Throughout the history of the United States, there has been a consistent evolution of who a citizen is and how a citizen is defined, as the United States Constitution has been both decided upon and modified on various occasions to expand the definition of who is a citizen and guarantee equal rights for all individuals. In the late 18th century, a citizen was defined as a white, male landowner, and African Americans could legally be held as slaves. The 1857 Dred Scott v Sandford Supreme Court case affirmed this definition. The Oyez Project (2005–2011) puts forth that in this case the Court found that "no person descended from an American slave had ever been a citizen." Six years subsequent to this decision, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared "that all persons held as slaves within the rebellious states are, and henceforward shall be free."

This change was reflected in the Constitution of the United States in the 14th Amendment (1868), which states "All persons born or naturalized in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside," as well as the 15th Amendment (1870), which puts forth that "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." However, the next half century still saw roughly half of the country's population without full citizenship rights, as it was not until 1920 that the 19th Amendment was passed that granted women suffrage. To answer the particular question posed above, simply put, the 14th Amendment guarantees that a person born in the United States is thereby a citizen, even if both parents are illegal immigrants. However, this is not without controversy, and it has become a political issue, as citizens born to illegal immigrants have derisively been referred to as "anchor babies." For more on this issue, try searching the New York Times using the phrase "anchor babies." However, American children of foreign parents can be dual citizens depending in part on the rules of the other country. This status is conferred when "an individual is a citizen of two countries at the same time." The website newcitizen.us describes potential benefits to being a dual citizen; among them are "the privilege of voting in both countries, owning property in both countries, and having government health care in both countries." However, the U.S. Department of State puts forth that the U.S. government "does not encourage" dual citizenship "because of the problems it may cause," particularly that "claims of other countries on dual national U.S. citizens may conflict with U.S. law, and dual nationality may limit U.S. Government efforts to assist citizens abroad." To answer the initial question in regards to allegiance, allegiance may be more the way a person feels rather than actual law. On this topic the U.S. Department of State notes that "where a dual national is located [where the citizen resides] generally has a stronger claim to that person's allegiance."

From the early 1830's, emigrants from rural northeastern Pennsylvania traveling to northwestern Illinois had two possible routes that were widely used. The most popular of these was to take the Erie Canal.

The first route: They would have loaded on a canal boat at Elmira, NY, just north of Bradford County, PA. From there they would have traveled on the Chemung Canal, completed in 1831. This would have taken them up to Watkins Glen at the southern tip of Seneca Lake. At the northern end of the lake in a portage called Geneva they would have picked up the Cayuga and Seneca Canal which was completed in 1830. This would have taken them up to the Erie Canal at Montezuma (near Cayuga), from where they would have traveled west along the Erie Canal to Buffalo. From Buffalo, they could have gone to Chicago via Lake Erie and Lake Michigan (a circuitous route of a thousand miles) on a steamboat. A route that could only be navigated when the lakes were not frozen over in the winter. After about 1833, another possibility was to get off the boat in Detroit (rather than Chicago) where they could have transferred their goods to a wagon or stagecoach which followed the Chicago Road. This path stretched from Detroit to Chicago across Michigan above its southern border and around the south of Lake Michigan.

From Chicago, if it was still the very beginning of the decade of the 1830s, they could have floated up the Chicago River and portaged over to the Des Plaines River on a short draft flatboat—or they could have followed the portage route by stage or wagon, depending on the seasonal water level—and from there they could have connected with the Illinois River and floated down to join the Mississippi at Grafton, IL, above St. Louis. From there, they could have taken a steamboat north along the Mississippi to Savanna, IL, in Jo Daviess (later called Carroll) County. However, by the middle of the 1830s, when many new settlers were pushing into Illinois to find farmland, they would almost certainly have taken another route from Chicago, which was the State Road that went more or less directly from Chicago, through Elgin and Rockford, IL, and then ended at Galena, in Jo Daviess County.

The second route: They could have floated down the Susquehanna River (or used the canal system that supplemented and paralleled the river) south to Harrisburg. They would then have transferred their goods to a Conestoga wagon or a stagecoach, and from there they would have turned west and traveled across south central Pennsylvania by way of the Pennsylvania Road (the Old State Road), which went from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. At Pittsburgh, they would have transferred their goods to a boat and floated or steamed down the Ohio River to where it joined the Mississippi River at Cairo, IL. Then north by steamboat up the Mississippi to Savanna or Galena, IL (steamboats began regular service between St. Louis and Galena in 1827).

