24 - Citizenship

Summary

Physician and legislator, David Ramsay played an important if secondary role in South Carolina politics during the American Revolution. He achieved greater posthumous fame, however, as one of the first historians of the American Revolution, publishing his History of the American Revolution in 1789. In analyzing the meaning of the Revolution that same year, he offered what proved to be an enduring interpretation of one of the transformations at the heart of the independence movement. The colonies’ separation from Great Britain had, he said, fundamentally altered “the political character of the [American] people” by transforming them “from subjects to citizens.” The difference was profound: “Subjects look up to a master, but citizens are … equal,” and each enjoys a common share of sovereignty. Governments based on the limited grant of the people’s sovereignty to the state rested on citizens who collectively retained that sovereignty. Ramsay explained several ways one could become a citizen, all of which assumed that each “freeman” was “at liberty to choose his country,” and thus that citizenship, even citizenship that was presumptively conferred through birth or inheritance, rested on consent.¹