State, Citizenship, and Territory: The Legal Construction of Immigrants in Antebellum Massachusetts

KUNAL M. PARKER

Modern citizenship—understood in terms of the formal legal distinction between "citizen" and "alien"—functions as a barrier to the individual's territorial rights. In other words, it determines whether a given individual does or does not enjoy unimpeded rights of access to, and presence within, the territory that the state calls its own. In this capacity, it is wielded efficiently, systematically, and even brutally against individuals who seek to fashion better lives for themselves by moving into, or remaining within, the territories of states other than their "own." In the contemporary West, entirely as a matter of routine, millions are kept out of, and removed from, the territories of states on the ground that they are not citizens of the states in question.	1
Given the staggering human costs associated with citizenship's role as a barrier to the individual's territorial rights, one might expect this aspect of modern citizenship to feature prominently in historical renderings of American citizenship, particularly in light of the United States's romantic self-representation as a "nation of immigrants." However, one would be bitterly disappointed. Within the hegemonic liberal historiography of American citizenship, the narrative of citizenship is confidently plotted from the "inside." Thus, citizenship acquires meaning principally in terms of the experiences of individuals already inside a territorial community organized on the basis of citizenship, whether these happen to be those to whom "full membership" was historically available (propertied white males) or those from whom "full membership" was historically withheld (indigent white males, women, and racial minorities). In this rendering, modern immigration laws—laws founded upon citizenship's role as a barrier to territorial rights— are criticized insofar as they display obviously "illiberal" characteristics (Chinese exclusion being the most striking example). But they are not examined insofar as they instantiate the general legal relationship between citizenship and territory in the first place.	2
From this "inside" perspective, it is possible to imagine American citizenship as a category that has to do principally with the rich delights of membership, empowerment, and inclusion. Thus, Rogers Smith, in his extremely impressive recent canvassing of U.S. citizenship laws, represents his object of study as follows:	3
Citizenship laws—laws designating the criteria for membership in a political community and the key prerogatives that constitute membership—are among the most fundamental of political creations. They distribute power, assign status and define political purposes. They create the most recognized political identity of the individuals they embrace, one displayed on passports scrutinized at every contested border. They also assign negative identities to the "aliens" they fence out. The attention people give to national citizenship reflects the hard-boiled reality that governments are more likely to use their powers to aid those who are their citizens than those who are not. . . . Citizenship laws also literally constitute—they create with legal words—a collective civic identity. They proclaim the existence of a political "people" and designate who those persons are as a people, in ways that often become integral to individuals' senses of personal identity as well. As this passage illustrates, Smith understands citizenship as a category that is primarily positive: citizenship acquires meaning insofar as it creates a political identity, constitutes a civic identity, proclaims the existence of a "people," becomes integral to the individual's sense of personal identity, and so on. Smith's project is devoted principally to showing how barriers of race, ethnicity, and gender have historically prevented individuals from acceding to a legal status endowed with such positive potential. The fact that citizenship laws, in his words, "also assign negative identities to the 'aliens' they fence out" (my emphasis)—and especially the fact that citizenship generally functions as a barrier to the individual's territorial rights—is treated as incidental to what citizenship is "really" all about. Accordingly, it receives scant treatment in his work.1
Liberal historians' lack of attention to the way in which American citizenship became a barrier to the individual's territorial rights is attributable, in my view, to their being comfortable with, or at least not excessively troubled by, citizenship's thoroughly routinized functioning as a barrier to the individual's territorial rights. From their perspective, the "fact" of an individual's initial location vis-à-vis a territorial community already organized on the basis of citizenship somehow determines the relative moral urgency of that individual's claims upon the community, or at least the relative necessity of representing that individual's claims. Thus, Judith Shklar makes it clear that the claims of those initially located outside the boundaries of a territorial community organized on the basis of citizenship (immigrants) are less deserving of her attention than the claims of those initially located inside such a territorial community (women, racial minorities, and others). In discussing why she elects to focus upon the historical experience of domestic groups rather than that of immigrants, Shklar writes: "The history of immigration and naturalization policies is not . . . my subject. It has its own ups and downs, but it is not the same as that of the exclusion of native-born Americans from citizenship."2	4
This slighting of immigrants' claims because of their initial location vis-à-vis a territorial community organized on the basis of citizenship becomes especially acute when immigrants seek to enter, and remain within, territory. Thus, in his previous work, Rogers Smith has invested the contemporary American state's withholding of territorial rights on the basis of citizenship with the moral valence of a self-governing community's right to refuse access to outsiders. For Smith, the problem with "illegal aliens" is that they do not have the community's "consent" to enter its territory. He does not view the fact that citizenship generally functions to deny these individuals territorial rights as any kind of problem. Rather, what is at issue is assuring the integrity of the community's "consent" to admitting new members.3	5
This article attempts to restore to the history of American citizenship a dimension generally neglected within the hegemonic liberal historiography of citizenship, namely the heavily contested process through which citizenship came to function—through the propagation of hegemonic state discourses and the creation of state legal-bureaucratic structures—as a barrier to the individual's rights to enter, and remain within, territory. It explicitly characterizes the emerging relationship between citizenship and territory as a state strategy for refusing indigent resident immigrants' claims upon the community. To this end, it shows (a) how the state began at a discrete historical moment to curtail incoming immigrants' access to, and resident immigrants' presence within, its territory on the ground that they lacked citizenship in ways that were carefully tailored to refuse indigent resident immigrants' claims upon the community and (b) how the state's curtailment of incoming and resident immigrants' territorial rights on the ground that they lacked citizenship was of a piece with—indeed was only one among—a range of state strategies designed to refuse indigent resident immigrants' claims upon the community, all of which rested upon the state's strategic representation of citizenship as a marker of the legitimacy of claims. In so doing, this article aims to supplement the liberal representation of American citizenship as a category constituted positively in terms of membership, empowerment, and inclusion with a representation of American citizenship as a category constituted negatively in terms of refusal, rejection, and exclusion. Furthermore, it shows how citizenship could take the form of pure refusal, a refusal of resident immigrants' claims as aliens unaccompanied by, indeed entirely divorced from, any corresponding recognition of natives' claims as citizens.	6
As should be obvious, the characterization of the emerging relationship between citizenship and territory as a strategy for refusing resident immigrants' claims upon the community has implications for the view that makes the relative moral urgency of an individual's claims upon the community depend upon his initial location vis-à-vis a territorial community organized on the basis of citizenship. If the relationship between citizenship and territory was itself forged to refuse indigent resident immigrants' claims upon the community—in other words, if a territorial community organized on the basis of citizenship was itself brought into being to refuse indigent resident immigrants' claims upon the community—how can the "fact" of an individual's initial location vis-à-vis such a community possibly determine by itself the relative moral urgency of his claims upon the community and the relative necessity of representing such claims?	7
These themes are explored in a study of the changing legal constructions of immigrants in Massachusetts between 1780 and 1860. The choice of Massachusetts as the object of this study is hardly accidental. Massachusetts ranked after New York as the most important receiving point for immigrants in the antebellum north. Its extraordinarily well-developed legislative discussion surrounding the emerging problem of immigration affords a particularly rich ground for studying the various tensions that beset the historical construction of American citizenship as a barrier to territorial rights in particular and as a marker of the legitimacy of claims in general.4	8
According to the conventional account, between 1780 and 1860, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was compelled to develop a legal-bureaucratic immigration regime and, hence, to restrict the territorial rights of individuals on the ground of citizenship as the only reasonable way of coping with the social problems attending the rise of mass immigration.5 While it is difficult to argue with the fact that the development of a legal-bureaucratic immigration regime in Massachusetts had everything to do with the social problems attending mass immigration into the state—and no such attempt will be made here—this account completely erases the tortured process through which the Commonwealth, through the propagation of hegemonic state discourses and construction of state legal-bureaucratic structures, made citizenship a barrier to individuals' territorial rights and a marker of the legitimacy of their claims upon the community.	9
