Hoang Gia Phan frames Bonds of Citizenship: Law and the Labors of Emancipation with a dive into the heated debates from the early national period to the Civil War surrounding the “original intent” of the US Constitution's so-called “fugitive slave clauses.” He focusses on Frederick Douglass's hypothetical “man from another country,” which Douglass used in 1849 to argue against the assertion made by John C. Calhoun that the Constitution was ultimately a slavery-sanctioning document and that slavery had in fact been codified by the founders of the Union. In Douglass's scenario, the “man from another country” is one who reads the Constitution without any knowledge of its history and context or those of the nation it purported to write into legal and political being. Since the “fugitive slave” clauses do not in fact contain the words “slave” or “slavery,” but instead refer to the right under law of citizens to have fugitive “persons held to service or labor” returned to them, Douglass argues that the “man” would never be able to imagine that the clause refers to fugitive chattel slaves.

Phan elaborates on Douglass's hypothetical to make a foundational point for Bonds of Citizenship: that what was perceived in the antebellum era as the ambiguity inherent in the text of the Constitution's “fugitive slave clauses” reflects, by the time of the Union crisis in the 1840s, a popular historicism that neglects the role of indentured servitude as mediator between chattel slavery and “free labor.” An overarching concern of Bonds of Citizenship is thus to recover the “absent presence” of the indentured servant as a “vanishing mediator” that is integral to an understanding of bondage, freedom, labor, and citizenship in the antebellum era. Phan does this largely through close readings of literary texts and legal debates, showing how early national legal culture and burgeoning literary culture were intertwined in previously unacknowledged ways. Bonds of Citizenship's chapters provide both fresh, invigorating readings of familiar texts and attention to legal texts that have been heretofore unremarked with regard to the development of a US “national literature.”

It would be impossible to do justice in a short review to the myriad arguments and nuanced readings of texts throughout the book, but a focus on a couple of them will, I hope, prove representative of the significant interventions into American studies scholarship that Phan's project makes.

In chapter 1, “Bound by Law: Apprenticeship and the Culture of ‘Free’ Labor,” Phan expands upon his suggestion in the introduction to recuperate the role of the “bondsman” as a mediator between free and unfree laborers by excavating legal debates that “illuminate the historical understanding of freedom, slavery, and servitude as varying states of subjection to the law” (25). Through readings of Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789), and Franklin's Autobiography (1791), he illustrates the ways forms of indentured servitude exist upon a fluctuating spectrum of labor practices and function as modes of assimilation and integration. His reading of the Interesting Narrative is the most compelling, contending that Equiano's two certificates of “good character,” and the role they play in advancing his social and economic standing, reveal more complex conceptions of “slave personhood” in the late eighteenth century than can be gleaned by a focus solely on manumission papers, laws, or fugitive-slave advertisements. Phan argues that Equiano's “performance of fidelity” endears him to his masters such that they come to identify his moral character – defined by honesty, integrity, and fidelity – with late eighteenth-century conceptions of the traits required for obtaining the desirable bonds of public and national citizenship.

The third and fourth chapters return to Douglass, this time to situate My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and several of his most famous orations within the context of a number of contemporaneous legal cases. Phan argues that closer attention to Douglass's own reading practices can provide critical insight into his evolving political abolitionism and his relation to labor history and developing free-labor ideology. In the section on My Bondage and My Freedom, Phan suggests that the text's structure “stages Douglass's movement from bondage to freedom, in order to demonstrate the practicability of both immediate emancipation and the assimilation of the formerly enslaved into the social and civic life of the nation” (147). Interpreting the historical Douglass through the lens of My Bondage thus makes for an analysis very different from that conducted through his Narrative: the 1855 Douglass appears highly attuned, in Phan's estimation, to the predicament of the free African who is regarded as neither citizen nor alien, and whose legal status is therefore significantly confounded.

While at times the connecting threads between Bonds of Citizenship's chapters seem implicit or submerged within its close readings rather than explicitly linking its sections, making it read a bit more like a collection of interrelated essays than a book, it's hard not to appreciate Phan's deft negotiation of such a diverse array of literary texts, legal cases, and political rhetoric spanning nearly ninety years. Bonds of Citizenship condenses what could surely be a book double the length into one that's eminently readable and suggestive well beyond its pages.