In a cabin in the Kaw Valley, a few miles northwest of what is now Lawrence, the first baby boy of white parents was born in Kansas. His name was Napoleon Boone (yes, of the famous Boone family and yes, named after that Napoleon) and he arrived Friday, Aug. 22, 1828.
Napoleon’s entry into the world is notable mostly because, well, it was noted. It’s one of the first recorded births to white parents in the confines of the present state that historians can date. We know because it was written down, that he was the 12th child of Daniel M. and Sarah Boone, was a grandson of the Daniel Boone. One of Napoleon’s brothers remembered in a letter decades later that the cabin was on the north bank of the Kansas River, where the government had by treaty directed their father to instruct members of the Kaw nation in the art and science of agriculture.
At the time of Napoleon’s birth, 197 years ago, Kansas wasn’t yet a state or even a territory, but part of the vast swath of land from the Mississippi River to the Rockies acquired through the Louisiana Purchase. This land, purchased from France in 1803, about doubled the size of the United States.
Through no effort of his own, Napoleon was born an American.
Other white children were in the same happy lot.
There was Susan Dillon, born in 1830 at the Shawnee Indian Mission in present-day Fairway, and Maria Meeker, born in 1834 to Baptist missionaries in Johnson County. Like Napoleon, they were among the first seven or so white children born in Kansas.
It’s a difficult number to pin down, retired historian John Mark Lambertson told me. Although widely reputed to be the first white child born in Kansas, Napoleon Boone may actually have been the second. The first, Lambertson said, was likely Lucia Francis Pixley, born in 1826 or 1827 to Christian missionaries in what is now Neosho County in southeast Kansas.
But any way you count it, these children were all Americans.
Yet they were aliens in a land that had not yet opened to Anglo settlement. Lambertson, who served 19 years as the director of the National Frontier Trails Museum at Independence, Mo., said all these first white children were born to fathers who were connected to an Indian agency, a religious mission, or perhaps the army at Fort Leavenworth. White settlement would not officially open until 1854, when Kansas became a territory.
Lucia and Napoleon and the other children and their families lived in areas populated mostly by indigenous people who were barred by the Constitution from being citizens of the United States. Citizenship for Native Americans would not come until 1924, with the Snyder Act. Voting rights would come even later, granted with glacial advance on a state-by-state basis.
I’ve been thinking about Napoleon and the other first white children of Kansas because President-elect Donald “Windrip” Trump promised in an interview last weekend to end birthright citizenship for newborns as part of his mass deportation plan for immigrants.
Trump said he would seek to repeal birthright citizenship by executive order. He is also considering removing immediate family members of the deported, even though some may be U.S. citizens, to keep families together.
Believe him, because he’s packing his administration with the Macgoblins lined up to do it. He’s announced Stephen Miller — you remember, he’s the guy who looks like he’s sweating to beat Indiana Jones to the Ark of the Covenant — as chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser. Miller said a few days ago mass deportations would be the top priority from the first day of Trump’s new administration.
While legal scholars doubt Trump can actually end birthright citizenship because of the pesky 14thAmendment to the Constitution, I’m not so sure. Trump’s loyalists seem to care little for the rule of law, and some of those loyalists are on the Supreme Court.
Bias, if not outright racism, has always played a part in our national memory. We know about Napoleon Boone and the others because a century and more ago, predominately white historical societies and the readers of white-owned newspapers were obsessed with these sorts of firsts.
The Kansas “first” white children are regional versions of the American fascination with Virginia Dare, born in 1587 at the “lost colony” of Roanoke, the first child of English parents in the New World. The village of a hundred or so colonists on the Outer Banks of North Carolina disappeared by 1590, leaving little trace except for the enigmatic word “Croatoan” carved on a tree.
The Virginia Dare mystery has become part of American myth and folklore, inspiring novels and plays and sadly white nationalists, including the anti-immigrant VDARE Foundation. If you’re interested in the real history behind the Roanoke colony, don’t let racists with fringe theories dissuade you from studying up on it. If you’re intrigued by the story of Napoleon Boone or Maria Meeker, by all means pursue your interests.
The story of Jotham Meeker, the father of Maria, is particularly interesting.