Between 1780 and 1860, principally in order to manage resident immigrants' claims for a kind of "social citizenship" in the form of poor relief, the Commonwealth made citizenship a barrier to individuals' territorial rights and a marker of the legitimacy of their claims upon the community.6 However, in doing so, it was compelled to confront—and overcome—the formidable legacy of the Massachusetts poor laws. Long before the emergence of immigration as an autonomous problem, the colonial poor laws constituted the most significant legal system that regulated both individuals' territorial rights and claims for poor relief. Within this system, the basis of determining these rights and claims was the legal concept of "settlement," rather than citizenship, and the territorial unit of settlement was the town, rather than the province.7	10
Within the highly decentralized colonial system of poor relief administration, at least theoretically, every individual possessed a settlement in, or "belonged to," a particular town, which meant that he had legally recognized claims only upon that town's treasury for purposes of poor relief and legally recognized rights of residence only within the territory of that town.8 Vis-à-vis other towns, every town was compelled to recognize the claims and rights of those who possessed settlements therein. While this system was officially represented as a judicious means of distributing individuals among the various towns for purposes of poor relief—in other words, as a way for the provincial authorities to administer poor relief through the towns—it would be a considerable mistake to view the towns as passive instruments of the provincial authorities.	11
Although settlement laws promulgated at the provincial level spelled out how an individual might acquire a settlement in a particular town, in both law and practice towns were acknowledged to have a keen interest in regulating the size and composition of their "settled" populations. Accordingly, they were endowed with the legal power to restrict outsiders' territorial rights. Outsiders were specifically understood as all individuals lacking a settlement in the town, rather than as individuals lacking citizenship. The category of outsiders thus included individuals from neighboring towns, other colonies, and places "beyond sea."9	12
The relationship between a town's regulation of the size and composition of its "settled" population, on the one hand, and its policing of outsiders' territorial rights, on the other hand, was driven by the impulse to protect the town treasury from the claims of poor outsiders. However, it made sense only in the context of the colonial settlement laws themselves. For much of the eighteenth century, uncontested physical presence within the territory of the town was a legal basis for acquiring settlement. The settlement laws provided that an individual who resided within the territory of the town for a requisite period without being given formal notice to leave,10 or who arrived within the territory of a town by ship from "beyond sea,"11 automatically acquired a settlement therein by virtue of his physical presence within the territory of the town. In order to enable towns to avoid the charges associated with the influx of outsiders who might acquire settlements on the basis of uncontested physical presence within their territories, towns were endowed with two distinct kinds of legal power to regulate individuals' territorial rights. First, with respect to outsiders who sought to move into a town from other towns or colonies, a town could provide individuals with formal notice to leave, thereby cutting short the requisite period of uncontested physical presence within the territory of the town, and then have them physically removed to their town of settlement, or to the colony from which they came, through a process known as "warning out."12 Second, with respect to outsiders who sought to move into a town from "beyond sea," a town could demand information about such individuals from shipmasters, collect fines, forfeitures, and penalties if shipmasters failed to comply with its requests, and demand indemnities from shipmasters to cover expenses if the individuals they had transported ever turned to the town for assistance.13 During the colonial period, at least in comparison with colonies to the south, migration into New England from "beyond sea" was not great. The principal targets of the towns' policing of outsiders' territorial rights were thus the inhabitants of other Massachusetts towns and, to a lesser extent, other colonies.14	13
As these arrangements suggest, in colonial Massachusetts, towns constituted the salient territorial unit, a unit that was organized on the basis of settlement. As a distinct corporate entity, the provincial government played only a minimal direct role in regulating individuals' territorial rights, precisely because it played only a minimal direct role in meeting the claims of paupers. From the seventeenth century, the provincial government had borne the expense of supporting individuals who did not possess settlements in any town. Towns were required to support such individuals when they needed assistance and to submit accounts for reimbursement to the provincial authorities. However, for much of the eighteenth century, these accounts for reimbursement took the form of unsystematized petitions from local poor relief officials that varied widely in narrative, supporting documents, and so on. Their very lack of standardization suggests their relative insignificance.15	14
The economic crisis following the American Revolution compelled a reconfiguration of systems of poor relief administration in all the states such that state governments came to play a greater role vis-à-vis smaller units of administration such as towns, parishes, and so on.16 Massachusetts was no exception. In 1794, the Massachusetts General Court revised the settlement laws in ways that effectively diminished town control over who was able to obtain a settlement but at the same time—undoubtedly to accommodate the interests of the towns—made settlement extremely difficult for outsiders to obtain. As a result, greater numbers of outsiders found it difficult to obtain a settlement in Massachusetts. When such outsiders fell into need, they became the charge of the Commonwealth and were labeled "state paupers" to distinguish them from "town paupers." However, notwithstanding the greater responsibility assumed by the Commonwealth, claims upon the community and territorial rights were thought of principally in terms of settlement. In late eighteenth-century Massachusetts, there was no sense, either through the propagation of hegemonic state discourses or through the creation of state legal-bureaucratic structures, that citizenship was the marker of claims upon the community and a barrier to territorial rights. Furthermore, the responsibility for administering poor relief and regulating territorial rights remained entirely in the hands of town poor relief officials as part of a thoroughly decentralized system.	15
By the 1830s, with the onset of mass immigration, the state pauper category had grown and had come to consist overwhelmingly, albeit never exclusively, of immigrants. Around this time, even though the state pauper category continued to be constituted in terms of settlement (and thus contained large numbers of citizens who had been unable to obtain a settlement in Massachusetts), the Commonwealth developed official discourses of citizenship, foreignness, and cultural difference that sought to represent state paupers' claims upon the community as illegitimate as the claims of aliens. Within these official discourses, citizenship came to be endowed with a certain valence as a marker of the legitimacy of the individual's claims upon the community. However, the object was specifically to deny moral responsibility for resident immigrant paupers rather than to recognize moral responsibility for native paupers.	16
These official discourses of citizenship, foreignness, and cultural difference served to legitimize a wide-ranging effort designed to reduce state pauper expenses by specifically targeting immigrants, whether resident immigrants or incoming immigrants. As part of this effort, the Commonwealth suddenly began to manipulate resident and incoming immigrants' territorial rights in carefully tailored ways on the ground that they were aliens. Thus, citizenship emerged as a barrier to the individual's territorial rights. With the express object of deterring resident immigrants from seeking poor relief, the Commonwealth sought to invoke their lack of rights in territory as aliens at the precise moment when they turned to public authorities for assistance. Furthermore, while the Commonwealth did not attempt to prevent incoming immigrants from entering its territory, it charged them a fee as aliens seeking to enter its territory in order to create a fund to defray the cost of supporting state paupers.	17
Unfortunately, the Commonwealth's attempt to shift state pauper expenses onto resident and incoming immigrants by manipulating their territorial rights as aliens remained condemned to failure so long as the administrative responsibilities for regulating territorial rights and dispensing poor relief remained entirely in the hands of town poor relief officials. From the perspective of town poor relief officials, settlement was meaningful principally because it permitted them to refuse responsibility for individuals who lacked settlement. It did not instill in them any corresponding willingness to accept the claims of individuals who possessed settlements. This translated into two distinct postures, both of which were exceedingly troublesome from the perspective of the Commonwealth. On the one hand, town poor relief officials adhered steadfastly to the logic of settlement when it came to refusing the claims of state paupers, that is, paupers who did not possess a settlement in a Massachusetts town. Rather than seeing immigrant paupers in terms of the state-level discourses of citizenship, foreignness, and cultural difference that represented the claims of immigrant paupers as illegitimate as the claims of aliens, town poor relief officials saw immigrant paupers quite simply as the legal responsibility of the Commonwealth. This led to considerable laxity in their enforcement of state directives regarding the curtailment of immigrants' lack of territorial rights as aliens, which was a constant source of concern to Commonwealth officials. On the other hand, town poor relief officials failed to adhere to the logic of settlement when it came to recognizing the claims of town paupers, that is, paupers who did possess a settlement in a Massachusetts town. They exploited to the fullest extent the possibilities afforded by a decentralized system in which they were expected to administer poor relief to state paupers, submit accounts for reimbursements to the Commonwealth with respect to such state paupers, and collect reimbursements from the Commonwealth. Where they could, with the object of shifting the costs of supporting town paupers onto the Commonwealth, they surreptitiously represented town paupers as state paupers in their requests for reimbursement from the Commonwealth. Thus, as the Commonwealth tried to shift state pauper expenses onto immigrants by manipulating their territorial rights as aliens, the towns constantly inflated state pauper expenses by shifting their own poor relief expenses, that is, the expenses of supporting town paupers, onto the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth's frustration with these practices led to its decision to construct a centralized legal-bureaucratic immigration apparatus, as well as a centralized legal-bureaucratic poor relief apparatus for immigrants, in the years around 1850. As demonstrated below, this decision to centralize is noteworthy precisely because it underscores the functioning of citizenship as a gesture of pure refusal directed against immigrants.	18
