8 Surprising Facts About US Passports

“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.” 

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the U.S. government didn’t require American citizens to carry a passport during times of peace, but war was a different story. For two years during the Civil War, for example, passports were required to leave or enter the United States. Secretary of State William Seward used passport restrictions to prevent fighting-age men from fleeing the country. He also required passport applicants to take an oath of allegiance, which remained in place until 1973.  

The modern U.S. passport was born during World War I. The push for a standardized international ID began in Europe, where countries already embroiled in the war feared espionage and sabotage by foreign agents and began requiring passports from all travelers, including Americans.  

The U.K. issued its first ID-style passport in 1914, and the U.S. quickly followed suit. When America entered the war in 1917, the government required all steamship passengers to have their passports examined by customs officials. It was national security concerns more than a century ago that established the familiar ritual of examining passports both leaving and coming home.  

“The modern passport is a product of warfare,” Bixby says, “and the fears and suspicion that are native to warfare attached themselves to the document. Even in times of relative peace, we still have to prove who we are.” 

Photography was affordable and widespread by the late 1800s, but not in passports. Instead of a photograph, 19th-century passports came with a written description of the passport holder.  

“They had entries for ‘forehead,’ ‘nose,’ ‘cheek,’ ‘chin,’ and the descriptions were vague terms like ‘normal’ or ‘average,’” Bixby says. “So they weren’t very effective as identification documents.” 

The U.S. and other countries started requiring photographs thanks to a high-profile German spy named Carl Hans Lody. Lody stole a U.S. passport from the American embassy in Berlin and traveled to England, passing himself off as an American tourist named Charles Inglis. During World War I, Lody passed information to the Germans about the Royal Navy that contributed to the sinking of the Lusitania.  

Lody was caught and executed in 1914, the same year Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan required that all U.S. passports have a photograph.  

Before World War I, only single women in the United States could apply for their own passports. Married women and children were listed on their husband’s or father’s passport as “wife of” or “children of.” Similarly, if an American woman married a noncitizen, she could have her passport revoked until 1922.  

One of the rights women fought for in the early 20th century was the freedom for married women to travel under their own names, not their husband’s. In 1923, writer and activist Doris Fleischman became the first married American woman to travel with a passport under her maiden name.  

In 1937, marital status was dropped from the U.S. passport entirely.  

Ruth B. Shipley ran the Passport Division at the U.S. State Department for almost 30 years and personally reviewed every application—hundreds of thousands each year from 1928 to 1955. During the McCarthy era, Shipley wielded unchecked power to deny or revoke the passports of American citizens whose travel was “not in the interest of the United States.”  

President Franklin D. Roosevelt—a fan of Shipley’s ruthless efficiency—once called her the State Department’s “wonderful ogre.”  

Not everyone thought Shipley was so wonderful. High-profile figures like chemist Linus Pauling, author Arthur Miller and singer-activist Paul Robeson were all denied passports by Shipley in the 1950s under suspicion of being communists.  

Robeson, who was targeted for criticizing the treatment of Black people in the United States, couldn’t get a passport from 1950 to 1958, which left him in dire financial straits. “He was essentially imprisoned in his own country and not able to pursue his livelihood, his activism or anything else because the government had confiscated his passport,” Bixby says.  

In 1958, the Supreme Court ruled that the right to travel is an inherent liberty that could not be abridged by the government on the grounds of free speech.  

The first U.S. passport booklets, issued in 1926, had red covers. In 1941, at the outbreak of World War II, American passports switched to green covers to make it easier for officials to spot counterfeit booklets. Passport covers changed to blue in 1976 to mark the U.S. Bicentennial.  

The standard U.S. passport has remained blue ever since, except for a brief window from 1993 to 1994 when American passports were green again to commemorate 200 years of the U.S. Consular Service, started by Benjamin Franklin.  

Even today, U.S. passports come in four different colors: blue is for regular travelers; black is for diplomats, including the president; maroon is for other government officials and active-duty military; and gray is a service passport reserved for private contractors traveling in service of the U.S. government.