Naturalization Act of 1790 PDF: Full Text, Eligibility, and Duration

The Naturalization Act of 1790 is available as a PDF through several free government and archival sources, most conveniently as a scanned page from the Statutes at Large (cited as 1 Stat. 103) hosted by GovInfo.¹ The full law fits on a single printed page and runs roughly 200 words.

Where to Download the PDF

Four reliable sources host the document:

GovInfo, run by the Government Publishing Office, offers the scanned PDF of 1 Stat. 103 as it appeared in the original Statutes at Large.¹
GovTrack hosts an independent copy of the same Statutes at Large scan through its legislative archive.²
The Library of Congress indexes the statute under its official citation and includes a scanned image of the printed law.
Congress.gov, through the Constitution Annotated project, publishes the text alongside scholarly commentary on early naturalization law.³

The scanned PDFs preserve the original 18th-century typography, which can be hard to read. If you want searchable, transcribed text instead of a historical image, the Congress.gov annotated version is the easier option.

What the Act Actually Says

The statute laid out a short list of requirements for anyone seeking citizenship under the new federal system. An applicant needed two years of continuous residence in the United States, plus at least one year of residence in the state where the application was filed.²

The applicant also had to prove “good character” to the court’s satisfaction.³ The statute did not define the term or list qualifying evidence, leaving each judge to make the call on the facts in front of them.⁴

Filing happened in person at any common law court of record in the applicant’s state.² That covered a wide range of municipal, county, state, and federal courts, and there was no central immigration office.⁵ The court administered an oath or affirmation to support the Constitution of the United States, and the clerk recorded the proceedings. Once that record was entered, the person was considered a citizen.

One thing the 1790 act did not require: a formal renunciation of allegiance to a foreign government. The oath was limited to pledging support for the Constitution. Renunciation was added five years later.

Who Was Allowed to Apply

The act restricted naturalization to “free white persons.”² That language excluded enslaved people, free Black residents, and Indigenous peoples from the process. Federal law continued to restrict naturalization by race until 1952.³

The statute did not address the citizenship of people already born in the United States. Birthright citizenship operated under a separate body of common law, and the question of whether free Black Americans counted as citizens was not settled until the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.

Children and the “Natural Born” Language

Citizenship extended automatically to the children of newly naturalized parents, provided the children were under twenty-one and living in the United States at the time of the parent’s naturalization.² No separate application was required for the child.

Children born abroad to American citizens were, in the act’s phrasing, “considered as natural born Citizens.”² One exception applied: citizenship did not pass if the father had never resided in the United States.³ The rule ran through the paternal line, consistent with the legal doctrine of the era. The “natural born” phrasing is unique to this statute; when Congress rewrote the law in 1795, it dropped those words and described such children simply as “citizens of the United States.”

How Long the 1790 Act Lasted

The Naturalization Act of 1790 was in force for only five years. Section 4 of the Naturalization Act of 1795 expressly repealed it.⁶ The 1795 replacement tightened several provisions:

If you are working with the 1790 PDF for something that happened after 1795, remember that the 1790 rules no longer applied. The five-year residency period from the 1795 act eventually became the lasting federal standard.

Finding a Naturalization Record from the 1790s

Because any common law court of record could grant citizenship under the 1790 act, records from this period are scattered across municipal, county, state, and federal courthouses. There is no central index.⁵ The starting point is figuring out where the person lived and which court they likely appeared before.

The National Archives holds naturalization records from federal courts, organized by regional facility. State and local court records are usually held by state archives or local historical societies rather than the National Archives.⁵ National Archives regional branches operate in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Fort Worth, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Riverside, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., each covering federal court records for a specific group of states. Contacting the branch that serves the relevant state is the practical first step.

1
GovInfo. Statute 1, Page 103 – An Act to Establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization
2
GovTrack. 1 Stat 103 – An Act to Establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization
3
Congress.gov. ArtI.S8.C4.1.2.3 Early US Naturalization Laws
4
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Chapter 1 – Purpose and Background
5
National Archives. Naturalization Records
6
GovTrack. 1 Stat 414 – An Act to Establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization and to Repeal the Act Heretofore Passed on That Subject