As many will recognize, what is being attempted here bears some affinity with the work of theorists of the development of modern citizenship in Europe, who have long focused on the way in which citizenship came to function as a barrier to territorial rights. In his justly celebrated work, Rogers Brubaker shows how, with the decline of both local responsibility for the poor and a traditional social order that had hampered geographic mobility, nineteenth-century German states developed notions of citizenship as a barrier to the individual's territorial rights in order to distinguish "their" poor from the poor of other states. However, there is one difference between Brubaker's work and this article. In Brubaker's rendering, the emergence of citizenship as a barrier to territorial rights is represented as more or less inevitable, the product of an unstoppable interstate system endowed with its own invincible logic. It does not originate in a strategy of refusal directed against certain individuals already inside the territorial community. Thus, Brubaker states: "[C]itizenship, as a formally defined, externally bounded membership status, was not the product of the internal development of the modern state. Rather, it emerged from the dynamics of interstate relations within a geographically compact, culturally consolidated, economically unified, and politically (loosely) integrated state system."17 By contrast, this article is concerned with excavating the insidious politics of deploying citizenship strategically against certain members of a given community and with underscoring the costs, contingencies, and tensions associated with this deployment. It resists accounts of the development of citizenship as a barrier to territorial rights that rest upon summary invocations of an "interstate system" represented as a telos.	19
The account offered here hews closely to specific legal and institutional arrangements in antebellum Massachusetts. While systems of poor relief administration in the colonies were roughly comparable, after the American Revolution they developed along different tracks. In the antebellum north, most states followed either the model of Massachusetts (a town-based system) or the model of New York (a county-based system). As one might expect, these two states developed distinct legal responses to managing the problem of immigrant pauperism.18 It is hoped that the experience of Massachusetts, while important for its own sake, will shed light on the way in which American citizenship became a barrier to territorial rights specifically as a gesture of refusal, exclusion, and rejection directed against immigrants.	20
Before proceeding, it is necessary to draw attention to an issue that will not be discussed at any length in this article. As is well known, at the time of its creation, the U.S. Constitution transferred to the federal government the power to promulgate "a uniform rule of naturalization" but left questions of authority over immigration entirely open as between the federal and state governments.19 During the first half of the nineteenth century, as part of a broader judicial attempt to define the respective spheres of authority of the federal and state governments over questions of interstate and foreign commerce, the states' power to regulate immigration was increasingly cast into question.20 However, the signals from the U.S. Supreme Court were contradictory. In 1837, in Mayor of New York v. Miln, the Supreme Court upheld a New York law requiring masters of ships arriving in New York City to report passenger information and to post bonds for passengers who might become chargeable to the city.21 By contrast, in 1849, in the celebrated Passenger Cases, the Supreme Court struck down as an unconstitutional infringement on the federal Commerce Power New York and Massachusetts laws that taxed incoming aliens.22 Although these developments are discussed to the extent that they impinged upon Massachusetts, they are not themselves a focus of this article. Undoubtedly, they affected Massachusetts legislators' sense of how far they could go in restricting immigrants' territorial rights as aliens. At least since the 1830s, Massachusetts legislators were aware of potential constitutional difficulties attending their authority to restrict immigration in its entirety. In 1835, a legislative committee appointed to consider the subject of "pauper immigration" declared: "That they do not think it possible that this State or any other State individually, can constitutionally make or carry into practice, laws, which will 'effectually' attain the object sought after. . . . They think, however, that individual states can do much towards checking this great evil, and that the government of the United States can do the remainder."23 As will be seen, Massachusetts authorities in fact did "much towards checking this great evil" at a time when United States authorities did very little. An awareness of the shifting constitutional doctrine limiting their efforts does not diminish the importance of what they accomplished.	21
This article is organized chronologically. First, it describes the politics surrounding the reconfiguration of the settlement law in the late eighteenth century. Second, for the period between 1820 and 1850, it describes the Commonwealth's propagation of discourses of citizenship representing immigrants' claims as illegitimate as the claims of aliens and its efforts to manipulate immigrants' territorial rights as aliens; it then discusses the Commonwealth's conflicts with the towns and the way these conflicts subverted the Commonwealth's efforts to shift state pauper expenses onto immigrants. Third, for the period between 1850 and 1860, it describes the Commonwealth's centralization of control over immigration and poor relief. Finally, it points to the way that immigration law outgrew the poor laws and concludes with some observations on modern citizenship as a gesture of refusal vis-à-vis immigrants.	22
I. The Politics of Settlement in the Late Eighteenth Century
In the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, Massachusetts towns experienced a severe poor relief crisis as hundreds returned from the conflict to a maritime economy crippled by the loss of British markets. In response to the crisis, the settlement laws—the laws that spelled out the means through which individuals obtained settlements in towns—underwent prolonged legislative scrutiny during the late 1780s and early 1790s and were finally revised definitively in 1794.	23
Late nineteenth-century scholars were quick to condemn the 1794 settlement law as an atavistic impediment to the development of a mobile industrial labor force.24 In fact, it was a carefully engineered compromise between the Commonwealth and the towns that diminished the towns' discretionary control over settlement, on the one hand, and made settlement extremely difficult to obtain, on the other hand. However, in order to appreciate the significance of the departure represented by the 1794 settlement law, it is necessary to have some sense of the preceding settlement regime.	24
For much of the eighteenth century, as stated earlier, outsiders were able to acquire a settlement in a Massachusetts town on the basis of uncontested physical presence within the territory of the town. If outsiders could demonstrate this for a statutorily mandated length of time, or if they arrived within the territory of a town by ship from "beyond sea," they were deemed to have obtained a settlement therein. However, during the economic crisis of the late 1760s, undoubtedly under pressure from the towns, the Massachusetts General Court dramatically revised the settlement law to remove uncontested physical presence completely as a mode of obtaining settlement;25 around this point it also appears to have jettisoned the principle that outsiders arriving within the territory of a town by ship from "beyond sea" automatically obtained a settlement therein.26 Thereafter, regardless of how long an outsider might have lived, worked, and paid taxes in any particular town, he could no longer obtain a settlement therein on the basis of physical presence alone. Instead, an outsider would have to obtain the "approbation of the town, at a general meeting of the inhabitants for [the individual's] dwelling there."27 Thus, after 1767, towns came to enjoy virtually unfettered control over the size and composition of their "settled" populations. As towns had little to gain by conferring settlement upon an outsider, this led to a situation in which outsiders, who were for the most part migrants from other Massachusetts towns, could almost never obtain settlements in the towns in which they lived, worked, and paid taxes. In the 1780s and 1790s, the Massachusetts General Court determined to remedy this undesirable situation. The culmination of its legislative effort, the 1794 settlement law, significantly diminished towns' discretionary control over settlement through the reintroduction of various general legal criteria for obtaining a settlement. But at the same time it acknowledged the towns' interests by making settlement extremely difficult to acquire.	25
As part of the effort to make settlement difficult to acquire, citizenship entered the settlement laws. The 1794 settlement law represented a departure from all earlier settlement laws insofar as it introduced citizenship of "this, or any of the United States" as a prerequisite to the obtaining of settlement.28 However, citizenship was attached to only a few of the several legal modes of obtaining settlement. Where settlement was obtained on the basis of some preexisting legally recognized incorporation into the lived community of the town—marriage, parentage, service as a town officer, service as a clergyman, town approbation, and apprenticeship—citizenship was explicitly not made a prerequisite to the acquisition of settlement.29 By contrast, where settlement was to be obtained by a complete outsider—an individual who could not claim any preexisting legally recognized incorporation into the lived community of the town—citizenship was explicitly made a prerequisite to the acquisition of settlement.30	26
