The LotteryDavid Ramsay, a South Carolina congressman and early theorist of US citizenship, believed that American citizens "transmitted" their citizenship to their children "by inheritance." Before long, judges and legislators had extended this potent principle of hereditary citizenship to include any white person born to US citizens abroad and to white people born to noncitizens on American soil. Baltimore was a center of these efforts by free African Americans to assert their inborn right to US citizenship, and Jones focuses her narrative on their story.