My dissertation traces the rhetorical development of U.S. citizenship, as it was conceived through figures of political dispossession: both those systematically disenfranchised, and those voluntarily disaffiliated (expatriates, traitors, secessionists). Moving between fiction (by Rowson, Hawthorne, Douglass, Stowe, Hale and others) legal debates, and political philosophy, I examine how writers and legislators used negative exempla to both formulate and unsettle the paramaters of citizenship. In a period animated by controversies over borders and loyalties—from the fugitive slave act of 1793 and the Alien and Sedition Acts to nullification and secession—the problem of disaffiliation, I argue, held special import for both citizens and non-citizens. Thus, even as U.S. citizenship gained increasing legal definition by designating entire groups as “alien” (despite their nativity), figures of the alien offered unlikely analogies to an anxious and divided citizenry. While citizenship, and the rights it entails, was often conceived of as a special type of “property”—and one which obtained specificity through its distinction from both chattel slavery and a gendered domestic sphere—the literary and legal texts under examination in my dissertation establish dispossession (both its figures and sentiments) as the organizing principle of the antebellum political imaginary.