He likely brought the first printing press to Kansas, and at the Shawnee Baptist Mission produced a 24-page primer in the Delaware language. He would go on to print newspapers in 10 different Native American tongues, using a phonetic system. In 1837, he would found his own mission among the Ottawas in present-day Franklin County, Kansas. He died there in 1855.
Maria Meeker died in Nebraska, aged 87.
Susan Dillon died in Kansas City, aged 83.
Napoleon Boone went to California, where he died in 1850. He was 21.
We don’t easily know the fates of the many hundreds of Native American and Black children who were contemporaries of Maria and Susan and Napoleon, but we do know they were born without citizenship. Some were also born into chattel slavery, and the records we have of them have come down to us because they were recorded as property in census records and probate cases.
The president-elect’s desire to end birthright citizenship is just the latest in a long tradition of wicked plots to demonize, disenfranchise and own other human beings. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, granted formerly enslaved people the constitutional rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights, including birthright citizenship. But in the regressive backlash to Reconstruction, there was a catch.
“For many years, the Supreme Court ruled that the amendment did not extend the Bill of Rights to the states,” notes the National Archives. “A legacy of Reconstruction was the determined struggle of Black and White citizens to make the promise of the 14th Amendment a reality. … While these citizens did not succeed in empowering the 14th Amendment during Reconstruction, they effectively articulated arguments and offered dissenting opinions that would be the basis for change in the 20th Century.”
But the citizenship that most of us have taken for granted since our births —no matter what our color — is now in jeopardy.
Let’s assume, for a moment, that Windrip invokes the Insurrection Act, mobilizes the U.S. military, and succeeds in bullying or conning his way into revoking birthright citizenship. Imagine the scenes that would play out across the country, in which armed troops conduct raids and set up checkpoints in which they ask for documentation to prove you’re a citizen.
In other words, they’d be asking for your papers.
Will a driver’s license suffice? Well no, because you don’t have to be a U.S. citizen in most states to get a driver’s license. What about a Social Security card? Mine says it’s not to be used for identification purposes. Then I guess that leaves a birth certificate issued before Jan. 20, 2025, a green card, a valid U.S. passport, or some other kind of “special” documentation yet to be devised.
I doubt that I’ll be asked to show any papers, because I’m a white guy of a certain age. But the question for me — as it should be for you — is what happens when we’re at a checkpoint and see an entire family dragged out of their vehicles and put on the side of the road, hands behind their heads awaiting the deportation bus? What if some of those family members are clutching citizenship papers? How about when the neighbors next door with the newborn are rousted in the middle of the night? What do we do when a young mother is in her nightclothes, shivering with cold and fight?
What then?
The choice will be simply to watch and do nothing — or put ourselves bodily between the authorities and the oppressed and go to jail ourselves. This is just a thought exercise now, but one that could become real soon enough.
Never mind all the talk about the murderers and the drug dealers being deported. Undocumented immigrants have a much lower rate of committing violent crimes or dealing drugs than U.S.-born citizens. They are also hard-working and do the kinds of jobs, such as meat packing and housekeeping, that many Americans refuse.
Care about children?
Deportation of a family member can have serious mental and physical effects on children. Imagine the upheaval of deporting newborns and their parents. Many undocumented families from Central and South America endure dangerous jungle passages teaming with violent criminals to reach a chance at a better life. From the beginning, the greatness of America has been woven from the human threads that came from elsewhere. The tired and poor and huddled masses should not be sorted by color.
Right now, an expectant mother who is an undocumented citizen is waiting somewhere in the United States and watching the plan for mass deportation unfold. She may have been here for years, or she could have been recently arrived from Venezuela or Guatemala, having risked her life to swim across the Rio Grande.
She could be worried that she might not have the child by the January inauguration. If she delivers after that date, her child might not be granted birthright citizenship. That child could become human contraband, subject to the whims of immigration quislings and federal troops.
A child does not choose the circumstances of their birth. A newborn is perhaps the only completely innocent human being, thrust into the current of human events, full of promise but also uniquely vulnerable.
What kind of society sees a newborn as a threat?
Not the American society we know.
A hundred years from now, it is my fervent hope that some Kansas historians will be studying documents from our time — the birth certificates, letters, and family photos — and noting the Marias and Soledads and Néstors who were born to undocumented mothers Jan. 20, 2025. And I hope all of them became citizens by birth despite the sickness now dominating American politics.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
This column was originally published in Kansas Reflector.