How might we interpret the emergence of citizenship as a prerequisite to the specific modes of settlement made available to the complete outsider? From the contemporary perspective, inured as we are to the ways in which citizenship functions as a barrier to territorial rights, the fact that citizenship was linked to the specific modes of obtaining a settlement made available to the complete outsider might be interpreted as a straightforward instantiation of membership—only those who belonged to the political community should be allowed to obtain settlements, and hence territorial rights. But this interpretation would ignore the uses, meanings, and valences of citizenship in late eighteenth-century Massachusetts. It would paint over the politics behind introducing citizenship in a settlement law promulgated in deference to the interests of towns. In the absence of a complete legislative record on the subject, it might be productive to view the linking of citizenship to settlement in the 1794 settlement law in terms of the intimate connection between citizenship and real property.	27
From the perspective of the late eighteenth-century Massachusetts town, outsiders, commonly referred to as "foreigners," were firmly interpreted in terms of settlement rather than in terms of citizenship. This specific understanding of "foreignness" as a category defined in terms of settlement survived into the early nineteenth century.31 Citizenship was not a marker of—and hence by itself not a barrier to—territorial rights. For example, in 1791, of the 1,039 individuals "warned out" of Boston, 237 were born in foreign countries, 62 in other states, and 740 in Massachusetts (of which 341 were born in towns within ten miles of Boston).32 This statistic alone undermines the idea that, from the perspective of a town, citizenship as membership in the political community might have significantly affected the essential undesirability of the outsider.	28
However, citizenship was intimately intertwined with real property. Just as under English law, aliens in Massachusetts suffered legal disabilities with respect to holding, alienating, and devising real property.33 This connection between citizenship and real property was reinforced at every level. In 1785, the General Court considered a draft "Bill Declaring and Describing Who are Aliens and Who are Citizens of this Commonwealth" that stated bluntly that "no person who is an alien to this Commonwealth can have or hold any estate of freehold or inheritance within the same"; the bill went on to provide that any estate of freehold or inheritance purchased by an alien would "escheat & inure" to the Commonwealth.34 In 1795, the Massachusetts Society for the Aid of Immigrants thought it important to inform prospective immigrants to New England that they could not hold lands in their own names; it hastened to reassure them that the state legislatures "who have power to regulate the business, may qualify aliens to hold lands in their own names, by act of assembly."35 Perhaps most revealing, in 1800, a certain Ward Nicholas Boylston addressed a petition to the General Court asking for rights to hold and convey real estate. Although born in Boston, Boylston had been abroad at the time of the Revolution; he had been advised by counsel that "as he was not here, at the political birth of the United States, he cannot be considered as a citizen nor can he be entitled to hold real estate in this country." "[D]esirous of placing a considerable portion of his fortune in real estate," Boylston declared himself "wholly indifferent, whether he is, or is not permitted, to exercise any political rights" but asked specifically for rights to "purchase or receive by assignment, hold, devise by will, sell & convey any real estate within the state of Massachusetts."36 Given this widely shared sense of the linkage between citizenship and real property, it is not unreasonable to assume that—in the complicated bargaining between the Commonwealth and the towns that the 1794 settlement law represented—if the towns were to be persuaded to admit complete outsiders to the privileges of settlement after a period of unfettered control over settlement that had lasted over two decades, they would insist that such outsiders be at a minimum legally capable of owning real property, which was a marker of economic worth, social standing, and political agency in late eighteenth-century Massachusetts. This argument is strengthened by a consideration of the substance of the legal modes of settlement made available to the complete outsider.	29
Once citizenship had been made a prerequisite to the legal modes of obtaining settlement that were available to the complete outsider, the 1794 settlement law made these modes effective barriers to the acquisition of settlement. First, and for the first time in the long history of the settlement laws, settlement was explicitly linked to the ownership of property, including estates of freehold, inheritance, and monetary value, combined with various residence and tax-paying requirements.37 In other words, settlement was made available to citizen outsiders only where they could demonstrate through the ownership of property that they would very likely never invoke the claims associated with settlement, that is, the claims upon the town treasury in the form of poor relief.38 Second, and more significant, settlement was linked to residence. This was obviously an unpopular provision with the towns because it allowed citizen outsiders to obtain settlements on the basis of physical presence alone for the first time since the 1760s. Accordingly, towns did everything they could to make this mode of obtaining a settlement as formidable as possible. The 1789 settlement law, which introduced this provision, stipulated that every citizen who could demonstrate a residence of two successive years within the territory of a town without being "warned out" would acquire a settlement therein.39 As soon as it was introduced, this provision elicited vigorous protest from the towns.40 Accordingly, the requisite period of residence was extended to three years in 1791,41 four years in 1792,42 and five years in 1793.43 When the General Court revised the settlement laws in 1794, it required an individual to be a citizen, to have resided within a town for a period of ten years, and to have paid all assessed state, county, town, or district taxes for a period of five years within that ten-year period in order to obtain a settlement therein.44 Despite the difficulty of meeting these requirements, towns bitterly resented having to permit citizen outsiders to obtain settlements on the basis of residence alone. Where possible, they sought to subvert the operation of the law. For example, they deliberately "failed" to assess individuals—all of whom were citizens—for taxes so that such individuals would fail to meet the tax payment requirements of this provision of the settlement law. In 1809, the Supreme Judicial Court attempted to stamp out this practice by ruling that a "failure" on the part of town assessors to assess individuals for taxes could not be held against such individuals so as to prevent them from acquiring settlement: "But by the manifest default of the assessors of Mansfield [the individual] was not assessed to the county tax; and it is impossible for us to doubt as to the cause of the omission. It was probably done with the expectation of preventing his gaining a settlement in their town, while their treasury was receiving the benefit of his state and town taxes."45 The towns' general hostility to permitting citizen outsiders to obtain settlements bolsters the interpretation advanced here that they insisted on linking citizenship to settlement, not so much because citizenship as membership in the political community was seen as affecting the essential undesirability of the outsider, but because of the close connection between citizenship and real property.	30
Regardless of how the introduction of citizenship into the 1794 settlement law is interpreted, the important point is that the thoroughly decentralized Massachusetts system of territorial controls was resolutely organized in terms of the logic of settlement rather than the logic of citizenship. Towns were entrusted with the full administrative responsibility for policing the territorial rights of individuals lacking settlements in the state. Accordingly, town poor relief officials were (a) authorized to sue any individuals who left an indigent person in any town or district "knowing him to be poor & indigent," (b) designated as the recipients of legally mandated information that shipmasters had to provide regarding passengers arriving from outside the United States, and (c) entrusted with the task of commencing proceedings to remove "foreign" paupers to the places to which they "belonged," which might be places within the United States or "beyond sea."46	31
"Foreign" paupers lacked both stable rights to poor relief and stable rights to residence on the ground that they lacked a settlement in Massachusetts, rather than American citizenship. The legal provision calling for town poor relief officials to remove such paupers after their most immediate needs had been met did not single out alien paupers for especially punitive treatment. In fact, as suggested by the language of the legal provision in respect of the removal of "foreign" paupers, alien paupers may actually have been less susceptible to removal than citizen paupers because of the considerably greater expenses associated with removing them to distant places: "And upon complaint of such Overseers [of the Poor], any Justice of the Peace in their county, may . . . cause such pauper to be sent and conveyed by land or water, to any other State, or to any place beyond sea, where he belongs, if the Justice things [sic] proper, if he may be conveniently removed, at the expence of the Commonwealth; but if he cannot be so removed, he may be sent to and relieved, and employed in the house of correction, or work-house, at the public expence."47 What little evidence of removals of "foreign" paupers survives for the late eighteenth century points to an indiscriminate removal of individuals to neighboring states or the British colonies to the north.48 Thus, whether at the level of hegemonic discourses or legal-bureaucratic institutions, in late eighteenth-century Massachusetts, citizenship by itself was not a barrier to the individual's territorial rights or a marker of the legitimacy of his claims upon the community.	32
