Martha S. Jones's Birthright Citizens delivers a brilliant and timely analysis concerning the ways and means through which black Americans sought to claim their legal rights of citizenship in the immediate decades before the Dredd Scott decision. Legal history can often be difficult, yet Jones, in her usual, seemingly effortless style, weaves together the stories of black Baltimore – individuals, families, and communities – through antebellum court records. These records document the triumphs, challenges, and heartbreaks for black Baltimoreans in the years preceding the Supreme Court decision codifying African American citizenship in 1857. Jones brings antebellum Baltimore to life, highlighting the significance of the local and familiar – family networks, local organizations, workplaces, and the courthouse. Using this backdrop, she weaves a complex and innovative exploration of how free black men and women used the law to claim the privileges of citizenship as their birthright. In the process, Jones subsequently transforms what we assumed we knew – as historians – about black civil rights in antebellum America, not just in the city of Baltimore but in the larger story of African America and the American nation.

Birthright Citizens opens with an overview of William Yates's 1838 treatise, Rights of Colored Men, in which he makes the bold claim for citizenship rights for free blacks: “Denied the status of citizens, free black people were not secure in their ‘life, liberty, and property’” (4). Yates's argument sets the tenor for the resulting analysis as Jones considers the complexities of African Americans’ claims to the privileges of citizenship. Such rights are defined from the outset in her thesis as something more than political liberties, such as a right to vote, arguing that citizenship entitled people to a “claim to place, to enter and remain within the nation's borders” (4). Proceeding chapters chart the experiences of men such as George Hackett, whom the reader meets at various points in Jones's analysis. Hackett entered the archives – legal and church records – over the course of the 1840s and 1850s testifying his rights to act as an engaged citizen in Baltimore.

The colonization debate among the city's free black population during the mid-antebellum era is a major theme of Birthright Citizens. Jones examines the “borders of African American belonging” in the 1820s in the early part of her analysis, reflecting on how the views of the African Colonization Society (ACS) concerning their removal from the United States forced many African Americans to consider whether this movement was “undercutting their status as citizens” (37). As a result, as Jones's analysis documents, several free blacks organized against the ACS, bringing them into the realm of black cultural and intellectual life in Baltimore and beyond. However, alongside colonization – which many free blacks felt like forced removal – there was also the possibility of voluntary emigration to locations like Haiti and Canada. As Jones points out, with the introduction of increasingly harsh black laws in early 1830s Maryland, emigration may have looked like an increasingly favourable option to free blacks who wished to embrace an active and engaged model of citizenship.

A particularly insightful and sensitively written chapter concerns rights of black Baltimorean's to sue and be sued. In such cases, the consequences for free blacks might have been “the extinguishment of a debt and the restoration of a reputation; it might be the canceling of an indenture or the return of a child to family control” (109–10). While the outcomes of such proceedings could never be guaranteed, as Jones reminds us, it did mean that free black men and women could engage with the legal process as citizens of the city, the state of Maryland, and the nation itself. Stories of indentured free black children in the legal record discussed in this chapter reveal the complexities of definitions of race in the era and the often heartbreaking consequences for those bereft of protectors – family, legal guardians, and next friends – who cared enough to challenge the rights of whites to remove their children under alleged terms of indenture or apprenticeship.

Jones's Birthright Citizens expertly reveals the complexities of citizenship rights in an age when such issues are politically and culturally charged across the modern Western world. Jones's book, based on exhaustive archival research, expertly woven into a vibrant and engaging analysis, is a must-read for any scholar interested in histories of race and rights. Such an analysis has never been more important than in this moment.