these Colonies or the inhabitants of this State, or Commonwealth, employed to designate those
whom we should now denominate "citizens." The substance and purpose of the article prove it
was in this sense it used these words: It secures to the free inhabitants of each State the
privileges and immunities of free citizens in every State. It is not conceivable that the States
should have agreed to extend the privileges of citizenship to persons not entitled to enjoy the
privileges of citizens in the States where they dwelt; that under this article there was a class of
persons in some of the States, not citizens, to whom were secured all the privileges and
immunities of citizens when they went into other States; and the just conclusion is, that though
the Constitution cured all inaccuracy of language, it left the substances of this article in the
National Constitution the same as it was in the Articles of Confederation.

The history of this 4th article, respecting the attempt to exclude free persons of color from
its operation, has been already stated. It is reasonable to conclude that this history was known to
those who framed and adopted the Constitution. That under this 4th article of the Confederation,
free persons of color might be entitled to the privileges of general citizenship, if otherwise
entitled thereto, is clear. When this article was, in substance, placed in and made part of the
Constitution of the United States, with no change in its language calculated to exclude free
colored persons from the benefit of its provisions, the presumption is, to say the least, strong, that
the practical effect which it was designed to have, and did have, under the former government, it
was designed to have, and should have, under the new government.

vi. Naturalization Law

It may be further objected, that if free colored persons may be citizens of the United
States, it depends only on the will of a master whether he will emancipate his slave and thereby
make him a citizen. Not so. The master is subject to the will of the State. Whether he shall be
allowed to emancipate his slave at all; if so, on what conditions; and what is to be the political
status of the freed man, depend, not on the will of the master, but on the will of the State, upon
which the political status of all its native-bom inhabitants depends. Under the Constitution of the
United States, each State has retained this power of determining the political status of its native-
born inhabitants, and no exception thereto can be found in the Constitution. And if a master in a
slaveholding State should carry his slave into a free State, and there emancipate him, he would
not thereby make him a native-born citizen of that State, and consequently no privileges could be
claimed by such emancipated slave as a citizen of the United States. For, whatever powers the
States may exercise to confer privileges of citizenship on persons not born on their soil, the
Constitution of the United States does not recognize such citizens. As has already been said, it
recognizes the great principle of public law, that allegiance and citizenship spring from the place
of birth. It leaves to the States the application of that principle to individual cases. It secured to
the citizens of each State the privileges and immunities of citizens in every other State. But it
does not allow to the States the power to make aliens citizens, or permit one State to take persons
born on the soil of another State, and, contrary to the laws and policy of the States where they
were born, make them its citizens, and so citizens of the United States. No such deviation from
the great rule of public law was contemplated by the Constitution; and when any such attempt

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