However, the 1794 settlement law did have one immediate consequence that would lead to the emergence, half a century later, of a territorial community organized on the basis of citizenship. As a result of the passage of a harsh settlement law that made it difficult for all outsiders—citizens and aliens—to obtain settlements, the Commonwealth found itself assuming a greater share of overall poor relief expenses as outsiders entered towns, failed to acquire settlements in towns, and turned to public authorities for poor relief. In other words, after 1794, the state pauper expense, the expense of supporting individuals lacking Massachusetts settlements, began to grow relative to town pauper expenses. This brought to light a distinct problem with the system of poor relief administration, namely the problem of decentralization.	33
As the Commonwealth assumed a greater share of poor relief expenses, it found that it was increasingly unable to rely on town poor relief officials to serve its interests in keeping state pauper expenses to a minimum. In the late eighteenth century itself, this perception strained relations between the Commonwealth and the towns. Tensions were most acute in matters surrounding the actual dispensation of poor relief. Town poor relief officials imagined their interests narrowly in terms of protecting town treasuries from the claims of the poor. They recognized the claims of their "own" poor, that is, those who possessed settlements in the town, only grudgingly and where possible sought to shift them onto some other governmental authority, whether another town or the Commonwealth.49 Not surprisingly, the decentralized system of poor relief administration—in which towns provided relief to "foreign" paupers, submitted the relevant accounts to the Commonwealth, and collected reimbursements from the Commonwealth—furnished town poor relief officials with a rich opportunity for shifting the costs of supporting their own poor onto the state through various kinds of misrepresentation, cheating, and corruption.	34
During the 1780s and 1790s, evidence accumulated steadily that Boston poor relief officials were consistently overcharging the Commonwealth for the support of state paupers. In February 1790, a legislative committee appointed "to examine into the State of the Poor in this Commonwealth" visited the Boston almshouse and obtained a list of one hundred and fifty named state paupers with respect to whom Boston was receiving reimbursements from the Commonwealth. However, upon revisiting the almshouse shortly thereafter, the committee discovered that only sixty-three of the list were actually residents of the almshouse. Concluding that Boston poor relief officials had been cheating the Commonwealth by passing off as state paupers those who were in fact the legal responsibility of Boston, the committee recommended that Boston poor relief officials be compelled in the future to provide detailed information regarding the birth, age, marital status, and settlement of every individual whom the town claimed as a state pauper so that the legislature's standing committee on accounts, which examined town submissions for reimbursement, could verify the truth of each claim for itself.50	35
The problem of cheating was hardly confined to Boston. In February 1796, a legislative committee appointed to examine the state pauper accounts of Salem, the Commonwealth's second largest town, reported that the Salem overseers of the poor had charged the Commonwealth approximately sixteen hundred dollars for the support of thirty-six individuals who were eventually discovered to have had settlements in Salem or other Massachusetts towns.51 Barely a week later, and obviously in response to the problem, the General Court passed a resolve establishing the specific kinds of evidence that would have to accompany accounts exhibited for the support of the state poor.52 Three years later, it passed a statute requiring towns to provide detailed information about individuals whom they alleged to be state paupers; such information was to include the place from which such individuals came, the time of their entering the Commonwealth, and their various places of residence within the Commonwealth.53 In this manner, the effort to wipe out corruption on the part of town poor relief officials slowly drew the Commonwealth into a supervisory role with respect to poor relief administration.	36
Tensions between the Commonwealth and the towns in matters of regulating outsiders' territorial rights appear to have been less acute, if only because the problem involved a lack of vigorous enforcement by the towns, rather than an active attempt to cheat the Commonwealth.54 Needless to say, so long as the settlement law prevented outsiders from easily acquiring settlements, towns had little to lose by a lax enforcement of laws regulating the influx and removal of outsiders because outsiders most often became state charges when they required poor relief. Thus, the provisions in respect of the removal of "foreign" paupers appear to have been chronically underenforced. For example, in 1801, a Boston committee appointed to investigate "what legal and efficacious measures the town can take [to] remove vagrants and strangers of suspicious characters" deemed it appropriate to direct the attention of town officials to the removal provisions of the 1794 poor law, which gives an indication of the relative desuetude into which they had fallen.55	37
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both of the problems associated with the decentralized system of poor relief administration—the towns' propensity to shift their own costs onto the Commonwealth and their relative laxity in regulating outsiders' territorial rights—hinted at the fissures between the Commonwealth's interests and the towns' interests that had been opened up by the reconfiguration of the settlement laws in 1794. However, because the tumult of the Napoleonic Wars had reduced European immigration into the United States to a trickle during the first two decades of the nineteenth century, these fissures would not assume serious proportions until after 1820.	38
II. The Emerging Legal Construction of Immigration, 1820–1850
After 1820, European immigration into the United States increased dramatically in response to the country's labor needs. In Massachusetts, the rise of mass immigration contributed significantly to the creation of an industrial labor force, which in turn transformed the state into the country's most industrialized by the 1850s.56 However, the creation of an industrial labor force also fundamentally changed the scale and nature of poverty. In comparison with the eighteenth century, greater numbers of individuals were driven to seek public assistance because of the ebbs and flows of the volatile early industrial economy.57	39
In this general context, immigrant pauperism was unique, not so much because immigrant pauperism rates were consistently higher than native pauperism rates, which they were, but because the immigrant poor as a class were the charge of the Commonwealth. Under the 1794 settlement law, which had made citizenship a prerequisite to the complete outsider's ability to obtain a settlement, immigrants were barred as a class from acquiring settlements in towns. Accordingly, when they needed assistance, they were automatically classified as state paupers. By the mid-1820s, the state pauper category was widely represented as one of immigrant paupers, even though it only consisted overwhelmingly—never exclusively—of immigrants.58	40
In response to this problem, the Commonwealth developed discourses of citizenship, foreignness, and cultural difference that represented resident immigrants' claims for poor relief as illegitimate as the claims of aliens. Thus, at the state level, the language of citizenship increasingly replaced the language of settlement. This new language served to legitimize the curtailment of incoming and resident immigrants' territorial rights as aliens in ways specifically designed to shift state pauper expenses onto immigrants. Thus, a territorial community organized on the basis of citizenship began to emerge.	41
However, the language of citizenship at the state level foundered upon the problem of decentralization. As in the late eighteenth century, town poor relief officials were entrusted with the associated tasks of administering poor relief and regulating outsiders' territorial rights. Moreover, just as in the late eighteenth century, they betrayed both a blithe disregard of the urgency of regulating outsiders' territorial rights (because outsiders would become state charges under the settlement law) and a disturbing tendency to shift the costs of supporting the native poor onto the Commonwealth through manipulations of state pauper accounts. (because they did not particularly want to recognize the claims of their own poor). While such practices had been mildly troublesome in earlier years, after 1820 they came to be seen as a serious problem to the extent that they subverted the Commonwealth's drive to shift state pauper expenses onto immigrants. The Commonwealth's conflicts with the towns drove it into progressively deeper direct administration of immigrant pauperism and immigrants' territorial rights, culminating in a complete centralization of these functions by the 1850s.	42
A. Shifting State Pauper Expenses onto Immigrants
Beginning in the 1830s, at the state level, there was a marked official shift from understanding outsiders in terms of settlement to understanding outsiders in terms of citizenship, foreignness, and cultural difference. The term "foreigner," once understood in terms of settlement, came to be understood largely in terms of citizenship. At a time when state pauper expenses were on the rise, official discourses increasingly represented the claims of immigrant paupers as illegitimate as the claims of aliens. While these official discourses should necessarily be interpreted as part of the emerging nativist, and specifically anti-Catholic, consciousness in the antebellum United States, it is important to distinguish official nativism from popular nativism. As scholars have recently demonstrated, popular nativism had empowering dimensions that sought to vindicate the average citizen's sense of entitlement to meaningful participation in the polity during a period of bewildering change. By contrast, when official discourses took up nativist themes, they did so to refuse immigrants' claims rather than to affirm natives' claims.59	43
In order for the Commonwealth to represent immigrant paupers' claims as illegitimate as the claims of aliens, official discourses had to represent immigrant paupers as coming from the "outside" already corrupted by pauperism and therefore as not being "produced" in Massachusetts. For example, in 1831 a house committee observed: "Immoral and idle habits are undoubtedly the principal sources of pauperism, but over such habits in persons born without the Commonwealth we can have no control. Such persons throw themselves upon our bounty, already deeply affected with vice, disease and want. . . ."60 Further evidence of the illegitimacy of immigrant paupers' claims lay in the fact that they apparently never developed adequate ties to the community, wandered from town to town in search of charity, and even demanded charity as a matter of right. An 1833 report described them as follows:	44