Another less probable route existed: Depending on how much they intended to bring with them, they might have considered whether it would be cheaper to travel with their goods to New York or Philadelphia—perhaps by way of the North Branch Canal or the Delaware and Hudson Canal and by toll road—and then to ship to New Orleans. From there to transfer it all to a steamboat bound up the Mississippi River as far as Galena. This may seem like a very roundabout way; however in the early 1830s shipping a lot of freight by road over the mountains of Pennsylvania and across Michigan and Illinois was more expensive than shipping it by water around the Eastern seaboard and up the Mississippi. The completion of the Erie Canal changed the calculation.

Their choice of route may have taken into account what they intended to carry with them, how much they could spend on their travel, as well as the local conditions along the various routes, insofar as they could foresee them. They would also have considered their strength and health, and whether they could endure pushing a stuck wagon over a mountain road or living in a makeshift tent on the upper deck of a steamship. If they were already farmers and planned on bringing livestock, tools, and household goods to the farmland of Illinois, that would have constrained their choices in a way that prospective miners, who also flocked to the region around Galena, did not experience simply because miners were not likely to have brought any of the tools of their livelihood with them when they moved. In planning their trip, they might have picked up a copy of Illinois pioneer and Baptist missionary John Mason Peck’s, Guide for Emigrants (1836), which recommended routes for prospective settlers from the East and even lists steamboat, stage, and canal fares. Also useful in planning their trip, if they were leaving in 1837 or later, would have been a copy of Samuel Mitchell’s, Illinois in 1837.

Eli Whitney patented his cotton engine, or “gin,” in 1794. A mechanical device to separate cotton fibers from cotton seed, it dramatically lowered the cost of producing cotton fiber. Formerly, workers (usually slaves) had separated the seeds from the lint by hand, painstaking work that required hours of work to produce a pound of lint. By mechanizing the process, the gin could produce more than 50 pounds of lint per day. Cotton fabric, formerly quite expensive due to the high cost of production, became dramatically cheaper, and cotton clothing became commonplace. In the early decades of the 19th century, Southern farmers shifted more and more of their acreage into highly profitable cotton production, and large-scale plantation agriculture became common in the Deep South states of Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. The gin’s effect on the economy and on the lives of the slaves who made up a significant part of that economy was complex. The cotton gin freed slaves from the arthritic labor of separating seeds from the lint by hand. At the same time, the dramatically lowered cost of producing cotton fiber, the corresponding increase in the amount of cotton fabric demanded by textile mills, and the increasing prevalence of large-scale plantation agriculture resulted in a dramatic increase in the demand for more slaves to work those plantations. Overall, the slave population in the South grew from 700,000 before Whitney’s patent to more than three million in 1850—striking evidence of the changing Southern economy and its growing dependence on the slave system to keep the economy running. Cotton cultivation proved especially well-suited to slave labor. A relatively delicate plant, growing and harvesting cotton was a labor-intensive process. On large Southern plantations, much of that labor was provided by slaves working in gangs. Gang labor fit the slave system particularly well: dozens of slaves collected into a work crew could be supervised by a single white overseer, which made for more efficient work. Unlike solitary jobs like shepherding, which made constant supervision of individual slave workers extremely difficult from a practical standpoint, gang labor in the cotton fields allowed one overseer to supervise (and, when necessary, to discipline and punish) large numbers of slaves simultaneously.

On large cotton plantations both the work and the punishments were unremitting and unforgiving. During the height of harvesting season, slaves worked from sunup to sundown; when the moon was full, they worked into the night as well. Slaveowners varied in their reputations for physical violence, but none eschewed punishment completely in the quest to extract more labor from their charges. Beatings and whippings were frequently used to coerce recalcitrant slaves; slaves who resisted labor or attempted to escape were punished with mutilation, sale away from their families, and occasionally death. There is no simple calculus to determine whether and how the cotton gin affected the lives of individual slaves. It is possible that the adoption of the gin made the working hours of a few individual slaves somewhat less difficult. However, given the barbarity of slavery generally—rampant physical and sexual abuse, the separation of families, lives of forced labor in acute deprivation, and the overarching dehumanization that the system enforced—it seems clear that any invention that encouraged the growth and expansion of the institution increased the misery of slaves in the aggregate acutely. Given the cotton gin’s effects on the spread of large-scale cotton agriculture and the resultant growth in the institution of slavery in the first half of the 19th century, it is difficult to portray its introduction as anything other than a disaster from the perspective of enslaved African-Americans.