Privilege built upon exclusion, marginalization, and subordination of others is fragile; it produces individual and collective resistance; it requires work to maintain. And so it was and so it did in the long nineteenth century United States. In myriad individual and collective ways, even as new limitations on their personhood and citizenship were incorporated into law, disabled persons, racialized others, and women challenged the borders of belonging. And women and racialized others especially gained greater recognition in law of their personhood and rights as citizens than had been true at the founding. As significantly, the resistance of those excluded from full personhood, citizenship, and nation rendered legible and exposed the flaw at the foundation of American liberalism: their own subjection and exclusion. But resistance also engendered defense of privilege so that what the founding generation of men took for granted in fomenting a revolution, they and subsequent generations defended as right long after the Civil War.

In part, deeply held assumptions relating to ability, race, gender — an abled, racialized, and gendered “imagination,” to borrow and expand on Alice Kessler Harris's evocative phrase — led to the replication of the borders of belonging even as context changed. In part, too, the political process meant that privilege reproduced itself. But the resilience of the borders of belonging depended fundamentally on the fact that men who were white and able held the reins of lawmaking. Over the course of the nineteenth century, incredible effort went into preserving law as the domain of able white men.