Everywhere viewed, and feeling themselves to be, outcasts; possessed of nothing, except the miserable clothing which barely covers them; accustomed to beggary, and wholly dependent upon it; with no local attachments, except those which grow out of the facilities which in some places they may find for a more unrestrained indulgence than in others; with no friendships, and neither feeling nor awakening sympathy; is it surprising that they are debased, and shameless; alternately insolent, and servile; importunate for the means of subsistence, and self gratification, and averse from every means, but that of begging, to obtain them?61 Not surprisingly, in light of such representations, corrupt immigrant paupers were represented as a grave threat to self-sufficient citizens, another instance of the decadence of Europe staged as a counterpoint to the virtue of America. Observing in alarm that foreign paupers "corrupt the morals and introduce improvidence and vice among our citizens," an 1835 house committee declared it entirely unnecessary "to point out the moral advantages which will be secured to the towns poor by such a classification as will separate them from the foreign poor."62
Therefore, in 1833, when Americans learned that the British Poor Law Commissioners had proposed a plan to authorize British parishes to levy taxes to transport poor parishioners to the British provinces (which were seen as affording easy overland access to the United States), they were sent into paroxysms of injured outrage. In his 1835 address to the General Court, Governor John Davis spoke of foreign paupers as a "tax" levied upon Massachusetts by foreign powers: "This is an unjust, wicked attempt on the part of a foreign people to exonerate themselves from their own natural burdens by casting themselves upon us. What would be thought of conceding to the British Government the power to tax us for the support of its poor? and yet this is more unjust than taxation, for they throw the whole burden upon us."63	45
As these discourses of citizenship, foreignness, and cultural difference developed, there was a shift from restricting individuals' territorial rights on the basis of settlement to restricting individuals' territorial rights on the basis of citizenship. The precise forms that these new restrictions took are of interest here. While undoubtedly shaped by Massachusetts legislators' concerns as to how far they could go in restricting immigrants' territorial rights without violating the U.S. Constitution, they suggest that the Commonwealth carefully manipulated immigrants' territorial rights as aliens with the express aim of shifting state pauper expenses onto immigrants.64	46
The restriction of the territorial rights of incoming immigrants began in 1820. However, at that time, the language used was that of settlement rather than citizenship. The Commonwealth directed shipmasters to provide town poor relief officials with information about passengers "who have no settlement within this Commonwealth"; if town officials found that any such passenger was likely to become chargeable, they could demand a bond in the amount of $500 that would indemnify the Commonwealth and the towns for poor relief expenses incurred on his account for up to three years after his landing.65 Unfortunately, the law proved a failure. In 1827, Josiah Quincy, the mayor of Boston, testified before the General Court that the bond had become a "mere form," that not more than $30 had been collected on bonds (although the nominal amount thereof was enormous), and that bonds were easily avoided through the expedient of bonded passengers changing their names, which made them "impossible to trace."66	47
In 1831, evidently frustrated by the failure of the 1820 law requiring bonds, the General Court decided to introduce the principal of commutation of bonds into law. However, this time it targeted "alien passengers" only. In other words, there was a shift from the language of settlement to the language of citizenship. Shipmasters were required to furnish bonds in the amount of $200 with respect to every alien passenger who might become chargeable within three years of arrival. But they were given the option of paying $5 into the local treasury in lieu of posting bonds. The object was to obviate the problem of suing on bonds and to collect money up front.67	48
Apparently these commutation provisions did not generate significant revenues. When a select committee appointed to reconsider the statutory scheme consulted various Boston officials for their views, it was told that the commutation fee of $5 was simply too high, which gave shipmasters little incentive but to post bonds and run the risk that poor relief officials would sue on bonds.68 The Boston city marshall offered the following advice to rectify this faulty incentive structure:	49
I am perfectly convinced that a small tax of a dollar, or at most two dollars, on each passenger landed within the Commonwealth, without requiring bonds to be given, would be the most effective way of creating a fund for the support of foreign paupers, and reimbursing the Commonwealth for their expenditures. Leaving the option of a bond or a tax to the master, he will prefer the former in all cases, except the tax be very small. Perhaps, however, the principle of commutation may be necessary in the law, in order to give it constitutional validity. I conceive that 5000 dollars a year, at least, might be obtained from the price of one dollar a head for all foreign passengers landed.69 The General Court decided to adopt these recommendations. Accordingly, in 1837, when it revised the 1831 alien passenger law, it provided that shipping firms would have to (a) post bonds of $1,000 to be valid for a period of ten years on behalf of alien passengers who were "lunatic, idiot, maimed, aged or infirm persons, incompetent in the opinion of the officer so examining, to maintain themselves, or who have been paupers in any other country" and (b) pay two dollars on behalf of every other alien passenger, with the money so collected to be paid into the treasury of the city or town "to be appropriated as the city or town may direct for the support of foreign paupers."70 Unlike the bonding provisions of earlier statutes, which state and local authorities could have acted upon only if the bonded passenger actually became a public charge, the 1837 law taxed alien passengers as a class regardless of whether they might eventually become public charges, leave the state, and so on. In other words, alien passengers were taxed not to defray poor relief costs that the Commonwealth might incur in the future on their behalf but to defray current poor relief costs incurred on behalf of resident state paupers (a category that included immigrants, native-born children of immigrants, and American citizens from other states). Incoming immigrants thus lost their rights to enter Massachusetts territory as aliens except on condition of helping to defray the state pauper expense.
In addition to restricting the rights of incoming immigrants, during the 1830s and 1840s the Commonwealth encouraged the termination of resident immigrant paupers' rights to remain in territory. This was intended to intimidate immigrant paupers into refraining from seeking relief, on the one hand, and to reduce the costs of supporting immigrant paupers by simply getting rid of them, on the other hand. In this regard, it was of course true that all individuals who lacked settlements in Massachusetts, whether natives or immigrants, were legally subject to removal from the state's territory. However, within official discourses and practices, that is, in the construction of the problem and in its attempted resolution, the focus was increasingly on the immigrant poor alone. Thus, in the 1830s there was a renewed interest in the 1794 poor law that had authorized town poor relief officials to initiate proceedings to remove state paupers to places "beyond sea." According to the emerging logic, the illegality of immigrants' presence in territory as aliens was to be invoked at the precise moment when—and only because—they turned to public authorities for relief. Until then, their presence would be tolerated. However, there was never any intention of removing all immigrant paupers, only of removing enough to deter others from seeking relief. In 1835, the Boston city marshall described the 1794 poor law's unrealized potential thus:	50
Is it not obvious that the execution of this law, either by removing a number of paupers to St. Johns, Eastport, or other places, from our House of Industry, under the authority of a magistrate's precept, or by employing them in Work-houses or Houses of Correction, would soon lessen the expense of the Commonwealth? In the first place, there would be an actual reduction of charge, from the number who might be removed, and in the next, an indirect reduction would result from those who would run away, or be deterred from going to the Poor-house for fear of the consequences—namely, transportation, or the House of Correction.71 In its report, the house committee indicated its approval of the law, observing that "[l]ately it appears this law has been noticed, and in a measure acted upon, in a manner even better for the State than the statute provides for."72
This was in fact the case. In 1837, reporting that the prevailing economic crisis had inflicted considerable hardship on the city's foreign residents, the mayor of Boston requested the city council that a portion of the alien passenger fund, that is, the moneys collected by taxing incoming immigrants, be set aside to transport foreign paupers to their native countries.73 In response, a committee of the city council recommended that the city's eleemosynary institutions "be authorized to send alien paupers to the Country from which they came, provided it can be done for an expense not exceeding ten dollars for each person so sent, and that the whole amount shall not exceed one half of the fund derived from the tax levied on alien passengers."74 In accounts submitted to city authorities in subsequent years, Boston officials regularly reported sums expended on the transportation of alien paupers; no similar references exist in these records with respect to the transportation of citizen paupers who lacked Massachusetts settlements. For example, in 1843, $2,740 were listed as paid for the "removal of Alien paupers";75 in 1844, $2,285 were listed as "[p]aid for removal of 568 aliens";76 and in 1845, $1,238 were listed as "paid for removal of 309 Aliens."77 While the relatively large numbers of aliens removed suggests that many of these individuals were sent to New York or the British Provinces, there is certainly evidence of individuals transported across the Atlantic.78 These practices probably lasted until the Commonwealth effectively assumed administrative control over immigration in the late 1840s. Thus, through the propagation of hegemonic state discourses that demonized immigrants as aliens and the multiplication of practices that curtailed immigrants' territorial rights as aliens, the Commonwealth was attempting to create a territorial community organized on the basis of citizenship. It should be clear that territory was a weapon deployed strategically in ways designed to shift state pauper expenses onto incoming and resident immigrants.	51
