The Modern US Passport is a Product of World War I

“The history of the passport starts in ancient Egypt 3,500 years ago,” says Bixby. “Royal messengers traveled with clay tablets marked with cuneiform characters that essentially carried a threat from the king, saying, ‘This is my guy. Don’t mess with him or you’ll have to answer to me.’”

The world’s oldest passport is part of the Amarna tablets dating to the 14th century B.C. On it, King Tushratta of Mitanni wrote: “I am sending herewith my messenger Akiya to the King of Egypt, my brother, on an urgent mission (traveling as fast) as a demon. Nobody must detain him. Bring him safely into Egypt! (There) they should take him to an Egyptian border official. And nobody should for any reason lay hand on him.”

Bixby points out that the modern U.S. passport contains strikingly similar language from the State Department: “The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.”

In 1782, while still fighting the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress authorized the Department of Foreign Affairs to issue passports to Americans traveling abroad. Those early U.S. passports weren’t the standardized ID documents they are today but letters written to foreign governments requesting entry and safe passage for the traveler.

Since passports weren’t strictly required to travel abroad, fewer than 100 of these “letters of safe conduct” were issued by the U.S. government each year through 1818. Until the Civil War, applying for a passport meant sending a personal letter to the secretary of state—that’s how few passports were issued.

The only Americans who were asked to show a passport were travelers on diplomatic missions or people seeking some kind of special favor from a foreign government. When Benjamin Franklin was serving as the American ambassador to France in 1780, he used his skills as a printer to make a passport for one of his aides—never mind that Franklin had no real authority to do so.

“Franklin printed this thing up, signed it, put his official stamp on it and that was that,” Bixby says. “The whole thing was rather ad hoc at that point across Europe and the rest of the world.”

In 1856, Congress passed a law restricting passports to U.S. citizens. The following year, the Supreme Court handed down its infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which said that Black Americans, whether enslaved or free, were not U.S. citizens.

Before the Dred Scott decision, some states had conferred citizenship on free Black men, and a few of those men had applied for passports. The National Archives recently found a passport application from 1834 for Robert Purvis, a wealthy and educated Black man from Philadelphia. It’s not clear, however, if the passport was granted.

Frederick Douglass, the famed abolitionist, was refused a U.S. passport in 1859, Bixby says. Douglass was in the United Kingdom and wanted to travel to France, a lifelong dream. Napoleon III had just survived an assassination attempt (by a foreigner), so France required a passport to enter the country. George Dallas, the U.S. minister to Britain, denied the application “true to the decision of the United States Supreme Court, and true, perhaps, to the petty meanness of his own nature,” wrote Douglass.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, repealed the Dred Scott decision and granted birthright citizenship to Black American men. As Bixby reports in his book, Douglass finally got his passport in 1886 on the eve of his honeymoon. All those years later, he hadn’t forgiven George Dallas.

“This man is now dead and generally forgotten, as I shall be,” Douglass wrote, “but I have lived to see myself everywhere recognized as an American citizen.”