Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

Taney not only denied that free Black people were American citizens. He also claimed that Black citizens of the states were not entitled to benefit from the Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause. Americans had debated the question for decades, and Taney now bestowed his authority on one side of the argument. A state could confer “the rights of citizens” to whomever it chose “within its own limits,” the chief justice said. But a person who had “all the rights and privileges of a citizen of a State” was not necessarily “a citizen of the United States.” To admit that free Black “citizens” of the states were US citizens under the privileges and immunities clause, he wrote, would be to recognize that African Americans from Massachusetts, New York, and other northern states would have “the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished.” This, of course, was precisely the kind of free movement that free Black northerners and their allies had long demanded—the same liberty to which white citizens were entitled. In equal measure, that liberty was precisely what pro-slavery southerners could not abide.