Of course, the official discourses of citizenship, foreignness, and cultural difference that emerged in the 1830s were restricted to refusing the claims of the immigrant poor as the claims of aliens. They did not imply any recognition of natives' claims for poor relief as the claims of citizens. As an initial matter, the much-reviled category of state paupers—however energetically represented and acted upon as a category of immigrant paupers—continued to be legally constructed in terms of settlement. As such, it included native paupers at all times. More important, during the antebellum period there was complete official hostility toward the claims of the poor generally, whether town or state charges, natives or immigrants, citizens or aliens. Hegemonic discourses of poor relief applicable to native and immigrant paupers alike developed in the 1820s and 1830s to divide the poor into two mutually exclusive categories, the deserving poor (consisting of the old, the sick, and the disabled) and the undeserving poor (consisting of the able-bodied). Within these discourses, the problem of public dependency was consistently associated with the undeserving poor, whose various vices—intemperance, improvidence, and indolence—were identified as the "true" cause of pauperism.79 Such representations of the problem of poverty determined the contours of the appropriate role of government in administering poor relief. In 1833, the Tuckerman Report, a highly influential report commissioned by the Massachusetts legislature, stated bluntly: "As Government was instituted for the security of the life, liberty and property of the subject, and as neither liberty, property nor life are safe, while the idle and able-bodied may without restraint demand support from the industrious and thrifty, it is therefore the duty of the Government to protect the last class against the unjust demands and incursions of the first."80 Accordingly, what was required was a cheap method of supervising, disciplining, and reforming the poor. Beginning in the 1820s, more or less punitive forms of indoor relief were believed to be the solution to this problem, thereby giving rise to the "almshouse movement" so extensively documented by historians of poor relief administration in the antebellum United States.81	52
Furthermore, in a context in which increasing numbers of working men were demanding rights of suffrage on the ground that they were "independent," native paupers were coming to embody the legal opposite of an emerging conception of citizenship as membership in the political community insofar as they were viewed as lacking autonomy, self-governance, and so on. As Massachusetts shifted from property-based to tax-based voting qualifications in 1820, paupers were explicitly denied rights of suffrage, along with women, children, and other dependents, their essential dependence consisting in the fact that they could not labor of their own will.82 This dependence was formally underwritten by the law. In 1833, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court described the legal relationship between towns and paupers as follows:	53
Towns are bound by law to support, comfortably, all such of their inhabitants as may from time to time fall into distress and stand in need of relief, and to continue such support so long as it may be needed; and during its continuance they are entitled to the reasonable services of those supported by them. . . . The rights and duties of towns and paupers are correlative. While the town supports the pauper, the pauper is bound to labor for the town. But when the support becomes unnecessary, the right to control the labor ceases.83 The object here is not to examine the plight of the native poor in antebellum Massachusetts, insofar as their laborious accession to civil, political, and social rights is concerned, but simply to highlight the purely negative use of citizenship against the immigrant poor. As they emerged in the 1830s, the official discourses of citizenship, foreignness, and cultural difference that served to represent immigrants' claims upon the community as illegitimate as the claims of aliens—and the construction of a territorial community organized on the basis of citizenship that such discourses legitimized—had very little to do with a positive recognition of the rights of the native poor as citizens. B. Conflicts with the Towns
Unfortunately for the Commonwealth, these official discourses failed to "catch on" with the towns. This is not surprising. Precisely because the state-level discourses of citizenship were used primarily to refuse immigrant paupers' claims as the claims of aliens, town poor relief officials viewed them as discourses of the state designed to manage a state problem. Under the 1794 settlement law, immigrants were not a town problem to begin with; thus town officials adhered steadfastly to the logic of settlement when it came to representing the immigrant poor. At the same time, precisely because the state-level discourses of citizenship were not used to recognize the claims of native paupers as the claims of citizens, town poor relief officials continued to respond to the claims of their own poor with hostility; in such cases they failed to adhere to the logic of settlement. Where possible, they sought to shift their own poor relief costs onto the Commonwealth.	54
Towns with migrant populations, principally the larger towns of eastern Massachusetts and growing manufacturing towns everywhere but other towns as well, had a heavy economic stake in preserving the 1794 settlement law. Precisely because it made settlement extremely difficult to acquire, this law ensured that when migrants turned to town authorities for assistance, the costs of their support could invariably be pinned onto the towns from which they had migrated (in the case of migrants within Massachusetts) or onto the Commonwealth (in the case of out-of-state migrants, including all immigrants). Accordingly, from the perspective of town poor relief officials, immigrant paupers were not problems as aliens but were simply state paupers, that is, the responsibility of the Commonwealth. This is revealed in the way in which town poor relief officials represented the immigrant poor.	55
Beginning in the 1820s, without attempting to alter the 1794 settlement law itself, the Commonwealth sought to rearrange the spheres of responsibility between the Commonwealth and the towns by shifting part of the state pauper expense onto the towns. This rearrangement took place through manipulations of the terms on which the Commonwealth reimbursed towns for the support of state paupers. Accordingly, and quite deliberately, the Commonwealth (a) set ridiculously low maximum rates of reimbursement,84 (b) attached stringent conditions to claims for reimbursement,85 and (c) refused claims for reimbursement in an entirely arbitrary fashion.86 Thereby, it forced the towns to absorb some of the costs of supporting state paupers. The towns protested these measures vigorously. However, they did so not on the ground that immigrant paupers were undesirable as aliens but on the ground that the Commonwealth was shifting "its" responsibilities onto them and thereby subverting the logic of settlement. For example, at the end of 1839, the overseers of the poor of the town of Washington protested the injustice of being compelled to bear the cost of supporting immigrant laborers who had been injured in the course of laying out a nearby railroad. However, in sharp contrast to official discourses of citizenship, foreignness, and cultural difference, the injustice had nothing to do with the fact that the laborers were Irish and everything to do with the fact that they were simply not the proper charge of the town:	56
The . . . inhabitants of the town of Washington ask leave to represent that in the course of the construction of the Western Rail Road a great number of Indigent Irish Labourers are necessarily employed within the town of Washington and being near the summit of said Road much Blasting is required, and the workmen frequently are wounded and disabled—and become Chargeable to the town to an amount far beyond the provision made by the State. . . . [A]s the work is far from being completed, the lives and limbs of the workmen are still exposed, and consequently this Town is liable to great and increasing expense—whilst your petitioners would cheerfully meet any charges which might occur in the ordinary support of the poor, we cannot but think that as the case now stands, that the legislature will consider our present liabilities very disproportionate with the rest of our fellow citizens. . . .87 Of course, the towns' persistence in representing immigrant paupers within the logic of settlement, rather than within the logic of citizenship, does not mean that they were at all willing to bear the burdens of supporting immigrant paupers. Precisely because the towns saw state paupers as not being their responsibility within the logic of settlement, as soon as the Commonwealth made it unprofitable to support state paupers, the towns began to turn them away as best they could. As early as 1823, the Boston overseers of the poor reported proudly to their constituents that "[f]oreign paupers, unless disabled, have found no liberty to remain [in the Almshouse]."88 In the 1830s, a series of town reports on eleemosynary practices published in the Tuckerman Report reveals the same practice. For example, Rowley reported that it had "turned away as many as twenty States poor within the last six months, after giving them lodging for a night, or dismissing them as soon as they were able to travel"; Medford reported that "[a]id is sometimes given to the States poor to carry on their way"; New Bedford reported that the state's poor "are dismissed as soon as may be, from a desire to keep down the numbers in the house"; Springfield reported that "States poor are sent away as soon as possible"; and Great Barrington reported that "it is the policy of the Overseers, and one of the stipulations of the bond given by the Keeper, that he shall dismiss all States poor from his charge as soon as possible."89 Thus, trapped between the Commonwealth's drive to shift the state pauper expense onto the towns and the towns' determination to resist, state paupers were quite literally produced as a vagrant class.
