Heathens and Citizens: Chinese Americans, Native Americans, and the Religio-racial Politics of Reconstruction

Between 1865 and 1870, U.S. Congressional deliberations of Reconstruction returned repeatedly to the prospect of extending political rights not simply to African Americans but also to Native Americans and Chinese Americans. Considering the Fourteenth Amendment, Pennsylvania Senator Edgar Cowan wondered, “What is its length and breadth?... Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California a citizen?,” sparking a discussion of the advisability of Chinese American citizenship. The debate soon turned to the status of Native Americans, with Wisconsin’s James Rood Doolittle warning that the Amendment “would bring in all the Digger Indians.” Discussion of the Fifteenth Amendment became similarly embroiled by debate over differences between “the white race and the black race and the yellow race and the red race.”

Ultimately, Republicans limited the benefits of Reconstruction to African Americans while further marginalizing Chinese Americans and Native Americans. In this paper, I argue that religion provided both a justification and lingua franca for excluding “heathens” from citizenship. Supported by leading African Americans, Republicans attempted to decouple hierarchies of religion and race, putting forward a new definition of citizenship based on Christian rather than white manhood. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in February 1870, brought a new political order to the United States. The nation’s antebellum definition of citizenship based upon racial manhood had given way to a new definition based upon religious manhood, dividing Christian and heathen men. However, this shift would encourage Chinese Americans and Native Americans to join Christian churches during the 1870s, making use of Christian theology and denominational resources in their own struggles for political voice while testing the nation’s newfound dedication to Christian male suffrage.