38 AMERICAN HISTORY
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R,NYCin formal votes by their legislatures. No one was sure what
rescission meant, except to rattle the amendment’s backers.
Ratification by Alabama and Georgia removed any doubt,
bringing the total of state ratifications again to 28, and on
July 28, 1868, Secretary of State William H. Seward certified
the 14th Amendment as adopted.
It had taken Lyman Trumbull two years, but he had suc-
ceeded in his quest for birthright citizenship. Trumbull’s con-
science, which had told him that people deserved certain
basic rights, was his undoing. Seeing radical
Republicans’ impeachment of Andrew
Johnson as a partisan vendetta, in
May 1868 he attacked his own
party’s “intemperate zealots” for
seeking Johnson’s removal.
When impeachment came to
a vote in the Senate, Trumbull
voted to acquit, effectively
ending his political career.
He retired from the Senate
when his term ended in 1873.
Over the next two decades,
immigration policy began to acquire
its modern form by means of a rolling
drumbeat of restrictions for entry. In 1875,
Congress barred entry by prostitutes and foreign
convicts, though providing no mechanism to
determine who was a prostitute or convict. The
1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred laborers from
that country and denied naturalization to Chi-
nese immigrants already living in the United
States. The same year, Congress prohibited entry by any
“lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or
herself without becoming a public charge.” In 1891, Congress
excluded “persons suffering from a loathsome or a danger-
ous contagious disease” and polygamists. Imposition of these
restrictions created a category for individuals coming to
America in violation of these restrictions. Today they are
called illegal aliens or undocumented immigrants, phrases
unknown to the 39th Congress because in 1866 anyone could
enter, and not until the 20th century did Congress begin set-
ting country by country quotas for admission. Deportation
also entered the picture, with Congress in 1891 ordering that
anyone caught trying to enter illegally “be immediately sent
back on the vessel Co. by which they were brought in.” Any
forbidden immigrant found to have sneaked in was to be
“returned as by law provided.”
Executive agencies imposed particular limits on birthright
citizenship. In 1884, Ludwig Hausding, raised in Germany,
sought an American passport, claiming to be a U.S. citizen
because he had been born here. On January 15, 1885, how-
ever, Secretary of State Frederick T. Frelinghuysen refused to
issue the passport, finding that Ludwig was not a citizen
because his German parents were not immigrants but only
temporary visitors when their son was born. Later that year,
the State Department came to the same conclusion regarding
Richard Greisser, whose German father and Swiss mother
had been visiting the United States at the time of his birth.
Customs officials had their own restrictions. In August
1895, California native Wong Kim Ark, 22, vis-
ited relatives in China and returned to San
Francisco. Customs collector John H.
Wise refused to let Wong land. Born
in San Francisco in 1873, Wong
was as American as Wise, but
the customs man, a self-pro-
claimed “zealous opponent of
Chinese immigration,” could
not see beyond Wong’s “race,
language, color, and dress.”
Wong was imprisoned aboard
ship in San Francisco Bay when
attorney Thomas D. Riordan,
known for his work on behalf of Chi-
nese-Americans, came to his aid. Wong
went to court. His case set the contours of
birthright citizenship when the U.S. Supreme
Court sided with him in a landmark 1898 deci-
sion. Writing on behalf of the six-member major-
ity, Justice Horace Gray described Wong’s
ancestry as irrelevant and found him to be as
American as the Fourth of July. Gray wrote that
Native Son
A racist immigration official refused to
admit the California-born Wong, who was
returning from visiting relatives in China.
Home at Last
New arrivals come
ashore in 1885 at
Castle Garden in
lower Manhattan.