But if the towns displayed a considerable solicitude for the logic of settlement when refusing responsibility for immigrant paupers, they ignored it when it came to meeting responsibility for their own poor. Where they could, towns sought to shift their own poor relief costs onto the Commonwealth by manipulating their state pauper accounts. Although these practices were reminiscent of those in the late eighteenth century, the magnitude and the consequences of town poor relief officials' corruption were immeasurably greater. At a time when the Commonwealth was straining to shift the state pauper expense onto immigrants by curtailing their territorial rights as aliens, the towns' corrupt practices kept subverting its efforts. The state pauper expense, an expense officially blamed upon dissolute immigrants dumped upon Massachusetts by irresponsible foreign governments, was constantly inflated, to a degree that can never be adequately measured, by the expenses of supporting citizens.	57
As in the late eighteenth century, the preferred form of stamping out the corruption of town poor relief officials remained periodic legislative investigations. During the 1820s and 1830s, such investigations revealed that these officials employed a bewildering array of stratagems to cheat the Commonwealth, including charging the Commonwealth (a) for the full amount of the reimbursement even when actual expenses of supporting state paupers had been significantly lower,90 (b) for supplies that had never actually been furnished to paupers, (c) for the support of paupers who had actually been discharged, and (d) in lieu of towns in which paupers had legal settlements, on the basis of flimsy evidence such as representations by paupers "that their parents were Irish."91 Occasionally, spectacular instances of corruption drove the Commonwealth to sue individual towns. In 1835, an investigation of the Cambridge state pauper accounts revealed that the town, after certifying to the Commonwealth that its state paupers were "not of competent health to labor," had been setting them to work, deriving profits from their labor, using that money to subsidize its own poor relief expenses, and collecting reimbursements from the Commonwealth. This was particularly scandalous because, for the year ending April 1833, Cambridge had only thirteen town paupers and over one hundred state paupers.92 The attorney general revealed the extent of the scandal: "By the official accounts of the Overseers of the Poor, rendered to the town from time to time, it would appear, that by means of the labor of [state paupers], and the money paid by the State, the town of Cambridge had for five years ending 19th April, 1833, not only supported all the inmates of its Alms House, but made a net profit by the establishment of nine thousand eight hundred and seventeen dollars and 24/100."93 Based upon the findings of the attorney general, a house committee recommended that the Commonwealth sue the town of Cambridge to recover the state pauper disbursements.94 In 1838, when the Supreme Judicial Court heard the dispute, Cambridge defended its practices on the ground that: "[I]t was the practice in all the towns having State paupers, as well as others, to set them to work from time to time, as they were able, and occasion offered; and that Cambridge did so, as well as other towns; that no credit was given to the State by such towns for the labor of such paupers, it being well understood that the cost of supporting them was much greater than the sum allowed by the State. . . ."95 The Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the Commonwealth would be entitled to recover its disbursements if, upon adding the earnings of state paupers and the state's reimbursements, Cambridge had received more than it had expended on supporting state paupers.96	58
In the 1840s, evidence of town abuses of the reimbursement system surfaced repeatedly, and the scale of corruption appeared to be even greater than in the 1820s and 1830s. This "corruption" must be interpreted in part as the towns' efforts to soften the fiscal impact of the Commonwealth's attempts to shift state pauper expenses onto them. But it undoubtedly included numerous efforts to shift town pauper expenses onto the Commonwealth. In 1846, upon launching an extensive investigation into the state pauper accounts of certain towns, the committee on accounts discovered that abuses were legion; accordingly, it deducted an aggregate of $11,000 from the accounts of Boston, Salem, Charlestown, Roxbury, Cambridge, Waltham, Newburyport, Taunton, Fall River, New Bedford, Worcester, and Watertown.97 Shortly thereafter, convinced that the extent of town abuses was even greater than these investigations had revealed, the General Court created a commission to investigate the state pauper accounts of every single town in the state.98 On February 1, 1847, after examining the accounts of one hundred and ninety-six towns over a period of many months, the commissioners submitted a massive report to the General Court. In it, they declared that approximately one half of the total amount of claims investigated were "illegal" overcharges.99 An examination of these "illegal" overcharges reveals numerous attempts to shift the costs of supporting town paupers onto the Commonwealth that underscore just how little citizenship, settlement, and other markers of belonging mattered to local poor relief officials. In an environment characterized by high immigration, when it was often unclear whether individuals were in fact citizens, the slightest question as to a pauper's antecedents led town poor relief officials to represent him as an alien and, therefore, as a state pauper. In certain cases, as the commissioners' investigations of the state pauper accounts of Tyngsborough reveal, the evidence appears laughable:	59
John Thompson was supported in the almshouse, and was wholly unable to labor. John Thompson came to this town about 1810. On the 30th of November, 1814, he married Elizabeth Upton, of Tyngsborough, as appears by the records of that town. We also ascertained, by the records, that he was taxed in that town for a poll tax in 1814, and for poll and real estate in 1815, 1816, 1817, 1818, 1819 and 1820, and there was no evidence that those taxes were not all paid. Tyngsborough claims he is a foreigner, and returns him as an Irishman; but Mr. Blodgett, one of the overseers, testified that no person had ever been able to ascertain where he was born, or anything of his history before he came to that town, and this we found confirmed by other persons. Elizabeth Thompson, the wife of John Thompson, states that her husband always assured her that he was born in Virginia, or, to use her own words, "in the State where Washington lived." . . . By the above testimony it is clearly shown, that he has gained a settlement in Tyngsborough, if he is an American citizen; but the commissioners do not think the question of his nativity clearly made out, and do not, therefore, feel warranted in rejecting the claim.100
From the perspective of Massachusetts legislators, this kind of corruption underscored the profound conflicts of interest between the Commonwealth and the towns and created the growing legislative conviction that immigrant pauperism could never be managed effectively so long as towns retained plenary administrative control over the dispensation of poor relief to immigrant paupers and the regulation of immigrants' territorial rights. Centralization was seen as the only response to these problems. It was not until the crisis of the Irish famine migrations of the late 1840s and early 1850s that the Commonwealth assumed complete administrative control over immigrant pauperism and the regulation of immigrants' territorial rights. But the roots of its drive to centralize these functions may be discerned long before that momentous event.	60
First, the Commonwealth began to exercise greater supervision over the administration of poor relief to state paupers. As part of this, it began to demand increasingly detailed information about individuals alleged to be state paupers before it would agree to reimburse towns for the costs of their support. For example, in 1831, the General Court required local poor relief officials to furnish the following information in respect of state paupers:	61
[A]ll accounts made out against the Commonwealth, for the support of state paupers, . . . shall be so made as to shew the name of each pauper, his or her age, the place of his or her nativity, the time when he or she first came into the Commonwealth, the time when he or she became chargeable, and the time when discharged, or the time of his or her death, or the time to which such charge is made . . . and the number of days which each of said paupers has been chargeable; and in all cases where said charge is for the support of any pauper not already mentioned on the State pauper list, said account shall be accompanied by a certificate [of the relevant poor relief officials] stating that neither of said persons has ever gained a settlement in any city, town or district within this Commonwealth . . . and that he or she has no legal settlement in any place in the Commonwealth, according to the existing laws for determining questions of habitancy; in all which certificates the [poor relief officials] shall certify that they made the same on the best evidence they could obtain, and that no part of the annexed account is for the support of any person over the age of twelve years, while of competent health to labor.101 In 1837, it required local poor relief officials to make annual returns to the secretary of the Commonwealth with answers to a number of even more detailed questions. Penalties were imposed on town poor relief officials who refused or neglected to make out returns as aforesaid.102
Second, the Commonwealth began to exercise progressively greater administrative control over the regulation of immigrants' territorial rights. Until the mid-1830s, town poor relief officials exercised plenary administrative control over the influx of immigrants. However, when the General Court considered the imposition of an alien passenger tax in the mid-1830s, it also began to consider stripping town poor relief officials of control over the administration of the tax. In 1836, a legislative committee left no doubt as to why an independent authority was needed to administer the alien passenger tax: "A law already exists, passed in 1830, providing for bonding all alien passengers arriving from any port without the Commonwealth. But as no means were provided for the execution of the law it has remained, for all practical purposes, a dead letter. It cannot be expected that overseers of the poor in towns, should attend to the enforcement of its provisions, while the benefit that would accrue from its execution would result to the Commonwealth and not to the towns."103 In the final version of the 1837 statute introducing the alien passenger tax, the General Court elected not to create a state-level post but simply "authorized and required" town authorities to appoint an officer who would inspect incoming vessels, require bonds, collect the tax, and so on.104 What is important, however, is that the statute stripped town poor relief officials of plenary administrative control over the influx of immigrants and required the appointment of a separate officer for that purpose. When they discussed the implementation of the statute, Boston officials revealed that they experienced it as a diminution of their authority, expressing "regret that on a subject so deeply interesting to the City and to individuals a little authority has not been given to the City Council to exercise some control over an officer receiving his appointment from one of its branches and that discretionary powers so extensive as those given by the law must be exercised by any individual."105	62
III. Centralization and the Enforcement of Citizenship
The Commonwealth's increasing involvement in the administration of poor relief to immigrant paupers and the regulation of immigrants' territorial rights might have continued incrementally had it not been for the Irish famine migration of the late 1840s and early 1850s. The Irish famine migration was entirely unprecedented both in its scale and in the incidence of immigrant pauperism that it brought in its wake. For the year ending September 30, 1845, the number of arrivals in Boston from foreign countries was 10,281; thereafter, for each year between 1847 and 1854, the number of arrivals in Boston from foreign countries exceeded 20,000; thousands more entered Massachusetts from the British Provinces, New York, and elsewhere.106 During this period, the difference between native and immigrant pauperism rates was striking; there was one pauper for every 317 natives, and one for every 32 foreigners.107	63
In order to manage the problems associated with the new immigrant paupers, practically all of whom became state charges under the operation of the 1794 settlement law, the Commonwealth rapidly assumed plenary administrative control; by the late 1840s, it had taken over the regulation of immigrants' territorial rights; by the mid-1850s, it had taken over the administration of poor relief for state paupers. Thus, by the mid-1850s, state hegemonic discourses of citizenship had been realized in state-level legal-bureaucratic institutions. This full-blown emergence of the state, while occasioned by the immediate crisis of the Irish famine migration, ultimately grew out of a sense that it was simply too expensive to leave administrative control in the hands of town poor relief officials.	64
A. Centralization
In the late 1840s, the Commonwealth finally ended the towns' role in administering the influx of immigrants. In 1847, a joint special committee appointed to respond to the problem of the Irish famine migration recommended that the administration of the alien passenger laws be centralized by replacing town-appointed officers with state-appointed officers. As revealed by the committee's description of the way in which the existing laws were being administered, there was an acute sense among state legislators that Boston officials were not serving the Commonwealth's interests:	65
It is very apparent .