience owed to their sovereign, Americans asserted through force of arms “the right to choose their allegiance.” 1 Influenced by a contractual notion of political compact and by the mayhem of a violent civil war, people shuffled and sometimes reshuffled into camps of revolutionaries, loyalists, and neutrals. 2